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Case
10: My Movie Experiences
The earliest memories
I have of my movie experiences are not at all distinct, but as I look back I
feel that I reveled in the hair-raising serials and the wild and woolly cowboy
type of entertainment. I started attending the movies with regularity when I
was about seven or eight years old. Every Saturday with the utmost inevitability
a gang of us fellows would attend the matinee; it became an accepted and looked
forward to routine in our lives. At that time my parents very seldom allowed
me to go to the movies with them on account of the fact that I generally was
bored to the point of extreme restlessness by most of the movies they attended.
But the Saturday afternoons were different, it would have been a tragedy to
me to miss an installment of a serial I was following up. Those serials were
very real things to us fellows, we accepted all that was in them with a perfect
faith and never doubted the reasonableness of any of the incidents for a second.
The serial we saw one week would stock us up with plenty of conversational material
to hold us over for the next installment. We discussed pro and con all the probabilities
of the manner in which the hero would escape the terrible predicament the villain
plunged him into just before the "To Be Continued Next Week" caption was flashed
on the screen. We conjectured upon the identity of the "mysterious rider" and
prophesied the downfall of the villains in language heated with the illusion
of reality. Our play .vas always influenced by the current type of serial we
were inhaling. If it had to do with cowboys and Indians we played cowboy and
Indian, if it had to do with cops and robbers then we played cop and robber.
I can't remember that I ever quibbled very much over the part I was to R play
in the re-enactment just so long as I got variety, one part today and 1 another
tomorrow.- Whether I was the hero or the villain I always played the part with
a gusto that was exemplary from the point of intenseness, at least. There is
but one movie star of those days that I can remember at all clearly, and that
is Pearl White. My memory of her is vividly linked with a serial in which she
appeared that centered around Iron Man, an automaton, and which is responsible
for the suggestion of the others I don’t know. I can’t say that this vivid recollection
ever had any effect on me, however, or that any movie I ever saw had a lasting
influence on my conduct. In those days I viewed my movies as I viewed a good
basketball or football game now. I clapped at the least excuse, I yelled at
the last minute rescue. I was almost continually in a high tension of emotion
that absolutely forbade me seeing any movie plumped complacently in my seat.
I certainly had a whole hearted ability for relishing the pie throwing comedies
of those days, often laughing, really laughing, to the point of satisfaction.
Roughly speaking, this period of my movie reactions lasted until I was about
twelve or thirteen years old. Then I began to get a little romantic in my tastes
and found myself actually enjoying some of the “love pictures” which a short
time ago I would summarily have relegated to the ash can. Not that I gave up
the action pictures entirely, I still enjoyed them, especially anything that
Douglas Fairbanks appeared in, he was my crowning favorite by far. But I began
to become aware of the leading ladies, to notice them for themselves and not
as mere incidental conveniences of the plot. If I chanced upon a movie in which
the action was not very strong and I was not carried away by the plot, I would
console myself with an aesthetic appreciation of the beauties of the heroine,
but this appreciation never took in more than the features of the face. At this
time also I occasionally saw pictures in the company of girls, but for the most
part I was more conscious of the fact that I was sitting next to a girl than
I was as to what was taking place on the screen. One incident, though, I will
never forget. I happened to meet a girl I was particularly partial to on her
way to the show one afternoon and I went along with her. What the movie was
I can’t remember, but it was a slow moving affair with plenty of idyllic love
scenes in it. We were sitting off to the side in a more or less deserted portion
of the theater, and under the influence of the hero’s amour I slipped my arm
about her waist and left it there with her permission the rest of the picture.
Such a long interval separated the next time that I went to a movie with her,
however, that when we did go again I was afraid to repeat the experiment.
As I got into high school and into my sixteenth and seventeenth year I began
to use the movies as a school of etiquette. I began to observe the table manners
of the actors in the eating scenes. I watched for the proper way in which to
conduct oneself at a night club, because I began to have ideas that way. The
number of buttons the leading man's coat had, the fact that it was single breasted
or double breasted, and the cut of its lapel all influenced me in the choice
of my own suits. The technique of making love to a girl received considerable
of my attention, and it was directly through the movies that I learned to kiss
a girl on her ears, neck and cheeks, as well as on the mouth, in a close huddle.
My reaction to all cowboy movies in those days had already become rather flat,
and I took more and more to the sophisticated society stuff. I also became more
worldly wise and understood what the more suggestive movies were all about.
I began to make it a special point to see all movies labeled "Adults Only."
In fact, I began to consider myself quite a wise man about town. I didn't content
myself with merely contemplating the heroine's face anymore. I began to notice
the swell of her bosom and watched it rise and fall as she breathed a little
harder in passionate scenes. I had my eyes out for the shape of her legs, too,
and the more I saw of them the better I liked it. More and mare my whole attention
focused on the women in the movie, not to the exclusion of the men, of course,
but to a quite great extent compared with my earlier days.
Sometime in my
eighteenth year I began to lose my former contact with the movies. I gradually
began to despise them, to see them altogether too critically to permit enjoyment.
I can account for this only in a growing taste and appreciation I began to cultivate
for literature. I always had been an avid reader but at that time I began to
get on the right track. Courses in literature at school laid a foundation which
my natural interest in that field built up into a quite widespread acquaintance
with the better books. My eighteenth year marks a turning point in my life;
then I consciously began to seek "culture." I not only read better novelists,
I discovered that rich field of poetry. I began to visit the Art Institute and
found a new field of enjoyment in pictures that weren't movies. None of this
was forced, I took to it very easily, and with it my former tastes in movies
began to be so undermined that today I rarely ever attend a movie and thoroughly
enjoy it. Five years ago I went to the movies on the average of two or three
times a week; now I go to the movies on the average of two or three times a
month. I see most movies now, by far, as insipid asinine things that produce
mental weariness and irritation in me. But still they are useful as cheap places
to take a date. I have one use for the movies in this respect that I flatter
myself I have performed some research and experimentation in.
A good movie plays
upon the emotions of all of us, but many people are moved by any sort of movie.
It has been my experience that nine people out of ten are so played upon in
their emotions by a movie as to find themselves in a particularly sensitive
and weakened mood in relation to that emotion which the movie most strained.
Let me make myself clear. For instance, after seeing a movie stressing the pathetic
case of a white-haired and sweet faced mother sent to the poorhouse by the cruel
neglect of her children, most people react tenderly to their own mother in their
thoughts. A movie featuring the torture of a noble white man by fiendish Chinamen
works people up against the Chinese. And so a highly charged sex movie puts
many girls in an emotional state that weakens, i let us say, resistance. I took
a girl I became acquainted with not so long ago out for the first time to a
very racy sex movie. It had the usual lingerie scenes, complications, etc. That
night when I took her home she was, in vernacular, quite warm. The next time
I dated her she wanted to see some. gruesome thing with Lon Chancy in it. That
night she certainly was not responsive to the same degree as the first, yet
I knew her better. It merely means that her emotions weren't aroused in the
same way by the second picture as by the first, her visceral tension and activities
were controlled more or less, and therefore, with most girls, I generally pick
the movies we attend with that point in mind. Remember, it is more or ' less
a physical and natural phenomenon, and nine times out of ten with intelligent
interpretation the girl's emotional state can be regulated and used to what
may be either advantage or disadvantage.
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