I was at my best friend’s house for a sleepover, watching the movie North, when I experienced one of my first memorable panic attacks. It was at the very end of the film, as the child hero North (Elijah Wood) is running toward the open arms of his parents (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and Jason Alexander) only to be shot in the back by a gun for hire. When I heard the shot, I remember screaming. I ran out of the room. My best friend, along with her mother, explained to me that nothing bad had happened. Elijah Wood hadn’t been shot. His parents were fine, and they were now reunited with their son: it was all a dream.
But it couldn’t have mattered less. There was the sound of a gunshot, and a quick cut. It didn’t matter if the cut revealed that North, asleep in his favorite department store chair, had dreamed up the entire movie. It didn’t matter because the movie had, in that penultimate scene, spelled out what it was about. And the thing it was about—a fear of being unloved despite being the perfect son, and the perfect person—was just about the saddest thing I could possibly imagine. And as I’ve discussed elsewhere, fear in childhood is sometimes a smokescreen for a kind of sadness so deep you don’t have the ability to fully comprehend it yet.
This was probably 1995—a year after North came out—and I was probably 7. I’d had panic attacks before, and I would have them again. But the deep identification I’d felt for the hero of North was probably, at that time, unmatched. I was used to seeing old movies and 90s romcoms. I wasn’t used to seeing another child go through something similar to myself. The identification was too great: I couldn’t not feel that in watching the story of North, I was watching the story of myself. That in witnessing North’s fate, I was facing my own.
Rob Reiner’s North is a perfect representative of one of my favorite genres: the kid-who-acts-like-an-adult narrative. There are many versions of this kind of story of varying quality in film and literature: notably Steven Millhauser’s Edwin Mullhouse, the Charlie Brown extended universe, the films Attack the Block, Stand By Me, and Brick. But North, while not being what I’d call a good movie, captures the spirit of what it’s like to be emotionally old in a young body, something that I think a lot of trans kids of my generation can understand due to our unique set of circumstances. We knew who we were, but weren’t believed: we were smart enough to comprehend the biological facts of sex, but we also knew that our nuanced understanding of gender was both valid and socially impossible. We knew that to say certain things out loud was to be called crazy: we also knew those things were the truth. Plus, we didn’t have Google. If we wanted to learn about ourselves, we had to wait for some shitty New York Times magazine article to surface, or to see the ad for Boys Don’t Cry in the paper resting on top of the laundry basket in the bathroom. We were perhaps the last generation to have general knowledge about queer identity gatekept from us by parents, adults, and the school system.
But we knew that in certain ways, we were smarter than our parents: we just didn’t understand quite how this had happened. After all, it’s contrary to just about every cultural message children are made privy to. Children are supposed to be, on average, less intelligent than adults. They are supposed to be less capable of understanding the world than adults are. But it isn’t true: and North, from beneath the cloak of satire, is a movie that attempts to address this falsehood.
The film concerns a comically prodigal son, North, whose parents are so wrapped up in their 90s bullshit that they can’t pay him the attention he deserves. In the film’s first scene, we see the way that North has found to gain his parents’ attention: by having a panic attack. It’s only when he falls on the floor claiming he can’t breathe that his parents stop talking about their jobs and start focusing on him. But it doesn’t last. Despite North being a model child and citizen—the MVP of his school’s baseball team, a straight-A student, a talented actor whose interpretation of Tevye brings a fellow classmate to tears—he is largely ignored by his comically busy parents, who are so trapped in the grind that their response, upon learning that a fed up North is filing for emancipation, is to fall into a dead faint for weeks.
After winning his case in court, North attempts to find new parents—ones who actually give a shit about him—before the 60-day summer deadline is up. If he’s not in the arms of either his old or new parents by Labor Day, Judge Alan Arkin explains, he will be remanded to the local orphanage. Kids everywhere are inspired by North’s move and use it to take the power back from their parents. He becomes a jet-setting citizen of the world, an inspiration, a meme and a movement: but he can’t find what he’s looking for.
If you took the song “Where is Love” from the musical Oliver!—another film about a too-adult boy trying to find the people who will care about him—and transformed it into a 90s comedy, you’d have North. And it’s delightful in its way, though tonally, despite the star-studded cast and screwball premise, you can’t ever quite outrun the sadness underneath. North is a familiar figure to us: his intelligence and ability clashes with his still-childlike understanding of the world, and of love itself. He reminds me of another satirical figure I find unbearably moving: the aviator André Jurieux in The Rules of the Game, a young man so confused about love that he genuinely can’t understand why his unprecedented feat of crossing the Atlantic in a plane in 1935 isn’t enough to make the woman he loves love him back. There’s a heaviness to a character like that, so full of promise but essentially at odds with the world. There’s also a real transness to it.
For us, there’s such an internal emphasis on not being who we are, but building out the kind of person we want to be. The culture we live in makes true self-knowledge impossible for a trans person. That’s its job: for years, the world tells us that it would rather we repress who we actually are in favor of being unobtrusive. Finding a path toward true self-understanding and acceptance takes decades. The path is long and unclear, and along the way we may encounter versions of love that feel right at first, only to reveal themselves as wrong or imperfect or impossibly conditional. North himself wonders, having finally found the perfect family, why he can’t bring himself to love them even though they make him feel everything he wants to feel: “happy, secure, and loved.”
It’s because North, being an adult disguised as a child, isn’t just looking for love: he’s looking for the kind of love that can’t be earned. At the same time, all he knows how to do is try and mold himself into a person deserving of love—whatever that is.
There’s a lot going on in North for me: it’s the kind of movie my Dad hated and wrote about in the 90s, that “forget ambition and focus on your kids” narrative plaguing so many Robin Williams movies from Hook to Mrs. Doubtfire to Jumanji. It’s the exact kind of movie my best friend’s mother would put on when I was visiting: whimsical, kind of dark, scary in a way that was only apparent to me. As a kid, I almost never wanted to sleep over someone else’s house. When I did, I had panic attacks. When I tried to explain it, no one seemed to understand. I was scared of my parents dying—that was how I put it, but it was more than that. It wasn’t just the death of my parents—specifically my mother—that horrified me. It was the feeling that by not being in the house, by not being physically present with my parents, I would somehow fail to protect them against the dark forces that were coming for them, that only made themselves known to me and no one else. My parents were the children in need of protection. They seemed so innocent to me: they didn’t see the ghosts I saw everywhere, and because of this, it was my job to keep watch over them.
This is a familiar type of story we hear as kids: who could possibly wipe from their mind the chilling anecdote that haunts the otherwise lighthearted story of “James and the Giant Peach?” James’ parents went to visit the city for one fucking weekend and managed to get trampled by an escaped rhino from the zoo. In another of my personal childhood favorites, the 1996 film Bogus, Haley Joel Osment’s loving mother is killed while sitting at a traffic light. In stories like “Oliver Twist” and “Anne of Green Gables,” we don’t know what happened to the parents of the kids in question. We only know that the reason we’re reading about them is that they have none.
For children, the idea of not having parents is both a dark fantasy and a deep fear: we crave the independence to do whatever we like, plan our days around eating candy and staying up into the small hours. But once we lose the structure family life provides, we realize just how thin the membrane is that separates our comfortable lives from the tragic ones of those less fortunate. We see that we are suspended safely in the air by not just our parents’ love, but their presence. Without it, we fall into a deep, endless, pit of neglect, defined by sadistic figures of authority (Ms. Trunchbull, Mr. Bumble, Count Olaf.) We fear the loss of our parents almost as deeply as we dream of our freedom from their constraints. And this tension, as I’m sure you know, doesn’t just disappear the minute you turn 18.
It took the return of panic attacks into my life this year to remember that for so many years my life was defined by them. They were regular, predictable. They came on when I was away from home, or in a place too far removed from society, or on vacation in an unfamiliar place, or in my bed listening to the sounds of my parents watching a movie in the room below. They were everywhere, and then, suddenly, they disappeared.
They lay dormant, mostly, throughout my adult life, until this year, when I’ve had to learn to manage them all over again.Sometimes I watch a movie like this, from my past, and I feel like I haven’t grown up at all. I feel like I never got over seeing North live out all my fears and fantasies at the same time. I feel like I’m not having different panic attacks as an adult: I’m just having continuations of the same panic attack I had in my old best friend’s old house, blocks away from my own.
Because we don’t really grow up, do we? We just get bigger.♦
