![]() The way Lucas presents this solstice finale is eons different from the ones I lived through as a freshly graduated 18-year-old. ![]() It’s what allows me to enter the full world of American Graffiti rather than just its first chapter, but not all that glitters is gold.Īmerican Graffiti is a 112-minute depiction of six friends’ last night of summer before Steve (Ron Howard) and Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) are set to head east for college. Perhaps it’s less of a burden for him to look at a pre-Vietnam War world and demand to live in it for as long as he possibly can (my dad’s formative years did hit just as the war reached a boiling point at the turn of the 1970s), or, perhaps, it is my own narrow-sighted opinion of what heartache and death and sickness really is that has rendered me forever desensitized to grief. He prefers to consider the picturesque perfection of the first movie and remain blissfully ignorant to the story’s forthcoming tragedy, but that’s too easy of a life to live. He doesn’t acknowledge the existence of the sequel, More American Graffiti-which came out in 1979 and was massively panned by critics-but I do. The magic that exudes from every second of American Graffiti is what he latched onto-and it’s what I became obsessed with, too.īut the version of American Graffiti that has become canonized in my life is not the one that is canonized in my dad’s. Yet, that wasn’t the point (it never is). It takes place in 1962-a full year before he was born-in Modesto, California-2,500 miles from Southington, Ohio, where he grew up. It’s a coming-of-age film my dad, in no way, shape, or form, could actually relate to. But no gift has ever been as talismanic as American Graffiti, George Lucas’ second feature film-which was released in 1973, four years before he made Star Wars. My dad has passed a lot of obsessions onto me: baseball cards, Motown, problematic comedies from the 1980s, the Bee Gees, Saturday Night Live, and the ever-agonizing destiny of loving Cleveland sports teams. Life was euphoric, even if the country was in a recession and everything beyond the utopian, poster-filled walls of my shoebox-sized bedroom was, to put it frankly, fucked. I was merely an overweight pre-tween who loved baseball, Superman-flavored ice cream, and rock ‘n’ roll. I was maybe nine or 10, not yet aware of puberty’s massacre or high school’s plague of pimply-faced misanthropy. He said something along the lines of “I want to share this with you,” or at least that’s what I’ve chosen to remember him saying. One summer many years ago, as firecrackers and bottle rockets painted the 4th of July air a technicolor flame outside our house, my dad ushered me into the living room and put his DVD of American Graffiti on the TV set. ![]()
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