The Other Side of Macabre...

I have a confession to make. As a child, I was a horrible scaredy cat. I couldn't even watch the preview to a movie that looked like it might be scary. I remember my dad renting Jaws and he had to pause it through the gorier bits because I would have nightmares if I saw them. I remember watching a trailer for a film in which a man sat on top of a giant meat grinder and I had nightmares for weeks. I never saw him jump into the meat grinder. I never saw him even get ground up. Yet, in my mind, he did; I knew what was going to happen and thus, I would lie awake for hours, hiding under the covers, afraid of the dark.

I was afraid of everything. I was afraid of the giant tree outside my window for a while because I saw Poltergeist and there's an evil tree in that movie that reaches through a window and grabs a little boy.

I even used to be afraid of John Wayne because right after he died, I had a dream where he was buried in our garden. I was afraid to walk by the patio area for weeks because the stones looked like gravestones to me and I was convinced John Wayne was buried there.

So, what it comes down to is that I was a child who did enough damage to her sleep patterns with my overactive imagination without needing help from horror movies.

Ironically, nowadays, I'm pretty much the complete opposite. I laugh at horror movies and like that darker side of life, the Dexters, the vampires, the shadows that surround us.

Yet, it doesn't change the fact that I was a bit of a wussy child. My parents were really good about limiting what we were allowed to watch and most of the stuff I saw that gave me nightmares was around a friend's house or with my older brother. Yet, I had enough to contend with by letting my imagination scare me to death. I'd imagine seeing corpses in piles of leaves or hear the cackle of a witch on a cold windy night. Yes, I admit, Captain Monkeypants was a bit macabre, even back then but it was the other side of macabre, the side that was terrified of it, not the side that liked to create it for the slight thrill of otherness it gives me today.

As a child, I knew my limits. I knew there were things I had to wait to see, things that were too old for me, books I would have to wait to read, movies my older brother saw and then told me about. I had to wait until I was older to see and read those things. I'm happy I had to do that; I think that went a long way into helping me embrace the scarier things in life, of learning that thunderstorms were not heart-stopping things of terror but, instead, were a fantastic display of nature at it's angriest. It made me see that Freddy Krueger wasn't some horror creation that should give me nightmares but, instead, was a bit of a laugh and was so ridiculous, it wasn't worth being scared about. It was a progression from the innocence of childhood, the great unknown of being older, of being allowed.

The point is, I needed this natural progression from childhood. It made me appreciate things in due course. I was allowed to be a child for a long time, long enough to help me become a proper adult (or, at least, as much of one as I am today).

Nowadays, I see that happening less and less. I found out that my brother was taking my niece to see the new Harry Potter film on Friday. She's five. As soon as I heard that, I admit I was shocked. I know she loves the franchise; she's been my Harry Potter buddy for a while now. For the longest time, her parents only let her watch the first couple of films, the ones where Harry, Hermione and Ron are still children, where Trolls and Basilisks are the scary parts.

I guess they eventually let her see all of them. I'm not judging my brother and sister-in-law as parents but it does make me sad that they're so willing to let her see these movies.

I know the movie, technically, is rated PG so it's not huge that she's seeing it in a rating sense. But...as a child? That just makes me sad. This movie contains the throes of adolescent hormones, violence, death of a major character, battles, betrayal....all things that a five-year-old, not matter how mature, won't truly be able to get.

I think as a Potter-fan that I'm sad for her on a whole other level. She's missing the chance to truly, slowly discover the series and the pleasure of discovering a new adventure of a character. Instead, she's viewing the movies as a five-year-old, with a five-year-old comprehension; she's never going to have the chance to 'discover' such a wonderful series because she's already 'been there, done that.'

As a reader, I always advocate the book over a movie. I'm hoping when she learns to read, she'll treat the series as a new one but I don't think that's possible. I think that once we see a movie and then read the book on which it was based, it's hard to picture characters in a book as anything other than the actors. I try deliberately not to do that, to treat the book and movie as two seperate entities. I usually succeed because I'm stubborn and I suffer from writer-bias. The characters were created by the writer so he/she should be able to have the final word on how they look. Thus, I'll always believe a writer over a film company who cast actors in the roles unless they match up. The cast of True Blood, for example, couldn't get closer to the pictures in my head for most of the characters if they tried.

Anyway, back to my point about my niece. I'm not her parent and wouldn't dream of telling her parents what to do. Besides, they'd never listen anyway. It just makes me very sad on several levels that they can't say, "Sorry but you're too young. We'll take you to see Ice Age 3 instead." Now there's a movie for kids with talking animals, crazy squirrels and a more child-friendly storyline. I'm not saying that Harry Potter shouldn't be enjoyed by a younger generation but as the storyline progresses, so does the maturity level and the darkness the characters face. I suppose part of me doesn't want her to know about that darkness yet, to enjoy the fact that she's a kid and the hardest part of that should be stopping her younger brother from wearing her play-jewelry.

Yet, I'm not a parent. Maybe this is a way for her not to have nightmares about John Wayne being buried in her garden or imagining trees reaching in and grabbing her when she sleeps. It doesn't change the fact that part of me wants to grab her, sit her down and read her some nice stories that she skipped in her efforts to embrace Hannah Montana and Harry Potter, stories that are sweet, pretty and wrapped in pretty bows. Yet she'd probably scoff at those, wanting to know when the fighting started, when the witch would eat the children.

I think what it comes down to is that children today are in a hurry to grow up and me, in my old fashioned way, thinks they should get to be a kid for just a little while longer before the awkwardness of adolescence attacks. Nowadays it's harder, that line between adolescence and childhood is blurrier by the day.

I want my niece to have a proper respect for scary things and not take them in stride the way she does now. Yes, I suppose it's a sign of maturity but there are some things that should be scary and it worries me that she no longer seems to notice this. Maybe she's just not a scaredy cat the way I used to be.

Or still am...actually. I saw Ronald McDonald on a TV show this morning. I never noticed before but he could inspire terror, even in an adult. I think it's the big clown mouth- I keep expecting him to show a set of teeth or wield a knife. Either way, with his Happy Meals and weird friends, he inspires suspicion. Apparently, you never completely grow out of some things...it seems that I'm still a little macabre.

Thanks for reading. Happy Tuesday.

I'm an Adult and I Blame the Jonas Brothers

So, last night as I'm watching TV, getting ready for Grey's Anatomy, it occurred to me that I'm getting old. It was one of those horrible, sudden realizations that stops you cold for just a second. Ok, so I am approaching my mid-thirties and it's not that old but you have to understand, until recently, I still sort of counted myself on the side of the young 'uns and not of the grown-ups.

I think it's time to admit I'm a grown-up, an adult. Eek. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I've been living like a kid. My bed is a grown up bed, not some princessy, curtain-draped wonder. I cook. I clean. I even occasionally do my own laundry. I act like an adult, I've just never really felt like one.

You might wonder what spurned this revelation. Well, in all honesty, it was those blasted Jonas Brothers. You have to be somewhat familiar with them. They're the hot teen band; you cannot go into Walmart without seeing their stuff displayed by the Hannah Montana merchandise. I think there are three of them, they're Disneyfied boys, prettied up to get the girls screaming and they play that bubblegum rock that makes your teeth feel like it's going to fall out of your head with the sweet teen-ness of it all.

Last night I saw a preview for their movie or whatever it is they're promoting and I thought to myself, "what funny looking little boys" and then it hit me, I called them little boys. My mind flickered to the audience for whom they exist and I realized that I had no connection to this generation, that it had moved on and so had I.

I think this is the first generation with which this has happened. I try to stay pretty current in my music tastes. I'm a die-hard Green Day fan, I love Linkin Park, I love My Chemical Romance, I like some of the songs they used in the Twilight movie. (I'm sad to admit that Stephanie Meyer and I do have similar taste in music and when she lists the songs that on her writing playlist, they're usually very similar to mine). I'm always worried that I'll seem like an old person trying to be young but, in truth, I really don't care. I've always loved music and that will most likely never change.

I will say that even when I was a teen, it's doubtful I would have liked the Jonas Brothers. With my generation, it was New Kids on the Block or, as they're so fondly known, NKOTB. I despised them in high school. I was annoyed at their popiness, their irritating sickly ballads, their clean-cut looks and their horrible choreographed dancing. I was into the hard rock stuff, Bon Jovi, Skid Row, Def Leppard, Cinderella. Well, that was until I suddenly started listening to showtunes and I became a complete an utter nerd but I've already told you about that.

Yet even though I didn't care for NKOTB, I cared enough to tease my friends who did and, deep down, understood why they liked them...yet it still wasn't for me.

With the Jonas Brothers, I realized I didn't even care enough to mock them. They exist but they have nothing to do with me. I wouldn't know if I heard them on the radio, all I'd know is that I was on the wrong station and scan for another one. Even with the craze before that, High School Musical (HSM), I had seen the first stupid movie. It was when I lived alone in L.A. and I had a free preview weekend of the Disney Channel (I only ever had basic, basic, BASIC cable- local channels only with a few odd extras). I thought it looked interesting when they previewed the first HSM. I still like a good musical and I thought "That looked cute."

Bad idea. I thought it was awful. It was a shiny-happy version of high school and not one that I remembered. I knew it was Disney but wow, was it Disney, the dimples, the shiny hair, the happy ending...give me that in a cartoon form, change the characters into monkeys or something and I might like it but not with those insipid kids with their flat-ironed hair and trained-from-birth singing voices.

Yet, you'll notice, I still cared enough to pick on it, to make fun of it. I would never mock the fans of it unless they were over the age of 16 but you get the point, right?

Those Jonas Brothers are just a sign of the times. They're a safe transition from pre-teen to teenagerness. Yet, to me, they're just there. I don't even groan when I see their posters the way I do with the two leads from Twilight because the kids like The Jonas Brothers and let 'em have their music.

(Of course, the Twilight thing might be because every picture I see of Rob Pattinson and Kristen Stewart looks like they've been smoking something they shouldn't have. Seriously, want a visual picture of 'stoned', look at the latest cover of Entertainment Weekly.)

I digress. Again. Anyway, back to the Jonas Brothers. They make me feel old. I do still remember the butterflies that a pre-teen crush can bring.*

(*side note: I already confessed I used to love George Michael. Today, a remake of "Careless Whisper" was on the radio and I still know every word without thinking. Bizarre.)

Yet I don't get the fuss about the Jonas Brothers and I don't care. The kids like 'em. That's all that matters. And by saying 'the kids' I'm separating myself off as an adult.

I suppose it had to happen sometime, I had to come out of the closet and admit I was a grown-up, no matter how many times I watch or read Harry Potter but I just didn't expect it to happen so suddenly and without my knowing it was going to happen.

I suppose it had to happen sometime, right?

Have a great weekend.