January 2009 Archives

I might want to write for Slate someday, so I am not going to say anything mean about Lunatic Mommy Opinionator Emily Bazelon, who has found a niche writing articles about her charmingly neurotic five-year-old son Simon.  The thing is that I actually love reading Bazelon's articles because I so relate to the character of little Simon, who has been known to have a outrageous drag queeny meltdowns when he can't find the "veggie sticks" in his sack lunch.  This type of thing is familiar to me.  I too was an extremely neurotic child, prone to emotional outbursts, meltdowns and completely irrational anxiety.  I mean, who wasn't, I guess, but I really was. 

In this week's installment of the Simon Chronicles, Ms. Bazelon tackles the topic of "Are G-Rated Movies Too Scary For Simon and What Should Be Done About It?"  Apparently Bazelon and Simon went to see The Tale of Despereaux and it scared the hell out of the poor little guy.  It turns out that G-Rated movies are just too frightening these days-- and not just Despereaux.  Bazelon can't help but wonder:

"What's the point of a G rating if movies like Despereaux fall into that category? This movie confirms my feeling that it's past time to replace G with better age-tailored guidance. I remember sad G-rated kids' movies from childhood: Disney classics like Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi. But my kids didn't find Bambi distressing. Instead, what's hard for them to handle are new movies, ostensibly created for their age group, from which they emerge metaphorically dripping in sweat, wrung out by an hour and a half of suspense and overexcitement.... Despereaux is the latest in a line of recent examples that have unwound my kids or the kids of friends. (Other villains: Finding Nemo, for the barracuda that eats the mom and most of the eggs; The Lion King, for Mufasa's murder; Cars, for the wildly fast-paced action; Swiss Family Robinson, for the pirates; Wall-E, for the landing of the spaceship and attempted shooting; and Monsters, Inc., for all the roaring at the outset.)

I'm not going to make fun of any little kid for being terrified of the "roaring at the outset of Monsters Inc." because little kids are weird and who knows what's going to freak them out?  I myself was inexplicably traumatized by Short Circuit, and let's not even talk about Willow.  But Emily Bazelon is clearly delusional if she thinks the "wildly fast-paced action" in Cars is more damaging to children than Pinnochio, which features one of the most fucked-up sequences in any children's movie ever.  Conflict and suspense, parental separation and nightmarish trippiness are all long traditions in family movies. 

Of course there is another tradition at work here: in the tradition of all lunatic mommy opinionators, everything is much worse in this day and age because it is happening to the most special angel in the world: mommy's! 

So why shouldn't a special class of rating be created to suit the idiosyncratic anxieties of the under-six set?  Perhaps Simon himself can be put in charge of this new ratings board?  Personally, if I had been in charge of such an initiative at age five, I would have established a strict UR rating for UNSETTLING ROBOTS as well as the deadly TFEP rating for Terrifyingly Fabulous Evil Princesses.

But no one cared what I thought.  Instead, I just watched the same three Jem videos on VHS over and over again until I was old enough to actually go to the movies without spazzing out.