The Secrets of The Movies That Made Us

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SCR200: A nine-year-old rides home in the back of a station wagon, stares up at the night sky, and can only say one thing over and over: “I love classical music.” He had just seen Star Wars, and he didn’t yet have the words for what a movie could do to a person.

For the 200th episode of Secrets of Movies, Dom Bettinelli, Thomas Salerno, Kathryn Laffrey, and Alix Murrayborrow the title of the Netflix series The Movies That Made Us and turn it inward — not how the blockbusters were built, but how certain films got wired into who they became: their tastes, their fears, their faith, and the roads they took.

Star Wars is the shared thread. It bonded Thomas and his brother, gave Dom a full-circle moment when his kids’ first movie in a theater was The Force Awakens, and put three generations of Alix’s family in the same row. Again and again the panel lands on the same idea: a movie is inseparable from the people you saw it with.

From there the lists diverge and reveal each person. For Thomas, Jurassic Park cemented a lifelong love of dinosaurs and a hunger to tell stories — and he argues the original is a smart Frankenstein-and-Tower-of-Babel techno-thriller, not the monster movie the sequels became. Kathryn traces her life as an artist to the hand-drawn Disney era — Sleeping Beauty, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood — and to the moment animation stopped being about the art and started being about the music. Alix credits The Last Unicorn and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai with cementing her love of fantasy and giving her the nerve to own her interests through years of being bullied.

Some of these movies made them afraid. Jaws, Alien, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers all left marks, and the talk turns to discernment — what you should and shouldn’t let through “the windows of the soul.” Others rerouted a whole life: Kathryn’s love of Caddyshack led her to a caddie scholarship, a full ride to college, and the husband she met there.

And some cut straight to faith. Dom pairs The Passion of the Christ with Schindler’s List — two films he can barely watch, and won’t watch often, precisely because they make the reality of evil and grace impossible to keep at a distance. The panel closes on The Lord of the Rings and Gettysburg: Peter Jackson filming Middle-earth as if it were history, Alix living in an English village that feels like the Shire, and Thomas tracing his vocation as a history teacher to a Fourth of July tradition of watching Gettysburg with his dad — and to the charity it taught him for the people of the past.

These are the movies that made them. What are the ones that made you?

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