The Media That Made Me

I grew up in a suburban neighborhood and attended a small religious private school for most of my life. My father worked in Atlanta, and my mother worked from home and cared for my older sister and me. On paper, we were living the textbook suburban life. When I think back on the time I have spent with my family, the majority of our time together was spent in front of a TV or silver screen. 

I have nothing to complain about my upbringing. In the suburbs, I spent my time after school either playing basketball in the driveway and avoiding the neighbors since I was a socially awkward introvert or I was sitting on the couch watching TV. I grew up very privileged, and one of the biggest privileges of all was to be a kid with cable TV. I can remember every television my family has owned and I can navigate a TiVo, Spectrum, and AT&T menu screen and remote effortlessly. If someone quizzed me on what channels I watched I could recite the programming and channel number. I had an unwavering allegiance to the TV and I was glued to it growing up.

When reflecting on the media that has influenced me the most, my attachment to and reverence for the power of the TV in my home is one of the most undeniable influences. I never was the biggest video game kid nor did I fully find comfort in music. Instead, the television shows and movies I watched with my family on my TV and in the theater were the most impactful. As I began navigating the world around me, I found myself looking to the TV screen for guidance. The TV was a portal into a different world that demonstrated perspectives and experiences foreign to me. Viewing things on the TV was always a captivating exploration into a new environment.

When I was in Elementary school, my family had TiVo and a 4:3 box-shaped TV that shocked you if you got too close. In these younger years, I watched education-based shows on PBS which featured shows like Wild Krats, Dinosaur Train, and Martha Speaks. I also loved other shows that were airing when I was a kid like Oswald, Backyardigans, Care Bears, and Leapfrog. 

Another major factor in my journey into media was physical media and a love for older shows and movies. My mother would play VHS tapes of Mr. Rogers and the Muppets for me, which were some of my favorite shows and movies as a young child. Also, having an older sister, we had to share TV privileges, so our compromises led to us watching shows like Phineas and Ferb, Fetch! With Ruff Ruffman, and Spongebob Squarepants. During my elementary school years, these were the major shows I sat and watched for hours. 

In middle school, my family bought an HD TV and we switched to Spectrum for cable which ushered in a new era in my relationship to media. My two best friends in middle school were Caleb and Tommy. Caleb lived in a mansion where he had a pool, a full-size basketball court, and an in-home theater. After school on Fridays, Tommy and I would go to Caleb’s, and his mom would buy three boxes of pizza and some wings. We would play basketball, swim in the pool, and play video games all day long. 

Caleb’s house was my second home in middle school and our whole world was sports. I vividly remember staying the night at his house, and by the time I woke up, Caleb was watching Sports Center on the TV. From that day forward, when I returned home from school, I would watch ESPN. When I walked inside the house I would switch on Pardon the Interruption and then Highly Questionable which I would record just in case I missed it live. Sports were everything in middle school and it was the only thing guys could consistently talk about, so when I was not playing them, I was watching them, and when I was not watching a game I was watching some former player talk about the game I had already watched. While sports played a major part in my conversations, it was not the full story of my relationship with media in middle school.

One of the biggest portals into my mind as a media lover in middle school was my DVD booklet. My grandparents lived in Florida, so my family would drive down eight hours there every summer and Thanksgiving. My mother bought a portable DVD player for the car rides, and a booklet to hold my DVDs. Inside was The Lego Movie, Napoleon Dynamite, Jurassic Park, Tintin, Guardians of Ga'Hoole, and my favorite show of all time, the 1960s Batman, which I had the boxset for the first two seasons. These films and shows share a glimpse into the media I valued the most at the time. 

As a TV watcher, I was a chronic channel surfer. While some kids pledge allegiance to a station, I took my attention to a different channel each day of the week. Some days I would only watch old football games on ESPN Classic, some days I watched Cartoon Network all day until it switched to Adult Swim at 8 p.m., I watched Disney with my sister, Disney XD by myself, Nickelodeon, and Boomerang. If I were to list every show I knew the plotlines for, I would have no pages left to write about anything else in my life. 

A lot of the humor that I have today was built by watching the Cartoon Network. My favorite shows were Regular Show, Uncle Grandpa, Amazing World of Gumball, Clarence, and Teen Titans Go. Also, some media that played a role in my creativity was a love for Lego, which led to a large collection of sets that I played with constantly. I went to Legoland, built Lego, and watched all the Lego shows like Ninjago, Clutch Powers, and Legends of Chima. 

I also treated the TV as a guide to saying funny things. I can remember surfing through channels to find weird shows so I could bring them up as funny anecdotes to make my friends laugh. By utilizing the TV to find weird shows, I started gaining an appreciation for niche sub-cultures within existing things I loved. For example, I fell in love with professional bowling and darts when scrolling through the high number sports channels no one watches. 

As I entered high school, the new 4k Roku TV wasn’t the only thing that changed, the school I went to was also a brand new experience. Since kindergarten, I went to the same small private religious school, but for freshman year, I began going to a 3,000-kid public school. This led to a major culture shock that forced me into a new situation. American high school is one of the most interestingly depicted things on TV. While I had logged countless hours of watching this depiction, I was in no way prepared for the ensuing experience I was going to have.

One aspect that did not change my freshman year was my love for basketball. In middle school, my height was unstoppable and I was the best player, but as I entered a 6A public school, basketball became one of the most difficult challenges. I played JV and sat on the bench during the Varsity games. The moment I realized my basketball career was not going beyond high school was when an opposing team player who was my age scored 40+ points in his debut (he is now in the NBA). Since basketball was so challenging and not pure fun like it was before, I found myself looking at the TV once again to find the joy that I once found in my sport. 

Over the summer before my freshman year, I began binge-watching the show, Survivor. I had seen a couple of seasons before that summer, but I became completely compelled by the premise and execution. During the summer, I would start a season when I woke up, watch the entire season, then go to sleep, and do the same thing the next day. Slowly, as I became more film-focused, Survivor was the only TV show I watched. Before this summer, my TV experience was dictated by channel programming and what was recorded on the DVR, but heading into high school, streaming dominated my media consumption.

With Survivor as a new favorite show and a growing interest in movies, I found joy once again through media consumption. 2019, my freshman year, was one of the most influential years for my film-loving journey. Films such as Knives Out, Little Women, 1917, Ford v Ferrari, First Cow, Marriage Story, Uncut Gems, and Jojo Rabbit were all distinct movie-going experiences for me. While all these films are great, the most influential film I can point to was seeing The Lighthouse with my parents. Still one of my favorite movies of all time, I remember being in the theater and completely melting away because I had no idea that a movie could do what this film had done. This film was my first real exploration of auteur filmmaking in theaters and completely changed the way I thought about and saw movies. 

From that point forward, I was hooked on seeing movies that made me feel the way The Lighthouse made me feel. In middle school, I watched movies and regurgitated takes I had heard online, but now I gained an understanding of what a great film makes you feel when you connect to its art. 

The second semester of freshman year began one of the darkest parts of my life and without a passion for media, I would not have come out the same man I am today. 2020 started with me entering my freshman year second semester, and before COVID-19, my aunt died of cancer. Then, during a basketball game, I knocked my head against the floor and received a concussion, making me take a hiatus from school. At this point in high school, I had no real friends, and the isolation began to lead me down a depressive path. After my concussion was healed, I returned to school for a couple of weeks, then COVID-19 shut down school for the rest of the semester. This shutdown was followed by the news that my uncle had passed away due to cancer. After the whirlwind events of this second semester, I was left depressed, lonely, and isolated. 

One of the major outlets to help me through this time was a local theater, which allowed guests to come to see classic films if they followed specific COVID-19 protocols. Through this theater, I got to experience an escape from my situation through the magic of cinema. Some of the major standouts were seeing Psycho and Chinatown on the big screen. 

2020 continued to be a challenging time, as another uncle and my grandfather passed away after starting my sophomore year. I wanted to give up basketball because of the depressive slump I found myself in but through the guidance of therapy, I got through my mental struggles. 

I continued to find peace and joy in filmmaking. My family invested in a Criterion Channel subscription where I watched nail-biting cinema like The Wages of Fear, the works of Andrei Tarkovsky, and discovered my favorite director and film through Jacques Tati’s Playtime. 

Since COVID-19 was still restricting the world in 2021, my family purchased a pass for Sundance online, which once again introduced me to filmmaking from a different perspective. During this online movie festival, I fell in love with niche weird films like Strawberry Mansion and gripping documentary filmmaking like Captains of Za’tari. 

Junior year of high school is when I was pulled out of this dark time in my life because I transferred back to the school I previously went to and began connecting with people and making friends in the classroom. As I began having real experiences again being back in the outside world with friends, film took a different role. Instead of using movies to gain experiences I was not having, films became modes of processing my own experiences by relating my feelings to a movie’s story. Movies were not my life anymore, but rather vignettes of life I could appreciate and art that continued to make me reflect and think.

When I reached my senior year of high school, I took AP Art, where I needed a thesis statement for the art I had to create for the course. I decided to use my love of cinema to shape the way I created my art. The art was a contemplation of the myths taught to us about US history, through popular culture, media, and school. The works questioned three major myths, The Cowboy, The Mobster, and The Soldier, who are glorified through media without the truth being shown candidly. It also tackled the 3 most harmful myths in US history, Manifest Destiny (major tool for Westernization), the Lost Cause (Southern teaching of the Civil War against Reconstruction), and the American Dream (current part of our everyday life, thinking, and culture). The purpose was to pose our perception of the truth versus reality. 

During my junior and senior years of high school, I discovered Mike Mills’ films, Charlie Kauffman’s work, Nomadland, Planet of the Apes, Blow Out, True Stories, Ghost Dog, and many more amazing art. As I lived and experienced more life through connection with others, I was watching films but not as the sole vehicle to my happiness, which created an even stronger appreciation for movies as a craft and art form. During my first two years of high school, I was clinging to film during a dark time, but as I reached a point of happiness in my life, my relationship with film grew healthier, which has only allowed me to appreciate it more than ever before. 

Movies define my high school experience and were even a major part of my college essay. I cannot reflect on my time in high school without thinking of my AMC A-List membership, Sundance experience, trips to the library for DVDs,  and all the movies that made me who I am.

When reflecting on my relationship with the media, I can categorize my viewing experiences into different eras, but I can still see aspects that I continue to carry with me to this day. I still have a love for physical media, which started with Mr. Rogers VHS tapes, I love the theater which was always a place my parents would take me growing up, and I always felt awe and wonder with every TV my dad carried inside and set up in my house. As I reflect on my 19-year relationship with the media, I can see the compounding influence of the media that has made me who I am today.