Rhymes With Cars & Girls

It was only recently that I understood how much my movie-obsession comes from my dad.

The weird thing is, my dad’s not really that big a movie buff. At least, not nearly as much of a movie buff you’d think he’d have to be for me to say my movie-obsession comes from him. It’s not as if he’s into Godard or has Quentin Tarantino’s personality or anything. But it was through and because of my dad that I got exposed to, and became fascinated by, movies at an early age.

My dad likes the blockbusters. Lucas. Spielberg. Sci-fi. Special effects. Jaws. Star Wars. This was back in the ’70s, the early ’80s, when special effects were interesting because they were hard to do well. He also would interest me in the directors: “Spielberg did this one movie called Duel…”, or “American Graffiti is by the same guy who did Star Wars.”

And so maybe I am underestimating how much he loves movies. He always liked to tell us about how/when he saw this or that movie. He liked to explain movies. He liked to get us interested in them. I know that he first saw Alien on a business trip when he had nothing to do. I know how long we stood in line when he first took us to see Star Wars. Hmm, I guess he is a movie buff, just not the snobby kind.

I have so so many memories like this: I’m in the family room watching some dumb TV show - Diff’rent Strokes, perhaps, or The Dukes of Hazzard. In walks my dad. He’s got the newspaper or TV guide under his arm. “Do you mind if we switch to channel 2? There’s a movie coming on that I really want to watch.”

I never minded. I totally trusted my dad’s taste. It never let me down.

So I’d watch with him. This is how I was introduced to what I think of as, in a sense, ‘the canon’: 2001, Dirty Harry, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. All the great movies from the past that seemed to tower over modern movies like gods. I’d pepper him with questions: why is this happening? why is he doing that? what’s going to happen next? My dad would explain. I was his audience. He probably doesn’t know to this day how closely I paid attention. Or how, in some sense, I’m just like him: I notice myself doing the same thing when I’m around my daughter.

So when I watch these movies today, they still stir up something in my heart. They’re not just movies, they’re movies I watched with my dad. Big, big difference.

There’s something else:

At first, I never got to see the end of these movies. Because of course that would take me past my ‘bedtime’. To my endless frustration, I’d have to go upstairs before seeing what happens to David Bowman as he approaches the monolith, or whether Richard Dreyfus gets on the spaceship. Dirty Harry steps on Scorpio’s wound in Kezar Stadium - commercial break comes on - “Okay, I think it’s bedtime.”

NOOOOOo!!!!!!

But of course eventually I got older and was allowed to stay up later and later. It was a constant battle that I would inevitably win. Every additional 15 minutes I got to stay up and see more of 2001 was an accomplishment, like a benchmark on the way to my adulthood. “If he just won’t say anything through this commercial break, then I’ll get to keep watching till the next commercial break, and maybe that’ll get me to the end.”

When I finally was allowed to get to the end - the Star-child, or seeing Richard Dreyfus fly away on that plane at the end of Graffiti, or Dirty Harry throwing away at his bad - it was as if I had truly earned something. It also felt like I had pulled an all-nighter. It was almost 11 o’clock. I would be exhausted and heady and feverish from the thrill. It’s said that George Lucas intentionally filmed Graffiti in the wee hours of the morning so that everyone would have that exhausted-yet-excited look about them. I got that exact same feeling watching it.

That’s how it was watching movies with my dad. You want to see how I felt, watch American Graffiti. That movie is now so wound up with my dad that just watching a piece of it instantly makes me think of him - and almost instinctively, a subconscious voice appears in the back of my head:

“I hope he lets me stay up till the end of it this time.”