Jon Kennedy, Nanty Glo Home Page webmaster and owner, is a former teen and campus minister. He began his journalism career as teen columnist for the Nanty Glo Journal and its sister weekly newspapers from 1957 to '62 and became the Journal's third editor in 1962 at age 20. He has edited other newspapers and magazines, and more recently, webzines, ever since. His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Christianity Today, and many other publications. His Jonals appear here on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

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Why did we ever go to all those movies?

Jonal entry 1087 | January 22 2009

My current reading is A Thomas Merton Reader. Merton, 1915-1968, was a Trappist monk who gained fame as the author of The Seven Story Mountain (an autobiography of his early life) in 1948 and about 60 other books that gained more readers after the critics highly praised his autobiography. He is generally known as a "peace priest," which I had always interpreted as a crypto-Communist or a "Liberation Theologian," so I took little interest in him until I came across this in C.S. Lewis's letters: "Have you read anything by an American Trappist called Thomas Merton? I'm at present on his No Man is an Island. It is the best new spiritual reading I've met for a long time." So when I came across the book I am currently reading in a used bookstore in Berkeley a month or so ago, I bought it.

It turns out that Merton did go through a short "Marxist phase" in his undergraduate days at Columbia University, but he had abandoned that long before his conversion to Catholicism and joining the Cistercian monks in Kentucky's Gethsemani Monastery. His writing is largely devotional or spiritual, as Lewis calls it, but the passages I'm reading from his autobiography are reminiscent of some of the best American literature I've read, like F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Jack Kerouac's On the Road. This passage especially ignited my imagination:

May came, and all the trees on Long Island were green, and when the train from the city got past Bayside and started across the meadows to Douglaston, you could see the pale, soft haze of summer beginning to hang over the bay, and count the boats that had been set afloat again after the winter....

Soon John Paul [his brother] was home from his school in Pennsylvania, and my exams were over, and we had nothing to do but go swimming and hang around the house playing hot records. And in the evening we would wander off to some appalling movie where we nearly died of boredom. We did not have a car...[s]o most of the time, we would get a ride to Great Neck and then walk back the two or three miles along the wide road when the show was over.

Why did we ever go to all those movies? That is another mystery. But I think John Paul and I and our various friends must have seen all the movies that were produced, without exception, from 1934 to 1937. And most of them were simply awful. What is more, they got worse from week to week and from month to month, and day after day we hated them more. My ears are ringing with the false, gay music that used to announce the Fox movietone and the Paramount newsreels with the turning camera that slowly veered its aim right at your face. My mind still echoes with the tones of Pete Smith and Fitzpatrick of the Travel-talks saying, "And now farewell to beautiful New South Wales."

...We were almost always in danger of being thrown out of the theater for our uproarious laughter at scenes that were supposed to be most affecting, tender, and appealing to the finer elements in the human soul—the tears of Jackie Cooper, the brave smile of Alice Faye behind the bars of a jail.

The movies soon turned into a kind of hell for me and my brother and indeed for all my closest friends. We could not keep away from them. We were hypnotized by those yellow flickering lights and the big posters of Don Ameche. Yet as soon as we got inside, the suffering of having to sit and look at such colossal stupidities became so acute that we sometimes actually felt physically sick. In the end, it got so that I could hardly sit through a show. It was like lighting cigarettes and taking a few puffs and thorwing them away, apalled by the vile taste in one's mouth.

I love the "poesy" of the whole passage, feeling transported by Merton's way with the language. I've seen little of Long Island in my life, but I feel I've been there in this page of writing.

But the thought that arrests my attention in it is "Why did we ever go to all those movies?" I certainly did not share Merton's critical eye when I was the age he's describing here (20 and 21 years old), but from my earliest years into advanced middle age, I was mesmerized by the movies, saw every one I could, and felt an obligation to do so. But now looking back on that fascination, I share Merton's bewilderment. I mentioned in my Christmas recollections here at the Home Page some time back that I couldn't quite bring myself to hate "Alexander's Ragtime Band," which was the "Christmas treat" movie at the Capitol Theater when I was, say, 11. I knew even then it was a waste of time, but it was a movie, and to us poor backwoods kids, any movie was a treat one would never dare complain against.

Being the sons of an artist who had lived abroad already in those young years, the Merton brothers were probably more sophisticated, by far, than I was, to be able to actually express repugnance at the movies of 1935 and 1936. I think some of my fascination (which I think was shared by many of our generation) with the movies was a byproduct of Hollywood's myth making. The publicity attending the movies was that they were cutting edge, suggesting that if you saw the latest movie you'd have some insight into the sexual peccadillos of the rich and famous that lower middle class kids could hardly imagine at the time. In the days years before even softcore pornography like Playboy Magazine became a topic acceptable for polite conversation, we suspected there were worlds out there that we could barely imagine. There was truth to this, of course, but the movies offered only a scent of the forbidden "fruit," with hardly any of the actuality. The trailers and movie magazines were more lurid—because they could suggest untold revelations they never had to deliver on—than the actual scripts acted out on the screens of the 1950s of my youth.

But beyond the suggestion of sex education, the movies also offered, at least to me, an insight into how adults of the middle and upper classes lived, how they talked, what they valued and aspired to, and there was no other way of getting glimpses of those hidden realms for someone who wanted to be part of the "professional class" when I reached my own adulthood. So in that sense, the movies were something of a "magic lantern" as the earliest movies projected onto screens had been called.

Our fascination was a byproduct of our unjaded innocence. No eleven-year-olds are that innocent these days, are they? And if they're not, that's a pity and a shame.

—Webmaster Jon Kennedy

Funny bones

The half full glass

Fifteen minutes after the Titanic sank, Angus and John find themselves hugging a piece of wreckage from the great ship. The water is freezing, sharks are swimming nearby, and, of course, the Titanic is long gone.

"Oh well," says Angus, "It could have been worse."

"Worse? How could it have been worse?" screams John.

"We could have bought return tickets."

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Why did we ever go to all those movies?

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Why did we ever go to all those movies?

Funny bones

latest additionsto the Nanty Glo Home Page

Today's chuckle

Thought for today

latest additions
to the Nanty Glo Home Page