Shazam!

My life is simpler now that my father is dead, but I wish he could have seen the movie "SHAZAM!" that came out this spring.

It's an origin story that tells how the orphaned Billy Batson becomes the mighty superhero named ... well, that part's a problem, actually. The original superhero was called Captain Marvel; but after decades of lawsuits that name is now the property of a totally different character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So now it's not really clear what his name should be. But he changes into this hero by saying "Shazam!"

The thing is, Captain Marvel was my dad's favorite superhero, back when he was a kid in the 1940's. He always took it almost personally that the comic was driven out of circulation by legal action. So I think he would have been clad to see the character finally get a movie of his own.

There is another, more personal reason I think it would have resonated with him. Please pause while I give the obligatory ...

SPOILER ALERT! The rest of this post gives away critical details of the movie's plot.

My dad was adopted. And while he never made any efforts to find his birth family, he fantasized about them endlessly and very emotionally. So I think it would have struck him hard when, in this version of the story, we find that Billy Batson was not, in fact orphaned. He was abandoned by a teenaged single mom who was totally unprepared to care for him. In the movie's third act he finally meets her, and all the hopes he has nurtured for a tender reunion are smashed. She explains that she couldn't take care of him then, and she doesn't really want him in her life now. Her life now is hard enough, thank you very much, and adding an unexpected teenaged son would just complicate it in bad ways.

And how would my dad have reacted to this? He was pretty sure that his own birth mother was an unmarried teenager -- that's why she gave him up for adoption, right? And while he imagined what it would be like to meet up with her later, ... what if her reaction had been like Billy's mother's? What if she really didn't want to see him, because it would just be too hard?

I think he would still have enjoyed the movie, though doubtless he would have had a long list of things that they got "wrong" afterwards. But I can also imagine him sitting in the theater sobbing silently to himself.

And I'm sorry he didn't have the chance.