My Father and ‘National Security’
Our last conversation was about the movie I least expected
National Security (Dennis Dugan, 2003) is an action-comedy starring Martin Lawrence and Steve Zahn. Like its predecessors 48 Hours (1982) and Rush Hour (1998), its narrative revolves around an unlikely cop partnership wherein both parties find themselves all mixed up in mayhem, violence, and requisite race jokes.
National Security earned over $50 million worldwide, was the second highest-grossing movie in America on its opening weekend (Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday), and stayed in theaters for several months. But for the year, it was the 78th most-profitable movie domestically. Moreover, compared to Big Daddy (1999) and Grown-Ups (2010), National Security serves as one of its director’s biggest misfires. The same goes for Martin Lawrence as the film stands as one of his worst-performing vehicles.
In 2015, I hadn’t seen National Security. There may have been a point at which I thought about the film. Maybe when I was a 19-year-old screenwriting student in Los Angeles, I saw a billboard for it. Or I noticed it on the marquee when I went to see something else. It’s possible I considered seeing it — I liked most of Martin Lawrence’s movies up to that point — but I didn’t.
It’s inconceivable, then, the last conversation between my father and me, of all possible topics, would be about this mostly forgotten buddy-cop movie.
I haven’t spoken to my father in two years. I haven’t seen him. I haven’t touched him. He is gone, and he is never coming back. Yes, people die every day. But not people you know, not your parents.
I had thousands of conversations with my father. At the time of his death, he was neither medically ill nor ailing from the usual effects of aging. So there was no way to know that, when he called me three days before he died, it would be the last time I would speak with him.
In real life, there are two kinds of deaths: expected, which may follow a long illness and allow those left behind a chance to say goodbye; and sudden, which happen unexpectedly and afford those remaining no opportunity to say their farewells.
Movies often blend the two: expected and sudden. A character has been shot and is bleeding out in the street, but he’s still able to muster a few words. A sidekick jumps in front of the villain’s knife, but she has time before she dies to hear her partner say, “Thank you.”
Scenes like this force the writer to think about what they might say in that kind of moment. But such scenes don’t often play out in the real world, and the hope behind them is misplaced. Few people get to create any final scene. In real life, a sudden death denies you those last few words.
Aneurysms. Heart attacks. Car accidents.
The last day I spoke with my father, he had watched National Security on Netflix, and he wanted to tell me about it. I’m a screenwriter, and the two most recent projects I had been hired to write were, what the industry calls, “urban” films — or the preferred euphemism for films with lead characters who are black.
Knowing the basics of my early professional writing assignments, National Security had sparked an idea in my father’s mind: that I could write something similar because it starred a black actor. At first I didn’t get the connection. But after figuring out what film he was talking about and hearing what he liked about it — along with his insistence I should try to write something similar — I told him I would check it out.
I hung up the phone, disheartened my father didn’t understand anything about my career and what I was trying to do with my life. The thing I pour my energy into, the thing that keeps me going through late nights, the challenge of writing words that both make sense and are important — none of that was in my father’s mind when it came to me and my desire to write movies.
My ambitions had been reduced to a particular niche that could be filled, effectively, if I would only sit down and do it. To my father, my work seemed to be laughable — or at least as laughable as National Security.
My father was born in Denver, but spent all of his childhood in Tustin, a small city in Orange County, California. His California was not Steinbeck’s pastoral lament. Instead, it was the rapidly evolving Southern California landscape of the 1950s and 1960s, which saw Disneyland plow over the orange groves and Surf City USA rise from the newly manicured coastline of Huntington Beach.
His parents, at one point, owned a chicken ranch, but they were not farmers. His youth consisted of cars, motorcycles, Little League, and a father who ate eggs and bacon for breakfast every morning.
When it came time to finish high school, my father had the opportunity to go to college. He enrolled at San Diego State University and moved to San Diego, where he would live for the rest of his life and where I would grow up.
My father was an engineering student. After graduating, he took his first of the many technically oriented jobs that would constitute his career. Although he professed to having very poor abilities in math or memorization, he found tremendous success as a manager and a project leader.
For him, there were the details, and then there was the bigger picture. During most of my childhood, I felt my father wasn’t as concerned with the details. I don’t know if this is necessarily true. Like many things that we think about our parents, that idea may have been based solely in emotion.
From an early age, I felt as though I didn’t have a lot in common with my father. I loved sports, and he didn’t. I was drawn to the arts, and he was not. Even as a boy I wanted to be a writer and work in the movies, but I never asked him what my career might look like because I thought he didn’t understand my ambitions. We didn’t talk about movies. In fact, I don’t recall my father ever taking me to a movie theater (maybe we did as part of a family outing, but I don’t recall going only with my father). Movie theaters would become a sacred place to me, but they were not something I shared with him.
About twenty months before my father died, I moved back to the United States after several years of living overseas. Now in San Diego, I saw modest success as a screenwriter. My writing partner and I had found representation, we were hired to write a script, and we had people willing to talk to us about our work.
As monumental as this success was for me, it was difficult to convey to my father. After all, since graduating college I had spent years working freelance jobs, living on friends’ couches, pursuing a Master’s degree, making films nobody was watching, and working as an assistant on studio films in London. I know my “reckless” path, though not unusual for filmmakers, couldn’t have looked great to my father. It was as insecure and unstable as his own had been calculated and assured. He must have been worried for me, confused as to what I was trying to do with my life.
My father didn’t understand my work, and that is largely because I gave up on trying to help him understand. In my mind, the only way I could show him I was “okay” was in basic terms: my name onscreen (“Written By”), in a movie he’d heard of, accompanied by a serious paycheck.
That was the only success my father would be able to grasp, I thought. He never got to see it. When he died, I wasn’t there yet.
The last day I saw my father was Easter Sunday. We had dinner. There were other people there. He and I laughed secretly at two of them, an inside joke between us. We joked with each other, too. We talked about current events. He told me what was going on with his house and what he hoped to do with it in the near future.
Since moving back to San Diego, I discovered how much I had in common with my father: a common love of exploration and a desire to take on project after project. Just prior to Easter, we rebuilt the fence in his backyard. It was a big project, the kind that he loved, and I enjoyed every minute of working on it with him. When we were finished, he was pleased.
After thirty years, I was happy in my relationship with him and looked forward to making the next few years count in terms of strengthening our bond. I was also more secure in my career and poised to bring him into it in new ways.
I left my father’s house after dinner, and he walked me out alone, as he always did. We said goodbye. Not unique among men, or sons, or fathers, he had a hard time saying “I love you.” I don’t know if, during the last moment I saw him alive, he said it. I don’t know if he did in that last phone conversation that we had. I don’t know. I wish I could remember. But I don’t.
Strangely enough, during that last Easter dinner, my father talked with me about dying. He felt good and was healthy. He had plenty of things he was still planning to do, and there was no reason he wouldn’t be able to do them. He told me that he thought he had twenty years left.
I don’t know if I believed him or if I just wanted to. But he didn’t have twenty years left. He had six days.
No relationship is one-sided. Over the years, maybe I didn’t consider my father as his own person. As I struggled to build my own career, I didn’t stop to think that he could appreciate my work without understanding it. But he had his own way of looking at movies, and his own way of looking at my success.
National Security is not what most people would call “a great movie.” It is not the kind of movie most filmmakers aspire to make. But it is a certain kind of movie and a certain kind of success necessary to advance the career of some filmmakers, especially those who work deep in the studio system.
I try not to think that my father, while watching National Security, felt it contained the kind of dialogue I write or that its clunky plotting is something I’m capable of or that a low-brow comedy is what I have oriented my life towards.
At one point Lawrence’s character, a security guard trying to be a cop, turns to Steve Zahn’s, a cop who has been forced to be a security guard, and says,
“Let me get this straight. Your partner got killed. You lost your job. You got thrown in jail. Your girlfriend walked. And now you’re a security guard making $182 a week. Know what you are, Hank? You’re a black man.”
This is the kind of heavy-handed, overtly racial dialogue that characterizes many movies. It’s a familiar line because it emulates other movies with similar lines. It’s a line an audience expects to hear, especially in a Martin Lawrence movie. It not necessarily a fault of the film; it is part of the film’s essential constitution.
That is what I wish I would have talked to my father about: why National Security works on some levels and doesn’t on others. I could have used the opportunity to explore films with him, illustrate what I love about them, and why I have always wanted to be a part of them.
I could have also explained why I may have to write a few National Securitys before I write The Godfather (although he never watched The Godfather, either). I could have seized the opportunity to start that process of helping him understand, ahead of my own arbitrary schedule for it. But I didn’t. I merely counted this as another example of my father’s not “getting” me.
Only now, after time has passed, can I see that on one afternoon, he sat down to watch a movie and as soon as it was over, the first thing he did was think of me. Good movie, bad movie, forgettable movie — it didn’t matter.
After years of wondering whether my father would watch a film in which he could see my work, he had done just that. Maybe I didn’t have anything to explain to him after all.
