Scary Movies
The sixties was an important decade in the history of USA. In the sixties the “Woodstock generation” flourished, the Civil Rights Movement (with Martin Luther King, as one of their leaders) made serious statements and the Vietnam War was at its most critical point. The story “Scary Movies” is written by Stephen Amidon, and it is about racial segregation especially in the suburb of New York.
The story takes place in the suburb of New York in the spring of 1968. The suburb that the story takes place in is a segregated community. We follow the narrator when he was a child. He looks back at this period which changed his life and his view at the world. The entire story is a flashback, because all the verbs is written in the past tense. For example: “was”, “went” and “would” etc.
When the narrator was nine years old he lived in a wealthy and “white” neighborhood with his mother and farther. He was very smart despite his young age. He shows knowledge about the things that is taking place in the world. “It was 1968, a banner year for fear, with bad news appearing on television almost as regularly as weather bulletins… I’d watch them with my parents, wondering if the world would go crazy before I even reached my teens.” However, he has not yet reached a fully awareness. This is what brings in the Roxy theatre. The theatre is what transforms the narrator from a naïve and fearless white boy into an aware white boy.
Through this essay, the narrator goes through a development. It starts when he and Kevin goes the Roxy theatre. They are impressed by the decorations and how the theatre is so different from what they are used to in their neighborhood. When the narrator and Kevin enters the theatre, the narrator describes his surroundings very précis, because when he finds out that he and Kevin is the only white children in there he gets scared. He actually gets so scared that he today cannot even remember the title of the movie. The important thing to notice is that they are not threaten or beaten by the black children in the theatre. This fear is the result of years of indoctrination and prejudices from their parents. Even though that the narrator often had seen the Negros and the riots in the news, he had not really taken any notice of them. He refers to like this: “All of a sudden, we were the invisible ones.” Like I said, this indicates that the Negros has been invisible to him and that he does not have a full grown consciousness. In other words the narrator fears the Negros without any reason, because he accepts what he is told. Here is an example: “We knew nothing about our black neighbors other that the cruel jokes our parents sometimes told … our youthful lore was full of stories about unsuspected classmates who’d been beaten and threatened.” The Roxy theatre becomes some kind of sanctuary for the narrator, because he experiences his first non-fictitious fear. He learns the difference of the non-fictitious fear and the fear he experiences in movies.
The movie “Them” is very important for the narrators’ development. Firstly it is the only movie whose title he can remember, secondly the title “Them” can easily be compared to the word “they”.
The narrator returns to the Roxy theatre after the riots, to make sure that nothing had happened with it. The Roxy is fine, but things are not as they used to be. The movie of the day was: “The Creature from the Black Lagoon”, which is very ironic. The Creature from the Black Lagoon => The black creature and the Goon. It is very ironic because at that time the Negros and Vietnamese (called Goons) were the “creatures”. But all of a sudden the narrator became the creature or monster: “… knowing all eyes were on me knowing who the real monster at the Roxy was…”
I think Stephen Amidon wrote this short story, because he wanted to put focus on the children, who was raised in 1960’s in the white American suburb. He wants to point out that children are affected by their parents and that making your own opinion is not that easy at all, when you are a child. He also wants to prove that white and black people can live side by side. He tells me with that story that if we had an open mind, like a child, we could all live happily among each other.