A24’s “Baby Film Buff” Book Taught Me That My Child Is a Boorish Simpleton
What toddler doesn't like "The Graduate"?
A24 — the hipster film studio behind movies like Uncut Gems and Lady Bird — has published a new book with film recommendations for kids. The book’s editor described it as pushback against the habit of dumbing things down for kids, and bemoaned the inclination to “oversimplify” and “oversanitize” children’s stories.
I was excited to buy this book. My three year-old son Carter loves movies, but he gravitates towards inane mush like Daniel Tiger’s Family Trip and Cars 2. I’ve been eager to challenge him with innovative films that explore the human condition and push the boundaries of the cinematic experience, and finally, A24 has provided a roadmap for the discerning preschool-aged cinephile! Carter and I dove right in.
The book’s first recommendation was Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro. This lovingly crafted animated feature from the Academy Award-winning director is a whimsical tale of two sisters befriending magical beasts in the woods of Japan. Carter called it “weird”. I tried to draw his attention to the “immersive realism” animation style that was seminal to the development of modern anime, but Carter just asked: “Where’s Pokémon?” I told him in no uncertain terms: There are no Pokémon in a Miyazaki film. And then I sent him to bed without dinner.
The next film we tried was Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon). This 1902 Georges Méliès classic was one of the first films with an extensive production budget, and it used ground-breaking techniques like transitional dissolves and forced-frame perspective. I explained this to Carter in an hour long presentation before the film, so he definitely had the appropriate context to appreciate the movie. But despite that, he fell asleep almost as soon as the film started rolling. And no matter how many times I woke Carter up, he kept nodding off! Frustrated, I tried to explain the film’s expansive influence by calling up the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight Tonight” video, but Carter started screaming uncontrollably when he saw Billy Corgan’s bloodless, vampirific face. I was going to send him to bed without dinner again, but my wife convinced me that seeing Billy Corgan was punishment enough.
I’d like to tell you that Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil went better, but it didn’t. This 1958 film noir classic had my son bawling his eyes out before the opening three-and-a-half-minute tracking shot had even concluded. “I want Paw Patrol!” Carter howled. I told him that Touch of Evil is better than Paw Patrol, because it contains a nuanced depiction of law enforcement and a bravura performance from Charlton Heston (whose character I described as “like Chase the Police Pup but anguished”). That didn’t work, and when I sent Carter to his room, he started throwing his vintage wooden toys around and pulling the lithographic reproductions of 1920s New Yorker covers off the wall. I honestly don’t know how I came to have such a churlish philistine for a son.
After that, I was hesitant to even attempt David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, but the A24 book gave it a “five butterfly” review and called it “an easy entry point to the psychological horror genre”. The movie caused some confusion, because Carter thought the mysterious “Yellow Man” was The Man In The Big Yellow Hat from the Curious George books. And I’ll be honest: I let him believe that, because I figured that he might keep watching if he thought his favorite cartoon monkey might show up. But when the Yellow Man murdered a drug dealer, Little Mister Can’t Handle Narrative Complexity started crying and yelling about how The Man In The Big Yellow Hat was going to go to jail. I told him not to worry: The Yellow Man does not go to jail — he dies in a hail of gunfire! But that just made Carter cry more. And then my wife stepped in, turned on Frozen, and told me to abandon this “sick film-snob experiment”. But I will do no such thing; if I don’t challenge Carter now, then he’ll grow up to be the type of person who goes to see Spiderman movies with a large group of friends.
Surely, one of A24’s upcoming selections will be the film that opens Carter’s eyes to the magical world of challenging and provocative cinema. Maybe it will be Raging Bull, maybe it will be Parasite — something has to click! Carter loved Bambi, so he’ll also love The Deer Hunter, right? And he liked the butterfly on the Silence of the Lambs poster that I showed him, so that might be a hit. Maybe I’ll do A Clockwork Orange next, because that’s an easy-as-pie portrait of social dysfunction (plus Carter is learning colors), and we’ll work our way up to the Kill Bill series and Charlie Kaufman’s later work. I don’t want to overload the poor tyke, and Stanley Kubrick is basically the Raffi of avante garde filmmakers.
I feel like I have a responsibility as a dad to teach Carter what’s good. I don’t want him going through childhood thinking that simple films that make him laugh and feel empowered will make him happy. I think that watching films like Roma and Taxi Driver with his dad — and engaging in hours-long deconstructions of those films afterwards — will teach him something that he sorely needs to learn. And I’m sure that when he’s older, he’ll look back at this episode and think that it really opened his eyes.
For the record: This is a bit. The book is real, but it doesn’t recommend any of the movies in this article (except for My Neighbor Totoro). “Baby Film Buff” is The Washington Post’s characterization of the book, not A24’s. And my son is one year old, not three, his name isn’t Carter, and his tastes can be described as “Elmo or go fuck yourself.”
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I never tried showing my (then) 2 year-old The Graduate ... but I DID (seriously!) repeatedly show her 2001: A Space Odyssey. She was having trouble sleeping, and so to get her to sleep my wife and I watched the first 15 minutes of that movie with her. The key thing was that it had elements that keenly engaged her interest (she called it "The Monkey Movie"), so she would eagerly watch it - but it was also hypnotically soporific in its pacing and music, so she would drift to sleep while watching it. Recommended for all parents of sleepless 2 year-olds!
You can do this for other media as well. Instead of reading Goodnight Moon to Carter at bedtime, try Kafka’s The Judgment, followed by a healthy discussion of alienation, parental estrangement, and suicide. He’ll love you for it.