“Someone Made This For You”: Giving Art the Chance to Do Something to You (Whether You Like It or Not)

My older kid is 15, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when he showed up in our home office when he was supposed to be downstairs, watching Boyhood with his 12-year-old brother. I was in the office going through the 12-year-old’s stuff, as we’d just painted his bedroom and I was now putting back all the things I’d taken out. “Looking pretty good in there,” is how Eli announced himself.

I looked at him. “Is the movie over?”

“No. I went to the bathroom, and then I figured I’d come up and see how this was going.”

“You didn’t like the movie?”

“No, I’m gonna go back and rewind it. It’s no big deal.”

Here’s where I had a lot of options. I could’ve thought: Well, he’ll watch it again when he’s ready. I could’ve had him help me and enjoyed some father-son time. I could’ve let it go, in other words.

That is not what I did. Instead, I said, “Eli, what the hell? You can’t just get up and walk around during a movie. SOMEONE MADE THAT FOR YOU!”

He’d heard that from me enough before that he wasn’t especially offended. He smirked, rolled his eyes, and said, “Okay, okay,” then went back downstairs.

An hour later, I went down. The final scene was on, and both my kids were staring at it. When the credits rolled, Eli exhaled. “Wow,” he said. “That was great. I didn’t expect that to be great.” When I asked if they wanted to watch the little making-of documentary that was on the screener, his brother said, “Yes!” but Eli said, no, he didn’t want to know. “I feel like I got to know that kid, and I don’t want to puncture that.”

This is not a post about what a great, instructive dad I am. It is not a post about how good it was of Eli to follow my (yelly) advice and finish a movie I knew he would love. Most of the time my best efforts are actually counterintuitive. Want your kid talked to death right into NOT doing something? I’m the guy to call.

This was different because Eli himself gave the movie a chance. He went back down there, but instead of sitting there full of spite or irritation and looking at his phone the whole time, something clicked for him and he did allow the film a chance to do something to him.

Today, two weeks later, we talked about that stuff. I told him, I hate lecturing you about paying attention to art, but this is important. You’re 15 and you’re not who you’re gonna be yet. And even when you get to be that person, you can’t stop feeding and challenging it. You have to find new art and you have to give it a chance to do something to you, even if that thing is making you realize what kind of art you do not like. And the whole time I’m telling him this, I realize I’m talking as much to myself.

I get in ruts. I steer toward books and film and television that will make me comfortable, that will affirm my world views and will conform to the way I like to have a story told, a character presented, language spoken. And I avoid the rest, even though I’m a person who’s been to college and then graduate school, where EVERY SINGLE THING that ever blew my little mind was something out of my usual categories.

I avoided Easy Rider my whole life. It was at the Blockbuster where I worked while I was a (lousy) film student, and even with my 10 free rentals a week, I steered clear of Easy Rider. Why watch it? It was a dumb hippie movie, probably self-indulgent, and I got it from the cover: hippies, motorcycles, a lot of scenery. This year, I finally watched it, because it was available to stream on Netflix. My initial thoughts: it was a smarter-than-dumb hippie movie full of motorcycles and a loooooot of scenery. But there was something unnameable about it that stuck with me (not unlike my recent Inherent Vice experience), so when my Media In America class was coming up on 1960s week, I decided to show it to them.

The second time through Easy Rider was a completely different experience for me — partly because I was free of that “Wait, what?” feeling that accompanies much of a first viewing, but more because I realized I was watching it with a bunch of 19 and 20-year-old kids, who were exactly who that movie was made for in 1969. And I thought the first ten minutes were one of the most amazing sequences I’d ever seen on film. You have the puzzling, windy, wordless drug deal between Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda and their connection, Phil “Does His Own Coke Stunts” Spector — it’s all ambient noise — that reaches a crescendo with a jet taking off overhead, then there’s just an instant where all that ambient sound goes silent, like in a vacuum, and then the first chords of Steppenwolf’s “The Pusher” and we’re into the opening credits.

The first time I saw that opening sequence, I thought: huh, that’s actually kind of cool. The second time, I thought: Goddamn, that’s amazing. I bet they’d never seen anything like that before in 1969. Now, of course, you might see that in any third indie film, not to mention plenty of Scorsese or Scorsese-esque movies. But can you imagine sitting down as a 19-year-old and seeing that for the first time in your life? And the long passages of motorcycles and landscapes are kind of great, and certainly informed music videos (and TV and film montage sequences) ever after.

The story itself is not much of anything, but even in this second viewing I found a lot to appreciate. Late in the film, when they’re at the campfire with Jack Nicholson and he’s saying how conservatives hate your freedom because they talk all about Freedom and its prices yet are beholden to a way of life and an ideology that’s anything but free — that’s a pretty perfect scene. (Because it was a Media In America class, I pointed at the screen and said, “REMEMBER THAT THING HE JUST SAID. IT’S GOING TO COME UP AGAIN A FEW TIMES.”)

(Note: I had my students write essays responding to Easy Rider, and while most of them didn’t think much of it, some were violently irritated by it and some were surprised how much they liked it. As a creator myself, I can tell you those latter two reactions are all you really ever want.)

Here’s the thing: the first time I watched Easy Rider, I kept looking at my phone. I had the thing next to me, and when things got slow in the movie, or when it seemed to be doing yet another ridin’ montage, I checked email, Twitter, Facebook. I was doing exactly the kind of shit I’d have yelled at my kid for doing. Because why? Because I’m past all that now, and I don’t need to pay full attention? Because I’m so smart? Because Easy Rider owes it to me to be more interesting?

I’m a big book-abandoner, and I’ve always been puzzled when my wife has that compulsion to finish a book she knows she hates a hundred pages in. But I think she’s right to do so, because she always has a thoughtful opinion about it afterward, even if it’s “It was incredibly repetitive, and everyone spoke in exactly the same cadence and style.” If nothing else, that’s useful information, right? Either for a writer (which she is), or for understanding why a thing bugs you.

Someone made Easy Rider. (Actually, a lot of someones did. Here’s a list.) I’m not saying “someone made a thing” is the sole criteria for starting to watch or read something. (Someone makes erotic Hobbit fiction, too.) But if you start something, I do think you have an obligation to finish it, if only an obligation to yourself — within reason. It’s hard to justify sticking with a seven-season TV series if you know, say, Aaron Sorkin’s writing style makes your brain bleed.

But did you start that movie? That book? Stick with it, make yourself pay full attention. Ask yourself, even: What does this thing want from me? What is it trying to do? What WAS it trying to do that it’s failing so miserably at? These are all important things to understand as a consumer of the arts. Don’t just brush past that art in the museum or gallery, stop and look at it. Confront it. Let it confront you. Maybe you’ll part ways agreeing to disagree, but at least you’ll have come to some understanding, and I guarantee that’ll make you a better human in some way. Humans are crafty beings, and there can be weeks that go by — months or years, if you’re careful — where you are able to avoid acknowledging anything at all. But in the end, you’re robbing yourself.

Two weeks later, my kid is still talking about Boyhood. Now, that’s a lucky break. There was every chance in the world it may not have done anything for him. But you never know what will, so you have to stay alert. And you have to stop telling yourself that you know what will work on you. Because you don’t know. That’s why it’s art.

I’m back to talking to myself here: Dude, put your phone away, even if what’s on is your 12-year-old’s 40th viewing of the ALF episode where ALF thinks he’s an insurance salesman. Even in the most basic, late-period, coasting ALF episode, there’s at least one moment that’s funny or weird or quietly devastating. I remember Home Improvement being alternately sappy and pandering, but I’ll be you dollars to donuts there’s something in there in every show.

So I won’t stop telling my kid that same thing: “SOMEONE MADE THIS FOR YOU!” Because he needs to hear it. Because we do have some say in what kinds of people our kids become, and we don’t want our kid to become a person who thinks it’s enough to glance up at something once in a while. Art can change lives, and that has nothing to do with the moment when a person’s inspired by something to become an artist. If he wants to grow up and be a lawyer or sell insurance or measure bee-asses, I don’t care.

But if you (I) stop giving art the chance to affect you (me), you’re (I’m) opting out of a huge part of your (my) responsibility here on Earth, which is to grow and learn and experience and share. And then what if there’s no Heaven after? Well, you’d feel like a real a-hole, wouldn’t you?