Movie Memories: On Tremors and Broken Homes

by Patrick Bromley

The night I saw Tremors, the entire world was crumbling underneath me and it wasn't the Graboids' doing.

I saw Tremors on a Tuesday night in 1990. It was a movie-going experience that changed my life forever.

On the one hand, Tremors is one of the first films I can remember that felt like a throwback in a way that I understood and appreciated. It was a movie that I knew could seem really stupid to some people, but I also knew there was something I "got" about it even at age 12. I understood that the goofiness was intentional, and that all of the movie's humor was self-aware. This may seem obvious to those of you reading this in 2017 -- or to those of you who were older or more sophisticated viewers in 1990 -- but to a kid, there's an exciting sense of discovery to realizing you can enjoy a movie on a level that goes beyond the surface. I understood that Tremors had the spirit and energy of a '50s monster movie without having seen that many '50s monster movies at that point (though I had seen It Came from Hollywood a bunch of times, so maybe that counts?). Despite having loved genre movies for my entire life to that point, there was something that felt different about Tremors. It unlocked something in my brain.

But this isn't why my first viewing of Tremors stands out. The real reason it was such a formative moviegoing experience is because it was the first time I hung out with my dad after he left our family. My parents separated a number of times while I was in junior high and even into high school; my dad would move out for a while and then he and my mom would try to reconcile. My mother, ever patient and trying to keep the family together, kept taking him back. Eventually, he would move out again. Rinse. Repeat. I'm not trying to paint my dad as a monster. He wasn't a terrible guy or anything, just confused and thinking he could be something that he wasn't. The first few times, it shook us all up. We were now one of those broken families at a time when none of my friends had divorced parents.The more times it happened, though, the less it stung each time; there's something desensitizing about helping your own father move his stuff out of the house when you're 12 or 13 years old. Eventually it got old, and the only reason his last "announcement" sticks in my head is because it was the one that broke my mom. Years of anger and frustration at his back and forth all came out. It was awful to see and to hear, but at the same time there was part of me that was happy to see her sticking up for herself and for us.

Our night out at Tremors came several weeks after the first time he left. My younger sister and I made plans to go to the movies with our dad, picking Tremors because I wanted to see it and because it wasn't rated R. It was a big deal to be picked up and taken out by the man who no longer lived with us, and as excited as I was to see a first run movie -- a rarity in those days, and on a school night, no less -- I also remember feeling a tremendous sense of guilt. Accepting my dad's invitation to a movie seemed like a betrayal of my mom. But I was young and didn't want to cut one of my parents out of my life, which my mom understood and never suggested I do otherwise. And so we got picked up in front of the house and taken to the mall theater to see Tremors, a movie I fell in love with enough to distract me from the weird "first date" feeling of the whole night. This was the first hangout and the first movie I was seeing under this new arrangement.

Over the next six or seven years, movies became how my dad and I would connect. On occasion, he would take me to the comic shop. A few times, I spent the night at his apartment (where we would rent movies). Mostly, though, we went to the movies. Pretty much any movie, especially if it was playing at the second-run down the street and we could both get in for a combined admission of $3. Lots of times, it was a movie I had already seen but would happily go see again for the chance to hang out and be at the movies. He was into a lot of the same dumb genre movies as me, so we made it a point to see Surviving the Game and Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man and Freejack in theaters. Sometimes we would get adventurous and travel to the art theater downtown to see stuff like My Own Private Idaho or Shakes the Clown. It's how I saw the re-release of The Wild Bunch on the big screen. It became the thing we did together, and though I had grown up rarely going to the movies now I was going probably once a week. All it took was a divorce.

These were years that were critical to my development as a movie fan. I won't say that they formed my tastes, because I think in a big way my tastes have been pretty set in stone since I was very young. But these were the years that my tastes were tested against a number of movies I might not have otherwise seen: V.I. Warshawski and Map of the Human Heart and Matinee, a movie that wasn't really on my radar but which wound up being one of my all-time favorites. Part of loving film is a willingness to have your tastes and your interests challenged -- to expose yourself to movies that run counter to what you are otherwise into. This is one of the reasons I fear for a generation that gets to curate every single piece of media they ingest, whether it's deciding exactly what to watch on various streaming services or watching YouTube videos or curating their own playlists instead of being exposed to stuff on the radio. I'm not suggesting radio is especially good, or that what's on network television is better than stuff on Netflix. But there's a lot of stuff I saw as a kid because it was on that I might not have seen otherwise, and I'm better for it. I don't think I knew much about The Player when my dad and I went to see it at the Catlow Theater because Roger Ebert had liked it, but it's a movie that opened me up to the entire filmography of Robert Altman.

It was Tremors that first set me down this path, so it's somewhat ironic that the movie itself isn't especially challenging. If anything, its greatest charm is that it feels familiar to fans of a certain kind of movie, albeit familiar in the best way. It's a movie with one foot firmly in the past and its other in the present, which makes it oddly perfect for what it represented in my life on the night in 1990 and what it still represents today. That was a viewing totally informed by the past -- you know, the past when we were still a normal American family -- and had lurched suddenly into a strange new present. I don't regret or resent any of it because I know both of my parents are better off apart than together and unhappy. I grew closer to my dad in the ensuing years than I had ever been, because even if things were weird at home and none of us knew where our parents stood with one another or if dad was staying or going, he and I at least had the movies. And, like so many other trying events in my life, movies got me through.