He Had the Touch

I took a personal day off for the second anniversary of my dad’s death and, not knowing what to do with myself, I decided to look at the movie listings, which reminded me that Transformers: The Movie is back in theaters celebrating its 40th anniversary. Having correctly targeted me as the exact audience for this movie, the internet has been aggressively advertising it to me for months. But it wasn’t until today that I realized it was appropriate timing.

Back in 1986, my dad was nice enough to take me to see Transformers: The Movie at the Mac Tri Cinema in the little town where I grew up, McMinnville, Oregon. At the time I didn’t think twice about it: as my dad, it was part of his job to take me to movies I wanted to see, especially when my mom was busy. I’m not sure what my mom and sister were up to that day, but my memory is that my dad and I went, just the two of us, and even when we got home, it was an afternoon and evening we had to ourselves.

Now, I’m impressed he was willing to go to a movie that stood against basically everything he believed in. It was a loud, crassly commercial toy advertisement full of violence and explosions, light on plot and heavy on things going “pew, pew” and “boom.” A lesser man would have banned me from seeing it, just because he not only wasn’t interested, but was also probably morally opposed.

My dad was the chaplain at the local college, where he used his position to help fight for civil rights and bring big thinkers and liberal views into our sheltered little town. He was a pacifist who traveled the world in the name of spreading peace. None of that was on my mind as he sat next to me watching Autobots and Decepticons blow each other up for 90 minutes.

Transformers: The Movie is intertwined with the concept of death and loss for an entire generation because the toy manufacturers who bankrolled it saw fit to use it to very publicly kill off their most popular and revered character, Optimus Prime, who, although he was a sentient truck, was also a father figure, symbol of positive masculinity, and model leader for every boy my age.

This was a decision to retire old toys and sell new ones, but what the geniuses at Hasbro didn’t bargain for is the fact that Optimus Prime’s dramatic death at the hands of his arch nemesis, Megatron (a sentient gun), would be viewed by children as tantamount to the assassination of Santa Claus.

I wasn’t among them. Yes, I was shocked Optimus Prime died. But even at the age of five or six, I was thrilled by the dramatic storytelling. It was sad, but I loved how serious the stakes were compared to the cartoon show, where nothing of consequence ever happened. Characters died. The good guys lost. The stakes suddenly mattered in a way they never had on the TV show. It’s not great cinema, by any stretch, and is derivative of other superior hero’s journeys that had come before it, but I was enthralled.

Too enthralled to think much about Optimus Prime’s death. When I heard another kid from the audience come back from a bathroom break and whisper to his parents, “Did Optimus Prime come back to life, yet?” I just rolled my eyes and thought… we’ve got more important stuff to worry about now. He’s not coming back. Of course, Hasbro got cold feet, and Optimus Prime did come back in the next season of the TV show, but by then no one was really watching anymore.

Whenever I really liked a movie, I would get to work reenacting it in one way or another. Either with my action figures, or by jumping around and acting it out myself, or by drawing picture after picture of it. The afternoon we came home from Transformers: The Movie, I went to work setting up a reenactment of the movie in my bedroom and then called my dad in to watch it. It starred a little red plastic rake, for making sand castles, that I thought bore a passing resemblance to one of the spaceships in the movie. My dad patiently watched and when it was over remarked, “That was kind of like the movie we just saw, wasn’t it.” Busted.

The thing is, this guy, my dad, who had a lot more on his mind than nihilistic, violent, trashy cartoons, didn’t stop to lecture me. He didn’t make me feel dumb for liking it. He just put up with it. Because although world peace is important, I was five.

When I got a little older he’d let a little bemused attitude leak through. Like when we saw the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie together, and I said it was really about fathers and sons. He kind of chuckled and gave me a knowing look and said, “Suuure.” Just enough to let me know he was onto it — it’s just more violent trash. But nothing to make me feel any less than or stupid or wrong or bad.

Which, I think, is healthy. You don’t want your parents all in on your bullshit when you’re a kid, because then you grow up an entitled brat who thinks they can do no wrong. And you don’t want them totally against you and everything you believe in, either, because that comes with another whole host of problems. Both extremes lead to Dr. Phil and Judge Judy. My dad found the middle: I was allowed to be a dumb kid while being aware there was more to life than being a dumb kid.

I never identified with the legions of nerds my age on the internet who swear up and down the death of Optimus Prime destroyed them. I never felt like it was a total betrayal, either. To me, it was just good storytelling. It was sad, but it was life. For most of my life, fictional deaths were some of my main reference points for the real thing. Optimus Prime was one. Spock was another. By a strange coincidence, I saw The Wrath of Khan on the big screen the night my dad went back into the hospital for the last time.

You could say this is just a sign of how little tragedy I’ve suffered in my life. And you’d be right.

Then my dad died. He’s been dead for two years now. As I was lying on the couch this morning, thinking about his death and what I was supposed to do to remember him, I saw that Transformers was back in theaters.

I didn’t go. But on the way home from the grocery store, I blasted the heroic hair-metal anthem “The Touch” from the Transformers soundtrack. It wasn’t a particularly fitting memorial for my dad, but it made me feel better for a few minutes.