Directed by Doug Pray
Review, Laura Hawbaker
A white-collared office employee awakens everyday to the blathering beep of his alarm clock and drags himself to work. He guzzles his coffee the way his SUV guzzles gas. He is tethered to a nagging wife, bratty children, a mortgage, bills. He might gaze at his pristine green lawn and white picket fence and yearn in his poor, battered heart to leave it all. To toss all that responsibility to the wind, discard everything that anchors him, and set sail to freedom.
This faceless corporate drone might examine the life choices of Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz with wide-eyed wonder. Awe. Respect. Doc Paskowitz left a high-paying medical gig, a powerful position as the President of the Medical Association of Hawaii and the prospect of becoming governor. Left it all to become a bohemian beach bum, surfing the country’s waves and living a holistic life with his family, completely off-the-grid. The Paskowitzs have been labeled the “first family of surfing,” and the Doc himself called a “prophet,” a new-age guru, a man of vision.
Or, maybe, Doc Paskowitz is just a run of the mill nutcase.
Doug Pray, who has proven his affinity for American countercultures in his previous films “Red Diaper Baby” (graffiti artists), “Infamy” (grunge music), and “Hype!” (DJs), turns his cinematic lens to surfers in this latest project, “Surfwise.” Pray found documentary gold in the Paskowitz family and the man at the helm, Doc Dorian. The Doc, now in his 80s but still fit as an ox, was one of surfing’s first American advocates and is a holistic health extremist. He believes the only way to live life is to live it as nature intended: unattached to the physical world, outside the political system and free from the foibles of human society.
The Doc had nine children with his Mexican-Indian, opera singing third wife, Juliette. Throughout the sixties and seventies, Juliette and the Doc traveled the country in a beat-up RV, popping out babies and surfing. That was it. No mortgage. No bills. No material possessions. No school. Just an endless stretch of road and sea. “I wasn’t an avant-guard intellectual radical,” says the Doc. “I just wanted my kids around me, surfing with me, and school be damned.”
It’s like something out of a hippie dream, and for the first half of the film, Pray gleefully indulges the fantasy of the idea. Using photomontages and archived footage accompanied by a whimsical soundtrack, Pray paints a pristine picture of beach life. The nine children (brothers David, Jonathan, Abraham, Israel, Moses, Adam, Salvador and Joshua, and the only sister, Navah) slept together like a huddle of puppies on the floor and in the bunks of the 20-foot RV, then were set loose every morning to surf the waves. Half naked, half-fed, and half-wild, “we were like monkeys in a little monkey cage,” recalls Navah.
It is the second half of the film, when the dream is undone by the problematic reality of modern life that “Surfwise” begins to finally delve into some of the wisdom alluded to in the title. The children, having grown up and set out into the world, find out modern society wants little to do with anyone lacking even a preliminary education. “My dad trained me to be one of three things: a surfer, a bum, or a rock star,” admits Adam, who went on to do the latter as the lead singer of the 90s rock band, The Flys.
There commenced a brief boom when, as Navah describes it, the brothers went crazy with something akin to gold fever. All the materialism the Paskowitzs had been denied in their childhood reared its ugly head full force: surfing championships, endorsement deals, clothing lines, and living a vice-ridden life, followed by the inevitable crash and burn. The family fell apart and certain brothers were ostracized, such as David, the eldest, who has lived in estrangement from the Paskowitzs for the last ten years.
Adam complains about playing over 500 rock gigs in seedy venues. “You always end up in a room with a lot of stickers. Sometimes, I wish I’d been a doctor like my dad, but [with me] not going to school…” he drifts off, his shoulders hunched and face haggard. Another brother says he missed many opportunities for achievement because “I’m a Paskowitz. I’m not smart enough in the ways of the wicked.”
“My kids didn’t find out for themselves the difference between education and knowledge,” says the Stanford-educated Doc, clearly bristled when Pray questions his decision to keep the Paskowitz children out of school. “Lots of people go to college. Why don’t you film them? Why do you care about a bunch of ignoramuses and come to film us?”
Therein lies one of the most intriguing points of the entire film. Despite and because of their extremist, alternative lifestyle, the Paskowitz family attained an aura of legend, a place in subculture history. This bohemian story of wild, rabid surf children crammed into a beach-blasted RV is so interesting to the humdrum citizens of average America, that is spawned its own documentary.
