Having observed most of his parents’ 54-year marriage, Doug Block believed it to be a good one. Mina, his feisty, energetic mother, and Mike, his calm, solid father, were inseparable: this was a union that worked, as those who knew them in the New York suburb of Port Washington would confirm. Then, unexpectedly, Mina died, and three months later Mike, aged 83, phoned Doug to announce that he was moving to Florida to live with Kitty who, 40 years earlier, had been his secretary.
Doug and his two older sisters were shocked. How long had Kitty been an intimate part of their father’s life, they wondered. Then Mike and Kitty married in a ceremony they punctuated with two 12-second kisses — observed with eye-popping fascination by their guests — and sold the family home. Doug, a documentary maker who had long been gathering footage of his family, returned to the house as it was being cleared and discovered that for 35 years his mother had kept a diary in which she recorded her unhappiness, her rage against her husband, her sexual fantasies about her therapist, a brief affair with a friend of her husband — and her suspicions about Kitty. The marriage, Mike told Doug on film, “was not loving, it was a functioning association”.
This is the story of 51 Birch Street, Doug Block’s documentary about his family which, since it had its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival last autumn, has been sold throughout the world. South Korea, New Zealand, Ecuador, South Africa and large chunks of the US and Europe have seen it, this week it is shown in the UK at the Britdoc festival, and More4 has bought it for television. A “top sales agent” has done a deal with US cinemas, Doug says, but if the film is rapidly becoming a phenomenon this is largely because the outline of the story is invariably greeted with open mouths. Of course, the assumption is that Mike and Kitty had an affair, or had at least sacrificed their love for the sake of their families. Their choice of Only You at their wedding did nothing to negate this impression.
By the time I meet Doug on the Hamptons veranda where he took Mike’s first call from Florida, I have watched 51 Birch Street and been gripped by its unravelling mysteries. The Blocks are neither famous nor remarkable but their story is powerful because it touches on universal themes that revolve around the flawed, complicated and often unresolved relationships that parents have with their children. How well do you know your parents? How well do you want to know them? Have they got any secrets? What right do you have to ask? And do you really want to know all the answers?
Doug was always close to Mina, a capable mother and confrontational woman who found her surburban responsibilities stifling. In contrast he barely knew his father, a mechanical engineer who never talked about his feelings but whose proficiency at fixing things made Doug feel “like an idiot”. Any attempt that Mike made to bond, Doug rejected.
“For many years I didn’t even know what he did. I also didn’t want to know, particularly. He was always trying to bring me down to the basement workshop and show me how to make things. It was like torture.” He laughs.
51 Birch Street is Doug’s third directorial credit. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, a law professor, and their 16-year-old daughter — they rent the Hamptons house for holidays — and jokes that he hopes I can see evidence of his genius. This is how he uses humour in the film: to say things that matter without being direct. Sometimes he responds to my questions as a son, though he admits that at times his interests as a film-maker take priority: “Whatever mystery is there you certainly try to accentuate. You take a little bit of artistic licence.” The tug between his desire to honour his family and his professional urges also complicated the editing process. “There were times when I wondered whether I would burn in Hell for doing this to my parents.”
The film would not have existed without the sea-change in Mike, who, once married to Kitty, began to talk openly to Doug. “It was when I asked him ‘Do you miss Mom?’ and he said no, it was just a functioning association — that was the moment that I thought ‘Whoa, something went on with my parents that they’d covered up’. Suddenly it (the film) almost seemed fated. I knew I was on to something primal to do with this ambivalence we all feel about knowing our parents.”
Why had he been so certain that his parents’ marriage was strong? They had credited therapy with turning their marriage around, he replies. “You hear what you want to hear with your family. God, who wants to know that stuff? So delving into the diaries wasn’t something I was eager to do. I felt a little numb. I don’t even know what I wanted to find. I was struck by how little I was mentioned.”
The diaries reveal what appears to be a lack of sexual chemistry between Mike and Mina. Her most intense feelings, Doug believes, were not for the unnamed man with whom she had an affair but for her therapist. “That was threatening to me, the idea that this might have been the love of her life, not my father, and that in some way it might have hurt the marriage by creating this ideal that my father could never live up to. I’m sure the therapist was very professional, and my mother credits him with saving her marriage. I’m not so sure.”
What seems to have happened is that Mike and Mina reached an agreement to stay together, and Mike gamely never acknowledged the unhappiness he felt. “That’s why my father’s behaviour was so strange when we first saw him around Kitty — that he could be so happy, so emotionally expansive,” Doug says. “Yes, I wanted to know about Kitty and were they really doing what I think they were doing, but it was also genuinely wanting to know him.”
In the film Mike denies that he and Kitty had an affair, though the editing leaves a sense of ambiguity around the denial. Doug tells me that he believes him: “In retrospect I felt sad for him that they hadn’t. I think there’s something admirable about his moving forward. There’s so much protection around families, so much left unsaid. The ordinary secrets that ordinary families have, when they are revealed, are not as threatening as you thought they would be. There is some pain involved but I have this amazing relationship with my father now that I didn’t have. My father says that he’s proud to have me as his son: God, what more do you want to hear? So, wow.
“Until you’ve got some sort of closure with your parents you get a little bit stuck in your own life. Getting to a point of forgiveness enables you to put your past in the past. It doesn’t have to be ‘I love you,’ it’s just ‘I appreciate what you did for us’. That’s important to say.”
