“You knew you were going to break up?”
“I mean that it’s all right to go to bed with an asshole but don’t ever have a baby with one.”
That shut him up.
I’ve kept the list of the movies we watched (yellow cards on the fridge), so I know that in the first few weeks I showed him Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). There’s a sort of rushed-homework feel to Woody Allen’s movies these days, as if he’s trying to get them finished and out of the way so he can move on to something else. That something else, distressingly, is another movie. It’s a downward spiral. But still, after making more than thirty films, maybe he’s done his life’s work; maybe he’s entitled to cruise on whatever gas he wants from here on in.
Yet there was a time when he knocked off beauties, one after the other. Crimes and Misdemeanors is a film many people have seen once but, rather like reading Chekhov’s short stories, don’t really get all of it the first time by. I’ve always thought it was a movie that lets you see how Woody Allen sees the world—as a place where people like your neighbours really do get away with murder and goofs end up with great girlfriends.
I alert Jesse to the film’s skilful storytelling, how efficiently it covers the courtship between the ophthalmologist (Martin Landau) and his hysterical girlfriend (Angelica Huston). Just a few brush strokes and we understand how far they’ve come, from a delirious courtship to a murderous junction.
What did Jesse think of it? He said, “I think I’d like Woody Allen in real life.” And we left it at that.
Next I showed him a documentary, Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry (1976). You can only say this once so here it is: Volcano is the best documentary I’ve ever seen in my life. When I first started in television more than twenty years ago, I asked a senior producer if she’d heard of it.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “That’s the reason I got into television.” She could even quote from it. “‘How, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old woman who plays dominoes in a cantina at seven o’clock in the morning.’”
What a tale the film tells: Malcolm Lowry, a rich boy, leaves England at twenty-five, drinks his way around the world, settling in Mexico where he begins a short story. Ten years and a million drinks later, he has expanded that story into the greatest novel ever written about drinking, Under the Volcano, and almost driven himself insane in the process. (Strangely enough, most of the novel was written in a small cabin ten miles north of Vancouver.)
There are some writers, I explain, whose lives inspire as much curiosity and admiration as what they actually wrote. I mention Virginia Woolf (death by drowning), Sylvia Plath (death by gas), F. Scott Fitzgerald (drank himself silly and died too young). Malcolm Lowry is another. His novel is one of literature’s most romantic paeans to self-destruction.
“It is scary,” I add, “to imagine how many young men your age have gotten drunk and looked in the mirror and thought they saw Malcolm Lowry looking back at them. How many young men thought they were doing something more important, more poetic than just getting really smashed.” I read Jesse a passage from the novel to show him why. “I think of myself as a great explorer,” Lowry wrote, “who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world. But the name of this land . . . is hell.”
“Jesus,” Jesse said, slumping back into the couch, “do you think he meant it, that he really saw himself that way?”
“I do.”
After a moment’s thought, he said, “It’s not supposed to, I know, but in a strange way it makes you want to go out and get completely wrecked.” I then ask him to pay special attention to the writing in the documentary which often matches the stature of Lowry’s own prose. Here’s a sample, Canadian filmmaker Donald Brittain’s description of Lowry’s incarceration in a New York insane asylum: “Here were things that kept on living despite the fact they were beyond repair. This was no longer the rich bourgeois world where one fell down on soft lawns.”
“Do you think I’m too young to read Lowry?” he asked.
Tough question. I knew that at this juncture of his life the book would lose him after twenty pages. “You need to know about some other books before you read him,” I said.
“Which ones?”
“That’s what you go to university for,” I said.
“But can’t you read them anyway?”
“You can. But people don’t. Some books you only read if you’re forced to. That’s the beauty of a formal education. It makes you read a lot of stuff you’d normally never bother with.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
“In the end, yes.”
Occasionally Tina arrived home from work to observe me luring Jesse up the stairs with a croissant in my fingers— as if I was training a porpoise at Water World.
“He has very understanding parents,” she said. Having worked summers, holidays, even weekends to help put herself through university, she must have found this afternoon ritual somewhat galling.
A word or two about Tina. The first time I saw her hurrying through the newsroom—this was almost fifteen years before—I thought, “Too pretty. Forget it.”
We had, nevertheless, a brief flirtation which she terminated after a few weeks with the stern observation that while I was “fun to drink with,” I was not “boyfriend material.”
“At my age,” she said, “I can’t afford to find myself down the road in two years with a dead-end relationship.”
Several years went by. I was leaving my bank one afternoon in an underground mall when I ran into her at the foot of the escalator. Time had lengthened her face and she looked slightly haggard. An unhappy love affair, I hoped. I tried again. We had a few dates here and there, and then one evening, walking home from somewhere, I looked over at her silhouette and thought, I must marry this woman. It was as if some mechanism for self-preservation clicked on, like a furnace on a cold night. Marry this woman, it said, and you will die happily.
On hearing the news, Maggie took me aside and whispered, “You must not blow this one.”
Next I showed Jesse Citizen Kane (1941), “Pretty good but no way the best film ever made,” John Huston’s Night of the Iguana (1964), “Bullshit.” Then On the Waterfront (1954).
I start with a rhetorical question. Is Marlon Brando the greatest film actor ever?
Then I do my pitch. I explain that On the Waterfront appears to be about cleaning up corruption on the New York docks, but what it’s really about is the accelerating emergence of a new form of acting style in American movies, the Method. The results, where actors personalize a character by connecting it to real-life experience, can be over-personal and wanky, but here they’re divine.
I go on to explain that there are a number of ways you can look at the film. (It won eight Oscars.) On a literal level, it’s an exciting story about a young man (Brando) who is faced with a real crisis of conscience. Does he allow evil to go unpunished, even though it’s been committed by his friends? Or does he speak up?
But there’s another way to view it. The film’s director, Elia Kazan, made one of those awful life mistakes that stays with you forever: he was a voluntary witness before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee in the ’50s. During the Committee’s “investigations,” I explain, actors and writers and directors were routinely blacklisted for being members of the Communist Party; lives were ruined.
Kazan got the nickname “Loose-lips Kazan” for his hand-licking performance and his willingness to “name names.” Critics claimed On the Waterfront was in essence an artful justification for ratting on your friends.
I can see Jesse’s eyes clouding over so I wrap up by asking him to watch for a scene with Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint in a park; he takes her glove; puts it on; she wants to leave, but can’t as long as he has it. When Kazan talked about Brando, he always talked about that moment. “Have you seen it?” he used to a
sk interviewers in the voice of a man who has witnessed, first-hand, an event that should not be able to take place in the natural world—but has.
On it went. I showed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? (1966); Plenty (1985) with Meryl Streep. Graham Greene’s The Third Man (1949). Some of the films Jesse liked, some bored him. But it beat paying rent and having to get a job. I got a surprise when I showed him A Hard Day’s Night (1964).
It’s hard for someone who didn’t grow up in the early ’60s, I said, to imagine how important the Beatles were. Barely out of their teens, they were treated like Roman emperors everywhere they went. They had the extraordinary quality of making you feel as if, in spite of their hysterical popularity, you alone understood how great they were, that they were somehow your own private discovery.
I told Jesse about seeing them at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto in 1965. I’ve never seen anything like it, the screams, the explosion of flashbulbs, John Lennon hamming his way through “Long Tall Sally.” The teenage girl next to me snatched so violently at my binoculars she almost took my head with them.
I told him about interviewing George Harrison myself in 1989 when he released his last album; how, waiting in his office at Handmade Records, I had almost passed out when I turned around and there he was, a slim, middle-aged man with thick black hair. “Just a minute,” he said in that accent you heard on the Ed Sullivan Show, “I’ve got to comb my hair.”
I tell Jesse how “right” they got it when they made A Hard Day’s Night —from shooting in gleaming black and white, to getting the boys to wear the trend-setting black suits with white shirts, to the use of hand-held cameras to give the movie a documentary, a real-life, feel. That jiggly six o’clock–news style influenced a generation of filmmakers.
I point him toward a few delightful snippets: George Harrison (the best actor of the bunch, according to the director, Richard Lester) and the scene with the awful shirts; John Lennon snorting at the top of a Coca-Cola bottle in the train. (Few people got the joke then.) But my favourite part, easily, is the Beatles running down a flight of stairs and bursting outdoors into an open field. With “Can’t Buy Me Love” soaring in the background, it is a moment so irresistible, so ecstatic, that it fills me, even to this day, with the feeling of being near to—but unable to possess—something profoundly important. After all these years, I still don’t know what that “something” is but I feel its presence when I watch this movie.
Just before I put the film on, I mention that in 2001, only a few years ago, the remaining Beatles released a collection of the group’s number-one hits. It went straight to the top of the charts in thirty-four different countries. Canada, the U.S., Iceland, all over Europe. This from a band that broke up thirty-five years ago.
Then I say what I’ve wanted to say all my life. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles!”
Jesse watched the film in polite silence, at the end of which he said simply, “Dreadful.” He went on. “And John Lennon was the worst of the bunch.” (Here he mimicked Lennon with astonishing accuracy.) “A totally embarrassing man.”
I was speechless. The music, the film, its look, its style . . . But most of all, it was the fucking Beatles!
“Indulge me for a second, okay?” I said. I fished around in my Beatles CDs until I found “It’s Only Love” on the Rubber SoulCD. I put it on and played it for him (my finger raised to capture his attention should it meander for a millisecond).
“Wait, wait,” I cried ecstatically. “Wait for the hook! Listen to that voice, it’s like barbwire!”
Overtop of the music I shouted, “Is that not simply the best voice, ever, in rock and roll!”
At the song’s conclusion, I subsided into my seat. After a religious pause and in a voice grasping for normalcy (it still kills me, that middle-eight), I said, “So what do you think?”
“They’ve got good voices.”
Good voices?
“But how does it make you feel ?” I cried.
Appraising me cautiously with his mother’s eyes, he said, “Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
“Nothing.” Pause. “I feel nothing at all.” He placed a conciliatory hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Dad.”
Was there a look of concealed amusement on his lips? Had I turned into a ranting old coot already?
3
Late one afternoon, it was nearly six o’clock and no Jesse. I went down the stairs and knocked on his door.
“Jesse,” I said. “Can I come in?”
He was lying on his side under the blankets, facing the wall. I turned on the bedside lamp and sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed.
“I got you something to eat,” I said.
He turned over. “I can’t eat, Dad, really.”
I took out a croissant. “I’m just going to have a little bite then myself.”
He looked hungrily at the bag.
“So,” I said (munch, munch), “what’s up.”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Is this about Rebecca?” I said.
He sat bolt upright. His thick hair standing on end like he’d been hit by lightning. “She had an orgasm,” he whispered. I recoiled. I couldn’t help myself. This wasn’t the sort of conversation I wanted to have with my sixteen-year-old son, not in that detail anyway. (That’s what his buddies were for.) But I could also see that having said those words, just by getting them to the surface and into the light, he had released a dose of poison from his body.
I hid my discomfort by taking a large mouthful of dough almost whole.
“But you know what she said afterwards?” he asked.
“No, I don’t.”
“She said, ‘I really like you, Jesse, but when I hug you, it’s like hugging a friend.’”
“She said that?”
“Exactly. I swear, Dad. Like I was some kind of girlfriend or gay or something.”
After a moment I said, “You know what I think?”
“What?” He looked like a convicted man waiting to hear his sentence.
I said, “I think she’s a troublemaking little bitch who loves to torment you.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
He lay back as if the awfulness of the situation had just re-occurred to him.
“Listen to me,” I said. “I’m going to have to go out pretty soon, I’ve got some things to do and you’re going to start thinking about this stuff again. . . .”
“Probably.”
Weighing my words, I spoke carefully. “I don’t want to have an inappropriate conversation with you, we’re not pals, we’re father and son, but I want to say this to you. Girls don’t have orgasms with people they’re not physically attracted to.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I said emphatically.
(Is that true? I wondered. Doesn’t matter. Not today’s problem.)
I took Jesse to see Sexy Beast (2002) with Ben Kingsley at the Cumberland theatre. I could tell he wasn’t watching the movie, that he was sitting there in the dark thinking about Rebecca Ng and that “hugging a friend” business. On the way home, I said, “Did you get a chance to talk about all the stuff you wanted to talk about today?”
He didn’t look at me. “Absolutely,” he said. Door closed; mind your own beeswax. We walked the rest of the way to the subway in a curiously uncomfortable silence. Talking, we’d never had a problem with, but now it seemed as if we’d run out of things to say to each other. Perhaps, even at his young age, he intuited I couldn’t tell him anything that was going to make a difference. Only Rebecca could do that. But it seemed he’d forgotten how his own nervous system worked, that just putting things to words released him, partially, from the distress they described. He was sealed off from me. And I felt a curious reluctance to barge into rooms where I wasn’t invited. He was growing up.
The weather, the way it always is when you’re heartbroken, was terrible. Rainy mornings; colourless skies in the afternoon. A car had squashed a squirr
el in front of the door and you couldn’t go in or out of the house without looking, involuntarily, at the furry gore. At a family dinner with his mother and my wife, Tina, he fidgeted with his steak and mashed potatoes (his favourite) with polite, if slightly mechanical, enthusiasm. He looked wan, like a sick child, and drank too much wine. It wasn’t so much the quantity actually, it was the way he drank it, too fast, chasing a sensation. Something you see in older drinkers. I thought, We’ll have to keep an eye on this.
Looking at him across the table, I found myself moving fitfully from one unhappy image to another. I saw him as an older man driving a taxi around town on a rainy night, the car stinking of marijuana, a tabloid newspaper folded on the seat beside him. I told him he could do whatever the hell he pleases; forget the rent, sleep all day. How cool a dad am I!
But what if nothing happened? What if I had dropped him down a well from which there was no exit, just a succession of shitty jobs and shitty employers and no money and too much booze? What if I had set the stage for all that?
I found him alone on the porch later that night. “You know,” I said, settling into the wicker chair beside him, “this thing you’re doing, not going to school, it’s a hard route, you know that.”
“I know that,” he said.
I went on, “I just want to make really sure that you know what you’re doing, that there are real consequences to having only a grade nine education.”
“I know,” he said, “but I think I’m going to have a good life anyway.”
“You do?”
“Yep. Don’t you?”
“Don’t I what?”
“Think I’m going to have a good life.”
I looked over at him, his narrow face open, vulnerable, and I thought I’d sooner kill myself than add a worry in his heart.
“I think you’re going to have a great life,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I’m sure of it.”
It was a spring afternoon. Jesse staggered up the stairs around five. I was going to say something but I didn’t. That was the deal. I had a rendezvous to have a drink with somebody about a magazine job (money still haemorrhaging), but I thought I’d get him started on a movie and then leave. I put on Giant (1956) with James Dean as a young cowboy. Jesse munched a croissant as the credits rolled over the big-cattle country, breathing through his nose, which kind of irritated me.
The Film Club Page 3