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Each week, Drew creates a watchlist with film recommendations provided by you.

A spoiler-free description of the movie.

A Korean American family moves to an Arkansas farm looking to live their American dream.

→ Immigrant stories. Call me crazy, but it seems us Americans still don’t fully appreciate the ‘American Dream’ from the immigrant perspective. Minari is semi-autobiographical, by the way.

→ Atmospherics and nature. The film is dripping with atmospheric camerawork, capturing beautifully the farmland and brownish-green grass and the diverse topography of Arkansas.

→ Grandma. It’s well-documented that Youn Yuh-Jung steals the show as Soonja, Jacob’s practical-joke-and-profanity-inclined grandmother who’s brought in from the old country to give advice and help with the kids.

Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari is, in more ways than one, a beautiful film. It lands with the artistry of a delicate watercolor painting.

The story itself is an undressed portrait of an immigrant family, struggling with the tension between assimilation, community, and identity. What makes this familiar tale so particularly special is the exceptional character drawings from the director and masterful performances from his cast, helmed by Steven Yeun and Han Ye-ri.

A clear scholar of human behavior, Lee Isaac Chung has an incredibly tight comprehension of his characters and their story; so much so that not a single supporting character lacks the shading often only reserved for the focal subjects of a story. Perhaps much of this is due to the right mix of artistry and lived experience of the writer-director. After all, the film is a semi-autobiographical take on his own upbringing.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat.”

Thoughts completely unrelated to this week’s film.

FOOTSTEPS.

My five-year-old son is shit at hide-and-seek (respectfully). He’d be a total savant, if only the rules of the game were to be found as quickly as possible, or to meticulously identify every hiding place in a single environment where one’s legs, feet or — at the very least — toes are obviously visible. Most often I find him with my razor-sharp ability to track down the precise location of his squealing, audible laughter.

A few weeks ago, my son and I were playing hide-and-seek. As five-year-olds do, he cycled through his most beloved hiding spots (e.g. under the kitchen table, in-between the legs of a barstool, in the living room covering both his eyes [I can’t see him if he can’t see me], etc.), and, as fathers do, I pretended to stumble around the house like I’d just been maced and rendered completely unable to find anything or anyone.

Every so often, my son realizes I’m about to find him and decides he wants to relocate. The ideal relocation method (according to my son): drape a blanket over your head and tiptoe right past the seeker with all the tactical discretion of a drunk college sports mascot. I usually let him shuffle over to his new hiding spot as I dramatically search beneath pillows and blankets and chairs, shouting AHA! with a confidence that five-year-olds seem to find funny, since they know I’m looking in all the wrong places. 

It was during a recent game of hide-and-seek, just after the song-and-dance of my son’s relocation and my AHA! idiot act, that my son posed a question that unnecessarily drove me into a state of existential crisis, because what else is there to do when five-year-olds are unknowingly profound, I suppose.

“Found ya!” I shouted performatively as I found my son below the dining room table.

“Daddy, you took forever!” My son always gloats after a game of hide-and-seek like this — one where he successfully relocates and hides on borrowed time. He laughs, “why’d you think I was under that blanket over there?”

“You were there, weren’t you?”

“But Daddy, I was there before I moved,” Cole starts a lot of sentences with conjunctions, most commonly the word ‘but’. I’m not sure why kids do this yet, but rest assured your author will find out one day.

“I thought I heard footsteps…” I played dumb.

“Then why didn’t you look…when you heard the footsteps?” Cole looked at me with the frankness of a man far older than he is, and I didn’t have an answer for him. Why wouldn’t I look if I’d heard the footsteps? Move past the silly routine where I pretend to be incapable of finding my own ten fingers and really try to think about it. What kind of father am I? I can tell you one thing: this comedy routine I have been doing has nourished an undeserved confidence in a five-year-old who is (because of me, now) abysmal at finding a good place to hide. He actually thinks it is an adequate strategy to hide in the middle of a room and that covering his eyes will allow him to go undetected by seekers of all skill levels. I’ve seen the strategy blow up in his face when he plays with his cousins, and it must be frustrating for him. Such is the life of an only child, I suppose.

Why don’t I look when I hear footsteps? I often find myself stumped by questions that my son asks, which is probably in equal parts a reflection of his intelligence and my dangerously slow processing power. It happens often in parenthood; one second, you’re playing hide-and-seek, then the next you’re tumbling down some kind of existential stairwell, pushed ever-so-slightly over the edge by the distinct blend of curiosity and interrogation that only very young people weaponize.

It’s obvious that my son, by asking this question, is simply trying to make sense of how his father, who appears to have all of his faculties operational for so much of the day, is incapable of registering and responding appropriately to a very clear and obvious clue (the footsteps).

But his inquiry brings about a whole host of messy and complicated choices we make as parents, particularly the half-truths we tell our children either to protect them or build their confidence or preserve the magic of youth or you-name-any-other good-hearted reason. The most universal, spirited, and well-intentioned half-truth anyone tells their kids as they grow up must certainly be the existence of Santa Claus (and yes, I’m aware this is a stretch, but we’ve come this far).

SANTA AND HARRY.   As is well-established at this point, your author is a one hundred percent, bona fide Jew. I grew up near some other Jews (there is a thing called Jewish geography¹) and also plenty of people persuaded by another religion or spirituality.

I’m not sure if I’d ever believed in Santa Claus but I vividly recall my parents informing me that Hanukkah, too, had a fun little mascot, in what must have been an act of desperation to avoid the classic Jewish-kid-jealous-of-Christmas thing. They calmly informed me that there was a brown-bearded man named Hanukkah Harry, and he was more-or-less the Jewish Santa Claus who delivered a portion of our gifts. My imagination may not have been the strongest, and so I immediately envisioned the same red-faced Santa Claus I’d seen in the plentiful Christmas films and cartoons, but deftly substituted the red gown for a blue one and the white beard for brown along with a generally hairier aesthetic. What’s funny about using Hanukkah Harry in this manner is that it was actually just a redeployment of a relatively famous Saturday Night Live character, portrayed by Jon Lovitz. Even funnier is that much of the humor of Hanukkah Harry is the half-baked premise itself of inventing a Jewish stand-in for Santa Claus.

No matter, because I’m not sure my parents’ intention was to ever actually convince me that Hanukkah Harry was real, and your author must be truthful that neither I nor my brothers ever really believed that this figure, who was supposedly responsible for much of the magic of Hanukkah, was indeed real. In other words, it was obviously never as pervasive or convincing of a lie for us in the way that Santa Claus was for the Christians.

Here we have what I suspect is one of the most dramatic and wild and downright fascinating distinctions between the Jewish upbringing² and children who come up in one of the many subsects of Christianity. This is probably the easiest and most obvious comparison to make, given the natural symmetry of Hanukkah and Christmas, but in no way is this your author taking a shot at either religion. The fact is, for better or worse, I’m not religious in any way, and perhaps best I’m described as loosely spiritual, which means (I think) that I take comfort in rationalizing the unexplainable things in life with trite sayings like “everything happens for a reason,” and every so often I decide to make a habit of meditation before dropping it the same way I would an overambitious diet. Further, my wife and I are raising my son as something of a hybrid, exposing him to select traditions both Jewish (high holidays, Hanukkah, salty bagels-and-lox, etc.) and Christian (Easter, Christmas, oven-baked ham, etc.). Albeit, he isn’t exposed to just about any of the arcane aspects of either religion; only the traditions involving family gathering.

My hope is that all of the above firmly establishes me as mostly impartial and as a kind of neutral spectator, though perhaps it’s worth noting my most apparent bias, that religion isn’t really of interest to me at all other than as a lens through which I can better understand and contextualize human behavior. 

Now, before you read the next section, remember that I’m not taking a side, and so you should read it all the way through.

SANTA.   In your author’s observations: Christian parents and the whole of the commercial and capitalist complex are all dead set on lying to every innocent Christian child by telling them as early as year one that there is an old, fat, white-bearded man that flies around the world in his bright red PJs for one evening, every single year, to deliver hand-wrapped presents prepared by an overworked group of elves. And the reason for The Lie is supposedly to preserve the magic of childhood. In the modern age of social media and daily window-shopping into other families’ lives, The Lie has become far more elaborate, with many parents claiming that Santa’s sent an elf to their houses to check in and make sure the kids are all good enough to stay on the nice list for Christmas this year. The elf gets into all sorts of antics, like pooping rainbows of glitter into the toilet or hanging upside down from the chandelier in the living room. The truth is, though, elaborate delivery mechanisms for The Lie are nothing new.²

The pervasiveness of The Lie is so great and penetrative that it’s made its way into pop culture of all kinds, and so Christian and (many) non-Christian kids all need to be eventually told, when they are deemed too old to believe in it, that Santa isn’t real. Too old is of course a relative measure, so a lot of kids become wise to The Lie when some overconfident punk at school sees them writing a letter to Santa Claus and says “You know, Santa isn’t real, right?” To a great many families, this transition is a relative calamity, a sad and challenging time, because it curtly puts an end to the “magic of childhood” for the child being informed of The Truth.

The important thing to note here is the obvious ethical violation in all of the Santa Claus business, the one that kids usually have a knack for pointing out right after they learn The Truth; grown-ups always say it’s bad to lie. In fact, this is the aspect of The Lie that most kids get upset about — that it is a lie. Even worse, lying is often a behavior that parents explicitly say would land someone on Santa’s naughty list. The dissonance is unavoidable and, well, it’s anyone’s guess the effect it actually has on the child. 

Despite all of this, it just so happens that The Lie is magical, not just because the way a kid’s eyes radiate when they learn of or hear about Santa Claus is cute or endearing. Imagination is integral to a child’s development, and there’s most certainly some value in training a muscle to believe in the impossible. There’s so much research that confirms the value of fostering a child’s imagination that your author sees no point in referencing anything. Instead, I’ll leave you with this astronomically ridiculous clickbait headline from the Washington Post, published 11 years prior to the essay you're reading today: 

“BELIEVING IN SANTA CLAUS COULD HELP YOUR KIDS DEVELOP A CURE FOR CANCER.”

HARRY.   Compare this, though, to the lack of sparkle of knowing Santa Claus isn’t real from day 1. This is the experience of many Jewish kids, or at least the ones who came up around me. I knew just about immediately that Santa Claus was an element of entertainment or storytelling or a way to sell toys. I still went out to see Santa Claus on the firetruck on Christmas Eve. But I always knew The Truth in my bones. I’m not even sure if it was ever a conversation in my house. Even Hanukkah Harry, that underbaked diversion tactic my parents employed to reduce my likely envy, was never much more than a joke around the house.

The Truth is something of a staple in Jewish childhood. And it is a little bit sad, really. There is something about the magic and innocence of being a kid that loses its luster when you don’t have such an omnipresent magical figure, like Santa Claus, to dream about or believe in. My parents themselves clearly felt the pressure, and my mother to this day is fascinatingly preoccupied with making Hanukkah “as fun as Christmas”, now for the grandkids. I suppose this insecurity of hers has become a full on complex, which is understandable. What probably sums it up most clearly is a side-by-side comparison of The Dreidel Song and literally any Christmas song. One body of music is simply more bouncy and joyous and festive than the other, though I suppose this is a matter of opinion.

Another thing I can tell you is that the only television show that told the story of Hanukkah from the child’s perspective (that I can really convincingly recall) was The Rugrats. But instead the flying reindeer and magic and glamour present in nearly every Christmas cartoon, I was treated to a child-friendly retelling of the Jews fighting the Greeks for religious freedom. In other words, I was given a version of The Truth. It’s easy to see why a kid could get a little green over all of this. Add to this the fact that, for Jewish kids, are no Christmas trees or outside-of-the-house lighting displays, and though we often partook in some of the festivities (e.g. we made a habit of seeing the neighborhood Christmas lights), your author was still left with a feeling of being on the outside. It stands to reason that being raised Jewish around the holiday season was to be on the outside of most of the magic and imagination and glitter.

Though, The Truth can also be magical in it’s own, even if you might hear it most often in the Phrygian dominant scale (in music, sometimes this is referred to as the “Jewish scale”). The story told in the Hanukkah episode of The Rugrats was, like many of the other episodes, a resounding display of the power of a child’s imagination, as well as their own autonomy in fostering it. Magic didn’t happen to the kids in The Rugrats. They dreamed it up all by themselves. Further, to be steeped in The Truth so early might encourage some kind of discernment and ability to be grounded and ask questions about the nature of things.

THE MAGIC OF CHILDHOOD. Most potent is that the end destination of both The Truth and The Lie is more-or-less the same. We want our kids to grow up with strong, healthy imaginations. We want them to be good people and to ask questions and learn and change and contribute to society in a way that we haven’t yet been able to. We want them to have a better life than we were given, even if we were given wonderful lives, and we want them to do the same for their kids.

It almost trivializes questioning any of this at all, knowing that either leads to a destination that’s more-or-less two sides of the same coin. It might not really matter at all if you choose to tell The Lie or The Truth, but rather that the more mundane elements of parenthood are most important. The monkey-see, monkey-do sort of stuff.

Eventually I’ll stop playing dumb with my son and he’ll learn how to hide better, but for now, it builds his confidence and it’s darned cute when he thinks he’s got the better of me as his toes curl from his own laughter. I’m not sure he’ll ever stop raising such existential excitement and dread and fear and optimism in me simply by being himself.

It really is a marvel, the way that kids make you think.

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