The bad news is that in order to grow up you have to bury your father. Metaphorically speaking. Our parents loom over us in an astonishingly powerful way, and if what we want is to grow up into adults with any sense of personal power, we must come to grips with the influence of our parents.
Now, I only met my dad three times. Once when he came up to San Francisco to visit. Once when he took me to an Oakland Raiders game. And once when I went down to San Jose for the weekend when he took me to a minor league baseball game. All I got out of those meetings was a lifelong love for football and baseball and a kind of phantom image of this man who is my father.
Star War's Luke Skywalker’s the most obvious example in popular film of a boy who must confront his father in order to grow up, but the prequel series has a similar structure. Anakin Skywalker meets Obi Wan Kenobi who becomes his surrogate father, but his role’s hampered by the antiquated rules of the Jedi order. The rest of the prequel trilogy plays out as a battle for the role of Anakin’s father between Obi Wan and Senator Palpatine, the future Emperor. This battle for the son of the prodigal between a dark and light father is as old as any story ever told, and Lucas doesn’t do the best job ever.
I think he’d have done better using as a model this week’s case in point: 1948’s Red River.
Before I saw this movie all I’d heard was the homoerotic tension between all of the male characters as revolvers stood in for penises and fraternal bonds stood in for man love. Yeah, it’s there a bit, but not between John Wayne and Montgomery Clift – and it’s that relationship that gives the movie its heft.
Clift’s a boy traumatized by an Indian attack, saved by Wayne as he’s on his way to start up a cattle ranch. Fourteen years later the prodigal Clift returns to discover that Wayne must take ten thousand head of cattle hundreds of miles north to Missouri in order to make them profitable. Wayne holds too tight to the cattle drive and the men involved, his obsession with finding financial freedom overwhelming everything. Eventually, Clift is forced to decide between his father and justice.
One of the joys of the movie is Wayne’s willingness to turn his image of the just cowboy into a parody of itself: push individualist values too far in the wrong direction and you’ve got a dictator, and that’s just what Wayne becomes. Clift is given the seemingly impossible task of crafting a performance of such contemporary masculinity that it can stand against John Wayne.
Of course, all Clift is doing is sticking with the values that Wayne has long abandoned. In many ways, growing up means trying to be the best version of one’s father, and that’s what Clift attempts to do. It takes a special kind of courage to live the values one’s mentor has long abandoned, but that’s what’s required to grow up in this world.
Next week: the real Obi Wan making with the funny.