When my father sighs when he is disappointed in me, it sounds exactly like the sigh he makes when a movie we’re watching is frustrating, or stupid, or bad. The worst part about this sigh is not when the aftermath, when I feel so horrible because I must have done something wrong, but knowing that I have this same sigh. It exists in my body behind my teeth, and it sounds exactly like his.
It is a slightly frightening idea to look at your father and see all the things he thinks are wrong with him in you. My father once said, in a game of truths that we played on vacation, picking question prompts out of a bowl, that his worst thing is his anger issues. My anger is the same as his. I wish that when my father looked at me and saw all the other things that I have from him, he would love them the way he loves our shared appreciation for cinema. My father and I have the same anger. It bubbles and explodes, and it lasts for a long time, drawing out like an ice age coating the Earth. My anger is twin to his, and still, seeing it in me irritates him. Perhaps if I was a son and not a daughter with a face like my mother’s, he would love me for it. I have to make up for the fact that I was a daughter, to be everything that a son would be for him.
But even with this, we find commonplace in front of the silver screen. To love movies the same way is to bond us.
My father is not a filmmaker.
But, he loves films as though they are his own. As if he has made them with his own hands, stood behind the camera, shouted at the actors in his own voice. He loves them like children love each other. Without asking for anything back. Pure love. There are some he loves so deeply that he calls them “pictures”.
I’ve only seen my father cry a few times. Once was a goodbye. All the rest came from movies.
It is my father who taught me how to love film. Just as I was taught to write and walk and talk, he guided my hand and soul into the world past the silver screen, where anything can be anything, and anyone can be anyone. In the streets of 1980s Toronto, with a group of messy friends and a cheap theater, a love for film spawned in my father, and unknown to both of us, it would be his greatest gift to me. All of his favourite films grew to become a part of him, fitting under his skin as easily as all the bones holding him together. And soon, by the time I became a teenager, my body would be built the same way. So many films, so many I inherited from him, I would love as strongly as my friend loves a boy.
I’ve loved the movie Fight Club since I was thirteen, which is too young to love Fight club, but I loved it anyways. When I think of movies like Fight Club and Inception and Ratatouille, movies that I’ve loved for a long time, I think of my father and the films he loved when he was thirteen.
I sometimes feel sick at the word father.
I think sometimes about how my father loves movies so badly that he wants me to love them. He loves The Shawshank Redemption, and I love it too, but not as he does. Not in an all time favourite kind of way. But he so desperately wishes that I did, wishing for me to let it climb up the list to number one. And when I tell him it won’t, that no, dad, Fight Club is first, he deflates, and his eyes harden slightly, as if to question me, how can you love something more than me? As if I am rejecting him by not loving this movie that he loves so much as deeply as he wishes I did. Like I am turning away all that he has given me.
When I think about it, our relationship would not be as it was if we could not sit down and watch a movie together that demanded attention and thought and feeling from us.
im even more late to reading this but jesus christ, this really moved me. i see parts of my own life reflected in what you've written, and this further evokes feelings within me. thank you, thank you for writing this.
i'm very late to reading this article but this made me cry a little- the way you write is so beautiful and personal! and i also, relate to this article on many levels, so thank you for making this, because it made me realize that films also connects me and my father :)