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No villains allowed
Escaping Into Movies
You may take this as bragging, but it most assuredly is not: my children, ages 8 and 4, have fallen in love with silent comedies. Earlier in the pandemic — I believe it was somewhere around Month 372, although I might have to double-check my records — we reached an impasse regarding the question of villains. With schools closed and the country on lockdown, our family sought to safeguard our fraying collective sanity and the silent terror of endless empty hours to fill with the imposition of a daily 4 PM movie, or “movie show,” as the 4-year-old termed it. And we had run into some challenges regarding villains, who I came to realize were rampant in practically every film ever made, and whose very presence terrified my children. Even Disney movies, supposed safe space for fraidycats of all ages, were crammed full of evil snakes, vicious lions, nasty women who wanted to turn dogs into fur coats, and all manner of baddies.
Racking my brain for a movie that might not activate that primal fear, I seized on the idea of showing them a Charlie Chaplin movie, testing my theory that Chaplin was so astonishingly gifted as to win over audiences of any age, under any circumstances. So we turned to the Criterion Channel and put on The Kid, in which Chaplin adopts sweet-hearted urchin Jackie Coogan. The kids loved seeing “Charlie,” as they instantly took to calling…
