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Monday, July 28, 2008

Surfwise

posted by on July 28 at 15:25 PM

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Surfwise, a documentary by the director who made Hype!, didn’t get much play in Seattle—just a week in the theaters, nobody went nuts for it—but it comes out on DVD this week and you should watch it, preferably after you’ve been swimming. It’s all about a man, his brood, surfing, patriarchal tyranny, health nuttiness, and so on:

Sometime in the mid-1950s, Dorian Paskowitz, MD, had a revelation. He was at the peak of his career (Stanford graduate, president of the American Medical Association in Hawaii, asked to run for governor) but felt horrible about himself and his life. He just wanted to go surfing.

So he quit the rich life, took a pilgrimage to Israel, had sex with women all over the world (he believed sexual inadequacy was central to his misery), married a California girl, sired eight sons and one daughter, and hauled them all over the world in a 24-foot trailer. They surfed every day, didn’t go to school, and occasionally almost died: Moses, son number five, nearly perished from a torn colon when a surfboard fin jammed itself up his ass off a remote beach in Mexico, several hours from the nearest hospital.

Did the Paskowitz children grow up emancipated or abused? It’s hard to say and Surfwise, by documentary filmmaker Doug Pray (Scratch, Hype!), toys with the question. Doc Paskowitz was clearly an eccentric and a tyrant. He was strict with his kids’ diet and exercise, pitted them against each other, and had noisy sex in the trailer each night while the children shoved their fingers in their ears and tried to think about other things.

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But, as adults, the Paskowitz children aren’t much different than their peers. One is a suburban mom. One is a graphic designer. One wants to be in the movie business. One is a cook. One runs a surf camp. One likes to paddle into the ocean, drop a hook, and let sharks and other gigantic fish pull him around. (Let’s take that as evidence of emancipation.) A few have been in shitty metal bands. (Let’s take that as evidence of abuse.) Some were estranged but, with the help of the filmmakers, have been reunited. You know, typical family stuff.

Surfwise doesn’t require that you care about surfing. Pray’s documentary—cobbled together from interviews, old TV footage, and home movies—is a case study of an eccentric American adventurer who treated recreation as necessity and the beach as his frontier.

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The trailer:

RSS icon Comments

1

Yeah, interesting story. It's a family story. You don't need to be a surfer, which I'm not. The hook is how they all grew up in that little RV. The rest is how all the growing up and growing old plays out in a big family. I liked it.

Posted by Lloyd Clydesdale | July 28, 2008 3:39 PM
2

Reminds me of when we lived in a small cabin, all six of us, north of Kaslo BC.

We may have been poor then, but I remember it as a lot of fun, and enjoyed floating on logs across Kootenay Lake (which is a few miles across, FWIW) by ourselves.

Posted by Will in Seattle | July 28, 2008 4:31 PM
3

Colon injuries or not...sounds like a better education than most get in the public school systems..or being home schooled in the traditional sense.

Haven't seen it but will check it out.

Posted by Julie Russell | July 28, 2008 4:46 PM
4

Sounds interesting. I love stories of eccentric families. It's now at the top of my netflix list.

Posted by ahava | July 28, 2008 4:57 PM

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