I’m not much of a movie guy.
Ask my wife and she’ll say trying to watch any movie with me is near impossible because within a short time, no matter how interesting or exciting the film is, my head’s drooped over like a thirsty plant and I’m sending Z’s skyward.
Take the movie Dune. Mel’s been trying to get me to watch it for months now. I finally relented and we watched it Saturday night.
I loved it for two reasons—first, it’s a fun watch. Lots of action and sci-fi drama.
Second, at two and a half hours long, I managed to sneak in three naps, so I was plenty rested by the end.
All this is to say I’m no movie buff.
I can’t recall the great acting or directing performances of our time.
Nor can I recite famous lines or scenes with any great detail.
But despite this, there’s one line from one scene in a likely-forgotten movie that bounces around my noggin’ more often than I care to admit.
The movie: The Boat that Rocked, or Pirate Radio for the American audience.
It tells the supposedly true story of a rebel British radio station in the 60s broadcasting rock music from a danky ship in the middle of the ocean to bypass a nosy and uptight government that wanted to shut them down.
This movie ain’t a masterpiece. In fact, it flopped at the box office. It’s cheesy and any halfwit movie guru reading this is probably scoffing at me right now.
But hey, let a man enjoy some cheap thrills and British humor, will ya?
The scene that’s stayed with me all these years features the late great Phillip Seymour
Hoffman. He plays a character called The Count—an American icon of the airwaves with a laid-back voice and the vibe one welcomes for a whiskey and a yarn.
As the movie approaches its climactic end, with the nonces in parliament having finally found a loophole they can use to shut down the radio station, we join The Count late one night as he’s staring up at the night sky.
The mood is somber as he reflects on his time at ‘Radio Rock!’ and shares his depression with the movie’s protagonist, a teenage boy whose coming-of-age story the movie is built around.
He tells the boy the terrifying revelation he’s had, copied here in full thanks to the glory of the Internet.
He says:
You know, a few months ago, I made a terrible mistake. I realized something, and instead of crushing the thought the moment it came I... I let it hang on, and now I know it to be true.
And I'm afraid it's stuck in my head forever.
These are the best days of our lives. It's a terrible thing to know, but I know it.
For whatever reason, that last line has stayed with me. It pops up in the most random of circumstances.
Maybe it’s because as I dad, I’m now more aware of time, life, and how fleeting it all is.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the past.
When Mel and I get some quiet moments together and we’re sitting outside in our humble little courtyard with its artificial turf and garden lights, we talk a lot about the ‘good old days’ and what life was like back then.
But the thing is, the good old days always change depending on what we’re talking about. They bear no specific time or place.
Sometimes we reminisce about how we both ended up in Sydney. Mel from Newcastle, me from Brisbane. We swap stories about those early-20 years with no money, no clue, and big dreams. The thrill, the freedom, the unknown.
We think back to when we first met, became friends, and later started dating. The excitement of a young romance followed by the heartbreak of long-distance love when I moved to New York shortly after.
Some nights the good old days are when we started building our lives together in New York.
We remember the days when we lived a 20-minute walk away from the Subway and suffered through bitterly cold walks to get to the station, wading through icy sludge as we avoided the crack-heads and trouble makers that peppered the route.
On other nights we recall the days living in our warehouse studio apartment in Bushwick with its cheap and stiff Ikea couch, poor ventilation, and paper-thin walls.
The good old days could be any day of the six years we lived in NYC, pre-baby or post-baby when we were with all our amazing friends—at dinner parties, restaurants, house parties, picnics, dive bars, work events, long weekends, beach days, park days, snow days.
They could be when we first arrived on St Croix, ill-prepared for the suffocating humidity and blistering sun, or any day thereafter when we lived one of the best experiences of our lives.
We often reflect on those perfect island Saturdays.
The morning ritual to get to the beach: packing the Esky with beers and the car with towels and toys, picking up iced coffees and arepas from the coffee shop, finding our secluded spot on the beach where we’d spend hours in the water and on the sand before heading home to fire up the charcoals in the late afternoon to spend the evening on the balcony overlooking the bay as our eyes slowly closed and forced us to bed.
With all these great memories, it’s easy to feel similar to The Count. That those days were the best days of our lives, and they’re over.
But when I’m deep in my thoughts, deep in my Dad feels and pondering life and all its absurdity—the kind of pondering that gets an eye-roll from my darling wife, and probably many readers of this blog—I realize nothing extraordinary makes a moment memorable.
The special times that stay with us are often completely unspectacular.
Even our nostalgia for the island features the uneventful—late-night chats on the balcony, watching hot coals wisp and pop in the Weber, days on the beach chasing hermit crabs.
For me, the realization is that nothing needs to happen for something to latch on and one day be a memory worth reliving. And often nothing does.
Hoffman’s line stays with me because it makes me remember that you never really know how good a moment is until it’s gone.
He wallowed in his despair thinking his best moments were behind him, that nothing better was on the horizon.
I like to think there always is, no matter where we are in life, as long as you have the right mindset.
I think that’s worth remembering.
Hear! Hear!