Meaning is highly subjective, isn’t it?
I don’t mean “definition”. We’re talking connotation, not denotation. But, as every author knows–and some can’t accept–once your work is out there, it’s not really yours anymore. You meant it to have a certain effect on the audience, but what they actually take away from it is beyond your control.
That’s at the heart of today’s topic. Day 23 asks us for “a film that means a lot to you personally.” And I love it, because that topic is wide open! It could be anything to anyone. If, for example, you were to ask my sister this question, she’d likely give you a Rob Zombie movie, and expound at length about why it means something to her. (Full disclosure: she’s done this challenge already, but I can’t remember what she put down for this topic.) And she’d mean it! Meanwhile, I could never do that. It wouldn’t be me, and it wouldn’t be my experience. My wife, on the other hand, might tell you it’s Spaceballs, because it was a longtime family favorite when she was a child, or Hook, because it’s meant a lot to her over the years, or maybe Big Fish, because it was the first movie she and I watched together. (More on that one in a few days!) My brother would likely list A Nightmare on Elm Street, and he’d be passionate about his reasons. My mother would give you one of several Stephen King films, owing to her nearly lifelong love of his work. You probably wouldn’t have picked any of those, would you? Your answer would be uniquely you.
And so is mine. I’m going to go with 1994’s Star Trek Generations, the film that bridged The Original Series and The Next Generation. I can hear some of you recoiling–there’s a fan theory that all the odd-numbered Trek films are garbage, and this one is number seven if we take the entire collection, number one if it’s only The Next Generation. But bear with me! Because meaning is subjective. And this one does, indeed, mean a lot to me.
I’ve told this story before, but I appear to have only told it on Facebook. (I certainly can’t find it in this site’s post history.) I may even make it to the end this time. Anyway:
Back in 1994, I was fifteen years old. That sounds like a good place to start. My father was thirty-nine that year (had he lived, he would be sixty-five tomorrow). Makes sense so far, right? The part that didn’t make sense, to me or my mom or especially to him, was what was wrong with him at the time. You see, my childhood was normal enough, and so was he–but around 1990, he developed some psychiatric problems. It started out with anxiety, then progressed to depression. He developed severe panic attacks that centered around closed spaces, and guess what closed space we used literally every day? That’s right–cars. Soon enough he lost his ability to go anywhere in a car. For years, he walked everywhere. He briefly got a motorcycle before an accident took that away. Finally, many years later, he was able to get the right combination of medications to restore most of his abilities.
But in 1994, that was all in the future. Mental health care wasn’t exactly a prehistoric wasteland, but it wasn’t as advanced as today, and the medication options were more limited. I’m trying to say that life became a struggle for a very long time. My brother and sister, both younger than me, had the fortune and the misfortune to have only cloudy memories–if any at all; my sister was born in 1990–of what he was like beforehand. Fortune because they don’t know what they missed; misfortune for the same reason. I do, though.
No matter how sick he got, he still loved us. He still wanted to connect with us. We were kids; we didn’t always make it easy. Sometimes, though, it worked out. This was one of those times.
I’ve mentioned before that my parents introduced me to science fiction, and to Star Trek in particular. Dad loved the show–both of the then-extant versions of it. (Okay, okay, Deep Space Nine was current too, but it had just started the previous year.) And this, we all thought, was going to be a historic year for Star Trek, because, after years of TOS movies, the films were making the leap to The Next Generation! But I didn’t expect to see the movie in the theater; I was a broke teenager, and rarely ever saw movies that way.
Back then radio stations used to throw what they called premiere parties. (Is this still a thing, here in the world of midnight releases?) In partnership with the theaters and the film studios, they’d schedule a premiere showing of a new movie the night before it officially launched–late enough that in the pre-internet world, spoilers wouldn’t ruin it for everyone, but just ahead of the crowd. They’d give away tickets in various contests…and I somehow won a set. (Actually I think now that someone else won them and gave them to me, but the effect was the same.) Two tickets! To the biggest movie event of the (nerdy) year!
Before I get comments mocking me for not making it a date, I’ll say that I did have a girlfriend, and she was also into Star Trek (you’re welcome, Ruth, wherever you are), her family was very strictly conservative, and she would never have gone to a theater. That left exactly one choice of who I would want to go with me to this thing–Dad.
To my utter surprise, he agreed to go.
Remember, Dad never went anywhere. He struggled with open spaces and enclosed spaces, and crowds, and pressure, and this situation would have all of that. He knew that, and he agreed to go anyway.
And he kept his promise. My mom dropped me off at the theater; he left the house early and walked the three miles or so to get there at the same time. She hung out in the car throughout, just to make sure nothing went wrong. And we watched as the Enterprise-B took its first voyage…and the Enterprise-D took its last. We watched as Captain Kirk saved the universe for the last time, and as he died in the bottom of a canyon on Veridian III.
Somewhere around that time, Dad had reached his limit. The pressure got to him, and he had to leave. I finished the movie by myself in the crowd, watching with my jaw hanging open as the Enterprise met its fate halfway around the planet from Kirk and Picard, and as the credits rolled.
But I wasn’t really alone. People say “he was there in spirit”, and they’re trying to be nice–but there are times you feel it’s true. I haven’t had that experience often, but I had it that night. We got to connect over something we had both loved for most of our lives, and I will never forget it.
Dad never went to another movie theater. He got his mobility back, and in later years he even became a bit of a traveler, visiting me after I moved out of state, taking my mom and sister and niece to visit attractions in other states. But some things were always beyond him, and this was one of them. Much later, the day before Halloween (his favorite holiday) in 2017, he passed away at the young age of sixty-two from congestive heart failure. We all still miss him.
But I have this. And maybe it is a lousy movie as Star Trek films go (I don’t think so, but many people do). None of that matters, because the meaning of the film is so much more for me. It was something I treasure with someone I can’t get back.
Do you want a lesson from this? Here it is: What’s yours is yours–and I’m not talking about your clothes and your house and your car. I’m talking about your memories, and especially those that intersect with the people you love. They’re yours forever, barring accident or Alzheimer’s or some other dementia. Hold on to them, because they mean something to you that no one else will ever have.
I miss you, Dad. I’d love to be talking this dumb old movie over with you now. I won’t forget the last time we did.
Timewalkerauthor 