First Flicker

What was your first movie? What did it make you feel?

Hey, here’s a gentle Fun Friday slow-roller for y’all: What was your first movie experience? For me, and maybe for you, what was technically my first movie is not the same as what was existentially my first movie. Permit me to talk those memories through.

I encountered movies on TV as a little kid, I’m sure, but I didn’t have a very clear idea of the difference between those and the TV shows, whether they were sitcoms or dramas or news or weather or commercials. It was all in black and white, for one thing; for another, it was all in that box, where the light flickered and things were always changing. (That may sound like the start of a standard-issue reminiscence about how the real world seemed dull compared to TV, but it honestly wasn’t like that for me. Of my real world in those days I can remember very little, apart from sounds like the furnace clicking and then whirring eerily at night, smells like my mother’s hot iron on clothes, blinking turn signals, ice clinking in glasses, and such like. TV was also a weird procession, but only of images and sounds, and I’m not sure I entirely got the connection between the human beings and events pictured there and the very few I saw in the world. I did come to recognize Andy Devine, and his gruesome sidekick Froggy, both of whom horrified me.)

The first thing that I knew was a movie, I saw while I was in kindergarten. I began to notice the world more then, because I was out of the house and among people, and things happened, like getting my cup of polio vaccine, sitting in a circle to hear Mrs. Ostrovsky read, crayons on rough paper. One day we were told we would see a movie, and were taken into a large room with folding chairs, a room I hadn’t known was in the same building, with what must have been a relatively small pull-down screen but which looked gigantic to me. The movie had something to do with pedestrian safety, and mixed human characters, who I do not remember at all, with a large cartoon car that (I believe) only appeared full-on, with pupils in its headlights, and talked through a moving grill in a very deep, resonant voice. The talking car reminded me of Froggy, except terrifyingly large, and the sound, especially of his voice, felt unbearably loud; I may even have begged to leave.

Years passed. I had more experience of the world and how to navigate its terrors and even enjoy a few of its wonders. We didn’t go to the movies because we didn’t have the scratch, but one day my mother announced we were going to a matinee, which I eventually learned meant a movie. I think it was a children’s matinee, and the scene in the seats and aisles was a lot more boisterous than what I experienced in later years — in fact, in my imagining it was not very different from the riotous premiere of Bride of the Monster in Ed Wood. They were showing a cartoon when I got in there, a cartoon like the cartoons I saw on TV, but huge and in color like on other people’s TVs; it was loud enough that the crowd did not drown it out, but not frightening the way it had been in kindergarten, maybe because it seemed reasonable under the circumstances, and maybe because I was able to visit the candy counter and the men’s room and so understood that if things became too much for me I could leave.

The crowd settled down, more or less — standards for movie decorum were looser then than now — and on came the feature: a Don Knotts movie, The Incredible Mr. Limpet.

You can read about that experience here, and how it made me feel. There was one animated section that frightened me, when Don Knotts was transformed into a fish via what seemed like a series of electric shocks, but since he came out of it with some equanimity (after all, he had just sung “I wish, I wish, I wish I were a fish”) I was alright after that. In fact, I let myself be, at least for long stretches, lost in the movie, a new pleasure that I came to cherish.

What about you?