That Bloody Film Made Me Do It

Now, THAT'S a good idea....

Violet Beauregarde claims that she's been chewing the same piece of gum for months, all day long, except at meal times, when she sticks it behind her ear. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory proved influential in that it gave me an idea of how to get into the Guinness Book of World Records without much effort or talent.  I saw myself being interviewed by Roy Castle and Norris McWhirter on Record Breakers.  Roy would be so impressed by how many months I'd chewed the same piece of gum for, that he'd celebrate my achievement by hitting the highest note on his trumpet, causing his arse cheeks to clench so tightly that you'd be hard pressed to slide a credit card between them (Billy Connolly's joke, not mine).

I started my chewing marathon one afternoon and come dinner-time, I secreted it behind my ear.  But this was about 1978 and like most 8 year olds I already had a large quantity of hair behind my ear, to which the gum stuck, requiring me to cut it out with scissors, thus rendering the gum thenceforth unchewable, my hair-cut somewhat lop-sided and my record-breaking ambitions up shit creek.

There was a lot of paper-talk in the 80s and 90s about how violent films were responsible for making children do violent things.  You actually needed to be strongly disposed towards violence in the first place, of course, in which case (regardless of what films you watched) you'd still carry out violence against others.  Films merely compensate for a lack of imagination, by giving you ideas of HOW to do things you were likely to do anyway.  I was likely to do the sort of stupid shit that all kids do and films usually gave me ideas on how to do it.

When you've got younger siblings, then OBVIOUSLY you want to scare them senseless whenever possible.  The Omen was pretty bloody scary, more so given that we were brought up Catholic and therefore believed in the feasibility of the Devil walking the Earth incarnate in human form.  Consequently, all that needed to be done to make my brother shit his pants was to turn the lights off and shout, 'Damien!'  If this wasn't terrifying enough, we watched Salem's Lot later on, and agreed that the scariest thing we'd ever seen was when a dead child returned as a vampire to haunt his brother by floating outside his bedroom window and tapping on it.  Needless to say, the shouting of 'Face at the window!' when someone was alone in a room, prompted an even more traumatic soiling of underwear.  But imagine the extent to which fear flew out the back end of my brother when I hid just outside the bedroom, perched on the coal-shed roof, and then tapped on the window after he'd been inside alone for 5 minutes.

Some film-inspired actions can fortunately be seen as innocuous and merely daft, rather than psychologically traumatising.  Rocky inspired many children of the 70s and 80s to want to box, but it also caused me to drink a glass full of raw eggs.  It was like swallowing snot.  That in itself was bearable in small amounts, because in the 70s every kid was snotty and so had to swallow back the occasional teaspoonful of sloppy mucus, but a whole glass of it.... grim!

Films didn't just make you do daft or nasty things, they could also shape your outlook on life.  Every time I see a new-born baby with a full head of hair I think of the babies in both The Omen and Rocky II, in both cases the child in question looked like it had been in utero for about 5 years and had come out with not just a bushy busby of black hair, but most probably a full set of teeth and politically conservative views that most of us don't have until middle age.  I always balk at seeing babies with full heads of hair, thanks to those films. (Apologies to any readers whose own children had hairy heads, I'm sure they were much less werewolfy eventually).

Sometimes you don't realise how much one particular film shapes your daily existence for years and years afterwards.  Everyone enjoys allowing iconic lines from a film to seep into their common parlance, as they subconsciously quote lines as part of their usual vernacular.  Often, these phrases are well known and instantly recognisable - maybe from Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars or Pulp Fiction. In my case, it's the film version of Please Sir!  About 10% of all exchanges with my wife comprise of quotes from this 1971 TV spin-off film.  Especially the less politically correct lines.

Finally, to conclude... Er… there's nothing to conclude.  Films just make you do daft shit.