The American Spectator

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Movie Takes

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"I just want to get the sun setting."

"Bull**** on the sun setting! This isn't a f****** Miller Beer commercial. This is your father talking about something that's important to him...What's important here is that I, the star of your f****** movie, desperately want to say something about what today has meant to me and why I went up here to San Francisco on this peace march. Now if that is not important to you or is in balance for you with the f****** sunset, then I might as well hang up my jockstrap."

One of the amusing things about this is that earlier Mark has shown us an excerpt from a Miller Beer commercial made by Haskell Wexler in the 1960s which features a particularly striking sunset. That helps to make his performance in this little scene not only extremely hostile and deeply unattractive but also hilariously funny. Yet Mark goes out of his way, it seems, not to notice either the hostility or the humor. Again and again his father belittles him to his own camera. Even when he seems to be unwontedly humble, he uses it to stick the boot in. "Maybe I would have been a better father if I knew what I know now; maybe you wouldn't have turned out to be such a mess."

At one point, Mark tells his father that one of his most painful early memories was when he told him that he thought him stupid. In fact, Mark says, he remembers a great many occasions on which Haskell had pronounced that other people, particularly the directors he worked with, were similarly afflicted. There is a pause and for a second or two we allow ourselves to wonder if at last Haskell is touched with remorse about something he has done to his son. Then he says: "You know why that was, Mark? Because mostly they were." And when Mark seems as taken aback as we are by this reference to a number of the most prominent directors in Hollywood, he elaborates: "Stupid."

Over this and other examples of toxic parenting, the healing balm of psychobabble is poured by, of all people, Jane Fonda, who had collaborated with the elder Wexler on Introduction to the Enemy and Coming Home. "For the men of our fathers' generation," she tells young Mark, "intimacy was not their gift." Well, that's one way to put it. Miss Fonda of course learned her own forbearance through her experience of an emotionally remote and difficult father, but at least Henry Fonda was spared the humiliation of having his personal unpleasantness recorded for the world to see by the child he had wronged.

topics:
Hollywood, Movies