Father's Days with Richard Linklater

Yesterday was Father's Day in Australia.

Yep, fathers gotta be different over here. Mothers don't; they celebrate Mother's Day on the exact same date as in the U.S. (They just get to that date some 15 hours earlier.) I figure the reason behind moving Father's Day to September ("moving," because I assume the holiday was invented in the U.S. and then applied elsewhere) is to avoid having it fall in winter. Seasons technically begin on the 1st of the month here (rather than the 21st as in the northern hemisphere), so come June 1st, it's technically winter. This means that September 1st is technically spring, and September 7th is the first Sunday after September 1st.

I was in Australia last Australian Father's Day -- had been for about two weeks -- but I didn't celebrate it because I'd already celebrated American Father's Day in 2013. My wife gave me the option of which one I wanted to celebrate this year, and I went for the September date. I mean, who wants to celebrate Father's Day in winter?

A movie was obviously going to be involved in some capacity, and here's where I inadvertently established a Father's Day viewing pattern. You see, in 2012, I claimed a couple hours at home by myself as a Father's Day present, and used that time to watch Richard Linklater's Slacker (see post here). Two years later -- er, two years and three months later -- I again spent the time with Mr. Linklater by watching Boyhood, which only just (finally) opened here on Thursday.

I'm not sure if Dick Link will have another movie out by either Father's Day in 2015, so maybe I can watch, I don't know, The Newton Boys.

In all seriousness, though, there's something kind of appropriate about Mr. Linklater on a day in which you're considering family bonds between the generations, and deeply contemplating in general. Slacker gets the "deeply contemplating in general" part down, but I probably only had some vague sense going in how much Boyhood would be about the relationship between this boy and, well, both his parents, really.

Ellar Coltrane's Mason has three father figures in Boyhood, actually -- his biological father, Mason Sr. (played by Ethan Hawke), and his mother's two attempts to replace him (Bill, played by Marco Parella, and Jim, played by Brad Hawkins). In many respects, it's a story about how Mason is failed by all three of these men -- fortunately, to a lesser extent by his father than by the two surrogates, but in some ways to a greater extent, because this was the man who was originally assigned the role and whose failure necessitated the existence of the two inferior facsimiles.

But what I really appreciated this Father's Day was a reminder of just how much a mother does -- and never gets credit for. There's been some discussion about why the scenes in Boyhood were the specific scenes chosen for inclusion -- and I'm not simply talking about the most basic logical argument that "those are the scenes Linklater shot with his cast for the short time he had them available to him each year." Let's for a moment treat Boyhood as though it were a conventional film and that Linklater had a perfect idea of which scenes he planned to shoot, and why, way back when he started in 2002. Who knows, he may have.

One idea is that the scenes are the ones Mason himself considers important either as he looks back on the past dozen years of his life, or as he's going through them in real time. If this is the case, it becomes even more useful to look at the ways he values the scenes with Hawke, an absent father he kind of idolizes, and those with Patricia Arquette, a present mother who is taken for granted. Mason "remembers," as it were, going bowling with his dad, or going to a Houston Astros game, or going camping. With his mother, he only "remembers" boring, mundane, around-the-house stuff that is mired in "have to" rather than "want to." By flaking out, going off to Alaska to try to find himself, and even starting a new family, Hawke earned a kind of mythical status with his young son. By making sacrifices in her life to give him a healthy and stable childhood -- or trying her best to do so, anyway -- Arquette is remembered only as some kind of functional provider, one who never represented anything like fun to her son.

I suspect this is a role a mother has to play all too often. Even when fathers are physically present, like I am to my children, there's an essentially lazy part of us that tries to do "the easy work" -- goofing around with the kids, doing silly voices, etc. The true, hard work of parenting is something only the mother has the maturity to undertake, knowing she will never be rewarded for it -- knowing that if she doesn't do it, no one will.

So on (the day after) this Father's Day, I would like to thank Richard Linklater for reminding me of the ways I can truly earn a day in my own honor -- which is by doing the hard parts of parenting, in addition to the easy ones.

By, in essence, being more like a mother.

Am I a Slacker?

It's funny how our movie choices can fit an appropriate theme, even when we're not going for a theme.

I actually might have been going for a Father's Day viewing theme this past weekend, as one of the three movies I picked up from the library on Saturday was The Way, starring Martin Sheen and directed by his son, Emilio Estevez. The Way is explicitly about father-son bonds, as Sheen plays a father grieving over the death of his adult son (Estevez) on a hiking excursion. I didn't know exactly when we might watch it, but I thought it was a good roll of the dice to accompany two safer choices, Say Anything ... and Heathers, the latter of which we watched on Saturday night. My wife had expressed an interest in The Way in the past, but we both decided it seemed too heavy (even though I didn't actually know the son died when I first rented it).

No, the inadvertent theme occurred when my wife took my son out for a couple hours on Sunday afternoon, allowing me to watch a movie. That was my one Father's Day request -- a couple hours of peace and quiet in the afternoon to watch a movie at home. She did lots of other nice things for me, but that was the only thing I specifically requested.

The question then became: Handed such a rare and luxurious opportunity, what movie should I watch?

I wanted it to be something I hadn't seen before, as I've done a pretty good job re-watching old favorites in recent years. But I didn't like the selection of new movies at the Redbox -- at least, not for this particular occasion -- and I didn't want the title I chose to be too much of a gamble. I wanted it to be something I knew there was a good chance I'd like.

So that morning, I browsed through our Netflix streaming and decided on Richard Linklater's Slacker.

Having already seen most of Linklater's movies, I considered it a serious hole in my filmography that I had yet to see the film that put him on the map. Many credit Slacker with helping usher in the indie film movement that has thrived over the past 20 years, and for that reason alone I should have seen it long before now.

If you aren't familiar with Slacker, it's a free-form, essentially plot-less journey through a day in Linklater's home base of Austin, Texas, meeting more eccentric characters than you can shake a stick at, each of whom has some philosophy on this thing we call life. The most meaningful frame of reference for me was Linklater's Waking Life, which came along ten years later, which I own and have seen four or five times. In fact, I came out of Slacker thinking slightly less of Waking Life, which I now recognize as basically a rotoscoped version of Slacker (rather than the completely original entity I imagined it to be). Or, to reverse engineer it, Slacker was a live-action Waking Life. The "story" weaves you in and out of conversations transacted by a wide array of Austin residents, the majority of whom are in their early 20s. You get a little snippet of what makes them tick, and then you move on.

The theme part of it? Owning a new home has confronted me with the question:

Am I a slacker?

In other words, instead of lounging on the couch on a Sunday afternoon -- even if it is Father's Day -- should I be out hammering nails and drilling holes? Should I be engaged in real "father" activities, like making sure my house is everything it can be? Even if it is the one day of the year fathers are supposed to get a day of rest?

Vance, you slacker.

It's no secret I'm laid back. My wife is much more forward-thinking about most of the things in our family life, whether it's the next stage of our son's development or the next stage of buying (and then improving) our home.

But I did tell myself that once I was a homeowner, I was going to be more proactive about things related to the house than I have been (for maybe obvious reasons) with things in the places we've rented.

How soon is too soon to tell if I'm already failing in that resolve?

Granted, this past weekend was only our second full weekend in the new house. There's no deadline for getting things in 100% working order -- a condition most homeowners will tell you it's impossible to attain, anyway. We haven't had a housewarming party yet, and if/when we do, we will likely time it to coincide with our son's second birthday -- which is not until the end of August. So even if we needed time, we've got time.

But the problem with the essential slacker mentality, the kind that's on display in Linklater's movie, is that it always seems like there's time. "Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?" "Laid back" is the generous way to characterize it. "Lazy" may be closer to the truth.

I've always wanted to be one of those guys who DIYs home repairs and figures out ways to make his home sparkle just a little bit more. Because I wasn't turning out to be one of those guys wasn't my fault -- I didn't have a home yet. There was no way to measure what I'd become when I did in fact find myself in those circumstances.

And I know two weekends is too early to make any judgments, but for now, I'm a bit worried that I won't be that guy. If my own history is any indication, I'll be the guy who lives with things that are partially broken, because really, I don't mind that they are. The "glass is half full" way of looking at something that's partially broken is that it's partially working.

I've made a couple status updates about home ownership on Facebook, and one response I got stood out to me. It seemed to perfectly encapsulate the pressures we put on ourselves when we own a home -- pressures to be some idealized version of ourselves that may not really be true to our nature, almost out of necessity. The guy quipped "Here's a quote that will soon become so true for you: 'Did you have a nice weekend, or do you own your own home?'"

Ha. You can't have it both ways.

The thing is, I do like to have a nice weekend. For now, I'm just basking in the glow of having the home. I don't really care if it's got approximately 37 things of varying magnitudes that need to be worked on. There's time. There's always time.

If that makes me a slacker, then so be it.