Alone In The Dark

For better or worse, I can put a finger on the moment when my father and I began to grow apart. I was fourteen in 1976, which is a pretty reasonable time in your life to begin making your own way in the world. Maybe not enough to move out of the house or start paying for your own school supplies, but perhaps this is where I could begin to make my stand.
It started innocently enough. My father took my younger brother to see "Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson." At some point, my father decided that he'd seen enough and walked out. He came home and reported to us all that it was an awful movie and we should be glad that we didn't waste our time with such drivel. Ah, but it was summertime, and I had been spending my TV-free afternoons reading The New Yorker and Time magazine, becoming more and more convinced of the power of the cinema, and the genius of Robert Altman. I wondered aloud at dinner about the possibility that my father just didn't "get" what it was that Altman was trying to say.
It wasn't a comfortable moment. The leg that I might have to stand on would have been the one that had seen the film myself. Instead, I relied on the commentary of Pauline Kael and Richard Schickel. My father, a good soul at heart, suggested that maybe I should see if I could sit through it first before I called his judgement into question. It was my belief that he took my little brother to see a "funny western," in the same way he had taken us all to see "Blazing Saddles" two years before.
For the record, when I did see "Buffalo Bill," I thoroughly enjoyed it, in the same way I learned to enjoy all of Robert Altman's films. But I had already been told what to look for and what to appreciate by those movie snobs. I didn't go to the movies with my father much after that. I remember him taking my younger brother and I to "Slap Shot": Paul Newman again, but this time it was a "real comedy." Years passed. He took me to see "Field of Dreams" and we agreed it was a good movie to see with your dad. Or your son. More years passed. I remember a conversation with him about "Natural Born Killers": He said he couldn't understand why the movie had to be so violent. "It's called 'Natural Born Killers,' Dad. Were you expecting something cuter?"
And so it went. He seemed resigned to the idea that his middle son was a film snob, and I began to appreciate his more objective tastes. Now that I'm a father myself, I can hear him chuckling at the friction generated by my opinions about the new Indiana Jones, or the second Transformers. My dad would have loved going to the movies with my son.