“There’s a reason you like movies! It’s because I like
movies!”
My father, a college professor of art history, said this to
me in one of our rare arguments. Rare because I never really had it in me to
stand up to him, and I was the only person he ever really stood up to. I don’t
know if it’s true: his loves of baseball, Orientalist art, NPR, and female
bluegrass singer-songwriters with really shrill voices never carried over to
me. I think maybe the love of movies did because it was turf where he was
willing to meet me part way. In every other field of art he had an idea of what
was objectively good and best; with a kid, he knew he had to start with movies
that were acceptable for kids, and he tried to expand that beyond my immediate
perimeter to things I hadn’t heard of but he had half a notion I’d like based
on my existing interests. Every summer when we’d travel to the United States
from Ireland, we’d spend a little time in New York City, and while there would
always try to see as many movies as possible that I’d never have the chance to
see back home thanks to restrictive ratings and limited screens. (Ironically,
Irish TV routinely showed all kinds of movies completely uncensored, but rarely
allowed kids under 16 into anything theatrical that was stronger than Indiana
Jones.)
When I was too young to see The Road Warrior, he went and
came back to tell me all about it. When I was way too young to see Quest for
Fire, he and my mother took me anyway, to a regional theater that wasn’t overly
concerned about enforcing ratings. My mother tried to cover my eyes nearly the
entire time. I saw Metropolis, Purple Rain, The Fly and Repo Man way before
anybody I knew. That last one would become a story all its own, as we were on
the other side of New York from where we were staying, late at night. We saw a
lone, empty bus, and the driver made a vague signal like he was going around
the corner. My father said we should go see if he’d take us; I ran and he
walked fast, skeptically. The bus was around the corner. Dad asked the driver,
“Did you wait for us?” He nodded. We got on, and as the bus picked up speed, we
saw he wasn’t picking up anybody else. He just asked where we were going, and
drove us straight to our doorstep, ignoring everyone else trying to flag him
down. We half expected the vehicle to glow and fly away.
British TV would typically run thematic weekly movies in a
collection, and for a while it became our Sunday tradition to watch Basil
Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies on TV while eating roast chicken. All the
Planet of the Apes movies ran on successive Fridays; later, all the James Bond
films did likewise. When we didn’t have a TV, we’d try to work our way into the
home of a friend who did, if the movie or show was important enough. Once we
stayed the night in a friend’s empty house just so we could watch An American
Werewolf in London on their TV, and it was playing too late at night for us to
get home on public transportation. He never cared much for horror, but if he
read enough reviews that said a horror film had more artful merits than just
scares, he could be persuaded.
We didn’t own a VCR until I was in high school, and that was
when we got HBO and I was able to catch up on all the great horror flicks
without him. He would drive me to the movies every week until I could drive,
buying my ticket if it was rated R, and accompanying me if that didn’t work. I
know he never wanted to see the Hellraiser or Nightmare on Elm Street sequels,
but he went because he knew how badly I wanted to.
The older I got, the more snobbish he got – he only wanted
to rent “art movies” but that definition extended only to the ones he’d heard
of. When I brought home Four Rooms, for example, he didn’t know what it was and
wasn’t interested, commenting only when I read off the cast list that Kathy
Griffin was also the name of a colleague of his. His objective theories of art
were creeping back in, and the argument I’d see years later on every dating
site, that “foreign and independent” movies were always better, came around.
When people say this, of course, I want to say “Let’s watch Gojira and The
Toxic Avenger, then.”
But this also strengthened my own points. I strongly
remember us coming out of Menace II Society, and him semi-sarcastically asking,
“Well, was that better than…Terminator 2?” I very firmly said no. Menace II
Society made stronger social points and maybe had its heart in a better place,
but purely as a movie, Terminator 2 was better. While my father loved both high
art and low art, he believed the former was always superior. My worldview that
this was not necessarily the case had been forming for years, but I was
starting to finally articulate it. He could love Beavis and Butt-head, but he
needed to justify that love by comparing them to Shakespearean
double-entendres. At the same time, he had fair points about needing to justify
why I liked what I liked, but I couldn’t hear those yet. I needed to feel okay
about liking what I liked first, and one time in college I even ducked his
phone calls for nearly two months because I felt like my tastes were being
dismissed. Ironically, he was also the one who subscribed me to the Joe Bob
Briggs newsletter, where I first heard of directors like John Woo, and figured
out that not all foreign films were heartwarming tales of growing up.
When I went to film school, he tried to buy me as many books
as possible by the likes of Pauline Kael, Martin Scorsese, and any other
luminary in the filed with good theories. When I became a film critic for the
first time, he was typically tactless but well-meaning when he sent me the New
Yorker film capsule section, “so you can see what GOOD film criticism is like.”
Compliments came hard to him. When I got into film school for production, he
said I should have gone into writing, because that was my strength – yet he had
never, to my recollection, complimented my writing. Except to other people,
when I wasn’t around. He subscribed to a North Carolina newspaper just to get
his friend Hal Crowther’s political columns; when I suggested he could do
likewise with my paper, he demurred, saying he had too many papers around the
house, and besides, he’d insist, Nan the librarian just loved printing them out
for him.
Speaking of Crowther, my dad always liked a phrase Hal would
quote his father as saying: “You don’t need to understand me, because one day
you’ll become me.” There’s some wisdom in that. Like my father, I’m a would-be
artist who become a chronicler and historian instead along the way. And the
older I get, the harder I work, the more I realize how people fall into
patterns of comfort. I have adopted many of his arguments about film over the
years, though I still maintain that high art and low art are in the eye of the
beholder to a point, and both can be equally profound, moving, entertaining,
and aspirational or full of shit.
It was a major compliment when I came home one year and he
actually took me to the video store so he could make a list of the movies I’d
recommend for him to see. I don’t know how many he ended up actually seeing,
but the gesture mattered – he would only have done such a thing if he meant it.
As the dementia crept in, he could still enjoy fairly
straightforward movies, but I told him to flat-out avoid stuff like Inception.
Complicated plots that he would try to work out backward always vexed him a
bit; once he became impaired, they were not worth tackling. Towards the end,
when I tried to show him something as simple as a Beavis and Butt-head
highlight reel, he mustered all his strength, and extended his voice beyond its
now-typical inaudible mutter to exclaim “I’m exhausted!” I always thought I’d
want to go on as long as I could watch movies. That he could no longer muster
the focus to even watch seven minutes has made me rethink how I might approach
my own end of life issues someday.
I don’t know if I liked movies because of my father. I do
know that because of him, the sheer breadth of what I have seen and appreciated
is much richer. I was never formally his student like so many were, but in some
ways, I reckon I got the master class.
James P.W. Thompson died last week. I reckon I also retained
his fondness for middle initials.