A Death in the Family

Michael Apted, RIP (1941-2021).

My friend Jack Shafer has noted, correctly, that the great vice of eulogists is to speak or write at great length about themselves rather than the deceased. I’m about to commit that vice. But it can’t be avoided, because I never knew Michael Apted, who died this week at 79, and because the only rational response to his masterwork, the Up series, is a personal one.

Nothing is more moving than watching how people change, and don’t change, over a lifetime. Apted was a film director who made many good films—I’m tempted this weekend to re-watch Enigma (2001), which I remember being very enjoyable—but he’ll be remembered chiefly for the Up series because these nine documentary films, which followed a group of Britons from various economic backgrounds from the age of 7 to the age of 63, constitute a collective masterwork that transcends its (persuasive) left politics and inevitable narrative biases. If you’ve never seen any of them, I urge you to watch 63 Up, the final film in the series, which was released in 2019. Each film recapitulates the previous ones, so you don’t need to binge-watch them all. Indeed, if you do, it’s liable to feel repetitious; these films were intended to be watched in intervals of 7 years. (I don’t know what the Royal Ocean Film Society is, but this video essay by Andrew Saladino, a Dallas-based writer, makes this point and is a very insightful introduction to the series.)

I have a dear friend whose job it was, when I married my late first wife 30 years ago, to prevent an older family friend from being dragged to a piano to sing “Sunrise, Sunset.” He’d written the song, and I’d seen this happen at three weddings. I’d got the impression he was heartily sick of performing this duty. He was a lovely man and far too kind, I thought, to say no. And while I admired his music as much as anyone, my 32 year-old childless self found this particular song a little ... sappy. So did my friend who was instructed to steer him away from the piano. In the event, there was no piano to be dragged to, so my fears were groundless.

Five or six years later my friend (OK, @RuthMarcus; the composer was the late Jerry Bock) told me tearfully that she was very sorry to have accepted this assignment, “because now I have kids and now I realize THAT’S THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SONG EVER WRITTEN!”

Another Michael, Michael Chabon, would later publish an essay (“Daughter of the Commandment”) making the same point in his 2009 book Manhood for Amateurs. (Thanks to Phil Korsnes for flagging it to me when I posted an earlier version of this essay on Twitter.) “I can remember being thirteen,” Chabon writes,

and feeling stifled, half-drowned, by the corniness of it any time some aunt at the piano took up the minor notes of ‘Sunrise, Sunset’ and all the adults wiped their eyes and wondered where my infancy and their youth and all the days had gone. But you know what? I spent hours putting together an iTunes playlist for us to dance to at the reception after the service [for his oldest daughter’s bat mitzvah], soliciting suggestions via e-mail from a team of party-mix experts, black-belt Snoopy-style dancers, and former part-time semiprofessional soi-disant DJs, a process that resulted in a selection of tracks glorious and replete and nearly perfect with Prince (“Kiss”), New Order (“Bizarre Love Triange”), and L.T.D. (“Every Time I Turn Around, Back In Love Again”), and yet the song that reached down to the very core of me was the final tune of the evening, the only tune you need, Mickey Katz’s perfect, wordless one-minute forty-eight second dance-band version of, God help me, ‘Sunrise, Sunset.’

That’s the power that Michael Apted tapped into with his beautifully rendered film series. I’ll never forget my introduction to the series seeing 35 Up at the old AFI at the Kennedy Center in 1991. The yet-unborn son of the couple we attended that film with and our yet-unborn daughter would later be friends and attend college together. Such an utterly unexceptional arrangement of facts feels to me extraordinary and moving.

A dozen years after my first wife died, I remarried. My two children, now grown, walked me down the aisle. My son read a Rumi poem and my daughter sang “Come Rain or Come Shine,” accompanied on the saxophone by my dear friend Marie Monrad, whose daughter Zoe had been playmate to both kids. My bride Sarah’s two grown daughters from her first marriage walked her down the aisle, and also participated in the ceremony.

Why do these perfectly ordinary experiences mean so much? Why is observing the passage of time in the lives of those we love, and sometimes in the lives of people we don’t even know, so powerful emotionally? In his essay, Chabon suggests it’s a kind of illusion:

We are so accustomed to thinking of ourselves, of our lives and histories, in terms of the succession of generations—‘Let the word go forth from this time and place ... that the torch has been passed to a new generation’—that we no longer even question the validity or truth of the idea, which, apart from the most strictly biological sense, has no real meaning and no basis at all in the way we live those lives or experience our histories as they unfold. There is only one time, and one life, and we all share them, and if there is a torch, then it is far too cumbersome and heavy to be passed.

This is manifestly true, and also pretty obviously not true. It is such an oddly conservative thing for a nice Berkeley liberal like Chabon to conclude that I myself can conclude only that our observance of time’s passage mocks all convictions, political or otherwise, and sets us adrift from time and reason. Which puts me in mind of a very different show tune about life’s mysteries that’s always “reached down to the very core of me,” as Chabon wrote, even when I was 32—Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s “Lost in the Stars." A song that I don’t imagine Weill being asked to sing at anybody’s wedding. (Though I do remember requesting a romantic jazz instrumental version, evocative of slow-dancing drowsily in evening dress at 3 a.m., to the DJ we hired for that first wedding 30 years ago; our celebration didn’t run that late, and I’m pretty sure he never played it.)

The death this week of Michael Apted feels like the loss of a beloved family member who shed light from afar on these intimate mysteries concerning time and our experience of it as mortal beings. He will be missed, even by those of us who knew him only through his extraordinary films. Requiescat in pace.