Last night
3Sat aired the documentary film Beyond this Place by Kaleo LaBelle, a son’s
attempt to come to terms with his dysfunctional relationship with his father, a
charismatic enigma from the Sixties who has been stoned for 40 years. Some men suffer because their fathers are
incapable of saying the words “I love you”.
Kaleo suffers in spite of the fact that his father repeatedly writes that he
loves him, because the words are empty. The father never actively tried to involve
the son in his life and never supported his family, choosing instead the path
of self-realization, first in a commune in Hawaii, and later, living in a makeshift
shelter behind his mother’s house in Portland, Oregon, a house that he
inherited and rented out to support his major passions in life: drugs and
bicycle riding. The father was born Gordon La Belle. He renamed himself Cloud Rock. If you believe his friends, he was a hippie
before the term came into use. He
meditated in volcano tubes, fasted, took psychedelic drugs, and had open
relationships with women in the commune.
He fled to avoid service in Vietnam.
Cloud Rock, now 67, has two sons from two different women. Kaleo's half-brother, Starbuck, whom Kaleo stumbles across on a trip to Maui, looks a lot like Cloud and Kaleo, but his mind has been destroyed by [fill in the blank: drugs from the father’s commune or, if you
prefer to believe the father, a fever caught in Asia]. Starbuck wanders around Maui in a daze and sleeps in a cemetery with nothing to
his name but the clothes on his back. Cloud
Rock says that Starbuck is “fucked up” and that he never wanted him and that he is more like his mother, not a true La Belle. What a bummer. Watching Starbuck's blank gaze, I was reminded of the dysfunctional brothers in the classic documentary, R. Crumb. Both films deal with the destructive power of the father. Both films are evidence of the creative power of pain experienced.
Here we
are at the film’s central theme: responsibility. Father Cloud no more acknowledges
responsibility for how Starbuck turned out than he does for the shattered
relationship with Kaleo, whose birth name, picked by Cloud, was
Ganja. Cloud suggests a bike tour with
Kaleo across the Northwest, and Kaleo sees this as a means of taking a close look at his father and,
yes, confronting him in a gentle way with his criticisms. How do you forgive a father who refuses to
ask for forgiveness? How do you love a
father who dismisses his responsibility to you with the claim that children pick their
parents – it’s karma? But for his
children and, presumably, his relationships with women, never explored in the
film, it would be hard to find anything reprehensible about Cloud Rock. Even
at 67 he seems much younger than his age -- vital and charismatic. Left to his own, he would surround you with
good vibes all day long. You might grow
tired, or not feel up to his challenge, but how could you be offended? Cloud’s
daily use of drugs, however, makes him seem less heroic. Is he really pursuing spiritual enlightenment
with his multiple hash pipes a day plus homemade mushroom chocolate, or is he
anesthetizing himself? For him, drugs are a religion. The film does not
have an opinion, but I don't think it is a coincidence that Kaleo does not do drugs. Cloud's decision to use the income from his inherited house solely for his own purposes and to not support his two sons, well, that might be typical for prior generations, but it certainly does not pass muster with our modern sensibilities. More demanding mothers might have put a major crimp in his lifestyle.
Kaleo
interviews another victim of the communes, a woman about his age who now lives in a
large suburban home with a young daughter.
When the woman was three, she accidentally ate a bowl of LSD-laced sugar left out at the commune where she lived
and spent three days coming down. As one
of Cloud’s friends points out, some communes were less careful than others about
keeping the drug consumption out of sight of the children. This woman felt abandoned by her parents and
swore to do a better job as a parent and to always make her daughter her top
priority. The young daughter jokingly
starts referring to her mother as a neighbor, and the mother laughs at being
abandoned again. This interview is
documentary evidence of what Joan Didion wrote about many years ago in her
essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a severe take-down of the hippie communes
in San Francisco and their dissembling failure to look self-critically at themselves. In
particular, Didion criticized their abuse of language to hide what they were
doing and their neglect of children. Cloud Rock fits well into this paradigm. His (smoke)clouds of spiritual invocation
ring hollow in the viewer’s ears. It is
hard writing these words, because I, too, was influenced by the beatniks and
the hippies, and I found their rejection of materialism compelling.
An
additional treat of this simple documentary film is the scenery of the Pacific
Northwest from a cycler’s perspective.
Mount St. Helens serves as a symbol for the destruction and potential rebirth of
Kaleo's and Cloud Rock’s relationship.
At the end of the film they stand above Spirit Lake for a final portrait. New growth appears all around. In spite of himself, Kaleo grudgingly admits to loving his
father. Perhaps the love is mutual. Perhaps it will nurture Kaleo. Perhaps not.
Cloud Rock’s grin is vacuous. Starbuck wanders alone through Maui. This is not a happy ending. Kaleo LaBelle created a powerful documentary film on a tight budget, and I was still thinking about it when I woke up this morning. The music is quite good, too. Fathers! How appropriate that yesterday was father's day in Germany.
