Reflections: Home Movies

Like virtually every household in 21st century America, ours contains a cache of obsolete electronic devices. Incongruously, our cache lives in a century-old roll-top desk, two drawers of which are packed with sedimentary layers of defunct phones, cracked tablets, and coffee-stained laptops, all enmeshed in a dense latticework of cables. Through the years, this collection has accumulated for the same reasons that I imagine it does in everyone’s home: the devices were expensive to buy. They still worked when they were put in the drawer. And they just might harbor sensitive personal information, state secrets, cute pet photos, or all of the above … but nobody can remember for sure. For all these reasons and more, these things are hard to throw away. Still, my wife and I have been on a bit of a throwing-things-away bender lately (I understand this is a common response to the youngest child leaving for college), so on a recent weekend I opened these drawers with the intention of clearing out the collection. I didn’t get far. 

The iPad was one of the large, early models that dated from about 2011. Its screen was cracked, and it was heavily battered, despite being shrouded in one of those chunky, rubber protective cases that suggests exposure to military conflict or young children. Surprisingly, when another fishing expedition into the drawer produced the matching power cable and I plugged the iPad in, the thing started up. 

My intention had been to start each device and erase the contents before taking it somewhere for recycling. But since the iPad was the first device that emerged, my mistake was to open its photo album. In there was a series of home movies made by our kids and their cousins—who are also our neighbors—when the four of them were aged between about six and nine. Country kids, they were growing up in an off-grid location which has only gotten reliable internet access this year and still hasn’t come to the attention of cell phone providers. So, these kids spent their childhoods in a kind of digital dark age that the glittering distractions of modern entertainment never quite caught up with. When we first got this iPad, I remember the kids being overjoyed. But since there wasn’t any internet for it to connect to, the thrill of photographing each other, or playing whatever little games the device had installed, quickly wore off. Deprived of the on-demand kids’ entertainment streaming to their city-dwelling brethren, the kids set out to make their own. Their movie plot—some kind of wild-west-whodunnit-with-fairy-princess-and-evil-dog murder mystery—involved every outfit in their costume collection, and played out in a series of shakily filmed scenes that involved much waving of swords, running through long grass, getting variously captured, threatened, and rescued; and dramatic dying. It was inadvertently hilarious and mostly awful, calling to mind Oscar Wilde’s quote that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. The best part, if you don’t count the sight of our then-six-year-old son trying to look menacing while stuffed into a Scooby-Doo outfit made for a toddler, is the background commentary. In one scene, in which the heroine/princess is tied to a tree as the crazed hound (snarling in falsetto) approaches, we hear the cameraman (in this case our kids’ cousin, Layson) squeak, “Oh no! Battery at one percent. Quick … Somebody die!”

Twelve years on, with three of the four stars away at college and nary a princess or Scooby Doo costume to be found, the kids’ home movie mightn’t be great art, but it stirs the imagination all the same. While we’re pretty sure none of the cast members are destined for a career in the entertainment industry, who knows how their adventures in backyard moviemaking might have readied them for the lives to come? As Eric Zala, co-creator of the iconic Raiders of the Lost Ark fan film says in Cherie Ward’s (terrific) profile story in this issue, “Life is forever unexpected, but then it reveals itself and you find you’re right where you need to be.” So, just in case, that iPad is going back into its drawer for a few years longer.