I Wanted My Four-Year-Old to Love Moviegoing. How Hard Could It Be?

When it came time to choose a name for our first child, my husband and I had a list of one.

A couple of years before her birth, we’d been on an especially good date to see an Agnès Varda film in repertory; the protagonist’s style, wit and ultimate resilience appealed to us as much as Varda’s own story as a pathbreaking woman in the French New Wave did. We’d seen Varda’s documentary “Faces Places” at New York’s Quad Cinema just a week prior to seeing “Cléo From 5 to 7” at the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn, and, especially in the spring of 2020, the double bill sat lodged in our minds. Cleo D’Addario turned 4 this past May.

I’d always assumed that moviegoing would be a part of Cleo’s story, and the story of our parenting her. I grew up movie mad, a town over from an AMC multiplex that’s still standing. That’s where I saw “The Lion King” and “101 Dalmatians” (the Glenn Close version) and “The Parent Trap” (the Lindsay Lohan version); you couldn’t have told me that now-forgotten movies like “Paulie,” “Gordy” or “Bicentennial Man” weren’t huge hits — I saw them as part of a crowd, after all. Visiting on school breaks from college and then after graduation, I saw “The Wrestler” and “Captain Phillips” and “Creed II” with my dad at that AMC — seeing movies together has been part of how we communicate.

So it was with high hopes that I took Cleo to her first theatrical film last fall. I’d explained to her that in a movie theater, you have to sit quietly and respect other people’s experience, and she understood as best a 3-year-old could; I told her that when it got dark, she might get a little scared, and she could hold my hand. I also informed her of the rich tradition of movie snacks, and when we got to the Regal Union Square in Manhattan, she took full advantage, finagling an ice cream cone as well as a kids’ pack of popcorn, candy and fruit juice from a dad who just wanted her to enjoy “Trolls Band Together.”

The trouble started about midway through the trailers, when Cleo began fidgeting as ad after ad played. I’d explained that these were previews of what we could look forward to, and Cleo did OK for a while. But at some point, a commercial for a car company came on, and Cleo groaned and said, loudly, “Again?” (I was a professional critic when she was born, and perhaps that has rubbed off.) Next came a promo for the musical remake of “The Color Purple,” one that began with foreboding music and went on to feature Colman Domingo’s character screaming and firing a gun into the air. Even those who appreciate “The Color Purple” can perhaps understand that its intended audience doesn’t overlap much with the “Trolls” demographic.

“I want a break,” Cleo said. We left the theater, and she told me that it was too loud and not fun. We eventually went back in and watched just enough of the movie to begin to get the premise — they’re trolls, but they’re also NSYNC — before Cleo announced, “I want to be done.” So we went to the Strand bookstore nearby, where I told her she could buy any book she wanted; instead, she picked out a purple toy cat and named it Sylvia, after one of her classmates.

Maybe it was just the wrong time, the wrong place! Seven months later, I tried again, taking her to a small theater in the NCG chain on a trip upstate. We went to a revival showing of “The Land Before Time” — more snacks, more complaints about the trailer load, a second freakout, vivid and loud in the dark. (The world of the dinosaurs might not be a place for a sensitive 4-year-old.)

“I was just pretending,” Cleo said after we left the screening room for the bathroom break she’d requested. “I don’t need to go. But let’s stay out here.”

Maybe my expectations were too high. Whereas I spent time on the playground shouting movie catchphrases with my friends, Cleo’s peers don’t seem to go to the movies — so much so that when a family we know took their daughter to the Halle Bailey “Little Mermaid,” we were surprised. (Cleo’s younger sister, Iris, has been to three movies in theaters, but that’s just because I took her to “baby day” screenings at Alamo, back when she napped all day.)

The currency among Cleo’s peers is entertainment they control — and my little master of the universe is no different. She pauses movies to rewind to favorite parts: I don’t think she’s ever made it past a scene in “Turning Red” where the heroine trips on her backpack, and “Barbie” exists to her as a star vehicle for Dua Lipa, who has a seconds-long cameo as a mermaid.

Cleo prefers supercuts to movies — YouTube is currently banned in our household, but back when it wasn’t, a video called “Cruella de Vil laughing for 2 minutes,” created by a user named JuanDiva, was what she thought “101 Dalmatians” was. And low-fi content that feels user-created, even if it isn’t, appeals to Cleo more than high-gloss Hollywood product: Her absolute favorite program features two children named Vlad and Nikita running around a Miami mansion screaming incoherently at their beleaguered mom. It also originated on YouTube, and I thought my ban on the platform had done the trick, until I discovered that it had been licensed to Max — Cleo saw it as I was cuing up “Sesame Street.” She refers to this show as “Kids,” and asks if she can watch “Kids” every single night. (Dear David Zaslav: This one is personal.)

Looking around me at both unhappy and uneasy screenings to which I took Cleo (and then a third, months later, of “The Wild Robot”), I saw that I was not the only parent trying to contain a child crawling out of their seat with impatience. If we can’t get kids to sit through a 90-minute movie — if they’re so accustomed to personalizing every element of their entertainment experience — what other communal experiences are they missing out on?

I know this is a silly thing to be worried about, inasmuch as I’m worried at all. A love of films may eventually click in, if the right movie comes along when she’s the right age (if theaters are still around, and I certainly hope they will be). Some of the reasons Cleo doesn’t like the theater — the booming speakers, the enveloping dark, the crowds of people — feel very much of a piece with her cautious, thoughtful nature. And it’s not a comment on Gen Alpha’s attention spans, and what YouTube has done to them, to observe that a 4-year-old is more comfortable in a well-lit room with images closer to human scale.

It’s the element of control that bothers me — the sense that maybe Cleo is simply so accustomed to determining the pacing and the circumstances of every single experience in her life that the great parts of moviegoing simply can’t compare. But if the delivery system for art really is changing — if this younger generation is so immune to its charms that the theatrical experience is going away, then maybe I’ll just be forced to find things to love, or at least to tolerate, in the entertainment Cleo chooses. She’s the one with the control, after all. (By the way, huge box office grosses for the recent “Inside Out” and “Despicable Me” sequels, and early tracking for “Wicked” and “Moana 2,” suggest that the theatrical experience isn’t, yet, going away.)

And if learning to love moviegoing is something that’s going to happen for Cleo, then it’s going to happen as she grows into her ability to follow a story. I know she’s at least curious about what’s going on with great characters; I saw it the first time her eyes lit up when she saw Cruella laugh. (Thank you, Glenn Close; thank you, JuanDiva.) It’ll happen, I think. But I’ve spent enough time in movie theaters to know that the experience really means more if you can’t fast-forward to the good part.

And just as I remember my movie trips with my father fondly, there’s something I cherish about that first trip to the multiplex with Cleo, even if we only caught one and a half troll serenades. On the walk home from the subway, she and I stopped to play catch on the sidewalk, using Sylvia the cat as the ball. As I tossed Sylvia back to her, I asked her what her favorite part of the day was, expecting her to say the bookstore or the subway or riding her scooter around Union Square. Moving so fast that I struggled to keep up, she looked for all the world like the teenager she’ll someday be — hopefully by then someone I’m taking to see big blockbusters and art films and movies she’ll discover and want to show me.

“Well,” she said, “my favorite part of today was when we saw ‘Trolls.’”

It was a start.