Boy Movies #3

The dead dad issue, feat. The Princess Bride

Oh goodness, would you look at this? You thought you subscribed to a lighthearted newsletter about movies and now you’re stuck reading about my dead dad.

I spent most of October 15th battling a cold as I trudged through the overheated streets of New Orleans, and I spent the last few hours of October 15th on a plane back to New York¹. My cold (not COVID) reared its head on day two of my trip and quickly spread to the other members of my three-person group, leaving us bone-tired and delirious by Saturday night. We planned this trip giddily and clumsily, deciding to go on a whim during the miserable dregs of July. We kept saying things like, “Why not? Fuck it! Why not?” The significance of the dates, or of one particular date, our last day, didn’t occur to me until later, though it rarely does.

I’ve forgotten the importance of that day — the anniversary of my dad’s death — more often than I haven’t in the twelve years since it became that day. In 2019, I made not forgetting such a priority that it briefly took over my life, made me careless and irritable and spacey. I remember getting on the wrong train three separate times in one afternoon and not noticing until several stops had passed. I can never predict what kind of place I’ll be in come October 15th; this year, it kept hitting me at random intervals and for no identifiable reason. My dad is dead, my brain would supply while I listened to my friends chatter over breakfast. When I get home, I have to write about him for the stupid newsletter, I thought as I popped another Mucinex.

I don’t know why it felt necessary to do this, by the way. The timing is my best guess. October is a minefield; sometimes I remember my dad’s death day, which leads to general weirdness, and sometimes I forget until it’s too late, which leads to overwhelming guilt. Either way, I always end up thinking about being fifteen and everything changing against my will and getting mad about things I still haven’t begun to process or understand, even with all this distance. Maybe, I thought, writing about him would grant me some clarity. Maybe I could write about his favorite movie and something fundamental — again, I don’t know what — would change. It seemed like a no-brainer.

The problem, I immediately realized, was that I had no idea what movies the man even liked. Can you literally believe that? I’ve always said that I inherited my appreciation for movies and TV from my parents, which in theory feels right, but I can’t think of anything specific that my dad passed along to me. I called my mom about it, expecting her to have a response right away, for us to have a long conversation about the films that mattered most to him, for me to walk away feeling new, feeling better.

Instead, she hesitated. After a beat, she finally came back with, “I remember him saying a few times that The Princess Bride was his favorite movie.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, deflating. “I didn’t know that. Cool.”

“Yeah,” she said. “He liked a lot of movies, but I’m pretty sure that one was his favorite.”

Well, who says that life is fair?

The night before that conversation, I’d spoken to some friends about whether any romantic comedies qualify as boy movies. (These are the things people talk to me about now — an honor.) Ruby Sparks was named, as was (500) Days of Summer. I mentioned The Princess Bride, which has always stuck out to me as the rare rom-com that boys are allowed to love.

Even so, I was disappointed not just by the predictability of my dad apparently loving such a quintessential boy movie, but also by my mom’s uncertainty. It felt achingly sad to me, realizing that this detail had been lost to time and there was no way of getting it back. What if, when I die, no one remembers how much I loved the gay Facebook biopic? It felt unimaginable, and it reminded me of a pervasive insecurity I’ve been grappling with for over a decade.

My dad died in 2010. I was fifteen, awkward, and cripplingly shy. My main interests were searching LiveJournal for Broadway bootlegs and staying up late to play The Sims. I was not a person yet, and no one told me that my days with my dad were numbered. I didn’t make the most of the time we had left while we had it because I didn’t know time was running out. My dad wasn’t a stranger to me but I wouldn’t say I knew him well. I loved him in the way you love your parents when you’re a kid: blindly and wholly.

So how do you grieve someone you didn’t really know? You rely on others to piece together who they were. You rely on assumptions and wishful thinking. You stay locked in a constant, exhausting search for validation. I can laugh at and cry at and hold close to my heart the stories people tell me about my dad while understanding that they’re not mine. I can say things like “my dad was the best” while knowing there’s a layer of honesty in every joke I make about being relieved he died before we got the chance to fight about politics. I can build a version of the person I imagine him to have been (he was a good cook, he was funny, he was loud) while knowing it might only be half right. I can open up Disney+ and hit play on The Princess Bride because my mom sounded like, 75% positive when she told me it was his favorite movie while recognizing it as another desperate bid for meaning.

I think many of us have movies we pretend to have seen in order to avoid incredulous responses from a specific type of person. You don’t have to admit it, but in the interest of transparency I’ll reveal that The Princess Bride has always been one of mine. Some of you reading this might even be remembering times I’ve spoken to you about The Princess Bride and thinking, “Wait, she was lying?” Yes, I was. I am the Meryl Streep of trivial fibs. It’s easy and sometimes necessary to lie about having watched things, especially boy movies. Boys get so upset when you tell them you haven’t seen their favorite boy movies, and it’s just not worth all the frustration. You might hurt your neck nodding along to all those emphatically delivered plot descriptions.

But The Princess Bride is not a film without its pleasures. If you’re also new to it, here’s the gist: Peter Falk’s (slay) grandson is sick in bed (me vibes), so to keep him company he regales him with the fantastical tale of a straight blonde couple (absolutely twisted concept) who fall in love, get separated by circumstance, and go through all kinds of trials and tribulations in their quest to reunite.

The Princess Bride is a sharp, frequently very funny movie. The fact that its screenplay has been quoted within an inch of its life couldn’t take away from the inherent comedy in lines like “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.” I was tickled by its meta commentary on boy enjoyment, like when baby Fred Savage asks if he’s being subjected to “a kissing book.” It’s cute how it makes the romance digestible to men by padding it with adventures and fighting. The cast is sensational. If we’re talking ‘80s rom-coms directed by Rob Reiner, I’ll always choose When Harry Met Sally, but I’m happy to finally know what all the fuss is about with this one.

What I didn’t realize was that The Princess Bride is a movie about death. It’s a movie about loss, and revenge as a response to loss, and catharsis driven by revenge. It’s a movie about a bunch of people who never arrive at the acceptance stage of grief.

Take Mandy Patinkin’s Inigo Montoya, who won’t rest until he kills the man who murdered his father, or Robin Wright’s Buttercup, who verges on suicide when faced with the possibility of life without her blonde hunk. Even when that blonde hunk, Cary Elwes’ Westley, dies, it’s not permanent: He’s brought back to life moments later when a kooky healer played by Billy Crystal learns that reviving him means his own sworn enemy will suffer. The Princess Bride purports that grief is something to be conquered rather than something you must learn to live with.

It’s a tempting thought, but my experience with grief has nothing to do with revenge. There has never been anyone to blame, no way of exacting retribution. My dad was sick and then he died and I was left adrift and that’s it, the end. There’s no bringing him back, and so every day is an exercise in searching for him wherever I can — in my mom, in every New Yawk accent that reminds me of his, in movies like The Princess Bride, which he might have loved, but, really, who can be sure?

Also, like, not to be rude, but whose dad’s favorite movie isn’t The Princess Bride? It’s how someone on TikTok got Patinkin’s attention, by asking whether a rumor about Patinkin’s reasoning for doing the film — to get a version of revenge for his own father who died of cancer — was real. In his response, Patinkin tearfully confirms, “If I get the six-fingered guy, that means I kill the cancer that killed my dad.”

It’s easy to imbue arbitrary things with power after someone dies, but you can’t dwell on it without the logic falling apart. Was this movie actually important to my dad? What about the bandana that I keep stashed in my closet, or the glued-together Superman Christmas tree ornament hanging from a hook in my bedroom? Would Mandy Patinkin’s dad have felt honored by his son sword fighting Christopher Guest? There’s no way to be certain, which is what I find to be the hardest part of mourning. I struggle with whether any of it matters, whether it’s enough to create significance for myself, regardless of all that’s unknowable.

Life is unfair, as Falk’s grandfather informs his grandson. Inigo understands that, which is why he brings Westley back from death. Life is unfair, but it means something that Westley is willing to die for love, and it means something that Westley can help Inigo’s vengeance mission. Inigo does end up killing the six-fingered man, but it doesn’t solve everything. “I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it's over, I don't know what to do with the rest of my life,” he muses afterward. He’s as unmoored as any grieving person.

Pain born from loss is acute and all-consuming and unlike anything else. It makes you weary in your mind and body. It’s senseless, having someone taken from you. At the end of The Princess Bride, Inigo is still searching for meaning, because grief never ends. I know that much. You learn to live with it for lack of any better option, and eventually the rawness fades, but it doesn’t go away. Life is unfair and life moves on and we have to move with it. All you can do is anything that makes you feel connected, however fleeting that connection is.

October 15th came and went the way it always does: without fanfare. By the time you read this, it will be in the past. My dad died twelve years ago and with every anniversary I find that I remember less about him. There’s a performative nature in public grieving that has always disgusted me, but I don’t know how else I’m supposed to do it. If I don’t tell you about my dad, it’ll be like he never existed. If I don’t tell you about my dad, I’ll forget him faster.

So I watch The Princess Bride and I write about it for this goofy newsletter. I laugh imagining what it would have been like to explain Substack to my dad. I remember another viral TikTok in which Patinkin gets choked up describing the bittersweetness of filming The Princess Bride, saying, “When you’d hear [Reiner] say ‘cut, print,’ my heart would drop because it would mean — that was it? No more?” I think about the end of that video, when the voice of Patinkin’s son, who was only six months old during production, cuts in to cheekily tell his father, “I remember it all.” And I think about how I don’t remember it all, but I remember what I can and call it “all” to keep myself going. And, yeah, I do keep going. I do.

Girl talk

• Friend of the newsletter Claire on Bodies, Bodies, Bodies (girl movie) is so good.

• Emthreegan is allowed to murder!!!!!!

• Imperioli :’)

1. AND WATCHING ELVIS FOR THE FIFTH TIME!!! During the scene in which Elvis drunkenly tries to fire Tom Hanks on stage in Vegas, there was so much air pressure weighing on my sinuses that I seriously considered spending $10 to purchase Delta’s in-flight wifi just to Google if your brain and/or eardrums could explode from it. That said, if I must ever unceremoniously pass away, I would like to be watching Elvis (girl movie) when I do.