[Pride 2020] My Mother's Guide to Video

“Affordable,” the catalogue said. Our first family VCR came bundled with a clamshell of Disney's Pinocchio, and as promised, all for a low price. Once my father learned how to program the machine, we could record whatever was broadcasted—while we were awake, or even asleep. This led to an accumulation of films and cartoons, all with side stickers to remind which tape was which. Bear in mind, these were TV edits, so most of the R-rated content was missing, the harsher language replaced or a few seconds of silence.

Like my father, I bent the machine to my will. After school, I sat patiently with my finger on the Stop button, omitting commercials during Ducktales and Tailspin. Somewhat skilled at this, I began to show off. I could deftly include commercials I wanted—action figure ads—no matter how short they were. I was always on my toes, anticipating the fade-in/fade-out.

Not that I didn’t have motivation. I perfected Stop/Record to save storage space, and more importantly, to appease my mother. She detested any display of sexuality, implied or otherwise by actors who dared to reveal their shower routine while selling moisturizer. Shoulders bare, pursing their lips into what’s become “Sparrow Face” on Instagram (that’s the slight pout/open-mouthed look). While I wasn’t sure about ads being indecent, they did interrupt my cartoons, which was a sin I could understand.

But taboo is taboo, and my curiosity was peaked. I was allowed to see gore and evisceration in the works of George Romero, so what was I missing? I found ways around these strict policies. For instance, she never censored TV listings in our local newspaper, none of the prevalent ink scribbles in my Wonder Woman or Black Cat comics, both women showcasing the same black gown, as created by my mother. I was free to read the synopsis of NBC’s programming, along with premium channels, like HBO. The latest Tales from the Crypt, sensationally-titled films like Body Heat or Full Body Massage, and so forth. Think Hard Ticket to Hawaii, with its promise of guns and naked bodies aligning. These listings, with their basic synopsis style, wouldn’t stand out to adult eyes as particularly explicit, but my inexperience informed my guilt. I hid behind my father’s recliner while creating visuals, imagined tan lines.

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PINOCCHIO (1940): Pinocchio falls in with the wrong crowd and succumbs to temptation, including smoking giant cigars with his new friend, a bucktoothed kid named Lampwick. Little do the boys know—they are being prepped for slave labor! Lampwick screams, his jaw extends. Animal parts push themselves out of his body. Rated G, 1 hour, 28 minutes.

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Some parents don’t mind exposing their own to violence. Free-falling terrorists like in Die Hard (the original), as a show of justice, what happens to the bad guys. Especially with a youngish Bruce Willis in tow, back when he still cared about working his face muscles. He was just young enough to tweak my undeveloped queer senses, something my mother never picked up on.

Early in the runtime, Hans—the villain—Gruber orders his men to round up hostages from their Nakatomi Plaza suites. During the confusion, a sleeping couple is pulled from bed half-naked, their sheets flying up like a classic white dress. The camera doesn’t linger, moving on to more important one-liners and boom, kapow, but the bodies are there.

This scene, with the nude couple, is absent from my childhood viewings.

Not that my memories are very intact—they’re not. Much of my childhood is hidden from me (either repressed, or my memory is just atrocious), but I have milestones. Moments that stick, like the time I played footsies with another boy, or when I first held a girl’s hand. Or when I caught my father peeking under the bathroom door late at night, my mother showering on the other side.

I was as confused as you might be reading this. But confusion was my norm, especially regarding sexuality—it’d be years before I came out as pansexual. As an adult, I know parents create rituals as a way to deal with the loss of personal and sexual freedom. “Me Time” once the wee ones are secured. Children who sleep with one eye open will notice these rituals, maybe translate them into a sort of security blanket, something to count on for stability. For instance, my father clenched his hands during conversation, like he was preparing to jump into action and save lives, spurred on by the horror stories of Guns & Ammo Magazine. He did this whenever my mother accused him of lusting for Peter Pan’s Tinkerbell, or the neighbor woman whose blouse shined like a moon. I held onto these constants. He moved like a man on the prowl for something to fix, as mechanics do.

Seeing him prone, his head interrupting the half circle of light from under the door, did not seem like role model behavior. For a time, this became one of his rituals. When the floorboards creaked at night to announce his entry into the living room, I shut my eyes tighter. I thought of soft-spoken film leads, stereotypical Native American trackers in Westerns placing ears to the dirt for signs of trouble. Why would he do this when my mother was rinsing her long hair? I wondered if she knew, if her dominant tendencies approved of a husband on his belly.

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PETER PAN (1953): The fairy Tinkerbell displays her cleavage while soaring nose-level with her young companions. Her dress well above the knees. She is often small, and a blur. Rated G, 1 hour, 17 minutes.

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My mother, while rarely clueless, was in the dark when it came to technology. But the machine left her no choice, so she learned how to adapt and edit my father's tape collection. This is a woman who’d cancel a night on the town if someone sat near our table wearing a spaghetti strap top, sometimes calling attention to the “indecent” offender and confronting them. Once we were walking through a busy mall, and she stepped near a woman—wrong place, wrong time—and called her a “slut.” She demanded the woman go home and “cover up.” Her victims never refuted her, probably because they were dumbfounded by this irate woman in the long dress.

My father’s routines remained alongside my mother’s, but she got the drop on him via his movies—with her learned prowess of the VCR, it was goodbye to anything especially teasing—cleavage, big eyelashes, sweaty bodices. This was the future, and she understood.

Bear with me—I have to get technical now. Whatever the TV is tuned to could be recorded onto a blank cassette; if a program already existed on the tape, it can still be overwritten. For instance, to replace a recorded Irish Spring ad with static, simply tune in to a dead channel, then push Play and Record (simultaneously). The offending commercial will disappear, nothing to see but a bomb of fuzz. And believe me, static, when interrupting a scene, will be loud and always unexpected.

And so inspired, my mother found she could erase women from my father's films. Goodbye Bonnie Bedelia, Linda Hamilton. That lone, sweaty woman in Predator.

Considering our family genres were Action and Horror, there was lots of static. Movie nights went like this: pick Movie, start Movie. Watch Movie for a short period, then static, plus noise.

Fast Forward.

Continue watching, then static. Back to gunfire, and slasher kills.

Fast Forward. Repeat until the names of Gaffers and Best Boys start to scroll, where one can see the list of the missing.

After a while I didn’t notice my mother’s edits, or at least react to them. Remote duty became the norm. Besides, any form of entertainment was a break from our seasonal farm obligations, and my battles with self harm. Blooming fescue meant wilting on the aluminum palm of a tractor seat, while trying not to roll the machine over every steep landscape, a surefire way of death that took relatives and neighbors without discrimination. I hoped to expire from natural causes before the weight of a John Deere did its thing.

I was convinced most kids my age were probably enjoying vacation while I was stuck in the field, trying to catch square bales against my face (without getting cut to shreds), my father commenting on my lack of muscles. As butchered as these films were, my mother’s videos were one of the few pleasures of my pre-teen years.

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TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY (1991): Sarah Connor breaks a man's ribs with a baton while escaping a mental hospital. Everyone thinks she’s crazy, cowering in fear as she passes by. In her loose tank top, she takes no prisoners. Her muscles are slick, tight. Rated R, 2 hours, 17 minutes.

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My older brother escaped our fields by landing a burger job in town, which became his excuse for early hair loss (blame the chemical grease). My father, who was not one to lend cars, drove him to work—with me in tow—every morning. On the way back we’d typically hit up Wrink's Market, whose owner was selling his comic collection alongside TV dinners. My ritual was to spend hayfield money on Walt Simonson's Thor and various Punisher issues, two of my father’s favorites. He kept them stashed in his work shed, so that we could both read them without my mother finding them.

One day we abruptly stopped by a larger grocery, where my father purchased a bodybuilding magazine. Muscle & Fitness showcased women with imitation leather skin, standing next to men with unavoidable bulges. Once in our driveway, my father said to keep this from my mother because, "She wouldn't be too tickled." I did what he asked, but she eventually found the magazine under the seat of his truck. She questioned me about the purchase, but I played dumb.

Her anger over this ordeal (and others) transferred to her children once my father was back on the road, which was often (truck driver requirements). Despite the goings-on I’m describing, my parents kept their arguments non-violent and short, as she had her bedroom and he could easily disappear into the field, or his work shed. She never fully let loose on him like she did with her young.

My brother owns a scar from a library rental of The Elephant Man. Yes, my mother introduced me to auteur David Lynch—I never said she had bad taste. Anyway, she launched the VHS at his forehead when he asked for a snack. She didn’t aim so much as just reacted, throwing the tape across the room. I stood by terrified, then ran for bandages as he cried.

She taught me to bristle at curse words. Whatever was to come from her mouth, I knew to expect a worse follow-up.

My left ear is hard-of-hearing because Elektra, the femme fatale ninja, appeared in my comic book. No, I haven’t seen the movie, and I doubt she did either.

Please attempt to understand my mother. She was taken from her family by Social Services after her birth mother tried to stab her with a kitchen knife. This grandmother I never met was—to quote my mother—the “town whore,” known to take strangers through her door while her children waited nearby, presumably looking for somewhere to hide. But there’s nowhere to go in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, unless you’re wearing a uniform and it’s time to ship out.

If these were only hookups and nothing more, I don’t know. Memory is a tricky thing, especially when gender is involved. But picture my mother covering her ears to avoid the sounds of affection, or just need. My grandmother and her private affairs are beyond judgment, but my mother’s home was clearly void of routine compassion, an absence as damaging as any knife threat.

When my mother’s sister would visit, I’d pretend to be asleep so I could listen to their stories, all the things their mother did to them. For a while I hoped to meet this woman, just to see if she lived up to the horrors. To me she was Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty, sex and terror tied up into two horns.

I’ve used the memory of my aunt’s neon hose and short skirts (never mind her mysterious life in Las Vegas) to form a picture of this dead woman who built my mother. Part PJ Soles, part Michael Myers.

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HALLOWEEN (1978): A girl waits in bed for her boyfriend to return, unaware that he's been murdered in the kitchen while on a booze mission. The Shape enters the room wearing a sheet over his head, and she flashes her breasts at him for a laugh. Rated R, 1 hours, 31 minutes.

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Cinema is the only interest my mother and I have in common. Since I hate and refuse to talk Midwestern weather, it’s all John Carpenter, or Clive Barker. I keep my writing life separate from my family. They know what I do, but that’s as close as I’ll let them, and this extends to my queerness. Instead of updates on publishing success or rejections, I’ll suggest Oculus or The Honeymoon Killers, communication for an hour or two without touching reality.

I neglect to mention the one or two scenes that she won’t like. Her editing days, her damning of the female body, are so far behind me that I forget to conjure her projected fears and play along by determining which scenes make the cut.

I should say, no, I haven’t seen any movies lately. But we have to talk about something.

I look at my father, who’s taken to binging Kurosawa, the women in formal dresses. This period detail allows for a pass from my mother, who still previews every purchase for offensive content. Should the film not make her cut, the Blu-ray will disappear without explanation since the format protects film against personal editing. It’s a new world, but my mother isn’t ready to change.

Which leads me to think about this scene where the girl is trying to impress the new bf, so her shorts come down. A pose becomes a silhouette with pop music, edited to show nude body doubles, possibly computer generated torsos and buttocks.

She asks for recommendations, preferably horror. I offer Spasmo, and Sinister. Cold in July, and Martyrs. I only mention the body count of each.

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