Won't Somebody Please Think of the Children?

In an article on the Slate website today, writer Emily Bazelon complains that G-rated movies, ostensibly created with young children in mind, are too violent and scary. It rubbed me the wrong way - like most complaints about movie, television and music content.

Bazelon talks specifically of how her six-year-old son and his friend were wound up a little too tight after watching the Tale of Desperaux, a film that apparently includes some images - scurrying rats, sharp-toothed cats, etc. - that could frighten young viewers. She makes some very interesting points about how animation has become so sophisticated and lifelike that kids might not always be sure what's real and what's fake, and how this might make movies like Desperaux more frightening than the patently ridiculous Road Runner-Wile E. Coyote cartoon battles of yore.

Still, I couldn't help but picture Bazelon's son as a hypersensitive scaredy-cat, rendered thin-skinned by parental overprotectiveness. Uncharitable and without any basis in reality - I don't know the Bazelons, after all - but still, I couldn't help it. I think what irked me the most is Bazelon's suggestion that it's not so much the violence that's the problem, but rather the "extended suspense that keeps my kids up all night." I get why kids movies shouldn't be bloody. But not suspenseful?

I'm probably biased her by my own early movie experiences, which included an unexpected exposure to the ending of the original Friday the 13th along with the usual kiddie fodder. But the fact is, kids can be scared by anything. When the mysterious government scientists in their white uniforms and masks came for E.T., I was horrified. I had nightmares about the end of Superman III, when one of the bad guys (bad girls, actually) gets turned into a metallic zombie by a machine that goes haywire. Numerous scenes from other kid-oriented movies left indelible and scary impressions on me as I was growing up.

In fact, those scenes have tended to last longer in my memory than most of the movies that surround them. Maybe that speaks to my own horror and suspense-y leanings, but I think it also says something about the point of going to the movies. You go to experience feelings, and those feelings can, and maybe should, also include fear. A safe kind of fear that, regardless of subsequent nightmares and racing heart rates, can be escaped when the curtain comes up.

Depriving one's child of the joys of a good, suspenseful ride seems to me to be more of a case of a parent not wanting to deal with an overexcited or sleepless kid than one of protecting said kid from any lasting damage. But being scared is part of the movie experience, just like children's nightmares are part of the parenting experience.

Caveat: These wise words are written by someone with no children.