Patton Oswalt is a good dad. His character in I Love My Dad is absolutely not. Oswalt plays Chuck, a lying loser of a father who, when he discovers his son has blocked him on social media, resorts to creating a profile based on a charming young woman he met at a diner. As “Becca,” he strikes up a conversation with his son. One thing leads to another, and all of a sudden Chuck is stuck in a faux-relationship that he can’t extricate himself from without risking his son cutting him out of his life for good.
Think that’s cringe-worthy? Consider this: The plot of I Love My Dad is based on writer/director/star James Morosini’s relationship with his real-life father. (One can only hope that Morosini didn’t fall prey to some of the more, er, “physical” stuff his character, Franklin, does with “Becca” in the movie.)
A twisting walk between actual reality and the reality so many of us create for ourselves on social media, I Love My Dad ponders the nature of connection, as well as how well we really know anyone online. WIRED talked to Oswalt about those very conundrums, as well as how he keeps his own daughter, 13-year-old Alice, safe amid the winding world of the web.
WIRED: How was your character, Chuck, explained to you?
Patton Oswalt: I remember getting the script, and I responded to it first cinematically because of how it was structured and how the story was told. It had this great quality that I love in movies, which is, “How in the fuck are they going to pull this off?” That’s the kind of stuff that gets me excited.
When I met James and we started talking on Zoom, he told me more background about his dad and his mom and all of their relationships. That’s when it just became, “I have to do this.”
The movie’s dialog is great, because it transitions really seamlessly from actual conversation into text-speak. It’s pretty charming.
They found a really clever way to build it and personify it through Becca and through Claudia Sulewski’s amazing performance. She’s playing Franklin’s ideal version of how he wants her to be responding and how he wants her to be talking, even though she’s just saying the stuff that I’m typing.
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I think a lot of us do that when we’re reading social media or texting. We imagine an inflection that’s not there.
It’s interesting to me, as a parent, to think about watching this movie now, versus if a 20-year-old me was watching it. I was just trying to think back to when I realized that my parents were just people who made choices, or even just people.
That can be a scary moment. I remember growing up, I had a couple of friends who had to go through the realization of, “Oh, my parents are still kind of teenagers in a lot of ways. They’re not the final authority on things, and they are still very, very fluid, and still going through changes.” You want that to be stable, so to have that taken away feels like a universal experience for me, at least.
Did working on this movie make you think about your own daughter, or how you talk to her about internet privacy, security, and what we share online?
That was something that we had been talking about already, because any parent can see how this is snowballing and going into very bad directions. Our daughter’s 13. She doesn’t have a phone and she doesn’t have a social media presence yet.
We want to stave that off as long as possible, because those years in the wilderness are where you get to form who you are. Because a lot of kids are being filmed or are broadcasting themselves from an early age, they’re letting the time that they’re living in form them, and then they’re getting stuck in that moment in time.
Everyone should have their years to make bad decisions with no one watching you or judging you, and with none of it being recorded permanently.
The definition of what it means to connect with someone has shifted so dramatically in the past 10 or so years that I wonder whether kids today even have the same definition of what that means as we might have.
Unfortunately I think with a lot of social media interaction there is that fantasy element, because you’re typing it out as a script in your mind. I mean, this also happens in face-to-face interactions. But especially online, you want it to go a certain way, you want a certain response, you want a certain inflection, and when it goes off the script that you formed in your head it can take you down some bad roads. Trying to make reality form into your fantasy or your ideal can end up being kind of dangerous.
How has that played out in your own relationship to social media? You’re not immune to its charms. You use it, and in some sense it’s part of your job.
Anyone that’s like, “I never read the comments”—uh, yes, you did. But it takes you a long, long time to start realizing, “Wait a minute, comments don’t really matter.” Just do your own thing and put it out there.
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I think you have to go through it though. It’s like when Ram Dass says, “How do you get rid of your ego? Well, you have to have an ego first in order to get rid of it.” Don’t try to go at it before the fact. Let yourself go down these holes, let yourself see how it messes up your sleep, how it messes up your work, and then have that real realization of, “Oh, wait a minute. This matters.”
I have a shortcut in that I see a lot of interaction online and a lot of comments on things, but then when you go out into the real world as a standup in theaters, you realize, “Oh, none of this stuff online affects anything. My trolls are not buying tickets to my shows. This isn’t affecting my career at all.”
That’s why, again, I’m going to try to keep our daughter offline as much as we can for as long as we can. That being said, I always get a little bit frustrated with any older generation telling a younger generation, “These are the mistakes I’ve made so you don’t have to make them.” I know that people have the purest of hearts when they say that, but you’re gonna have to let the other generations make their own mistakes. They have to experience for themselves. It sucks, but they have to do it.
But as a parent, that’s hard. That’s in the movie, too: How do you just let your kid tumble out into the world and not help them, even if you can tell they’re not going about things the right way?
Yeah, but what’s implied—it’s never said explicitly—but the shit that Franklin is going through is because of me. I’m the person that cut the ground out from beneath his feet way beforehand, though they don’t say specifically what I did. Clearly I fucked up in some major ways.
So what my character is doing—and I think a lot of people end up doing this—I don’t think initially he cares about Franklin. I think Chuck cares about appearing to be the good guy and people saying, “Your intentions are so good and you’re trying so hard.” It takes him a long time to actually go, “I'm only caring about Franklin now and not myself.” Unfortunately, this character is so fucked up he doesn’t do that until the very last minute.
I Love My Dad won the narrative feature competition at South by Southwest. What do you think people are connecting with in the movie? Do you think they’re seeing themselves at all?
I think a lot of people are seeing that you can hate social media, but you have to be very perceptive as to what its evils are, because it isn’t going away. You better find a way to make it human and make it healthy, because you can’t just go, “Oh well.”
That’s like saying, “We’re not using the telephone.” It’s too late. The telephone is part of our landscape. We’re using it, so how do we use it in a way that it’s not destroying people?
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It’s the same thing with a combustion engine. That’s why now suddenly all the companies are scrambling to make electric cars, because they waited until the last second, of course, because that’s what everyone does. They’re going to have to fix things or there ain’t going to be anything to fix.
You got a lot of acclaim back in 2009 for the movie Big Fan, and one could argue that there are some similarities between your character in that movie, “Paul from Staten Island,” and Chuck in I Love My Dad. They’re both guys who don’t fit into reality, in some respect, and they’re both sad in their own ways. Does this feel fair?
They’re both disappointed with reality for not making them effortlessly heroic and happy. They’re insulted that you’ve kind of got to work at happiness a little bit, and I don’t think they ever learn that faculty.
We all know those guys, and they really are just so sad, because in some sense it feels like they feel the ship has sailed for them, and yet they still have decades of their lives to live. You just wonder whether they’re ever going to figure it out.
I really hope they do.