Mom’s Version

0:00:00

Give it up for Misha. Misha, one more time. Hey, I’m nervous. OK, so when I was a kid back in the 1990s, my mom used to take my sister and I over to Blockbuster Video and she would say, go pick out any video you want and then we’d pick it out and we’d rent it and we’d bring it home and she would make a copy of that video for us to keep so we could watch it whenever we wanted. Right, so that’s illegal and we did it for many years and eventually Blockbuster kind of caught on and the VHS tapes would arrive with a sort of lock on them that prevented us from being able to copy them. So we found another video store called New Concept Video which was in Miami Beach, was a great local video store and we started doing the same thing there and it was kind of a blessing because New Concept had this entirely different collection of movies, like all these eclectic, independent movies and foreign films that my mom was in heaven because she’s a real film buff and she could kind of culture my sister and I a little with all these, you know, eclectic movies. So, you know, while she had her head buried in like the indie film section, I wandered around as a nine or ten year old in this video store and found another section which had this like partition with a red, like velvety curtain and I would poke my head through and see this, you know, like ocean of just like fleshy, just porn, it was porn, and I was amazed and mesmerized because, I mean, not only, you know, is it amazing but it’s also, I had no idea what sex was because we didn’t discuss these things in my family because despite the fact that like my parents are very open-minded and my mother in particular, I kind of think of her a little bit as like an Annie Hall, like a real-life Annie Hall. She’s very beautiful, very funny, and warm but neurotic and throws on like outfits that don’t really work but they look amazing on her. So she’s like that but she’s also Kurdish and Muslim, so along with this Kurdish Muslim-ness comes a lot of other, you know, baggage, in my opinion, like especially, basically, she’s sexually repressed. So, you know, and so we didn’t talk about sex growing up and she protected us a lot from that conversation which meant that these videos that she was copying, she wouldn’t just copy them, she’d also edit them.

0:03:03

Censoring out anything that she thought was too sexy or violent, so she just cut all that stuff out and so that means that like, you know, when I think about watching a movie as a kid, I really can’t remember one movie that I watched that didn’t at some point just freeze with two characters on screen like clearly about to kiss and then frantically fast forward and I was desperately trying to look past those gray squiggly lines on the screen but I couldn’t see anything because it was just this chaos of fast-forwarding all the way through the scene and then it would stop and the movie would continue and she did this without fail with every movie that we rented and then what happened is just to be safe and cover her bases, she wouldn’t just, you know, cut out like sexy scenes, she also cut out just huge portions of the movie because she was suspicious that maybe there’s some like subliminal sexual content in there that she’s not quite picking up on and just to be safe, let me cut out like this massive portion. So like for instance, like Grease, the movie Grease, which I loved, my sister and I would watch Grease and the way I watched, I thought like, wow, what a weird kind of like avant-garde experimental movie when really it was this incredibly conventional musical because she’d cut out like a third of the movie. Then there was The Wizard of Oz, which I don’t know if anyone remembers, there were these flying monkeys in the movie which terrified my sister so she made another version without flying monkeys, which I have to say did not affect the story at all. Still a great movie without the monkeys.

0:04:51

So yeah, this is the way I grew up and how I watched movies and, you know, I eventually like wanted to see the original format of these movies and I did, I watched them and I have to admit, I mean, I was pretty disappointed with the originals because they were really fake and phony and they had these stories that made sense and like a plot that was, you know, had a through line and an arc and a beginning and a middle and an end and I really like what my mom did because the movies she made, these versions, my mom’s versions, they reflect a lot more accurately my life. They’re scattered, they make absolutely no sense, and there’s very little sex in them.