Never took the cannoli

Fessing up to the cultural touchstones I've never touched

I’d been thinking about confessing for a long time. Then my friend D Parvaz posted this on Twitter the other day:

dparvaz🧿 @dparvaz

What classic movie have you never watched? Tell us about it : NPR

npr.orgWhat classic movie have you never watched? Tell us about itEveryone has a movie they’ve just never marked off their watchlist. NPR’s Weekend Edition wants to help.

It feels like an AA meeting. OK, here we go:

My name is Tommy, and I’ve never seen THE GODFATHER.

Hi, Tommy — wait, what? You’ve never seen THE GODFATHER? What the hell?

This is the point where some of you might go straight to the comments and write an impassioned 2,000-word essay on the importance of THE GODFATHER, how it often tops the list of Greatest Movies of All Time, how it has influenced the culture like no other film, how my life will be incomplete without it, and by the way, THE GODFATHER PART II is even better. I welcome all arguments:

But honestly, I think I’m good.

I’ve intended to watch it three or four times over the years — I think I even rented the DVD from Netflix at one point. But I could never gin up any excitement to watch. It felt like a chore. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why.

Part of it is that even though I haven’t seen the movie, I’ve seen the movie. I read the MAD Magazine parody when I was 8 years old. It feels like I’ve known the references my whole life: The horse head in the bed, sleeping with the fishes, an offer you can’t refuse, “leave the gun, take the cannoli,” Fredo’s betrayal, Sonny at the tollbooth, the gun in the toilet, Moe Green, Brando’s voice, that theme I’ve heard a million times.

Part of it is that the Mob has never fascinated me. Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up in a part of the country where it was a real thing. I couldn’t get into THE SOPRANOS, either — saw a couple of episodes and that was enough. I watched GOODFELLAS on a bus back from Chapel Hill one night. It was … fine.

(Some of you are absolutely FURIOUS with me right now.)

I think the main thing, for me, is that I’m just not drawn to such dark material. I know that understanding the personal struggles of a murderous crime family tells us something about ourselves, but I don’t feel like slogging through all the murders to get to the meaning. It’s the same problem I have with the modern Batman movies — the darkness is relentless. With every new iteration it gets grimmer.

I don’t mind violence in a different frame. Our whole family is addicted to Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books, which can be brutally violent, but at their core they’re mysteries — there’s a puzzle to solve and you know Reacher will solve it. My favorite TV show of all time is JUSTIFIED, which has murders and shootouts and other assorted mayhem in damn near every episode. But it’s so funny and so thoroughly entertaining that I never can decide if it’s a comedy with murders or a drama with jokes. The series is based on Elmore Leonard’s work — his specific genius is that his stories were both.

The bottom line, to me, is something that set me free the first time I heard it: It’s OK to like what you like. There are no guilty pleasures. That also means it’s OK to not like what you don’t like — there are no guilty DISpleasures, either. If you’ve never seen CHEERS or never read HUCKLEBERRY FINN or never watched JAWS, it’s fine. We don’t have to love, or care about, the same things.

However! I would love to be persuaded otherwise in the comments. I would also love to hear about the stuff YOU'VE never seen or read or watched. Confession is good for the soul.