Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965)

or, on my father

When I started this movie I imagined writing this whole thing about how this is my dad's "favorite movie," where by "favorite movie," I mean that it's the only movie I have ever heard him bring up on his own, in an excited way, in fact, it's the only work of art I have ever heard him be aware of as art, instead of a product its creator was trying to sell on the market, and when I was about an hour in, I felt paradoxically closer to my dad than ever before, despite being far away from him in the moment, realizing that what must have lit a fire under that twelve-year-old's creaky-ass wooden seat inside the Conrad, Montana Orpheum in 1965 was a sense of History, the scale of witnessing real actors, sometimes hundreds, in the streets of Moscow, being chased by Tsarist dragoons, a shocking and primal scream from seasons past from a part of the world so wholly removed from the vagaries of the planting season that structured the farming economy of the family farm, giving rise to an early awareness that the world he lived in once had great heroes and adventures, events which began decades earlier and led to the nuclear silos that surrounded the town of 2,000 he drove past on the way to school every day, asking his librarian for a book on Russian history, which he would read on the bus ride home, driving past those snow-clad fields just like the ones Omar Sharif stared at after breaking the glass in the window of his hideout, all of which, perhaps, lodged in his brain a memory that all his eventual years of Banking and Businessing were never enough to fully erase, a memory of that moment he first realized that the lives of human beings living tens of thousands of miles away could be so vastly different than his own, set in a country that, at first glance, felt to him like the virgin fields of the American West, full of possibility, which he had heretofore taken for the extent of his his world and the life he had lived, until that single day which lingered still, inside the mind of a 70 year old man, with an ever-accumulating set of years propelling him forward into an unknown Ahead, telling this story again and again to his son, first as a child, and again as a 38 year old man as if for the first time, him seeing in that first hour a different movie than the one his father experienced, a tragic story about revolutionary hopes by heroes living a life of adventure, when the world felt open for the taking and so far away from nuclear silos in Montana or dashed hopes for a life he thought would be in the waiting, but now just a moment both of them share before a future the weight of which feels crushing, whether it be measured in the time that is still left, or in the decades of despair and suffering looming in the wings on a heating planet facing crises few alive seem to have any plan to solve, short of the solutions that open this film, but which ultimately led to just a movie, projected on a screen, suggesting to two men that the world could be different than the way it is. But then the second half of the movie basically ran out of gas and I decided to do this instead.