Film School

Movies are magic.

Or can be.

The good ones, like all good art, don’t merely entertain. They enlighten. They inspire. They educate—an education of heart far more than head.

They transform us.

They challenge us.

They change us.

Of course, there are plenty of people who find film frivolous. Pragmatists, who, unlike me, fail to find meaning in fiction, in made-up stories, in myth and metaphor. It’s sad. Stories are sacred. Or can be. They speak to our souls. They have the ability to convey and communicate more truth, more wisdom, more of what matters most, than any other form of communication.

“The Film Club,” a memoir about movies and other things that really matter, by novelist, David Gilmour, demonstrates these truths quietly, but effectively, subtly, but with plenty of profundity.

Gilmour, an unemployed movie critic trying to convince his 15-year-old son Jesse to do his homework, realizes Jesse is beginning to view learning as a loathsome chore, and offers him an unconventional deal: Jesse could drop out of school, not work, not pay rent—but he must watch three movies a week of his father’s choosing.

Week by week, side by side, father and son watched everything from “True Romance” to “Rosemary’s Baby” to “Showgirls,” films by Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Brian Depalma, Billy Wilder, and others. The movies got them talking about Jesse’s life and his own romantic dramas, with mercurial girlfriends, heart-wrenching breakups, and the kind of obsessive yearning usually seen only in movies.

Through their film club, father and son discussed girls, music, work, drugs, money, love, and friendship—and their own lives changed in surprising ways.

Can watching movies with a novelist/film critic dad really be better than going to school? Is this ingenious parenting or grounds for being declared unfit? You can decide for yourself. My answer? Well, I happen to have a fifteen year-old son, who truly excels in school—far and away better than I ever did—and, I happen to be a novelist and (something like) a film critic, and I truly believe I could provide him a better education than he could receive virtually anywhere. I’ll only add two caveats: 1) Unlike Gilmour, literature would be a big part of my curriculum, and 2) I’d hire a math and science tutor.

Gilmour gambled. He risked a lot in attempt not just to educate, but to save his son. As he puts it, “The films simply served as an occasion to spend time together, hundreds of hours, as well as a door-opener for all manner of conversational topics — Rebecca [Jesse’s girlfriend], Zoloft, dental floss, Vietnam, impotence, cigarettes.”

The book is filled with insight and wisdom like:

“The second time you see something is really the first time. You need to know how it ends before you can appreciate how beautifully it’s put together from the beginning.”

“It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defenses and really break your heart.”

“The beautiful girl in the Thunder Bird in “American Graffiti” who keeps disappearing is an example of Proustian contemplation that possession and desire are mutually exclusive, that for the girl to be the girl, she must always be pulling away.”

“You can’t be with a woman you can’t go to the movies with.”
All of which leads Jesse, his son, to certain insights of his own: “It’s like when you’re watching a film you really love. You don’t want somebody trying to be interesting. You want them just to love it.”

Gilmour offers much to contemplate about the movies he chooses to reach his son with, too. Within just a few introductory paragraphs he reveals interesting information about the movies as well as helping his son (and the reader) have a more meaningful experience with it.

He reveals how Stephen King hated Stanley Kubrick’s handling of “The Shining,” said Kubrick made movies to hurt people; how Brando improvised the scene in “On the Waterfront” when he takes the girl’s glove and puts it on his hand; how Steven Spielberg made his directing debut with a truck-chase thriller called “Duel,” which he still watches periodically to remind himself of “how he did it,” how Spielberg said, “You have to be young to be so unapologetically sure-footed;” how Howard Hawks said that a good film must have at least “three good scenes and no bad ones.” And so much more!

Reading “The Film Club” and reflecting on it, reminds me of the way in which I used movies to connect with and educate my daughter over the years—particularly when she was entering early adolescence. We watched all sorts of films—including the horror movies that are such a rite of passage for teenagers—but most of all I designed a cinematic curriculum in feminism, attempting to empower her by showing her just how kickass teenage girls like Buffy Summers and Veronica Mars and Rory Gilmore could be.

This past weekend, my now twenty-year old kickass daughter came home from college with the textbook from her film class, and we connected over and celebrated cinema all over again as I devoured the tome in our kitchen, in the car (as she drove), and at the table of the Chinese restaurant where we went to lunch. The experience was all the dad of an amazing, kickass co-ed could ask for, and it made me so very grateful that we, like the Gilmours, had started our very own version of the film club so many years ago and that it continues to this day (we even watched “The Killer Inside Me” while she was here.)

Gilmour picks some truly great films to share with his son, and the book includes the complete list. I recommend reading the book and watching the movies—and if you can share the experience with someone, form a “film club” of your own, all the better.
Story can be sacred.


Movies can be magic.

Sharing the meaningful ones with our children is nothing short of shamanistic.