Kodachrome

Everybody stand up if your dad died on your birthday. No? It's a small club. This year marked our first 'anniversary' together, me at 48, him at -83 . It was an ok day, I didn't have the time or impulse to celebrate much. Later that night I found it difficult to fall asleep, and ended up contemplating the old man.

Not that I can tell you who he was, which is what kept me awake. Of all things, watching Jon Hamm's character on Mad Men tolled a bell. It awakened me  to the repressed qualities of manhood in the fifties and sixties, a familiar theme. Hey, I know that guy. He looks a bit like my dad. He wears his hair like my dad did. Don't architects think in white space, in the background  that defines a building? I only knew him from the exterior; ironically, my father was the family photographer. Yes, some of the best childhood photos of me were taken by the man I never knew. And because I knew him so little, my child's eye perspective on that dad  was infinitely malleable. Was he like Fred Flintstone, or Herman Munster (played by Fred Gwynne)? Well, he was about that two dimensional, and his name was Fred. To a child, any Fred would do, a screen to project on was better than a void of misunderstanding.

In  reality he was truly handsome, hailed from an upper crust Chestnut Hill family,wore the right clothes,belonged to the right clubs, graduated from Yale, and pretty much stuck to the script, as long as you couldn't hear the screaming tirades delivered only to the bosom of his immediate family. Not many people were privileged with that opportunity; though now that so many of his comrades
have also fallen, I'm learning that my dad wasn't the only one who played a different role behind closed doors. So many Don Draper/Dick Whittingtons out there from his generation, Jekyll and Hydes. Much much later, much too late, we got the diagnosis of bipolar, or they called it manic-depressive then. With that knowing, dark sense of tragi-comedy  I smile when I recall that after leaving home (at 17, ejected to boarding school and then college, never to return) my mother kept trying to sell me on the line  that 'he's so much better now'.

My mother had her own brand of repression going on; it took two to make a marriage like that work. She's the kind of person that if you call her on something, really confront her, she stops talking to you for eight years, and whatever it was never happened, or it's still your fault. I don't understand her either, but we've been close at times, in our own dysfunctional way, the only closeness I'd known growing up. Our most recent rapprochement coincided with my dad's funeral. And even then she was accusing me of having taken  all the existing family photos and slides ... I'd managed at one point to transfer  all the best shots to video, and that was the last time anyone recalled touching  the family photo trove. It had to be  my fault, right? No, I told her, you've still got them all, in your attic probably, keep looking. All the while thinking about Kate Chopin's  novella on motherhood, The Awakening, wherein a woman's consciousness is analogous to the house, with the attic symbolizing both her unconscious and her incipient madness at being relegated to a role that repressed her. I believe they termed it hysteria then.

I didn't have those slides anymore, it was true. Though when I did, the process of choosing the best shots had allowed me to almost memorize the catalogue. Is it only human or simply narcissistic to be most attracted to the pics either taken of oneself or by oneself? Even then, I didn't grasp the power of what I held in my hands, though somehow I sensed its import, finding myself fascinated without understanding why.  Only now, a year after his death, realization dawns. It was the perspective of the photographer that mesmerized me, the moments he chose.

I recall the little me he captured, and wonder if seeing that moment  through his eyes can help me to understand if he knew what father-love was, if he knew he was approximating a dad, or even  a husband. That is as close as I can get to feeling any kind of emotion from him, and  it took a lot of work on my part.

As I'm groping towards this idea, my heart finds it too far remote, too intangible. I try to recall more of his shots, but what keeps springing to mind is one I took of him. He's holding a can of black Krylon spraypaint; he'd been painting the iron patio furniture, went to open a new can and it was stuck, so he'd jammed something in the eye of the spray hole, and the paint had splayed out over him,  a fine spatter of black up his neck, over his chin, and onto his nose, something like the bear in the cartoon who gets a honeypot stuck on its head. His expression was sheepish, humorous, on the edge of laughing at himself.

Moments like that, I can feel as if I loved him. I certainly liked that he had a sense of humor. Love doesn't have to be reciprocal to exist, I understand that. There's the selfless love of  monks and Mother Theresa, sure, but when you're talking about your immediate family, it just doesn't work unless its going both ways, both giving out and receiving back. So my moments of ... nostalgia  are just that, because  nothing from him ever reflected back at me, and when it did, at times the emotion coming at me or my mom or my brother was like a spewing hatred, a repudiation of what the relationship was supposed to be.

That vitriol sent me back inside myself, at that time a child who slept with a pillow tightly over her head and her tummy pressed deep into the mattress, though the muffled screams and epithets still came through. Because  you couldn't tune it out totally - you had to be sure he wasn't coming for you, just in case. That girl with a habit of  undercover listening too closely is the same person who spent twelve years as a cop listening to at least three radio channels simultaneously,a woman who has a very strong male side, who can always count on herself, who tends to be the emotional stability for others. Should I thank him for making me grow that in myself, or wonder that I still sleep with a pillow over my head, on my stomach.

Taken

When I first saw the trailer for Liam Neeson's film Taken (2008), I was repulsed. Another movie about sexploitation that mimed the very ills it was alleged to combat, I thought.

Wrong.


It reminded me of George C. Scott in Hardcore (1979), yet another avenging father searching for a daughter lost to the sex trade, in that case snuff films.

I knew there  was some sexual slave trade out there, even trade in children  and sex tourism, but stealing an American woman  from an airport- nah, way too far fetched.

Wrong again.

Believe it or not we're  studying this in nursing school, a group reporting on multiple aspects over a six week span. I've been a captive audience. Cross-reference that with the fact we now tune in every  satellite channel available, and I end up watching Taken.

Why  this is a decent movie... from the first, Neeson is driven. He plausibly reflects  the ruthlessness and impetus required  of an ex CIA agent whose daughter  has been kidnapped by an Albanian gang that traffics in women.Where George C. Scott trailed listlessly through low life low light American landscapes, Neeson embodies a humanized Bond, international, no boundaries, technology or ninja equally at the ready.

A former co-worker  counsels him that statistically he has only 96 hours or less before his daughter is lost forever. Neeson uses every skill honed from years of dark arts, and then some. The film races tautly from Parisian seedy locale to construction site to  uppercrust slave auction, Neeson sparing no mercy, leaving a trail of bodies  efficiently dispatched by various methods, all the while suffering from jet lag.


It's also  decent because it does not seek to exploit the victims portrayed therein. The sad truth is this kind of business really does exist. It's a good action movie, but a  better commentary on an aspect of our society few want to contemplate.