"Quite At My Leisure"

On the subtleties of Jack Bauer's dad

This was written and submitted about four years ago for a Bright Wall/Dark Room issue on “favorite frames.” My essay was rejected, but it was a very nice rejection with an encouraging email from the editor. I had to read it twice to even realize. It’s been collecting dust in a desktop folder since then, maybe you might have some use for it.

A couple of years ago my friend and I took a road trip. I drove and he gave directions, roles which played to neither of our strengths and led to numerous disasters in a roughly 100-mile span. One of those disasters lay solely with him, however. I made the mistake of trusting him with my phone for directions, and in a moment of boredom and what had to have been a suicide attempt on his part, he took a quick scroll through my photos. I’m sure he expected to uncover lewdness of some kind, and frankly I would prefer he had, because what he unearthed was worse; about a quarter of my gallery was screenshots of Pride & Prejudice, remnants of an abortive dream to make my fortune as a One Perfect Shot knockoff. Needless to say, I have come to this moment prepared.

Pride & Prejudice is my favorite film, and while I feel that in a hundred years history will vindicate me, that is also the approximate distance I will need to feel comfortable admitting it. (Hopefully this issue will be sealed in a concrete time capsule.) I hesitate to do so both out of the fear of the miniseries fanatics, who I’m sure are loading their muskets to kill me in 40 minutes, and because this movie has been rather unfairly pigeonholed as a feminine. I try to keep in touch with my feminine side, but internalized lessons have often made it a long-distance relationship.

I have learned over my years traveling in film bro circles that it is far less complicated to fake admiration of Le Samourai then to unpack your admiration of an Austen flick. You go online in a vain attempt to join some sort of brotherhood of stranded Joe Wright stans (Wright brothers?) only to find all the Letterboxd reviews are from the same female viewers, posted at monthly intervals.

Perhaps most representative of this was all the way back in my freshman year of college, when my dad called my twin sister in frustration. He said he and our stepmom wanted to watch P&P, and they were frustrated she saw fit to pilfer away the only copy of it with her to school. I of course was the culprit, but gender had rendered me a purloined letter. I slipped it back into the cabinet during Thanksgiving break, and some shameful gaslighting has kept me innocent until this moment.

But in some ways the painful realities of such love can only enhance it, and so we come to the still. I have always identified with Mr. Bennet, the lonely patriarch of the Bennet clan. I see my solitary affection for his movie mirrored in his own affection for his family. We are both men in this strange little world, befuddled but also amused at finding ourselves so far behind enemy lines. Roger Ebert, in perhaps my favorite piece of his criticism, describes Elizabeth’s father as someone who considers being surrounded by women “both a blessing and a fate.”

Mr. Bennet, as played by Donald Sutherland, leans away from the near nihilistic separation of his literary counterpart, and reinterprets it as a sort of wry detachment, like a veteran sailor who can’t predict the waves but knows how to weather them. But even the scaliest of wag can be blindsided by a storm.

The still is from near the end of the film, when Elizabeth tells her father that not only will she marry Mr. Darcy, but that she in fact loves him. Parents don’t have favorites so much as allies, and Lizzie was perhaps his only comrade in this little nunnery. But I always suspected that Mr. Bennet regretted this conspiratorial relationship, that in pitting themselves against the world, he was setting her up for unhappiness when the world didn’t flinch. She had already lost one profitable engagement with his blessing, and perhaps that was her only chance at another man in her life. I remember back when we were little, that same unfortunate twin sister told our dad that he didn’t have to worry, she would never leave him. He kissed her on the forehead and told her he would be happier if she did.

I love this frame for so many reasons. I love the layers of brown, I love how Sutherland, embarrassed by his teeth, hides his smile behind his hand. I love how Wright goes so still and intimate when we know how athletic his inclinations are. But what I love most of all is how it captures the paradoxical nature of love itself in one image.

The language of love has grown more transactional over recent years. What used to be the gifts of friendship is now measured in emotional labor. Sex has become a line of troughs at buffets of varying quality. But when I see this image, I’m reminded that love isn’t marrow we crack open and suck from one another. Mr. Bennet is heartbroken that his daughter is finally leaving him. But we also see how ecstatic he is that she has earned a different breed of love, and that she may someday even create the love and pain he’s feeling at that very moment.

At the risk of having him write my essay for me, I quote Roger Ebert again. “Anyone who will sacrifice their own happiness for higher considerations deserves to be happy. When they realize that about each other their hearts leap, and, reader, so did mine.” Just as I share Mr. Bennet’s predicament and temperament, I break down at the precise moment he does.

I can’t help but see that love paralleled in my own father, who gently told that unfortunate twin sister to leave him behind, who refused to do the math on who else could have taken the DVD, who cursed me with that same inconvenient devotion to Joe Wright’s debut. (I know it wasn’t my stepmom who wanted to watch it.) Good fathers such as them deserve to be happy, and I think all our hearts leap when they realize that.