Bill & Ted Face the Music and the Beauty of Parental Relationships
**Spoilers for Bill & Ted Face the Music lie within.**
Bill & Ted Face the Music is a beautiful bookend to the saga. Bringing us all some much needed joy in the midst of everything happening, the movie is pretty much exactly what you’d expect (and what you’d want) out of another movie following the journey of Bill S. Preston Esquire and Ted “Theodore” Logan.
But what Face the Music does that really hits home is show two fathers who just accept their daughters without question. When we first met Bill and Ted in Excellent Adventure, their fathers wanted them to be something they weren’t. Ted’s father was threatening to send him to military school, and both teens were forced into focusing on their history exam, or else the world wouldn’t hear their music.
Luckily, they passed and went on a Bogus Journey until they, eventually, learned how to play guitar and came back to defeat Chuck De Nomolos and become the Wyld Stallyns we knew they’d be. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough, so there’s more work to do to save the world, but when we meet them in the future, they’re haven’t become two normal dads who criticize their kids and what they want to do.
Instead, both Bill and Ted look to Billie and Thea and their love of music as something wonderful. Both their daughters love to put together songs and sounds they like, and that eventually comes to work in their favor, as the “Preston and Logan” song that saves the world is one of their creations.
But they were able to do it because no one told them to be something other than who they are. In the beginning of the movie, Ted’s dad makes a comment about their daughters still being 24 and living at home, and neither Bill nor Ted se a problem with it. They want them to be happy, and that’s it.
And that, in itself, is a beautiful lesson because so often, kids are forced into whatever boxes their parents want them to fit into without really understanding that kids should be able to be whatever kind of person they aspire to. Seeing both Bill and Ted understand that and encourage their kids without thinking anything of it? It’s beautiful.
That leads me to the final moments of the film. Billie and Thea are on the “excellent adventure” aspect of the movie. They’re going back through time, trying to build the band to help their dads save the universe, and they never stop and once think that it is somehow going to be them. It’s such a Bill and Ted move because even when they’re told they’re going to save the universe, they just say “whoa” and accept it without question.
So, when Bill and Ted realize that the Preston and Logan who will save everyone is their daughters? They all pretty much just accept and help each other, resulting in a song that truly does make us all feel so much happier.
Father-daughter relationships onscreen are a mixed bag, to be quite honest. They normally exist to benefit the male character, and rarely do we see something like this, so thank you, Bill & Ted Face the Music, for teaching us the value of being excellent to each other.
(image: Orion Pictures)
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