Most of my generation, I suppose, were most influenced by movies as children, movies and television. I had a different childhood. What movies I saw till the age of 15 were solely on television because my parents were members of a Holiness Christian sect that forbade going to the cinema. Even to see a Disney cartoon. We were taught that to cross the dark threshold of the moving picture parlor was to seal one’s damnation.

Yes, I had a very unusual upbringing… at least, back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was unusual.

I watched a lot of television, an amazing amount in retrospect, an amazing variety of shows – my parents didn’t seem to exert much control over my intake of cathode tube rays in the beginning. And my mother loved certain movies – Hitchcock, in particular. I remember seeing The Birds a number of times (starting around age 4) and being utterly fascinated and terrified.

I especially loved Westerns, war movies, and detective shows. More of my personal ethical inclinations owe more to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood’s work for Sergio Leone than to sermons and The Good Book.  Then there was The Fugative and its healthy dark fear of authority; and Ephrim Zembalist, Jr. on The FBI, who just seemed trustworthy, and the flatfoots on Dragnet, the patrolmen of Adam 12; Mannix, Cannon, Barnaby Jones, Columbo, Banacheck, McMillan and Wife, McCloud; later, there’d be Quincy, ME.

But above all there was The Rockford Files, with the maverick law-bending, hard luck, happy-go-lucky, barely making ends meet Jim Rockford/James Garner. I think he was my supreme archetype for what a man was supposed to be like – the guy who tries to do the right thing, screws it up, gets punished for it, tries to do the right thing again, and so on until, at the end, he’s as broke as he started the day. But he did what he was supposed to do: stood for something worth standing for, regardless of the price, and outwitted the opposition, sometimes with the help of some dumb luck (and a sympathetic scriptwriter).

I learned about all the great and not-so-great movies of the ‘70s as they came out in the then black and white inky pages of MAD Magazine – I was introduced to the not-so-subtle arts of parody and satire and caricature, and to a bit of New York sarcasm and Yiddish cursing, all a providing a view of the world new to me. Later on I discovered the originator of MAD – Harvey Kurtzman – through reprints of the ‘50s issues, which were utterly amazing, especially the pieces with the artist Will Elder. It was like looking at William Hogarth prints made for 20^th century sensibilities. As an aside, it was because of Elder and Kurtzman that I became interested in Hogarth, and thus in the 18^th c. and its satirists, such as Voltaire, its philosophies and ideas.

As I became a little older in the late ‘70s and hung around other degenerate young boys, we regularly got our hands on issues of Playboy by various means, most nefarious, others hilarious. Stories for another day. The direction I’m heading here is a little strange – while the other boys immediately went for the centerfolds (“My name is Candy and my biggest turn-on is a warm smile and my biggest turn-off is nose hair.”), I discovered that Kurtzman was writing a comic for Playboy called Little Annie Fanny – sometimes Elder did the illustrations, at other times other teams worked on them, but overall they were as hilarious and socially pointed as anything Mel Brooks did in his earlier movies (though I did not know this at the time as it would be years before I got to see a Mel Brooks movie). Not that I didn’t get around to looking at the centerfold (“My name is Candy…”) like everyone else, but I had to check out what was happening in the topsy-turvy world of innocent and moral — and curvaceous and barely or non-clothed, big blue-eyed – world of ol’ Annie. My sense of humor, warped as it is, was being shaped, right along with my view of planet Earth – warped as it is, too. I mean, the planet, not my point of view.

Star Wars came out around this point. My life was, to say the least, a little unsteady those years due to an ongoing family crisis, and, for some reason, I experienced Star Wars as some sort of redemptive event, as if my seeing it would somehow make everything turn out alright, open doors to new worlds, brighten my horrible and bleak Appalachian-bound existence, heal the unhealable. I fell head over heels for Carrie Fisher, whom I love even more today as a fiction writer, social commentator, and activist for mental health and addiction issues. And she’s still pretty, too.

It was the first time a movie affected me – the first time I actually asked my father to break the 11^th Commandment: “Thou shat do no commerce with the infernal arts of Mr. Edison.” I suppose that was 1977 and I was 11. I begged, literally, I worked up elaborate and, actually, good counter-theological arguments to my father and his religion on this point. He did not relent. I questioned my faith, began to ask exactly how much any of it made any rational sense. Thus began my interest in philosophy of religion and comparative religion. 

It was also when I learned the lesson that it is probably better to ask forgiveness than permission. To this day I wish I’d just gone to see that movie and taken the punishment.

Plus, had I been allowed to see that movie, I’d probably be a respectable pillar of the community today instead of the trouble-making, anti-authoritarian bastard I am.

Parents, take a lesson.

So I began reading magazines of any sort that featured horror movies, fantasy, sci-fi, special effects. I began reading comics voraciously; the Start Wars comics adaptation of the movie by Howard Chaykin was how I learned the whole story, coupled with still photos from every scrap of print media that mentioned the movie. (Chaykin later became one of my heroes and is one of the finest storytellers and illustrators who’s ever slung ink – see his old American Flagg comics from the ‘80s for an example of parody, satire, and good writing mixed with fantastic comic art.)

The comics were my gateway to higher literature, politics, and a fair vocabulary. Most of the folks who wrote the better comics, of course, were frustrated novelists with university educations. They were probably bored, so there were references galore to the classics and various important issues in the ’60s and ’70s. My introduction to mythology came through Marvel’s Thor, for example, and I initially learned of The Rev. Sung Yung Moon and religious cults and the utter strangeness of the American political scene from Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck (those of you who recall the fiasco of a movie based on that comic should wipe it clean from your mind and go get some old issues of the Gerber/Gene Colan–there’s some nice satire there; and redheaded Beverwy, with her ridiculous lisp, is enchanting). 

Somewhere between Howard the Duck and the Nixon fiasco, my nascent political sensibilities were incubated.

My fascination with the morally ambiguous (aside from an obsession with the works of Edgar Alan Poe and a few others) came through the comics of the early ’80s, especially Claremont and Byrne’s New X-Men. Anyone who knows that comic via the movie versions should go track down the John Byrne run to get the full effect (or reprints, as they are extremely valuable now and you cannot have my copies).

The relationships between the characters is complex, their motivations are mixed… the most violent character, Wolverine, is genuinely the most sensitive and honorable, and wrestles with who he is and what he does. Phoenix is a mass murderer, but by accident (the Comics Code of Authority dictated she had to be punished, i.e. killed, eventually, even though her death itself was ethically questionable: a suicide).

There was more human drama in those books than the usual costumed morons doing silly nonsense. Chris Claremont performed an exploration, for about 25 issues, of what it means to be a human with human problems – and this is just what I needed at the ages of 13 and 14, living a life rife with similar questions.

The book also stressed what it was like to live as an outsider, feared and disliked by the larger community, and yet choose to live a principled life: For a boy-too-fast-becoming-an-adult without proper adult supervision, artistic, with uncommon tastes, in a small rural community where “different” equaled “evil” (by the age of 14 I was accused of witchcraft at high school by an assistant principle because of some of my other reading habits), these books provided role models of a sort. They were part of my education that intolerance should be met by decency and a proper sort of pride in one’s differences and talents. They taught me to be slow in making judgments of others simply on the basis that they were not like me.

All for pennies a month.

Long story short: eventually I became a philosopher and have taught the subject. I read the classics. I received a fair university education and use it to continue educating myself, filling in the gaps in what I learned. Such is part of my life.

I also became an adult and had to choose how to live, which values to put into effect and instantiate in my actions – just as everyone else has to. I had to learn how to exercise my own judgment, to agonize over my choices, to care about others, to struggle to forgive when possible and attempt to show that fine mix of mercy and justice a person must to live in this world. I also had to learn how to admit when I’m wrong or have done badly, ask for forgiveness and try to make some sort of repair when I can.

I had to learn the value of being creative in all aspects of existence while savoring the same in the lives of others.

Yes, I had to grow up.

I had to learn to try to live with meaning – and how to get up in the morning and start over when I blow it. My life’s no model of goodness by any stretch of the imagination; that’s not the point of all this. The writer’s no saint and has no illusion he could be. 

The point: The foundations were not laid in a school. They did not arrive with the diplomas. They were absorbed over time, as a child and young person, paying attention to the characters in stories on television and in comics, learning to interpret texts in many ways, paying attention to the attitudes of the writers and the artists, learning to see the world from a variety of cultural perspectives, and learning that my own individual perspective, though odd and out of step with my surroundings, was at least as valid and valuable as that of others.

Pop culture helped me learn to go my own way, helped me learn it was good to be my own person.

Perhaps that isn’t the only value of pop culture – certainly it isn’t. But for a boy in the backwards backwaters of America, it was a godsend. Maybe I found more in it than is, in fact, often there objectively. Maybe my imagination and mind used those things as a sort of Rorschach Test that invoked all sorts of thoughts and ideas that have little specifically to do with “what is there.” Maybe. But perhaps that in itself is of tremendous value and shows pop culture can have a level of significance and a use beyond simple entertainment, just as all works of art can feed the soul regardless of origin.

There is always more to human creations, no matter how common, than meets the eye.