I Don't Want My Kids Watching Star Wars . . . Yet

No, they're not mine--but easily could be.

Parenting is often harder than I was led to believe.

                Me, I struggle. With choices, with doing what my dad did, with doing what my dad didn’t do, with doing what other parents my age do, or with ignoring what they’re doing. It’s a great schmozzle, a plethora of options. At risk: your kids’ adulthood ruined by the choices you made in their childhood. Or, your own un-ending guilt despite having pretty normal kids and despite your own faults as a parent.

                Currently, I’m struggling with a lot of things, but a silly one taking up big chunks of my brain is, of all things, Star Wars. I’m a child of the 80s, and grew up with a fairly decent obsession with George Lucas’s meal ticket. I recall the spring of 1983, when  mother took me to see Return of the Jedi and had to read Jabba the Hutt’s subtitles to me. The eldest of my two sons is the same age, and I’m reluctant to show him those movies of my youth.

                When you consider these parallels—where your kids are in relation to where you were at their age—you get caught in the conundrums I’ve outlined above.

                Returning from a Star Wars-themed birthday party recently, my son showed me a Chewbacca tattoo on his arm. Immersive advertising works, and he could recognize from the style and colour that—like superheroes and Thomas—this is someone he should recognize. It’s only natural that many of his peers have seen the movies: their dads are my age, raised in the same era. You can’t avoid the decisions of parents or permeative marketing that, really, is the fault of the 80s anyway. Our own karma.

                They are, after all, kids’ movies, right?

                Right?

                Do we excuse them as kids’ movies because George Lucas originally employed fairy tale motifs, or because he was such a bad writer that we can’t in good conscious regard them as mature? I’d say the majority of Star Wars fans are middle-aged nostalgics with more money than they know what to do with attempting to buy back their childhood at ten times the original cost. Thank heavens for Calgary Comic Expo!

                It’s not like my kids watch much TV. We don’t have Treehouse, but they watch movies sometimes, like weekend mornings. They watch releases by Disney, Pixar, and their thousands of imitators. I like that these are the movies my kids watch. The films are relatively innocent, and usually have the sorts of messages I can get behind (with the exception of the always-embedded BUY THIS!)

                What’s different about Star Wars? The damn violence. Guns, shooting, explosions, lopping off of limbs. Bobba Fett watching his daddy decapitated. I hate guns, even fantasy lasers, and just because I grew up playing with them doesn’t make them okay now.

                Little boys like—even crave—guns. They have such a knack for imaginatively converting a stick or a rod or a bat into a firearm that one sometimes believes it’s a genetic predisposition. Some parents just accept boys being boys, and despite that I want my kids to grow into their own people and not who I want them to be, I’ll admit that my wife and I fight against gunplay hard. I grew up playing Star Wars and G.I.Joe, and even if I’m kidding myself, I want my kids not to play that way. At least right now.

                I’m aware that it sounds like I’m resisting boys being boys and am over-concerned about what it means in the future. I had a toy AK-47, and today I shun weaponry as piddly as slingshots (Saskatchewan gopher-hunting aside). The excuse that “they’re just as bad as we were” doesn’t hold water for me.

                I also run the risk of appearing like one of those parents I despise: those that hide the realities of the world from their kids, creating ignorant innocents who then get trampled by society when they leave the commune. I am not. I readily expose my kids to reality, encourage them to make the right decisions, without me—as the lingo goes—hovering above them. I do enjoy having small children who are innocent. I see no need in shoving them into the world’s nastiness—that’s different than hiding them from it.

                I like having sensitive boys. It’s my way of resisting this recent wave of New Men I’ve railed against in past posts, those that feel manhood has been robbed of us so we need to fight and spit and “screw chicks” and eat meat and hunt. Apparently, the only way to show you have balls anymore is to scream it from the rooftops, rather than have balls enough to move on and carve a new identity for men. Dudes what can cry and still lower a clean body check, grill a mean T-bone and yet can be soothed by vocal harmonies. It’s an evolved man I’m talking about.

                My wife puts Star Wars in my decision category—with the caveat we discuss it in advance of course. Right now, I’m resistant. I see them as violent films that treat women as weak supporting characters in need of rescue, that state a good blaster can solve anything, that all films should be nothing more than an advancement of merchandising, and that storytelling is nothing more than a series of badly-dialogued fight-scenes strung together by romping chamber music.

                I want my boys to be better than me, and I’m not satisfied with using my own childhood as an excuse for their behaviour. There will be a time for Star Wars (and its superiors like The Avengers and Lord of the Rings) later. Right now, I’ll lay the foundations of good and important storytelling in Brave or The Lorax.

                After they climb a tree. And possibly fall out of it.