My father, whom I admire as much as I admire and appreciate my own son, never was a lascivious man given to comments or behavior of an inappropriate sexual nature. It's times like this Anthony Weiner saga when you re-up your admiration for the dad you have rather than some of the more reckless alternatives.
But there was this time we were watching "Psycho" on television sometime in the 1970s. (For you younger folks: Television, along with electricity and disco, had just been invented.) Probably sensing I was getting a little freaked out by the intensity of Alfred Hitchcock's shower murder sequence, my father said, offhandedly: "You know, I've always liked Janet Leigh."
Odd time to mention it, but there it was. I'd grown quiet, and he was trying to take my mind off the stabbing, just as years earlier "Mysterious Island" was on TV and during the monster-crab attack, at a point at which I wanted to exit the room and return when effects wizard Ray Harryhausen's crab was done, he asked me: "How do you suppose they did that?" And I may have started thinking about how they did it. And here we are.
So I have both my father (very much alive and well and with my mother in Albuquerque, N.M., thanks) and "Psycho" and "Mysterious Island" composer Bernard Herrmann to thank for a few things.
In the movies and literature I'm drawn to troubling fathers largely because my own was, and is, not troubling, not a bully, not given to holding a household hostage with his mood swings. One of the reasons Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" will age well, I suspect, has to do with its portrait of the central character, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. If that oil man's relationship with his adoptive son began on a note of icy contempt, the film would have no emotional worth. But because that father/son dynamic starts in one place (brought on by tragedy, and the oil man's steely disregard for his workers' safety), it has somewhere to go.
We can all name Father's Day-appropriate movies that make millions weep in snuffling unison. You need only type the phrases "Field of Dreams" and "you wanna have a catch?" and it's too late, the crying game is on. There's a reason Gregory Peck in "To Kill a Mockingbird" looms so large in the collective minds of so many moviegoers, who'd already fallen in love with the character thanks to novelist Harper Lee. Atticus Finch represents so many stalwart, sensitive, forward-thinking paternal virtues: grace under pressure, moral courage, seriousness from which a child can learn.
To my own father, I'd like to say: Thanks for all the viewing time together over the years, from "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" to "M.A.S.H." to "Young Frankenstein" and beyond.
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