The Film Club

I learned about The Film Club by David Gilmour while driving home from school some Monday. He was getting some award and I found the idea intriguing. Allowing your kid to quit school (something more parents should consider) and watch movies with you as their guide. The book was interesting. I read it in a day and so it could make an easy airplane read.

The brilliance of Gilmour's method is the third thing. People need a "third thing" to focus on so that they can enter into a relationship. I find this often with men and it may be why golfing is so popular. The trap is that we allow the third thing to bear the weight of a real relationship. The release however that we can find in looking through and past the third thing to each other is more than worth the potential trap. Gilmour succeeds in his attempt to reach Jesse, his son, through movies. He doesn't try to teach Jesse but rather to relate to him and he does so through a third thing near and dear to both of their hearts.

My beef with the book is that I don't really like the picture Gilmour paints of himself. My relationships with women bear little resemblance to his and if that sounds marginally critical, it is. His convoluted relationships with the myriad of women in his life may help him empathize with his son but I struggle to feel sympathetic towards his poor choices.

As well, there was nary a word about any sort of spiritual life. Neither Gilmour seems to have any interest in faith. Given the candidness about so much I don't think this is an omission of choice but rather an absence entirely of anything that could be characterized as religious in the Gilmour family. In the end I'm saddened that the elder Gilmour seems to hand on a legacy of tortured and torturing relationships with women to his son. Of course this legacy is handed on with the brilliance we might expect from a distinguished man of letters. It is not a legacy that I would like to hand on to my children however so while I will try the Film Club when they get older, our club won't happen in a spiritual vacuum.