Yesterday I watched the first episode of ‘Eric’, written and created by Lucy Forbes and directed by Abi Morgan. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Eric, the father; Gabbie Hoffman, Cassie, the mother; and Ivan Morris Howe, Edgar, the child. The miniseries captures that dirty, febrile, unnerving New York backdrop we find, for example, in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. The father is intense, the couple fight, the child goes missing. I woke up thinking about it.
It taps into the genre of one of these incredibly powerful 1970s, early 1980s movies in which the children wore outfits – unisex, primary colours, dungarees – that I would have worn and played with similar toys. One of these films where the parents’ relationship is fraught, like I remember my parents’ relationship being. One of these films where the child characters are so three-dimensional, insightful, beautiful and haunting, and filmed with such sensitivity, observation and close-up, that their presence subsumes that of the adults. (And yet this mini-series is called after the father.) Some of the fathers have ’70s beards, like mine did. Children go missing, or nearly die, or do die, or get forgotten as their parents argue, or vanish while their parents are preoccupied. Or one of the parents is missing. The fathers may have a special interest, monomania, or all-out madness, or they are actually physically absent. A mother, absent for seven years, longs to be present to her child.
The films this first episode reignited in my memory and imagination are: Steven Spielberg’s ET (1982) and Encounters of the Third Kind (1977); Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) directed by Robert Benton; Franco Zeffirelli’s The Champ (1979), with Jon Voigt and Faye Dunaway; Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland; Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).
The child – in lieu of parental attention – often has a fantasy friend: the alien, ET; Danny’s talking finger in The Shining; and here, in Eric, a puppet the child Edgar has drawn carefully, while watching his dad at work puppeteering in the TV studio.
Is it that I am born of a certain time that Eric and these films resonate so with me? (ET was the first film to make me cry, and I was of an age with Elliott.) I see Eric capturing my mother’s generation too, the one that identifies with the adult characters. (The Shining is a favourite film of hers.) Or maybe the psychology, narrative and film-making gives this genre more universal appeal?
It was an era where divorce was becoming more common. The dreadful side of it now is quite normalised to not be considered such. My kids have separated parents. My parents are divorced (my mum, twice). My kids’ dad’s parents divorced. My aunt and uncles have all divorced. (We are not representative, but still…)
In these films, there is a big focus on the child. On the sadness of the parent who doesn’t get to be with the child. Of the child who loses contact with a parent. Of the child who is lost. Lost in themselves, lost physically, lost to a parent.
There’s a Milan Kundera essay in which he says Kafka was perfectly placed to see and write about the monstrous side of overwhelming bureaucracy because he was there at its inception; we don’t see it now because it’s par for the course. You hear the loud, interrupting, imposing noise of the one motor car going through the village better than you ever hear the ever-present buzz of motorway traffic. For me, these films of the late ’70s and early ’80s were more noticing of the sadness and strains of breaking or broken marital relations on the children. Of parents too preoccupied with one another. It behoves the film-makers to notice the children.
I will always prefer Paul McCartney to John Lennon. Aside from Let it be, he crafted Hey Jude for Julian Lennon, to comfort the boy while his parents came apart. He invited the boy to ‘take a sad song and make it better’, embrace love anyway, and not carry the world upon his shoulders. McCartney noticed the child. These films do too. In 2022, Speilberg released his cinematic memoir, The Fabelmans, and in an interview conveyed the influence of his parents’ divorce on his film-making: in ET the boy’s relationship with the alien serves to ‘fill the gap in his heart’ left by the separation.
With Eric, I wonder how and if Edgar will be found, what the co-created puppet gets up to, and why Eric is centre-stage. I’ve still not watched the second episode. In truth, I feel apprehensive and may leave it at that. The old dvd I have of The Champ only plays half-way. That suits me fine.