That bias towards youth in the audience has always been there – never more so than today. For decades now, it has been easy to shock parents by telling them that their children, by the age of 18, have probably spent four times as long watching moving imagery (films and TV) as they have reading. The same boy saw the beast burst out of John Hurt’s chest in Alien and chuckled, whereas his mother had once retreated from the theatre with nausea. Any movie-goer knows such stories and they are steps in the dance I referred to.
From the earliest days in film history, parents and teachers were alarmed at how much time kids were spending in the dark watching the flickers. In 1973, The Exorcist was – for adults – one of the most disturbing films ever shown. There were reasonable anxieties that some tender teenagers in the audience might be endangered – and this is all the more possible in that the central victim is a child. But when the film was reissued a few years ago I took an 11-year-old son and the only thing that interested him was how they had got the girl’s head to revolve. One problem for the new King Kong is going to be the wise child’s response to Anne’s alarm: “Gee, hasn’t she seen King Kong before?” In other words, our children have become very hip. The film-makers reckoned that the dynamic emotional thrust of the story was FEAR! That’s why Anne Darrow the ing?e actress is first taught to scream the movie way and then allowed to scream for real as she sees a beast beyond her imagining. It was always the credo of Chaplin that he appealed to the child in every grown person, and to this day you can introduce a 10-year-old to classic movie fun by showing them Laurel and Hardy or the Marx Brothers.
However, try W C Fields, and you discover the extra, embittered maturity in Fields – which went with the alleged liking for children, if boiled or roasted. Horror and crime pictures were the only genres of the Thirties outside child’s territory – and King Kong in 1933 was regarded as a kind of horror picture. In hindsight, one can see how easily the set genres of that age appealed to everyone: action and adventure films, without undue violence; romantic stories, without too much sex; musicals – “Everyone loves a musical!”; and, of course, comedies. That ” golden age” atmosphere is part of the opportunity seized upon by the film industry to reach “everyone” at the same time. In turn, that was a measure of an age when families without the means to afford baby-sitting services liked to go, all together, to see movies. Those packed houses for The Lord of the Rings were a throwback to the days when families went to mainstream films together, fairly sure that young children could follow the plot without being unduly frightened.
One large reason why Jackson was personally paid $20m to do this Kong was because in The Lord of the Rings – full of dread, combat and potential horror (to say nothing of complex mystical urgings) – he delivered a film that children, parents and grandparents saw together, happily, congratulating each other on what is now a very rare thing – a family entertainment. There’s an odd contradiction of forces at work: older generations may long for tranquil “children’s films” – thus the return of Lassie in a new version this week to divert the little ones from video games that may entail hours of questing, zapping and destroying Yet kids also long for a taste of the grown-up world. The new Harry Potter picture has moments that are flat-out scary and intimations of adolescence blooming in our central trio. The bringing to the screen of the Narnia story is an attempt to hold on to the child audience while keeping adults interested. And some of it will work, even if sometimes kids can only prove themselves through rebellion. A little fright is OK, but the creative vision will have been tempered to the box office. We may never hear the details, but if Jackson left elements of authentic terror or adult sexual suggestiveness in his film, those will have been drained away to get the 12A rating.
