Sadly, no flux capacitors or DeLorean are involved.
Rather, I experienced some time-travel watching a movie this weekend. Title is Aunt Mary, and it starred Jean Stapleton of All in the Family fame as an older woman with physical disabilities who took it upon herself to become a baseball coach for a group of troubled local kids who wanted to form a team. As always, Stapleton’s performance was fantastic, and as a person with a disability myself, I appreciated the nuance she brought to the character. (I’ll leave the people with disabilities should play characters with disabilities debate for another post.)
Anyway, back to the DeLorean-free time-travel. The movie debuted in 1979 as part of the Hallmark Hall of Fame series, and as such, it contained some, well, hallmarks of the time. Specifically, when Mary announces her intention to coach the boys, a father-figure for one of said boys tells her she can’t coach because she’s an old woman (true) and doesn’t know anything about baseball (unequivocally false). I’d love to say that’s the first and last time in the movie Mary gets pushback about her gender as it relates to sports, but it’s not.
And it’s not surprising.
I’ve grown to dislike the term “problematic” because I feel it gets overused and whipped around. I also feel that most media isn’t problematic because it offers a glimpse into the ideas and opinions of the time it was created. Time-travel, if you will.
That said, I watch movies like Aunt Mary that I feel are intended as a feel-good story about people realizing they are more than the world tells them, and part of me just gets annoyed at the world that’s shown. A world where the first (perhaps expected) response to an older woman with disabilities saying she wants to be a baseball coach for a group of kids in her neighborhood is “no.”
And why? Because she doesn’t match some arbitrary idea of what a baseball coach should look like?
But then, on the flip side, Aunt Mary didn’t let that opinion stop her. She turned to the character who said it and calmly namedropped a famous baseball coach who did the job into his 80s. Then she went out and coached baseball.
You go, girl! (And great name, BTW.)
This particular time-travel experience was wrapped up in many emotions for me. Annoyance at the automatic “no” of something different. Hope at the people who take that “no” and say “actually, yes.”
Most of all, though, it was a thought exercise for me and the media I create. In forty-five years (give or take), what do I want time-travelers from the future to understand about the world of now? What message will the books and movies released today convey to readers in 2079? Everything we put out into the world now will potentially be part of the greater analysis of this moment. We’re living someone else’s history. Perhaps it’s too optimistic, but I’d like to think there will come a time where feel-good movies from fifty years ago don’t trigger annoyance for some people. I suppose that expects too much uniformity. People are vast, and opinions vary. Not everyone will ever think the same thing about anything.
So I guess all we can do as creators is make stories that matter to us, show the world we want to show, and offer entertainment (and maybe lessons) to consumers of tomorrow.
👋 Fair travels,
Mary
