Day Off

I've been meaning to write about this movie. Not because it's a great movie (it is) but because it makes me think about my father.

In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy has a parable about 2 sons. One son knew their father, the other did not. I'm the son that did not.

Of course how many people can say they really knew their father? Do my kids really know me? There's a lot I've never told them. Stuff I never will tell them. They don't need to know.

My dad wasn't around enough to tell me things. My mom left him when I was young. We moved to another state. I visited quite a bit, however. But he didn't talk about himself.

He didn't tell me stories. I was too young to hear most of them. I got those later, after he died, secondhand. A relative gifting me possessions of a dead man.

What he did tell me was practical stuff. About how to write down important things (like bank account numbers) in code. And how to comb my hair, and talk to a barber. And how to play craps.

Now he was an old man by the time I was born. And of course he was even older when I was growing up. Because we're all getting older, and we're all getting closer to death.

Being older, I don't know if he knew how to relate to me. His wife (my stepmother) being a 20-something model, did know how to relate to me. Because at that young age she still remembered how to be a kid. She gave the best birthday presents--because she knew what the kids were into.

But as she spiraled down in addiction I would see her less and less on my visits. She'd be at "camp" which is what my dad called rehab, or she'd go into the master bedroom and not come out for the entirety of my stay.

One way my father communicated was through movies. On my frequent visits to Los Angeles, we'd see a movie every night. He lived in Beverly Hills, so we'd usually hit the theaters in Westwood.

It was such a joy to see the Bruin Theater in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood because I'd seen so many films there as a child. But as an adult who lived in L.A. off an on for the better part of two decades I never saw a film there. It was too painful. I couldn't go back.

My dad loved movies. And it wasn't just a hobby, it was a major part of his life's work as an entertainment attorney.

He knew the industry, and he knew a lot of the players. He had represented many of the luminaries. Some of them were close personal friends. But his friends were passing away.

Because time and age does that.

There's a time in life when you go to birthday parties, then there's a time when you go to weddings. And then there's a time when you go to funerals. When I was a kid he was going to a lot of funerals.

He had trouble connecting with his grade school-age son, but that didn't stop him from trying. He'd try to come up with fun trips. Like Disneyland, or Knots Berry Farm, or Magic Mountain. But sometimes we'd do destination stuff. He'd fly in, pick me up, and take me somewhere.

I remember a trip to The Breakers in Palm Beach. He also loved the Hotel Del in Coronado. He loved big classic luxury hotels, but then again who doesn't? So we'd take these trips, and stay at these hotels, and then I'd go back to living in poverty with my mother with the food stamps and the government peaches and the government cheese.

It's a strange way to grow up.

I guess it would have been around 1985 when he started telling me about the New York World’s Fair, and how he went as a young man, and how incredible it was. It sounded fantastic. The entire world showed up? And going to the fair was like seeing all the countries in the world? Amazing!

And then the next year, he sprung it on me. We were going to the World’s Fair in Vancouver BC, also known as Expo 86. I was thrilled. I was ready to see the future. I was ready to see the world.

And it sucked. It just fucking sucked.

It was rainy, it was cold, and it was boring as fuck.

The monorail was cool, but I’d been on one at Disneyland. I don’t remember anything from the fair except that it was wet and that fucking monorail. I forget the exact date, but I feel like we must have been there towards the end of the fair because it was quiet and lifeless.

The city and the world had already moved on, ready to reclaim and redevelop the land into god knows what.

It felt like a cemetery. That emptiness. It was like walking through rainy ruins.

I was just a kid, but I wasn’t impressed. I could tell my dad wasn’t impressed either. We had come to see The Future. And The Future was still coming in New York in 1939. By New York 1964 and Montreal in 1967, the future had arrived. Men were in space. A better world was being built.

But by 1986 the future had stopped cold. It had stagnated. What we saw at the fair was a preview of the post-industrial malaise and hints of our current globalized dystopia.

My dad was as bored and disengaged as I was.

The highlight of the trip, however, was when we saw a movie. This was our thing. We were good at this. We liked this. We couldn’t fuck this up. And the movie we saw was Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Of all the movies we saw together this is the one I remember the most vividly. Maybe because it was a welcome respite from our failed adventure. Maybe because this was before cancer, and his drawn-out divorce, when he was still happy.

And maybe that’s how I want to remember him. Not the broken man of a few years later living in a hotel and going bankrupt.

But mostly, it’s because he loved that film. Of all the movies we’d seen together, he enjoyed that one the most. Afterwards he was beaming. And I was too.

Of course it’s a fantastic film. I think it’s the best of the 80s, and maybe the best of all time. And this one changed us. It changed my dad, and it changed me.

Of course, great cinema changes people. It has that power. You get hypnotized by the moving image. It’s not real, it’s just light reflected off a screen. But you think it’s real.

You don’t look at it, you look into it.

And it hypnotizes you.

And it implants ideas into you. Plants them deep. Most people don’t even know they’re there.

And those ideas change you.

If you think this sounds like the plot of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, you are correct. Because this is the plot of Inception, which is a movie about how movies work.

Movies play with time and space and hypnotize, and implant ideas. Movies can be insidious tools of propaganda. Some people intuit this, and they don’t trust the film or the filmmakers. And then they come up with wild conspiracy theories (mostly involving Jews).

I don’t blame these people. They’re intelligent enough to know they’ve been somehow manipulated. They feel this. And they’re trying to make sense of this.

But they don’t have the wisdom to know that there’s too much incompetence in the world for grand conspiracy. And they don’t know the filmmakers just want you to enjoy the movie, so the movie makes money, so the powers that be let them make another movie.

Because they don’t want to alter or control you. The filmmakers just want to make movies. It’s what they love to do.

I’m going to assume you’ve seen the movie, so I won’t review the plot. But let me just say that it’s insidious. It’s sneaky. And it’s a shiv to the guts so slow, and so deep that I didn’t feel it for decades.

The key to the sleight of hand is this: it’s not about Ferris.

It’s about Cameron. He’s the protagonist. He’s the one with the character arc. He starts the movie has a pathetic miserable man without a future who’d be better off killing himself, and ends as a guy who might have a chance in life.

Cameron’s Hero’s Journey goes something like this (according to me):

- Normal life: Cameron is “sick” in his parents’ cold loveless home.

- The Call to Adventure is Ferris asking him to help spring Ferris’s GF Simone from school, which involves stealing the forbidden Ferrari.

- Cameron crosses the threshold into the underworld as they leave school and drive into Chicago.

- In Chicago they face many tests.

- The final ordeal comes when Cameron realizes there are too many miles on the Ferrari. He becomes catatonic and falls into a pool. At which point he is reborn.

- Finally, Cameron decides to destroy the Ferrari, take the blame, and stand up to his father. He decides to exercise agency over his own life, thus becoming “the master of both worlds”.

I don’t think John Hughes planned it this way. I don’t think it’s possible to write something that insidious, that sneaky.

I think he was touched by the muse and this is what fell out. This is how art happens.

The muse touches you and something comes out. i know because this is what happens to me. And I don’t know where it comes from.

This is what I see when I watch the movie. This is what I see the muse told John Hughes to make. I see a story about a man’s journey through this hostile and unfair and irrational and absurd world.

But then again I have some years now, and kids, and responsibilities. And successes, and many failures. And things I’m proud of, and things that I’m still ashamed of. And many things I have yet to do.

But what did my father see on that rainy day in Vancouver? He left the theater transformed. He didn’t know about the cancer yet, or that his wife was going to leave him and try to take him for everything. Or what to do with his young son from a middle marriage who would undoubtedly grow up without a father?

I’d like to think that he was thinking about me. That the movie gave him hope for me. That maybe I wasn’t doomed. That maybe I’d turn out okay.

That’s what I’d like to think, but I’m not sure it’s true.

There are mundane things I wish I could ask my deceased loved ones.

Mundane things like, where did those Krugerrands in your safe deposit box come

from Mom? Or, how’d you feel about Ferris Bueller’s Day Off Dad?

It would be nice to have those answers. But life doesn’t give you the answers you want when you want it.

It’s something I’ll have to wait for.