Magnolia (1999)

directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Daniel Isaiah Elder

I am waiting for my father to die.

This is the fifteenth year of our estrangement. I don’t know if he is sick, or ailing. I don’t know if he stands hale. I don’t know much about him anymore. What I know has to do with me, with the wound I carry and won’t let heal. The scab I always pick at.

I know better than to expect what won’t come, or to wish for it. A deathbed reconciliation. Two hands clasped after so many years apart. And words—so many words. All the words never said, all the words never expected to be heard. All the things I want to hear, that I work every day to accept that I never will.

I’m sorry.

I twist in my sheets in the dark, wondering what it would be like to hear that. I’m always writing the scene in my head, but I can never quite set it down. The unreality of it is difficult to punch through.

So I’m over by the Blu-Rays again, fingering the plastic cases, looking for the one that tells my story better than I can, fractured across multiple narratives.

*

Earl Partridge knows he’s been a piece of shit. On death’s doorstep, he harbors no illusions. The end is nigh. He knows his current wife, Linda, married him for his money. And he knows that he was cruel to his first wife and great love Lily, abandoning her to die of cancer, and abandoning their fourteen-year-old son Jack to care for her.

Once you hear Jason Robards cry out, “The goddamn regret!” you never quite shake the echo of it.

Earl knows that time is running out. He’s losing touch with reality, but moments of clarity break through. He asks his nurse, Phil, to find his son.

As Phil says over the phone later, it’s a dying man’s wish. “This is that scene."

*

I was sixteen years old when I walked into a movie theater and saw Magnolia for the first time. I had nascent dreams of writing my own films, then, and the stories I concocted always seemed to sprawl and multiply with criss-crossing narratives that soon lost me with their frankly unnecessary complexity. I remember walking out of Magnolia feeling awed by the way all these characters’ stories not just wove together but echoed off of one another. And all of it culminating in a kaleidoscopic froggy weirdness that spoke directly to the nerdy, awkward heart of me.

All these broken lives intersecting. And in that torrential amphibian intersection, as absurd as it was, there was something to be found: meaning.

When the film came out on DVD, I snatched it up. I remember making my mom come into my room to watch it on my desktop computer, which had the only DVD player in the apartment. There was an urgency in me to show it to her. To share this piece of art. If you’d asked me why, at the time, I would have said it was just the storytelling, the music, and the way everything fell spectacularly together at the end. Not that the story resonated with any particular part of me.

But now I look back and wonder. I hover in that dark room, Aimee Mann’s rendition of “One” playing out the shitty computer speakers into an apartment devoid of a father. My sisters gone off to college. Me and my mom and our cat. Me, the only boy.

One, the loneliest number.

*

When my mom sued for divorce, my father refused to move out of our apartment. He shifted all the living room furniture—couch, coffee table, TV stand—a little farther from the windows overlooking 35th Avenue in Jackson Heights. Then he dragged his bedding and a reading lamp to the space between the couch and the window and arranged a new bedroom for himself there. He lived behind the couch for over a year, grumbling and snoring and complaining about my watching morning cartoons. Until one day I woke up and he was just gone.

My beautiful mom was sitting in her bathrobe on the sofa in the living room, which was pushed back now to its old position closer to the windows. All the months of lawyers and acrimony had taken a toll on her. She looked ragged, gray. Wreathed as always in the sickly blue curlicues of Marlboro Red smoke. I asked her where my father was.

“He abandoned us,” she said, with a bitter laugh.

He’d absconded to Australia, taking much of their money with him.

*

Aside from us, the audience watching Magnolia, no one really sees Stanley Spector. Stanley is the driving force behind the reigning champs on What Do Kids Know? and it’s through that lens that everybody views him. He’s a brilliant kid, but his genius (and its recognition) hasn’t saddled him with the blistering ego of his cutthroat father. As he’s rushed from one place to the next by his father and by the show’s handler, Cynthia, we see that the impulse pushing him forward more than any other is his boundless curiosity for the world.

Cynthia is the only person who openly notices that, albeit briefly, as they ride the elevator to the day’s quiz show taping. A flicker of recognition—then it’s back to business.

For the show and those running it, Stanley means ratings. For his teammates, he’s a set of coattails to ride. And for his father, Rick, Stanley means money. Stanley isn’t a son so much as he is an investment. And the curiosity he expresses, and the way he can harness and process that curiosity, isn’t a thing to be celebrated in itself but an asset to be exploited for gain.

No one really sees Stanley, but in the end, when frogs come pouring from the sky, Stanley is the only person who understands what’s happening.

Unperturbed, his sad eyes glisten with a curious joy as he watches them fall croaking through the rain.

*

My bedroom was a land of posters and action figures and CDs. Guitar was always spilling from the stereo, soundtracking the stories I wrote with my figurines, my epics of posable plastic, heroes and villains climbing furniture skyscrapers and traversing wormholes from one corner to the next. My mom once told me I was always able to get lost in my imagination, and that she was happy to let me spend time there. 

I tried to tell my father about my stories, tried to spin him those CDs, tried to talk to him about the passions that I found and that developed in me. But the words would hit a wall, and he would lead me to his office in the bedroom he still shared with my mother. He’d sit me on his lap to learn about the things he loved the most. On the computer screen were charts and graphs, stocks and commodities, and wasn’t it kind of like a video game, and didn’t I want to learn how to play?

He had a story worth looking up to. As a young man in the U.S.S.R. he’d gotten a job as a doctor on a merchant marine ship departing from the Baltic Sea. He jumped rope every day up on deck until one day, when they docked in the Côte d’Ivoire, he jumped ship instead, fleeing for the U.S. embassy.

Now, in what he called the land of the free, he was obsessed with money. And trading was the game he wanted me to play.

My father had a casual cruelty about him. He liked to pick up our cat by her tail, laughing as she tried to squiggle free while he swung her back and forth like a pendulum. “She likes it!” he’d insist. He was always commenting on people’s bodies on the street, whether they were fat people whose very bodily existence offended him or women he wanted to fuck. He loved telling me all about the latter.

I didn’t want to play his games.

After he disappeared, he would call from Australia and ask to speak to me. But I never took the phone. I knew we had nothing to talk about.

*

When I was twenty-five years old, I removed my father from my life. Sometimes I say it was like excising a tumor. But really, it was dropping ballast. There’s an upward arc to my life from that point, a surfacing, a movement towards flickering light.

What did it mean to that teen me, sitting in the dark with his mother ten years earlier, when Stanley Spector walked into his dad’s room at the end of Magnolia, and told him the unvarnished truth? When he said the thing that I couldn’t yet bring myself to say?

“You need to be nicer to me.”

*

“The goddamned regret!”

That’s the moment I always think I’m returning to Magnolia for, but I see pieces of myself and my father scattered throughout the film. It’s in the men of Magnolia that I most clearly see the echoes, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Claudia. The way she pours cocaine out on to her table and knows it’s a bad idea but bends her head to insufflate a pharmaceutical prayer anyway.

For years after I separated from my father, I devoured drugs, mainly psychedelics. One of my sisters was concerned for me, and when she expressed that concern I bridled with self-righteous indignation. This wasn’t a drug habit, it was a spiritual path. I wasn’t getting high, I was enlightening myself.

I was communing with God every Tuesday, and sometimes on weekends too.

“Can’t you see you’re just filling the hole he left behind with this stuff?” my sister pressed upon me.

Years later, after a cross-country move and a much more balanced relationship to pharmaceuticals, I started leafing through my journals from the time of my schism with my father and the months afterward. And I found…nothing. Not a word about my father, or my pain. It was just grandiose proclamations of meaning, dripping with fractal religiosity, as far removed from the intimacy of my inner self as could possibly be.

And I realized, then, that she’d been right. 

*

My father was never as famous as Magnolia’s quiz show host Jimmy Gator, but he was surrounded by yes men and sycophants all the same, fans clamoring for his attention. In one of our final conversations, while I laid all my hurts at his feet and asked him to look at them, he responded by telling me that all his colleagues assured him he was a great father. Not that any of them had any idea what it meant to be his son.

Jimmy Gator is dying, but he doesn’t have the clarity of Earl Partridge. He lives in denial, until it eats its way through him in the end.

*

Fathers are a presence throughout Magnolia, but we never see Quiz Kid Donnie Smith’s parents. He tells us, though, that they stole all his money.

The trauma of being used by his parents—the way Rick Spector uses his son Stanley—and then being robbed by them, has shaped Donnie into one of the saddest creatures ever seen on screen. He is bitter, he is angry, and full of self-loathing. And perhaps worst of all, his desire for other men has been poisoned by the wounds he carries.

“I really do have love to give,” he cries. “I just don’t know where to put it.”

*

I shaped myself to be anything but my father, the womanizer, the chauvinist. I hated being a man. And when I finally opened up to my desires for other men—for their lips, their cocks, their warmth—there my father was, standing between us, even though he was nowhere to be found in my life.

Any man could be my father, capable of shifting from kindness to cruelty in the blink of an eye. How could I ever feel safe enough with men to let them as far inside as I wanted them?

*

My father’s father was a Soviet military man. He was nothing but kind to me in the little that we interacted, but my father thought him a cruel man. My father cut him out of his life, just like I would do to him one day. When my grandfather was dying of cancer, he begged my father to come to his bedside. My father refused.

I think about that a lot. These echoes of estrangement.

What if he called for me?

Would I go?

*

Claudia fills the hole inside her with drugs. Donnie fills his with bitterness and resentment.  And then there’s Frank T.J. Mackey, once Jack, the son of Earl and Lily Partridge. Frank has become the apotheosis of what his own father was when he abandoned his wife and son—a womanizing scoundrel without apology. His grief is such a sickness that it has transformed him into a more monstrous version of the father who ruined his own life.

Still, he comes to Earl’s bedside.

I don’t know what to think about sixteen-year-old me watching that scene in that fatherless apartment. Frank is gripping the slack, sleeping hand of the dying father he hasn’t seen in years. So much anger is pouring out of him, but then, ripping through that anger, merging with it, wrestling with it, is something far worse, something far more painful.

“You fucking asshole,” he cries. “Don’t go away, you fucking asshole, don’t go away…”

That scene. It holds everything I’m struggling with.

*

I see myself in Magnolia, but that can’t be me. I’m not Frank T.J. Mackey, am I? I shaped myself against my father, not around him, didn’t I? If I was in the audience of a Seduce and Destroy seminar, Frank would think me pathetic, effeminate, a cuck.

And I’m not Claudia, but I’ve taken steps down that path, and I know the allure it holds.

And I can’t be Donnie—I can’t be so broken as that. I have held the hands of men. I have felt their warmth inside me, a very precious few times.

Soon I’ll turn forty. But I’m trying, every day, to be young Stanley. To look at the world with unbroken wonder. To remain curious. To know what I need, and what I deserve.

*

I’ve tried patching things up with my father in the last fifteen years. I have offered olive branches that have been viciously spurned. Now I sit three thousand miles from my father, and I wait for him to die.

“I wish he’d get it over with,” I said to my sister during a recent visit.

She frowned through all that he’s inflicted upon her and said, “That’s not very nice.”

And she’s right.

But maybe if he’s dying, he’ll call.

And then I’ll glean some new vision of myself. I’ll learn if I would stay, or I would go.

*

That’s how it is, I suppose. We go searching for things we know we’ll never hold in this world.

Sometimes, there’s a loneliness that won’t settle for anything else.

I wait for my father to die, and I pry the Magnolia disc from its plastic tray case and slip it into the machine for the tenth, the twentieth, the thirtieth time. I can’t make a neat pile of the mess between me and my father. So I watch the strands of this story instead, watch them weave into the most wondrous web. How they build and tremble and collide in a symphony that makes each character’s pain more meaningful than just the random collateral damage of coincidence.

The narrator who opens and closes Magnolia wants to assure us—and himself—that there is meaning, however cryptic and indecipherable, in the suffering we endure. That each of our travails is more than just “one of those things” that happens.

*

I keep a photo of my father on my altar. It’s black and white. He’s eight years old. Just a Soviet boy with his whole life ahead of him.

The photo is a totem. It is a reminder. A testament to possibility.

Daniel Isaiah Elder is a 2018 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Writer. He is the Navigator for Lidia Yuknavitch's Corporeal Writing. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, Catapult, Pidgeonholes, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and many more. Born and raised in Jackson Heights, Queens, he now lives and writes in Oregon with his cat, Terence.