Play It Again, Dad: A Reflection on Memory, Movies, and R. P. McMurphy
I still remember my first movie experience: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). The family piled into our brown Pontiac (large enough to outfit our neighborhood block, btw) and headed to the drive-in. I’m fairly sure I fell asleep in the front seat shortly after the movie started because my only recollections are bright lights and a spaceship leaving with aliens. I was only five after all.
But some of my most vivid memories revolve around watching movies with my dad. I haven’t seen a movie with him in almost twenty years — he died of a massive heart attack in 1997 — but our late nights in front of a screen were invaluable. My dad introduced me to the world of Hitchcock, Foreman, Speilberg, and Ramis, and in doing so, he taught me the power those movies can have over our emotions.
That I can recall, one of the first films I watched with my father is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). I couldn’t have been more than eight.
I was in my room playing — probably with Farah Fawcett and Donny Osmond dolls (it was the ‘70s after all) — when I heard my dad laughing. What I didn’t realize was that my dad laughed at comedies like The Blues Brothers AND at horror films. For example, the Father’s Day scene from Creepshow had him in stiches every time. For better or worse, it’s a trait I’ve inherited.
Laughing heartily, my dad called out to me from down the hallway, “Hurry, Chantel!” I ran to see what he was watching, and he told me to stand in front of the TV and wait. I did.
To my eight-year-old self, this was just an old black-and-white film in which a woman was looking for Mrs. Bates. Seemed harmless enough.
But when the skeleton of Norman Bates’s mother turned around cryptically in her rocking chair, I started to cry. I don’t think I talked to my dad for the rest of the day.
I hadn’t thought much about these parent-child-film connections until this week, when I found myself (re)watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen this film, and I’ve often thought about what draws me to it — beyond the fact that it remains one of only three films to have swept the Oscars. During this screening, it finally registered.
When Jack Nicholson’s R.P. McMurphy hands Chief (Will Sampson) the Juicy Fruit gum before shock therapy or Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) looks less than amused at McMurphy’s antics as he rejoins the group, I am instantly taken back to my parents’ den. Dad is in the recliner and I am in the orange rocker. Late at night, we share the experience together.
That’s the beauty of art. It’s not just the sense of escapism it offers, but it’s also the memories it conjures up — encouraging that pleasurable state of liminality in which one is caught, even momentarily, between the past and the present.
My dad has been gone for almost 20 years. But when I see R.P. McMurphy walk into the room, it’s almost as if my father walks alongside him. In an instant, I become that 8-year-old girl who watches movies with her dad.
I don’t want our time to end, but it will, just as I know Chief will grab the sink and throw it through the asylum window and escape through the fog. I also know that if I long to have that feeling again, I can always replay the movie. If only life was the same.
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