My siblings and I grew up without television, but our parents took a generous attitude towards the movies. When we were little, they enjoyed taking us to old movies, and even the occasional new one. We moved to Paris when I was nine, and seeing Tim Burton’s Batman on the Champs-Elysées brought me to a pitch of cinematic ecstasy that in some ways I could never reach again. Only a little later, my older sister and I were allowed from time to time to wander on our own to the Left Bank’s (still extant) repertory theaters, that specialized in old American movies—a legacy of the Cahiers du Cinéma reverence for Golden Age Hollywood. Thank you, Truffaut and Godard!
A bit later, now in London, we went to the movies a lot, both on our own and with a parent. There was always extra allowance-money for a movie, and there was no age restriction: if we could get in, we could go see it. Most of my most vivid and happiest memories of movie-going are from ages fifteen to twenty: Lawrence of Arabia on a Sunday morning in a North London suburb; getting not just myself, but my little brother, into 15-rated Blade Runner; a family expedition to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance on a school night; entire seasons of Howard Hawks and Douglas Sirk at London’s National Film Theater; The Best Years of Our Lives in a snowy Berlin; The Truman Show in a mall—the parking lot glowing amber and purple in the summer twilight—in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
There was always extra allowance-money for a movie, and there was no age restriction: if we could get in, we could go see it.
I was the family film expert. In Paris and then London, I would scour a weekly listings magazine (remember those?), to learn what was on. I was not—to put it gently—an athletic kid, but I spent many recesses in the school library reading movie dictionaries. To this day, I can tell you, from memory, the stars and director of hundreds and hundreds of movies, although my knowledge peters out around the year 2000. I heard Sophie Marceau on the radio once, saying that, as a young woman, she used to go see a movie a day, and I thought “this is the life I want”. Inevitably I determined I would grow up to be a movie director.
I did not grow up to be a movie director, and I don’t go see a movie a day, or even a movie a month. The enthusiasms of youth tend to dim, and I can assign various reasons for my love of movies cooling off. But it is clear to me now that essential fuel for that love came from the constraints that fenced it in. The key such constraint was living without television: this meant that I could see far fewer movies than almost all my peers. Then there was being too young to have my own money: a movie was always a gift. In addition, I was simply restricted by what was on: I carried a mental list of scores of movies that I longed to see, but had no control over when I might be able to see them. It could take years for an old movie I had read and dreamt of to get shown in one of London’s handful of repertory theaters.
Essential fuel for my love of movies came from the constraints that fenced it in.
Now, of course, I can see almost anything I want. I can afford it, and I need only summon up a title from that old mental list, and type it into Google. I do this on occasion, and even find often enough that my younger self had some good ideas about what was worth seeing. But the pleasure does not approach the thrills of those repertory theater years—not just because I am older or watching on a computer, but because it is all far too easy.
Naturally, almost everyone we knew as kids did have a television, and to us, they seemed to roll in a depraved abundance of entertainment. Yet, in retrospect, they too lived under a regime of exciting limits that is now dead. For most, “television” meant five or six terrestrial channels, with much of the programming of no possible interest to kids. There were also videos, but there too one was restricted to whatever could be bought or rented locally. A TV wasn’t a portal to watching anything you wanted, but a pleasure constrained, and thereby enhanced, but one’s lack of dominion over what was on.
Nowadays nearly everything is on, all the time, and the only serious constraints kids face are those imposed by parents, or those they (hopefully) learn to impose on themselves. To me, this all seems very joyless, just as, when I was younger, even my peers’ access to movies via TV programming and VHS seemed drab, in comparison with my cross-city adventures. In return, those peers were in general utterly baffled as to how our family could even live without a television. Yet now we all share memories of the joys of constraint, that will be still more baffling to those who cannot remember the time before broadband. The age of movies and television and videos is over: we have entered the age of content. The pleasure of catching an elusive movie will soon be as alien, as antique as the delight a child could once feel at being given an orange and a wooden toy for Christmas.
