Parental Guidance?! Please, Don't Expect Much From Me | We Watch Edward Scissorhands En Famille
I can barely remember what happened in this week's GBBO.
I found myself carefully explaining the meaning of PG-13 to our children this week. “It means that it’s up to your parents to decide whether or not you’re old enough to watch it, so ideally they’d watch it first and make up their minds from there,” I said, wisely, before looking up to see they’d both left the room.
This happened, too, the time they asked me what the Age of Enlightenment was, and while their Dad quipped, “after lights were invented”, I decided to use it as an opportunity for learning and started talking about Darwin and the discovery that the world is spherical. Pay attention? They’d rather die.
Anyway, Edward Scissorhands is proof that no parents are capable of making good cultural decisions on behalf of their children, because it wasn’t until Joyce was making poor Eddie cut open her blouse that I started to think that maybe this wasn’t the best choice of Halloween-adjacent film for our 9- and 7-year-olds.
For context, our nine-year-old recently asked what I was putting on my porridge and, when I told him it was cinnamon, he started to tell me about how, if you accidentally touch your Elf on the Shelf, you should sprinkle cinnamon in a circle around yourself and sing a Christmas song, “otherwise Elfie loses her magic”.
It’s fair to say he’s not really at the, “let’s talk about consent and bodily autonomy” stage of Edward Scissorhands watching.
He has his moments, though: as the camera panned in on Peg, flogging her Avon wares door to door in her candy-coloured neighbourhood, he remarked, “ugh, these houses are very generic”.
A lot happens in Edward Scissorhands. There’s some casual sexual harassment from Joyce – which later, damagingly, turns into a kind of Chinese whispers sort of accusation wherein he is the perpetrator. There’s a lot of teenage angst and some dog grooming and a jaunty topiary montage and some petty crime and there is, of course, an overbearing bully character and a wide-eyed innocent and a kind of troublemaking younger brother and a religious evangelist neighbour. There’s a murder. There’s a water bed.
It’s odd to me that I didn’t remember any of this, when I suggested we watch the Tim Burton flick this past Sunday evening.
But it all started to come back to me as we got further into the film. A feeling of dread settled into the pit of my stomach and grew, with each passing moment, as we built up to what I, as a child, thought of as the most horrifying moment of the movie: when Joyce gets Edward in the back room of their new salon and uses his scissorhands – against his will – to open her top.
(You have to admit, those scissorhands would be, for want of a better word, handy. I’m forever misplacing our scissors and left with nothing to trim flowers with, no means of opening my latest Amazon delivery.)
I was bracing myself for the questions: why is she doing that? How come he doesn’t cut her? What does she mean, “he almost raped Joyce”?
But the questions didn’t come. Instead, there was silence. Uncomfortable silence, into which I injected my own thoughts and fears. Are they not asking because they already know what’s happening, I asked myself (silently). Do they not know that what she’s doing is wrong? Do they think this is a sex scene?
Nobody said a word.
Edward Scissorhands is, according to the internet, about adolescent isolation and loneliness. It’s about not fitting in, especially if you live in what seems to you to be a cookie-cutter town. It’s about conformity and rebellion and knowing right from wrong.
I wondered if this is what the boys took from it.
At least, until, as the credits rolled, the 7-year-old said, wistfully, “I wish I had scissors as hands!”
I haven’t been to the cinema since pre-Covid times, and I’m beginning to feel like it might be time to change that. So the question becomes: Smile, or Don’t Worry Darling?
By the way: the salad dressing that Ted Lasso laid down in front of Olivia Wilde’s car over is this one: