Not Fade Away

Bob Dylan ends +Not Fade Away with “She’s an artist; she don’t look back.” +David Chase is an artist whose first feature film is not just a look back at his coming of age in New Jersey around 1963 but about the ambiguities in the impulse to look back.

As one character quotes The Tibetan Book of the Dead, there is no past, only the present, which contains the past as it does the future. The film’s title comes from a song and a singer (the prematurely snuffed Buddy Holly) we don’t hear in the film because it’s not about that particular song/singer or even that period; it’s about the ineffable presence of the past, our containing what we were. The past is the one thing that doesn’t fade away, the way youth, vim, hopes, love, faith, family, friends, lovers, do. 

Time is the film’s central theme. The early and late TV clips show a trio twisting again, like they did that implicit mythic summer. In the clip from Welles’s Touch of Evil the fat old sheriff harkens to the memories stirred by Marlene Dietrich’s mechanical piano -- and she struggles to find the old Hank in the grotesquely obese one. Ok, all those candy bars and booze don’t fade away either.  

Chase’s hero, Douglas (John Magaro) -- however autobiographic -- is today what he was then. The plot replays the boy’s growing away from his family and the independence he gained first from his passion for rock and roll music and then from his transition to the West Coast and filmmaking. In reverse of the most repeated song in the film, he has time on his side because he’s alive in its flow. It’s time, not the lover, that keeps running back to him.  

As in his TV masterpiece, The Sopranos, Chase reflects upon the tensions in a family and in the professional family (Mafia, rock band) that supplants it in duty, nourishment and devotion. He again uses pop music to propel his themes, especially the pulsing vernacular of rock and roll. There’s also a clip from South Pacific, “Bali Hi,” which begins with the observation that we all live on one island but wish we were on another. Here that works temporally as well as spatially. We’re all enisled on the point of time in which we find ourselves -- the time that maybe God made; we didn’t -- but yearn to be on another, whether the past of a treasured moment or the future of even a hopeless ambition.

The film richly evokes its period. In the last scene the hero’s kid sister contends the US has two great inventions, rock and roll and nuclear power, but we don’t know which will win out. Perhaps its heartening that fifty years later we still don’t know.That harkens back to the “duck and cover” atom bomb warnings of the ‘50s. In the wealth of period evocation perhaps two anachronisms stick out: something “sucks” and “phenomenological.”  But that’s minor amid that wealth of accurate particularities.

The film bristles with an ironic view backward, which gives it more of a Mad Men feel. The black worker is a deacon so he doesn’t share the white boys’ ardor for the Delta blues. The beatnik older sister’s revolutionary spirit now seems so much self-conscious silliness. Her and others’ philosophic apercus float like bricks. Her wealthy father can’t understand or tolerate her revolt so he has her forcefully committed. The more moderate daughter gets away with her own rebellion by being more discrete -- and goes on to pre-veterinary studies. Because the film is pre-feminist -- and the shaping memory is a man’s -- the women are types, not given the attention or sympathy accorded the males. 

For Chase -- again -- the James Gandolfini father anchors the narrative. He begins as the satiric butt of a father angry that his son isn’t growing into his expectations. This turns around when the father, who has learned he’s dying of cancer, suggests a dinner to prepare his wayward son to become the head of the family. He doesn’t get to that topic. Instead he recalls a fiery girlfriend of his own past. Then he reveals that during his recent treatment he fell in love with a West Coast woman and considered leaving his wife for her. Instead of trying to change his son, this recollection makes him understand the boy and realize the constraints he accepted on his own life. He’s embarrassed by his own loving impulse when he shoves a wad of money into his son’s hand as he sees him off for California.

The film is about the 60s because that was the time of the social revolution, that music, the Vietnam protests, the civil rights advances, Kennedy’s death and (the implicit surprise) Johnson’s domestic triumph, but mainly because that was Chase’s time. Give or take four years, it was my time too. But the film isn’t about just that time. It’s about every generation’s discovery of its path, its recoil from old strictures, the shaping vitality of its popular culture, its own discovery of its new frontier -- and the indelible traces the inescapable past will leave.