Gilmour - The film club: a true story of a father and son

David Gilmour is a novelist who has earned critical praise from literary figures as diverse as William Burroughs and Northrop Frye, and from publications as different as the New York Times to People magazine. The author of six novels, including A PerfectNight to Go to China, which won the 2005 Governor Generals Award for Fiction, he also hosted the award-winning Gilmour on the Arts. His books have been translated into 11 languages. He lives in Toronto with his wife Tina Gladstone.

The Film Club

OTHER BOOKS BY DAVID GILMOUR

A Perfect Night to Go to China
Back on Tuesday
How Boys See Girls
An Affair with the Moon
Lost Between Houses
Sparrow Nights

THE
FILM CLUB
A TRUE STORY OF
A FATHER AND SON

DAVID GILMOUR

Thomas Allen Publishers
Toronto

Copyright 2007 by David Gilmour
First paperback edition 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any meansgraphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systemswithout the prior written permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Gilmour, David, 1949
The film club : a true story of a father and son / David Gilmour.
Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-88762-285-4 ISBN 978-0-88762-349-3 (pbk.)

1. Gilmour, David, 1949. 2. Fathers and sons.
3. Motion picturesAppreciation.
4. Novelists, Canadian (English)20th centuryBiography.
5. Film criticsCanadaBiography. I. Title.

PS8563.I56Z467 2007 C813'.54 C2007-903271-0 PS8563*

Editor: Patrick Crean
Cover and text design: Gordon Robertson
Cover images: iStockPhoto (chairs), Shutterstock (film frame)

Published by Thomas Allen Publishers, a division of Thomas Allen & Son Limited, 145 Front Street East, Suite 209, Toronto, Ontario M5A 1E3 Canada

www.thomas-allen.com

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

12 11 10 09 08 1 2 3 4 5

Printed and bound in Canada

To Patrick Crean

I know nothing about education except this: that the greatest and most important difficulty known to human beings seems to lie in that area which deals with how to bring up children and how to educate them.

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE (153392)

The Film Club

Contents

I was stopped at a red light the other day when I saw my son coming out of a movie theatre. He was with his new girlfriend. She was holding his coat sleeve at the very end with her fingertips, whispering something into his ear. I didnt catch what film theyd just seenthe marquee was blocked by a tree in full flowerbut I found myself remembering with a gust of almost painful nostalgia those three years that he and I spent, just the two of us, watching movies, talking on the porch, a magic time that a father doesnt usually get to have so late in a teenage boys life. I dont see him now as much as I used to (thats as it should be) but that was a gorgeous time. A lucky break for both of us.

When I was a teenager, I believed that there was a place where bad boys went when they dropped out of school. It was somewhere off the edge of the earth, like that graveyard for elephants, only this one was full of the delicate white bones of little boys. Im sure its why, to this day, I still have nightmares about studying for a physics exam; about flipping, with escalating worry, through page after page of my textbookvectors and parabolasbecause Ive never seen any of this stuff before!

Thirty-five years later, when my sons marks began to wobble in grade nine and toppled over entirely in grade ten, I experienced a kind of double horror, first at what was actually happening, second from this remembered sensation, still very alive in my body. I switched homes with my ex-wife (He needs to live with a man, she said). I moved into her house, she moved into my loft, which was too small to accommodate the full-time presence of a six-foot-four, heavy-footed teenager. That way, I assumed privately, I could do his homework for him, instead of her.

But it didnt help. To my nightly question Is that all your homework? my son, Jesse, responded with a cheerful Absolutely! When he went to stay with his mother for a week that summer, I found a hundred different homework assignments shoved into every conceivable hiding place in his bedroom. School, in a word, was making him a liar and a slippery customer.

We sent him to a private school; some mornings, a bewildered secretary would call us. Where is he? Later that day, my long-limbed son would materialize on the porch. Where had he been? Maybe to a rap competition in some shopping mall in the suburbs or someplace less savoury, but not school. Wed give him hell, hed apologize solemnly, be good for a few days and then it would all happen again.

He was a sweet-natured boy, very proud, who seemed incapable of doing anything he wasnt interested in, no matter how much the consequences worried him. And they worried him a great deal. His report cards were dismaying except for the comments. People liked him, all sorts of people, even the police who arrested him for spray-painting the walls of his former grade school. (Incredulous neighbours recognized him.) When the officer dropped him off at the house, he said, Id forget about a life of crime, if I were you, Jesse. You just dont have it.

Finally in the course of tutoring him in Latin one afternoon, I noticed that he had no notes, no textbook, nothing, just a wrinkled-up piece of paper with a few sentences about Roman consuls he was supposed to translate. I remember him sitting head down on the other side of the kitchen table, a boy with a white, untannable face in which you could see the arrival of even the smallest upset with the clarity of a slammed door. It was Sunday, the kind you hate when youre a teenager, the weekend all but over, homework undone, the city grey like the ocean on a sunless day. Damp leaves on the street; Monday looming from the mist.

After a few moments I said, Where are your notes, Jesse?

I left them at school.

He was a natural at languages, understood their internal logic, had an actors ear, this should have been a breeze, but watching him flip back and forth through the textbook, you could see he didnt know where anything was.

I said, I dont understand why you didnt bring your notes home. This is going to make things much harder.

He recognized a tone of impatience in my voice; it made him nervous, which, in turn, made me slightly queasy. He was scared of me. I hated that. I never knew if it was a father-and-son thing or whether I, in particular, with my short temper, my inherited impatience, was the source of his anxiety. Never mind, I said. Thisll be fun anyway. I love Latin.