Not For Kids
I went to see Avatar on opening night. Not long after I sat down, my stomach dropped. A man sat in front of me with his three children aged about 1, 2, and 4 years old. He was a fat guy in his mid-thirties still wearing his Mcdonald’s work uniform and stank of deep fryers. Whatever, no big deal. I like kids and he must have just been really keen to see the movie.
Before the movie starts, he gives all the kids juice. This is a three-hour movie and those are high-sugar drinks. I’m 25 now and the notion of having kids has never entered my head as I don’t think I’m ready, but I still thought what is he doing? They’re going to be crying, fidgeting, and winging before the end of the first half-hour, and after that, they’ll be tired and whining.
Sure enough, they are and I’m annoyed as I’m trying to get into what’s going on in the movie. The four-year-old is standing on his seat and then running around the theatre and rather than collecting the kid or taking him outside to give him a talking to, the father just sits there spitting profane words at him and telling him to sit down.
As if he’s not the father, but just another patron in the cinema who is putting up with a hyperactive kid. The toddler is relatively quiet and the baby is fussy but not doing much. An hour or so into the movie the kid is still moving around and has been complaining for about 15 minutes that he needs to go to the toilet.
At this stage, I understand that the kids have no interest in seeing the 3-hour-long sci-fi movie and that the father has just dragged them along because he wanted to see it. He’s not leaving because he clearly does not care about what the three kids want to do. He eventually relents, angrily yanks the kid’s arm violently, and drags him out of the cinema. Except, there was one problem…
He leaves the toddler sitting in her chair and the baby rolling around on the seat! My sister is sitting next to me. She works with teenage mothers and deals a lot with helping others to learn basic parenting skills. She and I are both staring nervously at the baby wondering whether it will be worse to pick the baby up and bare the wrath of being discovered holding a stranger’s child, or letting the baby fall off the chair it’s rolling about on and do some serious permanent damage to itself.
We watch the baby, ready to jump in, until the father comes back and jostles the boy back into his seat. The kids are all complaining a lot by the time the movie is over. It’s horrendous. He laughs loudly at most inappropriate moments in the movie and utterly ignores his tired, bored and unhappy children. The credits roll, and he stands to leave.
My sister and I stand up and berate the ever-loving life out of him. She outlines one by one the list of ways in which he has failed as a father and as a compassionate human being. He responds with something about not knowing what it’s like to be a father and I explain who she is and what she does and outline for him point by point, the things which he’s done in the past three hours to the detriment of everybody around him.
The whole packed cinema just sits and watches him leave. At the start of the film I was annoyed at the kids, but towards the end of the movie, I wanted to remove them from his care.