Gearing up for my fourth paternity leave, I knew the drill. For the older kids: batch-cooked meals, ready in the freezer. For the newborn: all the baby stuff down from the loft. For my wife: whatever the heck the heroic matriarch wanted. And for dad? A ready supply of films for those long solo night-shifts.
Paternity leave nighttime viewing has but one purpose: stay awake. Specifically, stay awake whilst sitting as still as possible so as not to disturb the sleeping newborn on your chest. As such, there’s no point making grand designs to watch the five-star, high-brow things that you’ve been meaning to watch for goodness knows how long simply because you feel you ought to. Theoretically, I will really enjoy the critically acclaimed Shogun on Disney+. But when a man is trying to give the marvellous mother of his children all the rest he can, he has to follow his gut to make it through until morning. A man wants what a man wants.
And so where did my gut take me? Meandering, is where. I kicked off with Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3—an immense disappointment. I was reassured that it’s no bad thing that the first arc of the Marvel Cinematic Universe wrapped up just as I was starting a family and losing my old cinema-going habits. This gave me a sci-fi hankering however, and I found myself in the mood for one of those obligatory classics I’d never managed: Blade Runner. Dangerous territory in the wee small hours, with its slow pacing and atmospheric Vangelis synthesisers, but I was pleased to find it lived up to the hype. As the sunrise crept in, I marveled at the wondrous little being nuzzled into my dressing gown and felt reassured that the AI replicants aren’t going to give humanity a run for their money any time soon.
By now, I was feeling distinctly ‘daddish’, and whacked on The Great Escape. The gallant exploits of virtuous men led me into the realms of high feeling with my third son in my arms. I whispered pledges for another viewing years hence with him and his brothers. This was rudely interrupted by the appearance of his mother, a history teacher by trade with a specialism in the Holocaust, irked by the portrayal of the apparently easy-going prison camp. I scored a rare historical point by informing her that the Luftwaffe-run camps for captive airmen were a different animal to other labour camps, and sent her back to bed.
I felt a taste for stone-cold classics coming on, with a minor in history. I took a risk: Forrest Gump. As a cantankerous 33-year-old, I wondered if I would view it through far more cynical eyes than whenever I last watched it. But perhaps this is hard to do with a days-old baby to hand. It’s cinema gold, and by gum even the haters know it. The mood of heartfelt 1980s and 1990s Hollywood overtook me, and I dove into Rain Man, one of the only Tom Cruise movies I can stand. The fraternal affection on screen made me unexpectedly emotional: what a thing to have given my children another brother.
I whispered pledges for another viewing years hence with him and his brothers
The algorithm got me good and proper next, with Jim Carey’s disposable 2008 romcom Yes Man—a film I have always found bizarrely rewatchable despite its supreme mediocrity. This may have something to do with it co-starring Zooey Deschanel and coming out when I was 16. Formative years; life is different now.
Being September, the early morning was becoming a slow, beautiful time, dawn’s rosy fingers turning soft and silver. I wanted a correspondingly slow and beautiful film to float me through to daybreak—again, a risk, but I found myself watching The Wind Rises, Studio Ghibli’s gorgeous story of pre-war Japanese aeronautical engineering. My eldest, the only girl and almost eight, woke up early that morning. Wordlessly, she stumped downstairs with a blanket and clambered onto the sofa with me and her newest little brother. I’d normally have sent her back to bed, but we sat there together, entranced until breakfast.
For my final night, I treated myself to Sicario, a film much hyped as a five-star crypto-conservative classic by right-wing Twitter. Alas, it left me cold and simply wanting to read a Cormac McCarthy novel instead—another great pursuit for dads, to be fair. Right on cue, as the smoke cleared on Benicio del Toro icing a load of drug-running Mexicans, the baby began to stir.
We’d had a good night, but my shift, and my paternity leave, was over. The boy wanted milk. And there are only so many things that daddy is good for.
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