A couple years ago, my wife’s cousin, Chris Cresswell, had a gig with his ska/punk band, The Flatliners, down at the El Mocambo. Family members went to hear the band: my wife and I, Chris’s mom and dad, his aunt and her partner, his brother and brother’s friends, and his grandmother. The Flatliners were headlining the show so we had to wait until almost midnight before they came onstage. When Chris stepped to the mike, he mentioned that some of his family had come down, including his grandmother. “So I have to be careful not to say fuck and shit so much.” Among other things, his grandmother is a past president of the Toronto chapter of the Royal Canadian College of Organists, so I expect there were other things more challenging to her ears than a few stray expletives from her grandson’s mouth.
The Flatliners have played a lot of clubs throughout the city. They’ve toured across the country. They’ve played a lot of U.S. College venues. They’ve even toured the U.K. and continental Europe. So why, in particular, would we have to see them at the Elmo? Probably for the same reason everybody talks about the Elmo. People can’t help themselves. I know I couldn’t. After I paid the cover charge, it slipped out of my mouth. I turned to my wife and said: “The Stones played here, you know.” More than thirty years later, people still talk about it. In 1977, The Rolling Stones billed themselves as The Cockroaches and used the Elmo to record Love You Live. Jim Belushi MC’d the show. In the week before those performances, Keith Richards was arrested at Toronto’s Westin Harbour Castle and charged with possession of heroin for the purposes of trafficking. At the same time, Ron Wood had “something special” going on with Margaret Trudeau who partied with the band after its performances at the Elmo. It’s part of the city’s lore. And somehow, if bands play the Elmo, then through a weird inexplicable magic, some of that badness rubs off on them. It’s like a rite of passage for Toronto bands. Nearly twenty years ago, we heard the Barenaked Ladies there, and look at how the badness worked its magic for Stephen Page.
In The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son, David Gilmour can’t help himself either. In the last scene of the book, his son, Jesse, who has been trying to get a rap act off the ground, finally invites his father to see the act. David has been dying to see his son, prodding him for an invite, even trying to sneak into a gig, but it isn’t until Jesse plays the El Mocambo that he feels comfortable letting his father watch:
A few nights later, the unthinkable happened. Jesse invited me to watch him perform. He was playing at that club around the corner where the Rolling Stones had once played, where the ex-wife of our prime minister had gone home with one of the guitar players, I believe. The place Jesse had kicked me out of a year earlier. It was, in a word, chock full of history.
I was told to arrive a few minutes before one in the morning at the front door and to behave myself, by which he meant no awkward demonstrations of affection, nothing that might diminish his aura of danger and heterosexual, hard-bitten “street cred.”
It’s difficult to decide what The Film Club is. It purports to be literary non-fiction and was nominated for the 2008 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Gilmour himself identifies the book as “true” and notes, in an afterword, the challenges of writing honestly about people you are in a relationship with—presumably because, if you write too honestly, you may jeopardize the relationship. Nevertheless, because the book is written as a narrative, it has the feel of a novel. It blends two perspectives we’ve encountered before in Gilmour’s writing. There’s the son’s perspective—the disaffected youth—which is reminiscent of sixteen-year old Simon Albright from Lost Between Houses. And there’s the father’s perspective—the jaded, mildly alcoholic, malaise of mid-life which he introduced in Back On Tuesday and brought to accomplished fruition in A Perfect Night To Go To China.
The premise is delightfully simple and provides the hook for the narrative. David Gilmour was film critic for The Journal, then hosted Gilmour on the Arts for CBC Newsworld until 1997. The Film Club opens with Gilmour losing his job at CBC and wondering what to do with himself. At the same time, his teen-aged son, Jesse, is failing at school. Gilmour and his ex-wife, Jesse’s mother, are at a loss how to deal with the situation, so, acting somewhat impulsively, Gilmour strikes a deal with Jesse. The boy can quit school as long as he agrees to join his father three times a week to view a film of his father’s choosing.
Like all his previous books, The Film Club concerns itself primarily with male sexuality and what it means to be a man, and like all his previous books, there’s a healthy dose of cigarettes, alcohol, drugs and fumbled humbling encounters with women, but this time things seem gentler — wise even. I’m not sure why I get the sense of a moderating wisdom, though I have a theory. Strung throughout the narrative are succinct comments about dozens and dozens of films they watch together. Many of these get selected as a subtle way to handle Jesse’s emotional responses as he lives through loves and loss and tries to make sense of the unfathomable weirdness that is women. It’s as if there’s a whole council of seasoned teachers present in the background to help guide Jesse through this difficult time: Marlon Brando, James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmie Stewart, Carey Grant, Al Pacino, Richard Gere, Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Alfred Hitchcock, Warren Beatty, Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Christopher Walken, the whole pantheon.
And Gilmour supplements these with snippets he remembers from interviews with actors and filmmakers. Harvey Keitel is a stand-up guy, but not very bright. David Cronenberg’s favourite guilty pleasure is watching Christian television. Ziggy Marley is “a sullen little prick if ever there was one.”
Along the way, Jesse does some foolish things—calls girls back when he should leave well enough alone, uses alcohol as a crutch, gets suckered by hustlers in Cuba, experiments with cocaine, lands in the hospital after an overdose. But then we have the final scene—the gig at the El Mocambo. It signals that Jesse is going to make it. Despite all the missteps, everything is going to be all right.
The Film Club is a pleasurable read; the prose goes down smooth like a good scotch. And if you’re a film buff, so much the better.