My Kids Now Know Stuff I Don’t: A Shining Example

A story about the benefits of shutting up and listening...

One of the best things about having kids is watching them grow up and become interesting adults and how that changes your relationship.

For about a decade-and-a-half (if you’re lucky) you’re the teacher and they’re the students and then your kids go off to college and develop their own interests and learn things you don’t know and then they become the teachers and you become the student, which is a pretty cool transformation as long as your ego can handle it.

The same kids who needed you to change their diapers will be the ones who show you how to program your flat-screen TV or make your cellphone quit sending you email notifications at 3 AM or explain how we “beat” the Nazis in WW2, but then recruited some of those Evil Nazi Scientists because we wanted them to make weapons for us and not the Russians, which means right after WW2 (supposedly the Last Good War) we had members of the Nazi Party and the SS and war criminals playing for Team USA.

I’d never heard of “Operation Paperclip” (google it) until one of my sons told me about it.

Which isn’t totally my fault because Hollywood didn’t mention any of that stuff about picking Nazi Scientists in the First Round of the Evil Genius Draft in all those John Wayne movies I watched growing up.

So each generation gets smarter than the last one (theoretically, although the shit you see on Tik Tok might make you wonder) and now my kids know a lot of things I don’t and when the internet became a thing, they also warned me that corporations were collecting information about my preferences through my online activities which first time I heard it sounded unlikely and paranoid, but now I know my kids were 100% right so these days I listen closely when they have something to say.

And recently, one of them explained how to be successful.

The Secret to Success

That’s a picture of Rae’s Restaurant on Pico Boulevard and when I visited LA my son Paul suggested we go there which was a great suggestion because when I ordered breakfast they gave me so much food it came on two plates.

Also, Rae’s was featured in the Steve Martin/Eddie Murphy movie Bowfinger and we sat at the same table where they shot a scene and then went back to Paul’s apartment and re-watched the movie which was even funnier the second time around and now I have to question the validity of the Academy Awards because how do you not give a Best Actor Oscar to a guy who looks like this:

But can make a face that looks like this:

Now that’s acting and every time Eddie made that goofy face I started laughing.

Anyway…

We were in Rae’s when Paul explained how to be successful in this era of divided audiences where you watch one TV channel if you’re a Democrat and different TV channel if you’re a Republican, so here it is (and you might want to write this down) THE SECRET TO SUCCESS:

Identify a large demographic and tell them they’re right.

If you think about it – and I did – Tucker Carlson tells Conservatives they’re right about pretty much everything and Rachel Maddow does the same thing for Liberals, but when I created Judging the Royals I did the exact opposite: I identified a large demographic (baseball fans into analytics) and told them they were wrong.

I mistakenly thought baseball fans would value the opinions of Major League Ballplayers, but it turned out they valued their own opinions quite a bit more and I think we can blame the early demise of Judging the Royals on Paul for not speaking up earlier.

Also…I would like to have known that shit about Nazi Scientists a little sooner than I did.

JUDGE MOVIES

If I needed any more evidence that my kids now know more than me, I got it when I re-watched The Shining with Paul.

Here’s the deal on that:

Paul – the music producer (he’s got Gold Records and worked with Young Thug and Migos and had a song in a Will Smith movie before Will went batshit) – is now doing a podcast about movies and he’ll watch a classic movie dozens of times and do some research and point out all the stuff the rest of us might have missed.

The first and only time I watched The Shining was in 1980 when it first came out and I thought it was an OK horror flick about cabin fever, but missed a lot of what was up there on the screen.

Apparently, director Stanley Kubrick was big on the details and absolutely everything that appears in the movie was planned out and had meaning and because I didn’t know any of that when I first saw the movie, I missed a lot.  

For instance:

• At the beginning of the movie a lot of the characters are wearing some combination of red, white and blue, which represents America and its point of view and when Jack Nicholson’s character is interviewed for the job of caretaker at the Overlook Hotel, the guy who does the interviewing is wearing the same colors as the American flag, so once you get the symbolism it’s kinda like he’s asking Jack if he wants to become caretaker of America.

• While waiting to be interviewed for that caretaker job, Jack’s character’s reading a Playgirl magazine which is a really, really weird thing to be reading in a hotel lobby and that particular issue had an article about incest, which hints that Jack just might be a pedophile and if you want to hear more about that, just listen to Paul’s podcast on Eyes Wide Shut.

• A book in Shelly Duval’s apartment is The Wish Child, a story about kids growing up in Nazi Germany.

• The Overlook Hotel is built on an Indian burial ground which, first time I saw the movie seemed like an explanation for all the spooky shit that takes place there, but this time seemed like a metaphor that refers to America’s history.

• At one point the child character Danny is wearing a Mickey Mouse sweater, but Mickey’s kicking a football so it looks like he’s goose-stepping and apparently Kubrick used Mickey Mouse as a symbol of American Corporate Fascism more than once because there’s also a scene in Full Metal Jacket where American soldiers sing the Mickey Mouse Club theme song after killing a bunch of Vietnamese.

On second viewing – with Paul’s help – The Shining went from being an “OK horror flick about cabin fever” to a scathing indictment of America and what lies beneath the surface and early in the movie that Red, White and Blue character describes the people who stay at the Overlook as “all the best people” but then those people turn out to be murderers, racists and pedophiles.

All of which I missed until Paul’s podcast brought it to my attention.

And don’t get me started on Dr. Strangelove with all its references to impotence and angry men who can’t get it up in the bedroom taking it out on the rest of the world and all the joke names like President Merkin Muffley (a “merkin” is a pubic wig worn in movies and I’m pretty sure you get the “muff” reference without my help) and General Jack D. Ripper and Colonel “Bat” Guano and Peter Sellers having a Nazi hand that gets out of control and tries to kill him.

After listening to Paul’s podcasts now I want to go back and re-watch all those classic movies to get the parts I missed the first time which will be a pleasure and if you’d like to do the same thing, here’s a free sample of JUDGE MOVIES and a link to the Dr. Strangelove episode:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/02-dr-77003224

And now I just need Paul to set up my new Blue Ray DVD player and I’ll be all set.