Jack Frost (1998)

directed by Troy Miller

Meggie Gates

“Fucking hearing aids.” My dad’s hand shakes, frustrated. “All the money I’ve put into my head this year. You’d think something might work.”

I’m driving us to breakfast in our hometown following a lengthy Labor Day weekend. It’s sunny out, a perfect sixty degrees, and I’ve elected to be my dad’s babysitter following a stroke the week prior. For thirty days, somebody needs to watch him, ensuring he does not fall and die from another blood clot in his brain and I, recently unemployed, figure this would be a job I’m good at. There’s no reason to go back to my apartment in New York, no reason not to spend my days following my favorite person around, and I hang with him doing all the things we used to do, unable to comprehend that things are, and will be, different from here on out.

“He’s supposed to be resting,” my mom says when we show up after a trip to his friend’s farm. “He wants to hang out because you’re his best friend. You have to say no to him.”

*

I first realized my parents were going to die after seeing the 1998 film Jack Frost in theaters. I was five, developing a complex worldview on the hierarchy of Chuck E Cheese, when we went to see the almost-two-hour movie at our local theater. The movie itself is one of those monumental clusterfucks of the late ‘90s, a poster I’m sure my parents saw hanging outside the marquee and thought, “Yeah, that looks fun.” It opens with Michael Keaton’s cover band singing Christmas songs in a sexy low lit bar, his skin unnaturally tan for Colorado. They’re banging on the keys, crushing their performance, when a music manager in the audience picks up his phone. “Uh Mike?” he says into the receiver. “You’re gonna wanna hear this.” Keaton comes home elated by the fact he’s finally getting his break. The only stipulation? His band has to play on Christmas Eve.

The beautiful, stunning, insert-every-adjective-for-a-hot-fucking-woman-here Kelly Preston is his wife and she is, obviously, upset by this. Why he would dare push his luck with her is beyond me, but he’s doing it, letting her know he’s worked years for this moment. Giving up one Christmas won’t hurt, but Keaton can’t reconcile this with the reminder that he let his son Charlie down.

He rushes out of the recording studio in a blistering snowstorm as his keyboardist Mark Addy cheers him on. “Go!” Addy screams as Keaton grabs his coat on the way out. “Say hi to Charlie for me.”

Charlie, played by Joseph Cross, is Keaton’s son and all-around fan girl of his father. A child somehow blessed with two good parents, Charlie was the kind of cool kid I aspired to be: a hockey player, a boy. The bond between him and his father is so strong, so palpable, that even at thirty years old, I sob at their goodbye. That’s right: Keaton dies in that snowstorm and before he does, he leaves Charlie a harmonica—an instrument Charlie throws off the bed after hearing Keaton won’t be spending the holidays with them. “Please, I can’t leave like this,” Keaton insists, but Charlie pulls the covers over his head, unable to understand his father’s dreams are bigger than the four walls of his home.

Growing up, my dad was rarely home. He was a traveling salesman whose dreams began and ended with providing for his family. But to have enough—to provide enough—he needed more. A sizable salary that fed three kids and a wife. “My dad had this painting of a captain leading his ship at sea and I wanted to be that for my family,” he once told me over a fire he made. “To provide, to protect.” Because he wasn’t home often, his time was valuable. My siblings clamored over each other for a chance at attention on his off days, a chance to be swung around the room to Don McLean’s “American Pie.” When we danced, my feet never touched the ground—a balloon flying to heaven—and the high was enough to last for his several-weeks-long business trips. Once, after my siblings went to college, he said I was his favorite, something I’d hoped for years, something like looking God in the eyes to say that I’m immortal, too.

*

Charlie is distraught after Keaton dies in a car crash, riddled with anger and grief and regret. No time with our loved ones is enough, but his is cut so short, so early into childhood, that he recedes into himself, unable to talk to his classmates for a year. Who cares about anything? Who cares when the one thing carrying you into that vast, open sky cuts the rope, sending you back to Earth? He goes home, he acts out, as Kelly Preston looks sad and ethereal as she’s mistreated by yet ANOTHER man.

One night, in his rage, Charlie finds a box of Keaton’s old stuff and does what any angsty preteen does: he makes a snowman to Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” a definitive break in what was once a childhood activity becoming a solitary act. Addy, Keaton’s aforementioned keyboardist, is asleep on the couch when Charlie sneaks out, letting the perpetual scream trapped in his lungs out in negative degree weather. After what feels like hours, he assembles a snowman suspiciously resembling Colin Bridgerton. An uncanny valley looking motherfucker who—this is going to be kind of vulnerable to admit—I find hot. He returns to his room and sadly plays the harmonica as magic swirls outside, reincarnating Michael Keaton as Ms. Thickorita snowman. Not a tree, not a fish swimming in fresh water springs, but a snowman. Something even more fragile than what he was before.

For the next hour, a series of wild adventures and wacky mishaps occur. Keaton teaches Charlie how to shoot a slapshot, Keaton haunts the local hockey coach with his presence—a character played by, I shit you not, Henry Rollins —and, my personal favorite, Charlie and Keaton brawl with the local bully in a moment where Keaton is pelted by snowballs that eventually become breasts he rubs up and down on his body. This might not be what either expected, but it’s their chance at one last goodbye. The chance to right the wounds inflicted when Charlie turned his back and Keaton closed the door.

When spring peeks its head over the horizon, Charlie realizes how futile his efforts are. You can’t beat a ticking metronome but Charlie tries, shoving snowman dad onto the back of a truck with the help of his former bully. They share a kindred moment bonding over lost dads, lost expectations, lost souls, before Charlie and Keaton ride up the mountain, planning to keep him where he won’t melt. It’s frantic, it’s panicked. Keaton lets out a meak “Charlie” and Charlie lets out an exasperated “I can’t lose you again.” Kelly Preston, overwhelmed by her son's disappearance, is tipped off by snowman Keaton who somehow operates a telephone to let her know where they are. She sprints over a snowbank to catch Charlie and Keaton sharing their final goodbye, wide eyed in disbelief over her long departed husband. “As long as you hold someone in your heart, you will never lose them,” Keaton tells a crying Charlie. “If you ever need me, I’ll be right here.” He takes his little mitted hand and pats Charlie's chest before evaporating into the sky, singing Ella Fitzgerald's “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.”

*

My dad takes a break from fumbling with his hearing aids to look defeatedly at his hands. “I’m not ready for this,” he says, more to himself than me. “I’m not ready to get old.” The sentence breaks me, and I see the next decade of our life flash by. I’m going to be reconstructing him, always piecing together our past, struggling to grasp that the present we live in was the future I once dreaded. He’s going to be bringing up stories from my youth as we speed further away from childhood, the Earth spinning and speeding as it falls into seasons. I don’t remember seeing Jack Frost in theaters, but I remember the feeling, something tight in my chest, punctuated by Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.” Jack Frost is a devastating movie—Rotten Tomatoes 19% rating be damned—that effortlessly captures how life stretched out like a highway folds up like a map in one minute.

As it goes, when we left the theater that day, I was quiet, gripping my dad’s hand with conviction. “What are you thinking?” he reportedly asked me. And with all the boldness of a five year old coming to terms with the fact I’d lose him one day, I turned to him and said, “Will you please shut up?”

Meggie Gates is an all around mess living in New York. Their work has appeared in Vulture, Cosmopolitan, and their favorite magazine, wig-wag.