Pinocchio but actually mostly about Chris O’Connell , A film essay by Sean Maher

Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio starts with a child dying in a bombing by the Italian military. The narration states that they were just offloading ballast, a bomb specifically. It hits a church where in which Geppetto is working on a depiction of Christ nailed to the cross. How many times has this image been invoked through out history? I think now. His son dies in this bombing. His faith is ruined with this bombing. Not his faith in god, not his faith in people exactly, but his faith in the world. The world is not a consistent place. Things are there and then in a moment they can be gone. He becomes a recluse and drinks.

Later Geppetto builds a new son out of wood but that son was not what he expected. He is disobedient and easily excited. A whirlwind devil.

My father, Christopher O’Connell, was a drunk for a long time. I never took the chance to talk to him about his life before he died. He was already in his thirties when he met my mother and they got married. I don’t know how long he was a drunk. I know he lost his mother when he was young and that this had a heavy impact on his life. I’m not sure if it started there or after.

My mother has stories of getting drunk quite often. She partied when she was young but all she ended up addicted to was cigarettes and coffee. My mother has loved me since before birth. She wasn’t sure if she could give birth after my brothers were born. She has called me her miracle child. After me came Ashton. Ashton takes care of shit, I’m proud of her as her less responsible older brother. We have all struggled with our relation to substances at one time or another. She vapes nicotine and so does one of my brothers Derek. Ryan partied a lot. Drank a lot. I talked in my previous blog about my addiction to marijuana. My father’s addiction ruined his life for a time.

Me and my father never had the relationship we wanted. There was a time when I was quite young where I loved him dearly. He was my papa and he tried to be in our life. It was imperfect. My mother recalled recently a moment where I was sick. Burning up and he had me pressed against him. It was the summer and it was hot. I had a seizure. Or the moment he dropped me in a carriage down the stairs. I was fine but it was scary. My mother couldn’t handle any more. He could not watch me drunk. He couldn’t be my caretaker.

When I watched Pinocchio I couldn’t help but think of my dad and me. I was a child that was only entertained by the things I liked. Video games. And when he’d buy me things it was like feeding my beast. I was voracious. He couldn’t understand why they were so important to me. He was a mechanic and when he got sober he would have us live with him for a while at his apartment. My interest was never in physical mechanical objects but digital mechanics. He tried to do things for us like taking us fishing but I had no interest anymore. I was not the son you could take to the lake. I was not the son my father had known. I had been a whirlwind devil as a child willing to try anything, eat anything. I came back to him reserved. I am not Pinocchio. I am not that cheery but willful boy. I was interested in my own little world. One my dad had no access to. The formative years that had come and gone without him. I had grown up without one father. I had a string of them in my mother’s boyfriends. Each one had their own little tragedy wrapping up their relationship between them my mom, my sister, and me.

Christopher died later from cancer. I could have visited him more before he died. I didn’t. I didn’t come to the understanding between Pinocchio and Geppetto. We were separate and I was OK with that. I didn’t cry for him when he died. But I said goodbye. Goodbye to his dying form. No longer conscious. In his unconscious state, he reached for his oxygen tubes and tried pulling them out. Then after the nurse stopped him from doing that and a few hours having passed. He died.

I cried a lot during Pinocchio. It was a beautiful movie. A perfect story. I don’t have that perfect story to tell myself. I wanted more from my father. He wanted more from me. And we couldn’t give each other that. Either we didn’t have the time or the will. And now he’s gone. And I am left with his absence.