Nemo, Godfather, Holland, Thomas, and me.

Nemo, Godfather, Holland, Thomas, and me. June 15, 2008

I’ve been thinking about doing a weekly series of favorite movie images, and for some time now I have wanted to start with the image above from Finding Nemo (2003) — and since today is Father’s Day, this seemed like as good a time as any.

I love the image above for a number of reasons. First, the luminous translucence of Pixar’s simulated underwater photography. Second, the obvious pro-life resonance. (I’m not saying that that’s how the filmmakers intended it, but it’s there just the same.) Third, the way this image ties into one of my favorite subjects, i.e. the nature and purpose of memory; to quote the relevant paragraph from that three-part lecture of mine on ‘Memory at the Movies’ that I sometimes talk about:

Of course, it isn’t too long after this that Marlin and Dori discover that Nemo is still alive after all, and there is an interesting scene where Nemo, who has just helped rescue a lot of fish, sinks to the ocean floor, exhausted, and Marlin scoops him up in his fin and says, “It’s okay, Daddy’s got you.” And as he says this, there is a brief flashback to the very beginning of the film, when Nemo was just an embryo and Marlin held him in his fin, shortly after the predator attack took away Nemo’s mother and all of Nemo’s brothers and sisters. The flashback is, of course, a memory. But it is not Nemo’s memory, it is Marlin’s. Does Nemo remember being an embryo? Does he remember the attack that scarred him for life? Of course not. But is the Nemo in that fish egg the same Nemo that we see throughout the rest of this film? Yes, of course. And it is through his father’s memory of him that the embryonic Nemo and the child Nemo have their unity. The story of Nemo is a much bigger story than Nemo himself can tell — it is a story that is built not just on Nemo’s memories, but the memories of others, too.

And finally, I like the image above because I am a father myself now, and scenes like this speak very powerfully to my protective instincts, and my sense of the frailty of life, especially in its early stages.

This is my third Father’s Day as a father, and while I love all three of my children and feel a special bond with each of them on various levels, I have a particular set of memories regarding the birth of Thomas.

I have often said that his birth, half an hour after his sister’s, was somewhat anti-climactic; the shock of Elizabeth’s first cries in the delivery room, and the sudden sense that my world really had changed irrevocably and I was nowhere near as prepared for the change as I thought I was, were so strong, that adding Thomas’s cries to the mix half an hour later didn’t really change much.

And yet. From that day to this, Thomas has always been much more easy to disturb, much more prone to crying. And he, like his sister, was born six or seven weeks premature, and spent the first month of his life in a special-care ward. And on the day that he was born, I spent several hours pumped on adrenaline and too distracted to even grab a bite to eat — so that by the end of the day, I was chemically unbalanced, and an emotional mess myself.

And I remember paying a visit to the special-care ward late in the day, and watching the nurses bathe Thomas, and watching Thomas cry and cry and cry — and it was almost too much for me to handle. I had spent months worrying that Thomas and Elizabeth might not make it out of the womb alive — my wife had been on strict bed rest from Halloween to Groundhog Day — but now, suddenly, I was hearing his cries with my own two ears, and I wanted to apologize for bringing him into this world of pain. Standing off to the side, while the nurses did their thing, I felt quite helpless.

So of course, I found myself thinking of a scene from another movie, namely The Godfather Part II (1974; my comments):

I have written here before about how having children of my own has made me more sensitive to the depiction of death and murder in film. To quote what I wrote two years ago:

Last night I finally got around to seeing The Departed . . . and I was struck by how some of the sudden deaths — especially when they happened in rapid succession — made me think about how these people had once been babies like my own, and how lots of love and care, or at least work, had gone into raising them and making them who they were. I was more acutely aware than usual of what a waste death is.

I have not seen The Godfather Part II in its entirety since my kids were born, but I imagine my sensitivity to such issues would be particularly high here, since this film, having shown us the infant Fredo and the clear love and concern that his father has for him, will go on to show the adult Fredo being killed many years later — by order of his brother. Really, just watching the scene from which these images were taken, just now, was involving on a level that I don’t think it ever has been before.

Anyway. When I did hold Thomas myself, I felt an urge to comfort him, to soothe him, and so I began to sing John Lennon’s ‘Beautiful Boy’ to him — and I was somewhat conscious of, and even a little embarrased by, the fact that I may have been inspired in this minor regard by Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995). I don’t own the film, and I have not seen it at all since its initial theatrical release, so I don’t have any images from that film here, but here is a picture of me holding Thomas when he was less than one day old:

Oh, wait, a copy of that scene from the film is up at YouTube; the ‘Beautiful Boy’ segment begins about two minutes in:


Click here if the video file above doesn’t play properly.

Anyway. I have no idea if Thomas would want me to sing him this song when he’s 15, or whatever age Cole is in the clip above. But I have a very, very strong suspicion that I will keep thinking the song, and wanting to sing it. And in my mind, I’ll be singing it underwater, in a sepia-toned tenement from the early 20th century.

Finally, to complement the picture of Thomas above, here is a much more recent picture of him, taken a few weeks ago during a father-son trip to the zoo:


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