Detox | Censors in the summer house

In this issue, inspired by last week’s holidays, we present a guide to help you pick the right film to watch with the family on long, balmy summer nights, especially while vacationing together. 

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During the holidays, family relationships are put to the test. Most of us no longer live under the same roof as our parents but at times we travel together to a shared summer house. When that happens, adjusting once more to cohabitation becomes a challenge. We get asked a lot of questions, we are subjected to comments that are not devoid of criticism, we wonder where and when we’ll sneak that cigarette, we argue about what to eat, whether we should order groceries from a certain supermarket, but of course we are told that they are “thieves” and we should drive to buy our groceries ourselves. Simultaneously we’re all dealing with a ridiculously high level of humidity, under old depleted fans. The sea is beautiful to look at but does not really encourage a dip; the waves are too high. The family has expanded as time went by: we’ve fallen in love and now have partners and some of us even procreated little ones, and now the house that we once thought of as massive is overflowing with humans.

Tensions accumulate throughout the day and they only start to ease near sunset: the heat breaks, we finally manage to sit down to have the dinner we agreed to make after endless discussions, the children’s noises die down as their bedtime approaches. Sitting in the garden also becomes an option, as the flies magically disappear — and even though this is the time the mosquitos begin their attack, we’ve developed strategies to keep them off our bodies through years of experience, so the night definitely beats day. 

If we don’t think of a group activity the night will be wasted on each of us staring into their screens, totally isolated from one another. Some of us are playing games, others returning texts, reading articles or scrolling through friends’ pictures on Instagram. Only a film can bring us together, but it has to be one that everybody will like. We realize this is a most difficult task: How do we choose a film suitable to watch with our family, particularly our parents? (And not have to go through the same draining debates surrounding the day’s main meal?)

When we ask them what they want to watch they say they’re up for anything, but we all know that’s not true. They actually have a lot of demands, and they almost always clash with our preferences. The Internet here is no good for streaming, so we connect the external hard drive to the new television that we just bought before the summer so we can watch movies together as a family, a big screen with USB and HDMI outlets. We sift through the folders, hundreds of pirated movies we’ve accumulated over the years. It is up to us to choose.

“We want something to change our mood,” the mother says. 

Oh, well, this film is out of the question, then. A story of a black man and his journey to freedom from slavery could only change our mood to bleak. But wait, it has a happy ending, we say. Then again, what’s a happy ending, really, except a concept invented by Hollywood to sell stories to audiences longing for escape? The man becomes free, yes, but black people are still being killed in broad daylight on the streets of American cities, so…

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Alright, how about a sweet, slightly melancholic romance? Perfect. But it’s a lesbian love story, one of us points out. And they are right, that wouldn’t do. After all, we don’t want the film to be followed by a raging discussion that would ruin everyone’s night. Such conversations with the family have their moments, but a holiday spent together isn’t one of them. Fine. How about a comedy? Some light fare that doesn’t clash with anyone’s beliefs, just pure entertainment. But we can already predict what they’ll say: “What is this nonsense, kids?” — then they’ll go back to their phones, disengaged.

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There’s a critically acclaimed Taiwanese film that’s been on our list for some time, this could be a nice opportunity to watch it together. But the nonlinear narrative and slow pace of the film is likely unfamiliar for the parents; they would get bored fifteen minutes in. We should pick something with a clear plot; a clean three-act structure that's easy to follow.

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When we were young and used to go to the video rental store we were only allowed to pick a film from the children and family section. Our mother used to take the age rating system very seriously, rendering the rest of the shop off limits for us. Only she would roam around and pick the film she was going to watch with our father during the weekend while we picked our child-friendly film. As time went by we had memorized the films we were allowed to watch and started to develop an irresistible curiosity towards the other films — the “real” films, we used to call them — the posters of which adorned the facade of the little store. It was the nineties in all their glory, the age of larger-than-life movie stars: Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, Nicholas Cage and many others. But we were stuck with Disney animations or family comedies such as Home Alone. The closest we would get to the other films was to sneak a peek at the film our parents rented when they were out of the house (this is how we watched Braveheart for the first time — we still don’t know how that uncensored cut made its way to the tiny video store across from our house).

Now we stand in front of the new television set, time and our experience with Torrents (a concept our parents have never been able to grasp) placing us in the position of the censor. It hits us that this is exactly the role we are playing as we try to pick a film to watch together as a family. The tables have turned and now we are in complete control of the film library, a collection much larger than any of the video stores of our childhood could encompass. We only allow the films we deem “safe” to watch: Light but not frivolous, touching but not depressing, “meaningful” but not likely to spur unwanted conversations, conventional in form and lacking in experimentation to guarantee audience satisfaction.

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We think of the children, sleeping so peacefully inside. When they get past the stage of watching cartoons and their curiosity begins to stir, will we perform a similar kind of censorship on them? Will they in turn practice this censorship upon us, decades from now, when the keys to the film library are inevitably passed down to them? Is there a way out?

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When in doubt, go with The Godfather, somebody finally suggests, and nobody objects. It is a choice that clearly breaks the rules: it is far from light, and definitely depressing, but it becomes less intense when you know the events and can predict the tragedy — and this is a film our parents have known long before we even existed. The night ends in peace, and everyone goes to bed happy. They call them classics for a reason, right? 

*This guide was written by a group of “censors” from their family summer house on a Thursday night.