My father was not impressed with the ending of Willow (1988), my pick for movie night with the kids. Up until the finale, the movie had been enjoyable enough, although it’s not a very good movie.
“I thought we might be watching My Fair Lady (1964) or The King and I (1956). You know, classic family entertainment.”
Hadn’t he and my mother watched The Wire? I thought, although I didn’t say so. Nor did I remind him of some of the movies he’d taken me to as a kid of around ten years old: Blade Runner (1982), Excalibur (1981), and The Beastmaster (1982). Those three films had a big effect on me. They’re all violent, but of the three it’d be hard to top the carnage and mayhem of Excalibur. I remember an image from a Mad magazine parody of that movie that featured two men goring each other, and squiggly intestines dangling off the ends of the javelins.
The finale of Willow also features a dramatic impaling, when the character Madmartigan, played by Val Kilmer, hoists his arch enemy onto a large protruding spike. With an emphatic push by Madmartigan, complete with sound effect, the enemy’s torso slides down and the spike protrudes through his backside, to let us know he’s finished.
“Ugghhh!” we collectively gasped and looked away. My younger son buried his face into my shoulder, horrified.
But isn’t that the intended effect? The horror, the recoiling, the gasps, the hiding of eyes, the little thrills of dramatic, violent finales. I doubt either of my kids will soon forget seeing that movie, just like that trifecta from the early eighties sticks with me. In the moment, though, I felt badly about showing everyone that. What was I thinking? I should have shown My Fair Lady.
“I think you just have to look at the production value,” my mother offered. “I’ve never seen anything like that. It was quite well made.”
She was being truthful. She had enjoyed it, as we all had at times. My father had commented on the physical comedic acting of Kilmer, that it reminded him of the acting of Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954), yet another movie he took me to see as a kid. You may be wondering, Did we ever go to see age-appropriate movies? The answer is no. My mother and my grandmother took me to some of those, but with me and dad, it was always adult fare. Only years later did I realize that those movies weren’t for kids. Those experiences were among my most formative and left an indelible mark. Would they have been the same if we’d been seeing the latest Disney movie instead? It’s hard to believe they would have. The shocking content had something to do with the strong impression.
Such was the life with a father who could recall the names of actors from Kurosawa films, decades after seeing them. He may have seen Seven Samurai as a kid himself. I’m not sure. But that movie provided an invaluable touchstone for us, as he showed me how the plot got recycled in other films over the years, such as in The Magnificent Seven (1960), and in another one we saw together in the theater, Battle Beyond the Stars (1980).
One thing for certain, though, is that I would never show my kids anything like those movies. I’ve gone out of my way to avoid screening violent or profanity-laced content for them, to the point that now they’ve likely encountered much more violent and profane content on their own.
“They’ve watched all the Harry Potter movies, haven’t they?” my partner had pointed out while I was debating what to show. She had liked Willow when she was younger, but even she had forgotten about some of the plot points, such as that the entire thing revolves around a baby that an evil queen wants to sacrifice, and nearly does, or that part of her attempt to do so involves using her magic to turn everyone into pigs. That scene reminded me of the donkey scene from Pinocchio (1940) which also terrified me as a kid.
My kids’ ages and my preferences in movies have led to some difficulty in picking what to screen. So much of what I’d like to show, what made an impact on me, I know is inappropriate. The rest of it, I just don’t remember the awful parts, until I see them again. I knew they were into fantasy, so I was attempting to meet them where they are. But the truth was that I never really liked fantasy movies that much. I couldn’t really remember the difference between Willow and Legend (1985) or even Labyrinth (1986).
There I was outside of my wheelhouse trying to pick a movie. I often turn to the website Common Sense Media, which rates and reviews movies with kids in mind, for help in these situations. Their review of Willow noted that there are sword battles and killing, but that there is no blood, which in hindsight was a key selling point for me. I thought of the killing in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), another formative film that I’ve written about before. The sword and arrow deaths in that movie are quick and bloodless. Prince John’s men get stabbed or shot, and fall. That’s it. No “gore” to speak of, yet the battle scenes are riveting.
That was what I had in mind with my pick, and in fact, some of the battle scenes in Willow are strikingly similar to scenes from Robin Hood, particularly one that takes place on castle steps. I mentioned this to my father while we were watching, and he acknowledged the similarity. That was when things were still going pretty good, though, before the evil queen got ready to stab a baby on an altar.
Of course we all know that there are multiple ways to be disturbed by a film, and thus various ways to gauge what content is appropriate for kids and what isn’t. There’s a kind of hierarchy: Fights and battles in which people are shot, stabbed, and killed. Then there are jump scares, killers hunting for victims, the thrills of hiding, running, being chased. Then there’s extreme gore, blood splattering, guts spilling, headshots with high-powered guns and the subsequent images of exploded skulls. Then there’s torture, violence against a restrained or confined victim. Then there’s kids being tortured or killed, or potentially killed, in any of the above-mentioned ways. Then there’s babies getting that treatment, such as in Willow. Then there’s dystopian plots in which teenagers are compelled to hunt each other to the death, with no way out. Then, at the far end, for my kids at least, there’s any scene in which an animal is harmed, mistreated, or potentially has as much as one hair, feather, scale, or antenna disturbed.
My kids would rather watch the second episode of Breaking Bad, where a half-dissolved torso crashes through a ceiling and splats onto the floor, a hundred times before having to watch one minute of John Turturro going to town on those penguins in Five Corners (1987), while Jodi Foster looks on in horror. Admittedly, that one is truly one of the most disturbing scenes I’ve ever seen depicted on film, but that Breaking Bad stuff is no picnic, either. I find myself covering my eyes much more often these days. As the extremity and frequency of violence in our entertainment has increased, my tolerance level for it has gone the other way.
My point is, it’s not cut and dry what’s appropriate and what isn’t, since what’s disturbing and what isn’t shifts and changes even within ourselves over time. What’s true is that being horrified is an essential part of watching and loving movies, and while I’ll continue to veto The Hunger Games (2012) for a nine-year-old, I also know that dark thrills and glimpses behind the curtain of our twisted psyches are part of the experience.
“It wasn’t that bad,” the older kid said after it was over, as my parents were making their exit and I was apologizing for the pick. “You’re more freaked out about it than anyone.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s fine, no biggie. I think I meant to pick Labyrinth. That’s the one with the Muppets, right? Maybe I’ll run it back with that next time.”
“No! You don’t get a do-over for that pick, dad,” the older informed me.
“Fine,” I said. “But just wait. I got something even better for you next time. Just you wait and see.”
“This isn’t animation! This isn’t animation! This isn’t animation!”
The younger screamed out his displeasure with the opening scenes of The Phantom Tollbooth (1970). It’s a scene of Milo, played by Butch Patrick, post-Munsters but still a kid, fancifully whiling his time away under some puffy clouds, a cheese-ridden theme song playing along that describes his fancy-free mindset.
What’s to become of Milo? He might rise up if he only tries, see how life could be!
The younger could’ve objected to any number of qualities commonly found in kids’ movies from the sixties and seventies — the TV sitcom star, the low budget, the soundtrack that sounded like a very low-rent version of The Association’s “Windy.”
But it was the live-action setup that was really bugging the kid. He was promised an animated feature, and, damnit, if he were going to be forced to endure one of his dad’s old-man picks from the Stone Age that he said was at least going to be animated, then where the heck was the animation??
I’d never seen this movie, but I knew that it would be an easier sell for the older because he had read the book in fifth grade and was into it. Their class had made a unit of it and had done writing projects in the style of it, sort of fan-fiction versions, with alternate characters and such. The story is comprised of wordplay and puns, with places such as The Doldrums and the Point-of-View, characters such Tock the “watch” dog (as in tick-tock), and Rhyme and Reason, two princesses who are needed to resolve the conflict between words and numbers taking place in the cities of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis. The character he had created and integrated into the plot was called Quitty McQuitter.
Where did it start with me and cartoons? At the very beginning, is where, wired straight into my earliest memories, waking up early to catch Bugs, Popeye, Speed Racer, Felix the Cat, most of it much older than I even knew, or cared, on weekends, or even before school, solo with a bowl of cereal, cold and darkness outside.
Selling Tollbooth had worked like a charm with the older. The younger was a tougher customer.
“That is so old!!” he exclaimed as Milo talks on a phone that was a big box plugged into the wall.
Milo receives a mysterious package after school one day, after complaining to his friend on the phone about being bored. In a stop-action sequence, a tollbooth pops up and a letter invites Milo to drive through in a little car. When he does, he becomes animated! He backs up and goes through again a few times, as the director, Chuck Jones (his only feature!) has fun with split-screen technology and creates an effect of Milo being animated on one side of the tollbooth and live on the other.
When I was a kid, feature-length animation got really interesting, and dark. Watership Down (1978) freaked me out good, and Rikki Tikki Tavi (1975) and The Hobbit (1977) opened up whole worlds. It kept going. Rites of American high school brought the wonders of The Wall (1982), Heavy Metal (1981), and the transgressive pleasures of Ralph Bakshi. Deep dives into feature animation’s past revealed insanity such as Fantastic Planet (1973).
Milo and company come across a series of strange characters, each one receiving its own trippy sequence with song. In the one dealing with Chroma, who’s in charge of regulating time and orchestrating sunrises and sunsets, the animation turns at one point to a dripping-clocks motif.
“Salvador Dali!” The older exclaims, and I’m impressed with his knowledge.
When I ask how he learned about Dali, he says that his class did mini-unit on him.
“It gave me nightmares.”
This movie rips off several famous plots at once, errrr, I mean, has several clear, notable influences. It’s basically a mash-up of The Wizard of Oz, Lord of the Rings, and Alice in Wonderland. Done in the signature animation style of Looney Toons.
“What do you think Miyazaki would say about this movie?” I asked my partner, irritatingly continuing stupid themes from past movie nights.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Well, I don’t think he would have too high an opinion of it.”
“Not his style,” she said.
Caveat: I was sure Miyazaki is a warm and wonderful man, and he’s obviously a creative genius. It just cracked me up when people get angered by Disney. Not that they weren’t 100% correct, but there was something about getting mad about being beaten over the head with joy and happiness that really spoke to the misanthrope deep inside me. Yes, shove that magic kingdom up your magic ass!!
Despite what Miyazaki or any of us might have thought about this movie, and cartoons in general, it hit undeniably on certain kid level. The younger, settled down now after the live-action thing, cracked up when the Spelling Bee keeps stinging people in the butt.
Milo and co. encounter the Dodecahedron, a character with twelve faces that express twelve different emotions, who’s voiced in the film by Mel Blanc. My kids’ faces lit up.
“Sounds like Bugs Bunny!”
They’d only encountered Bugs tangentially, mainly through the Space Jam movies. But for me, the voice and the animation style took me back right away.
There was a warm, fuzzy place in the family den of my heart for Bugs Bunny, Looney Tunes, and The Bugs Bunny – Road Runner Show (“Overture/ hit the lights / this it it / hit the heights.” Jerry sings the whole theme song in an episode of Seinfeld). A handful episodes in particular transported me directly back — “One Froggy Day,” the Wagner opera one with “Kill the Wabbit,” Marvin the Martian v. Daffy Duck. Absolute gems, all of them, even with all the violence and problematic depictions.
For a moment I was there. Then the moment ended.
Milo and co. are tasked with a riddle involving the Fibonacci Sequence. There’s a Grotesque Exaggeration and an Overbearing Know-it-all. Milo fires the word “humility” at him.
The younger got nervous and hid his face when Milo begins causing mischief, messing with the sunrise to get Chroma to wake up. The younger was, as always, so tuned into on-screen characters’ emotions.
Sweet Rhyme and Pure Reason finally arrive and set the world straight so that Milo can make it back home. Turned out they had sent for him in particular to rescue them because they needed someone who was bored, but also very curious.
Rhyme and reason reign once more!
“It wasn’t that terrible for something that old” the older admitted.
A lot of those old cartoons reminded me of my father, for one reason or another, his love of opera, for instance. My limited knowledge of opera came straight from those cartoons, through him, as we watched them together and he told me the references. Or the way he himself loved “One Froggy Day.” (The pathos, he would note, of the poor, mustachioed fellow who discovers the signing frog who won’t sing for anyone but him. So there it was, my origin story for the word “pathos” and its meaning.)
Now there I was, showing my kids some Chuck Jones that I’d never seen, wondering what they will remember of it, what they’ll think of it down the line. Daddy liked old shit, ancient shit, liked it before he was even born, they might say. The older had just recently gained a sense of American decades, the ones before he was born, trying to situate me and my parents in there, figuring out what the word “Boomer” actually referred to. He won’t love old shit quite the way I did, that much was for certain, but it wouldn’t be nil, either. The 20th century would live on, through them, somehow, whether they liked it or not.
After the feature ended an ad came on for another film,1949’s A Challenge to Lassie, and the kids recoiled in horror.
When Netflix announced that it would be shuttering its DVD-mailing business as of September, I was bummed but not surprised. I’d wondered for a few years how the thing even still existed, since no one I knew besides myself subscribed to it, and anyone who visited my house and saw one of the red envelopes sitting near the TV had the same reaction: laughter.
“Haven’t seen one of those in years!”
“Did not know they still did that. What a throwback!”
Etcetera.
I thought about my bookend experiences with the service, how when my roommate first showed me one in 2003, I’d laughed as well.
“You’re going to wait days for that thing to come in the mail?” I’d asked him incredulously. “Why don’t you just walk down the street and rent it?”
At the time, we lived on Haight Street, near Into Video, an exceptional video rental store. I couldn’t see how a mail-based service could ever compete. I didn’t understand that, as great as Into Video was, it was never going to take profits from rentals and put them towards producing their own shows, let alone movies as well, that would come to dominate the entertainment industry. I didn’t see how Netflix could stay in business.
Fast forward twenty years and I was having the exact same thought, how can this DVD-rental service possibly stay in business? but for completely different reasons. No one but nerds and old people seemed to have any interest whatsoever in renting scratched-up discs through the mail.
I didn’t bemoan the loss, though. I’d been around long enough to see media formats come and go, and come back. I’d never ditched my records for CDs, even though I bought plenty of CDs, and I never ditched my CDs for streaming. I was one of those. (Shocker! I know.) I can’t say I knew exactly what would happen, but let’s just say that when I see vinyl reissues of Led Zeppelin II selling for $44.99, I don’t think about all the years I had to drag my collection around the country as I moved from city to city. I think that I’m glad I held onto my copy, with its hot-pink “Used $3.00” sticker.
What I did do when I saw the news about DVD.com, was take a look at my queue. Some time in the early teens, I had put a bunch of titles on it from various lists, some compiled by the American Film Institute, another from collected essays of Roger Ebert, and a few others. Then over the next 10 years I’d proceeded to watch hardly any of them, instead moving up current titles that I actually wanted to see, instead of film-class stuff that I felt like I had to.
When the news hit, I decided to start letting the list flow, after some slight re-ordering. The results have been absolutely terrific, and now I am bemoaning! Turns out I’m just a film-class nerd after all. (Another shocker!)
One other thing happened. I was watching Vertigo (1958) on TCM when the host Alicia Malone came on after with some interesting news. Vertigo recently had been topped in the highly regarded Sight and Sound critics poll as the greatest film of all time, a spot it had held for a decade or so after it had replaced Citizen Kane (1941). The film that took top spot was blah-blah-blah. At least that was what it sounded like when Malone said it, since it was a title I’d never heard and thus did not expect to hear.
Wait, what did she say?
I hit rewind, or whatever we call that function now that nothing is being wound and we’re talking about doing it to live TV, and turned up the volume.
Do what now? There was a movie called Jeanne Dielman (1975) and it’s better than Vertigo? Better than Citizen Kane? Well, I thought, ain’t that some shit.
I popped that one onto the queue and to the top. The DVD.com news actually broke while I had Jeanne Dielman “At Home.” But since it is the greatest film of all time, even though it isn’t even on any of the lists I’d used, I’ve included it in this little round-up.
The round-up? Right, the point of this post. Following is my ranking of four titles from the lists, plus the one other, that I’ve watched since this news came down, ranked worst to first. If there are any other nerds out there doing something similar, maybe this little list can help you use your remaining time wisely. The rest of you, we both know that you’re never going to watch any of these, so just read the damn list and enjoy it.
Number Five – Solaris (1972)
I needed some way to decide what to push to the top, so I tried choosing titles from the year I was born, part of my ongoing fascination with the times into which I entered. (Sidenote: The film that got me closest to understanding the cultural moment I was born into was Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War (2017), an absolutely amazing series.)
Solaris is a Russian-made, moody, enigmatic, very slowly paced, and somewhat dated sci-fi drama. Many of you are probably familiar with the George Clooney remake from 2002, but I’m guessing few have watched the original. For good reason. It’s a tough watch. The scenes are long and still. Some of the plot points are very subtle and hard to follow. The effects and set designs are old and Russian, and there are some unintended comical moments that come out of this. What does make the movie cool is its intriguing plot about a mysterious place in deep space where human thoughts and desires are made real, or real-seeming, which presents a host of philosophical, ethical, and practical questions both to the characters and to viewers.
The end scene is quite memorable, a sweeping pull-back that illustrates the psychic damage done to one character once he’s returned to earth. And I will say that I was getting quite a lot from the commentary on the re-watch, but then I fell asleep and in the morning decided just to pull the envelope adhesive strip on that one and send it back.
Number Four – MonOncle (1958)
This is a well-made and enjoyable French satire, not exactly in the French New Wave mode that we associate with French films of this era, but still an edgy and forward-looking comment on modern life. The director, Jacques Tati, stars as the old-fashioned uncle, who grows close with his young nephew despite not understanding the modern, suburban world of the boy’s parents.
The set designs are terrific. Fans of midcentury modern style will love the suburban house. Even the fountain feature that becomes a running gag about impracticality is a pretty cool fountain. There’s some solid visual comedy here and some nice moments of bonding between the boy and his uncle. There was no commentary on this disc, which I really could have used, and which helped land it in the fourth slot.
Number Three – The Bicycle Thief (1948)
This Italian film-class staple is excellent, a touching and evocative story of a father and son’s search through Rome for the father’s stolen bicycle. There’s so much to learn here about the organization of Italian society right after the war. It’s fascinating. There’s a bit of “bygone era” here, compounded by the foreignness of the setting, which leaves one wondering along the lines of, wow, I can’t believe life was really like that for them. There’s a doggedness to the father’s pursuit. He’s desperate but righteous. The scenes of visits to the apartment of a kind of soothsayer woman are strange and haunting. The kids’ book Strega Nona came to mind. The woman is definitely a strega!
The kid is great as well, finding himself in his particular ways of helping his father. He’s a pretty good father, but he does hit the kid in a sad and difficult scene that sets up the finale. Of course the father cannot be forgiven for hitting the kid, not by modern viewers at least, but the scene functions nicely to complicate the relationship, and the story, in gratifying ways.
The finale is fantastic, unforgettable, really. (Spoiler alert! Skip this paragraph if you don’t want the end spoiled.) The kid is sent home on the bus, but before he can make his way onto it, the father attempts to steal a bike. The kid sees the commotion as his father is chased down by a mob and dragged off the bike and back to where he’d stolen it. The kid comes walking up to his father just as the bike owner is being asked if he wants to press charges. The man takes one look at the father and his son.
“No, let him go. He has enough troubles.”
End.
Damn.
Great stuff. No commentary on this disc.
Number Two – Jeanne Dielman
The hell is up with this movie? It’s fascinating, absorbing, hypnotic, maddening, all of this for certain. But better that Vertigo? Better than Citizen Kane? Absolutely not, no way, no how. I don’t know what the critics polled by Sight and Sound are smoking, but I want some!
Seriously, though, I’m glad they brought this movie to my attention. It’s well worth the watch, especially for fans, like myself, of super-slow 1970s movies. The longer and slower, the better, but only if, IF, the payoff is worth it. That’s a big “if” and you can never know until after you’ve spent those hours watching those long, slow, still scenes. To me a classic example of this is Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). I suppose a lot of Kubrick’s films fall into this category, but in that one, the length and the slowness perfectly complement the tortured restraint of the main character, played by Ryan O’Neal. Until he does act, and when he does, the emotional payoff is cathartic.
In Jeanne Dielman the length and stillness of the shots also mirror the mental state of the titular protagonist. By the way, when I say “still” about a shot or scene, I mean exactly that: the camera does not move. At all. Hardly ever, throughout this nearly 3-hour film. For almost the entire duration, in fact it may be every single shot, the camera is fixed and does not move or track at all. We are fixed on this woman, and her son, in their small apartment. Her daily, seemingly mundane activities, mostly in the apartment, form the basis of the “plot.” Her work preparing meals in the ridiculously tiny and tidy kitchen are transfixing and more than a little crazy-making to watch. She makes the hell out of some dinners! It’s also very French. I’ve not seen anyone work a damn meatloaf or some breaded cutlets like that before. Is she insane? Or is this normal for a French cooking process? Or are we meant to wonder which?
Oh, and she also works as a prostitute, meeting clients in, where else, the apartment, while her son is at school. These scenes are mostly handled with a single shot down the hall. The client goes in , the door closes, the door opens, the client exists, pays, and leaves. There are some shots of the bedroom being prepped beforehand and fixed after, but nothing of the bedroom activities is shown, until the end. I’ll spare you the spoilers on this one. Let’s just say that after a few hours of watching her live her insane-yet-normal life, the viewer is greatly relieved to see her do something / anything! (to borrow a phrase from Todd Rundgren.)
So there is payoff to this one. Whether or not it’s worth the wait is up to you to decide. (I don’t recall if there’s commentary on this one, but I did not listen to it if there is.)
Number 1 – Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
Holy hell, this one! Stop what you’re doing right now and go watch this movie. Then watch it again with the Werner Herzog commentary. You will experience the nature of true art, the mystery, the danger, the insane calling of the artist. The line between art and reality is obliterated here, as you realize that what is being filmed, what’s being shown on film, is not just what the characters are experiencing, but what the filmmakers, actors, and the rest of the 400-person crew were actually experiencing.
Loosely based on some historical letters and records, Aguirre tells the story of a Spanish conquistador, played by the amazing Klaus Kinski, in search of gold and the fabled city of El Dorado in the jungle of South America. The religious fervor of such a pursuit is fully captured here, along with the fever for glory and riches that drove these men to the brink and beyond. The viewer is transported in time. We feel the characters’ sense of the unknown, of the possibility in what lies beyond the next bend in the river, and ultimately the slow dawning of the futility, the hopelessness, the loss and doomed end of it all.
Kinski is riveting. The line between the insanity of his character and of him as a person and actor is completely blurred. “Only Kinski,” Herzog says on the commentary. “Only Kinski could do this.” And we believe it. In the backstory we learn of his volatile nature, his violent tantrums and real life battles with the director and the crew. “Love/hate” can only begin to describe the relationship between Kinski and Herzog. They are two people marching to the beat of drummers that most of us have no chance of ever hearing. They needed each other to accomplish what they did. We understand that If people have to die along the way, that is a price each is willing to pay, without a second thought, even if those people are themselves. It is truly a remarkable viewing experience. (Animal lovers, hide your eyes. I don’t think a P.E.T.A. representative was along on the shoot.)
The pairing of these two, and the jungle setting, is revisited in the more highly acclaimed Fitzcarraldo (1982), which happened to show up at my house in a red envelope just yesterday morning.
Will it be the last DVD.com I get in the mail? Will it blow my mind as well? Will it be the subject of a future Xuladad? Will my kids ever see it? Will I show it to them? Will they ever forgive me if I do? What does the future hold?
I can’t wait to find out.
P.S. On the subject of DVD commentaries, I know that Criterion Channel has them and that they will still exist in some form or another. But I also know that they are a feature that evolved through the technology of DVDs, and that as DVDs go away, the nature of commentaries will inevitably change as well. Something will be lost, even as something else is gained. Not all of these great old movies are part of the Criterion Collection, anyway. What happens to those?
My favorite ever film commentary is one done on Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), by Peter Bogdanovich. In it he reads from the text of a French film scholar and Renoir specialist, so it’s not actually Bogdanovich’s comments. But the combination of the terrific film writing (in translation) and Bogdanovich’s deep, wise voice is total winner. There’s nothing quite like the cumulative effect of a great film, astute writing about it, and a velvet-voiced reader.
Be sure to watch the alternate endings and deleted scenes as well. I always do! Peace.
A magical goldfish named Ponyo yearns to become human to be with Souske, but their friendship leads to unintended consequences on both land and sea.
We were looking for a movie to try from Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation giant and possible rival to Walt Disney. That was the blurb for Ponyo (2008).
“It sounds like a Mad Lib,” the older said.
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said and started to re-read it.
“A magical blank named blank yearns to become blank to be with blank.”
The older laughed and took it from there.
“But their blank leads to unintended blank on both blank and blank.”
It looked a little newer than the other title we were considering, Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989). We ran it by his brother.
“It sounds childish,” the younger said. “I’m not a child, dad.”
I was new to Studio Ghibli movies. My Neighbor Totoro (1988) had been sitting in my queue for years, next to other stuff that kept getting pushed down, like Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Umberto D (1952). I had finally watched it, with the kids, after my wonderful partner gifted us some DVDs that she had watched with her kids, Totoro among them. We had liked it, collectively experiencing the strangeness and wonder of Ghibli that I’m sure all fans recall from their first encounters. There’s nothing quite like these movies, with their surreal, animated blend of family drama and nature-inspired whimsy, and almost nothing in our experience as American movie- watchers prepares us for them.
“I must say that I hate Disney’s works. The barrier to both the entry and exit of Disney films is too low and too wide. To me, they show nothing but contempt for the audience.” – Hayao Miyazaki, founder of Studio Ghibli.
Totoro had come and gone. I went back to my own well for picks, and the kids were in no hurry to burn one of theirs on another Ghibli. Then a piece in a recent New York Times caught my attention, the one that contained the above (older) quote. A Ghibli-inspired theme park had opened in Japan, and what was described in the article put the vast gulf between Japanese and American sensibilities, in film, life, and everything in between, into stark relief. The theme park wasn’t at all what Americans might imagine it to be. It was the anti-Disney.
Located on the outskirts of Nagoya, an industrial city seldom visited even by Japanese people, Ghibli Park is housed entirely within another park, a commemorative park from a 2005 expo that looks exactly like what such a description implies: sports facilities, nondescript buildings, and acres of manicured green park. The park does not scream out to be seen. According to its website, the park was built “in close consultation with the surrounding forest.” The exhibits are not rides, but rather low-key installations, connected by miles of wooded paths. One, pictured with the article, is a Totoro climbing structure that looked like no more than a handful of kids could play on it at once. There’s no signage, no concessions, not even a bench. Everything is tucked away, hidden, special and secret-like, to be encountered individually, and with nature.
The whole thing seems designed almost as if they do not want people to visit there. The barrier for entry was sufficiently high and wide. This man’s hatred for Disney was starting to make more sense.
Ponyo begins with the birth of the aforementioned magic goldfish, under the sea, near the lair of a kind of mad scientist, with long, unruly white hair and striped pants, whom we learn is Ponyo’s father, voiced in the American version of the film by Liam Neeson.
“Who dresses like that? He looks like a demented rockstar,” the younger said. Then he qualified that. “Actually all rock stars are demented. He looks like an extra demented rockstar.”
The beginning is strange. Colors swirl in shades reminiscent of 1960s Fender guitars. The man is acting crazy. The fish seem to be crying.
“Do fish cry?”
“He’s crazy!”
The room filled with confusion, as the assembled family, including my sister and my partner, along with the kids, wrestled with the first ten minutes.
“Why do they all look like Speed Racer?” my sister asked. “You’ve seen this before? I’ve never even heard of this.”
It felt strange to be placed in a position to have to defend Disney, but Miyazaki seemed to be saying that Disney is for stupid people because the movies are too accessible, too easy to get into, to follow, to understand and enjoy. And the endings suck because they’re too neat. And anyone who would present such movies to an audience must hate that audience or think they’re stupid.
On some level I agreed, but on another level I bristled. Who was this guy, with his weirdo, trippy art films, with their irritating theme songs that just repeated the title over and over, to be cracking on a beloved cultural institution that has given the world hundreds of movies, musicals, TV shows, and cartoons over nearly a century? And songs. Especially the songs.
I had never given Disney much thought. I watched the old, classic films growing up and enjoyed them, especially Peter Pan (1953). But that was a long time ago. The most recent ones I remember going to the theater to see were The Black Hole (1979) and The Fox and the Hound (1981). Then I discovered punk rock and girls. For the next thirty years, I could not have cared less about Disney movies. I didn’t see a single one, barely knew they even existed. The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995)? Nope, nope, nope, and nope.
When the older was about three years old, Disney came back into my life. It was two Disney movies that had the biggest impact of any movies on my kids’ young lives: Frozen (2013) and Moana (2016). It would be tough to overstate the effect of those movies on my kids. They were all-consuming, and not for a short time, but for years. And more so than even the movies, which we watched many times, what stuck hard with the kids, especially the older, were the songs. The original songs composed and performed for both movies were outstanding. They were more than afterthoughts with inane lyrics to run over the opening and closing credits. Way more.
The plot of Ponyo unfolds as the friendship develops between the two main characters. Ponyo starts out looking sort of like a fish, but as she yearns to become more human, she sprouts an odd pair of chicken legs, and begins to take the shape of a girl.
“She’s a magic fish-human chicken,” the older said.
“She looks more like a squid or a dumbo octopus,” the younger countered.
What was that? we asked.
“It’s an octopus that has webbing between its tentacles.”
The younger knew a lot about animals, especially sea creatures. He had paid close attention during episodes of the Octonauts.
Ponyo’s father goes to look for her.
“He’s acting like a psycho maniac idiot!” the younger said.
“You don’t know that,” my sister said in the father’s defense. “Maybe he’s just out of sorts.”
“Oh, he’s definitely out of sorts,” the older countered, always ready to try out a new phrase as if he’d used it for years.
Then Ponyo’s mother, a type of sea goddess, joins the search, and all of the searching stirs up the seas in dangerous ways for the human characters. Storms and floods overtake the place where the boy, Souske, and his mother live. Souske’s mother springs into action to beat the storm and reach her home. The music of the film score, which had been mostly dreamy, childlike glockenspiel, shifts to a dramatic Wagner-like mode. The waves rise and crash onto the land like monsters. Cars race. Faces strain in anguish. The Wagner-style strings peal in great crescendos.
It’s an action sequence. A fairly standard one. You don’t need to be Pauline Kael to understand it. The bar, for this scene at least, is not high.
For his fourth birthday, the older received a visit from Elsa, ice-princess-turned-queen from Frozen. Hired through Wish Upon a Star, from the depths of Metairie, she knocked on the door for a full house of young party-goers and their parents. We played it up, maybe too much. She came in knowing the older’s name, looking for him. He was mortified. I held him in my arms and he buried his face in my shoulder when she tried to speak to him. When she wasn’t trying to talk to him, though, he was mesmerized, staring wide-eyed at her, as his guests took turns posing for pictures with her. She was so beautiful! The other kids weren’t as fazed. They were asking her to turn things into ice, to demonstrate, to prove, really, her magic powers. Her powers didn’t work so far from the north pole, she told them.
“Let it Go” was one of the older’s first favorite songs. He knew the words and could carry the melody in his small, breathy voice. He would never do it for people, but I would overhear him singing it to himself. “Let it Go” was composed by the husband-and-wife team of Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, and was performed by Idina Menzel as part of her voice role in the film as Elsa. A simplified pop version was also recorded by Demi Lovato and released by Disney. The song became Disney’s first top-ten Billboard hit since 1995. It sold 10.9 million copies worldwide in 2014, the fifth-best-selling song of the year, worldwide. and has been recorded in 25 different languages.
Other massive-selling worldwide hits from Disney include “When You Wish upon a Star,” “A Whole New World,” and “You Can Fly.” The first was co-written by Ned Washington, the second by Alan Menken, and the third by Sammy Cahn, three Jewish Americans. Jews are by far one of the most minor ethnic and religious groups in Japan, consisting of around 1000 mostly foreign-born, non-citizens.
I ran this half-baked theory by my colleague.
“You think maybe there’s no songs in Ghibli movies because there’s no Jews in Japan?’
He wasn’t buying it, but the next day he did tell me that his wife thinks I’m hilarious.
I was asking him for recommendations on which one to try. He had watched a lot of them with his kids. I told him we had seen Totoro and had tried Princess Mononoke (1997) but that it was too violent. He had suggested Spirited Away (2001) but warned that it might be disturbing. The parents get turned into pigs.
Another colleague had suggested Pom Poko (1994). He had watched a bunch of them with his kids. It seemed like everyone had watched these movies with their kids! These were arty people, though, academics, with their “children-of-academics.” They were never going to plan a vacation to Disneyworld. They might side with Disney in the extra-stupid fight between the company and the Florida governor, but that didn’t stop them from also loathing Disney for their own reasons. (“I don’t give a fuck about Disney, but in this case . . . ,” a third colleague told me.)
My colleagues may have been curmudgeonly about Disney, but nowhere near to the degree of the king curmudgeon himself, Hayao Miyazaki.
The Times article goes on to describe how Miyazaki had formed the studio in 1985, when he couldn’t find anyone to distribute his work, and had named it after a word for “hot wind” which he felt was needed to blow through what he saw as stagnant Japanese animation of the time. He is the ultimate control-freak about the creative process, hand drawing all of the storyboards and tinkering with individual frames before signing off on finished work. His reverence for and attention to detail in portraying the natural world is legendary. His movies deal with nature in an all-encompassing way. They involve fantastical and hybrid natural creations and events, but they also serve as allegorical origin stories, seeking to explain and explore the mysteries of our human relationships with nature in all its force and beauty.
He and his studio became known as the Disney of Japan, which he apparently hated. But being associated with Disney wasn’t the only thing he hated. The man seemed to despise, loathe, or hold general negative views on a wide range of subjects, including the ability and competence of his own adult son to oversee the studio.
Of course, Walt Disney was also known as a controlling overseer. He founded his own studio for similar reasons. He cranked out product at a similar pace. His films became ubiquitous in the U.S., as Ghibli’s did in Japan. His films received worldwide acclaim, the way Ghibli’s have. Maybe there was something to the comparison. (Interestingly, although Walt Disney is viewed in the popular imagination as a racist and anti-Semite, a review by the film critic Richard Brody of a massive Disney biography indicates that there is scant evidence to support either claim, the existence and ongoing saga of Song of the South (1946) notwithstanding.)
Obviously the phrase “the Disney of Japan” is just shorthand, but shorthand tends to stick, especially in the U.S., much to Miyazaki’s irritation. Obviously the two sensibilities are completely at opposite poles, with as many differences between the two as there are between Ghibli Park and Disneyworld. Shorthand can only get you so far. Only a cranky, old, animation master, or a late-to-the-game, movie-blogging dad would bother trying to engage with such a phrase at face value. The two worlds can be enjoyed separately, distinctly, for their own pleasures and on their own terms.
The climax of Ponyo involves the sea-goddess mother finding the child and, in welcoming her back into her proper environment, setting nature and the world back into peaceful order. It’s a sequence not entirely unlike the climax of Moana, in which Te Fiti is made whole and peaceful again by the restoration of her emerald-colored heart-stone.
“It’s weird how there’s no real bad guys in these movies,” the older said.
The closing credit rolled and we all sang along with the Ponyo song. “Ponyo, Ponyo, Ponyo / Fishy in the sea / Ponyo, Ponyo, Ponyo / Magic sets you free / Ponyo, Ponyo, Ponyo / Little girl with a round tummy.”
The happy, schoolyard melody got stuck in our heads for the rest of the evening, but by the next day none of us could remember how it went.
The younger squealed with delight and pulled his blankie over his mouth to try to contain himself.
“Aww, they’re sooo cute,” the older said, sitting up in his beanbag seat to get a good look.
The scene that elicited those reactions was a quick one, but it was enough. They knew it was coming. Return of the Jedi (1983) was their favorite of the first three Star Wars movies, the trilogy. In the last third of the movie, the Ewoks defend against the Empire, who have tracked down our rebel heroes to their jungle-planet home, Endor. The kids lit up during the whole battle sequence, with it’s deft blend of comic cuteness and David-v-Goliath feel, primitive jungle dwellers rigging traps and using manual weapons to bring down the laser-equipped space-war forces of the Empire. It’s a terrific sequence, not quite on the level of my favorite scene from the trilogy, the attack on ice-station Hoth that opens The Empire Strikes Back (1980), The kids liked Jedi better, though, mainly because of the Ewoks. They were so damn cute.
“Is this your favorite Star Wars movie?” I had asked the younger earlier.
“Yes, except for when Boba Fett dies and when Yoda dies.”
Those parts had passed, and now his uncontrollable shrieks of delight weren’t from the Ewoks’ ingenious maneuvers. They were for one brief cut amongst the rapid sequence of images. The one they’d been waiting for: the baby Ewoks.
The baby Ewoks.
My kids sat with their blankies and beanbags on the living-room rug, surrounded by a collection of stuffies including a stuffed Chewbacca and a Boba Fett, the older kid already twice as old as I was when I first saw Star Wars (1977). What they were loving about Jedi was exactly what I had hated. I had seen Jedi during its premiere week, waiting in a long line to get in. It was the Joy Theater on Canal Street, I believe, although I could be wrong about the details. Much of what I recall about the way I experienced the original trilogy is clouded by the haze of memory, but the basic facts still stood out. One was that I loved Empire the best, always had, from the way it first blew me away, at an age, a moment, that couldn’t have been better timed. Another fact was that the reason I had hated Jedi, much as I’d wanted to love it, was the cuteness factor, not just the Ewoks, but the other Muppet-like characters and scenes from the the Jaba-the-Hutt sequence in the beginning. What the hell was that? I remembered thinking, Muppets playing horns in a Star Wars movie? For laughs? To me Jedi had started bad and gotten worse. I was eleven years old, and I was done with the whole thing. Or so I thought.
I recently saw a clip of comedian Jordan Klepper saying that he was sad for his kid because he knew his kid would become a Star Wars fan, which to Klepper was a comment on the pathetic state of entertainment and nostalgia. Why weren’t there any new stories? Why was this stuff still around?
My father took me to the theater to see Star Wars when I was five. I was scared going in. It had the word “war” in the title. I didn’t want to see a war movie. The first scenes were quite terrifying, an indelible white-knuckle moment, the rebel troops preparing to be boarded, a flash of smoke and a laser shootout. People getting blasted left and right, killed by laser blasts that left them crumpled over with smoking black holes. Then the moment the fighting is over, just as I caught my breath, Darth Vader appears onscreen for the first time, a holy-fuck moment for a five-year-old. Dude is choking out his own commander, with his mind!
By the time the action moves to the desert planet Tatooine setting, I was entranced. Everything about the film is absolutely riveting. The allegorical aspects, good versus evil, Obi-Wan Kenobi, the force, his mission and Luke’s role in it, the concept of the Jedi, all of this is readily accessible to a kid of five. Obi-Wan’s death at the hand of Vader was shocking and moving. The rebels ultimate victory and destruction of the Death Star were exhilarating. I left the theater happy.
My dad never saw another Star Wars movie in the theater, and only crossed paths with one again years later, with his grandkids, at our house. Did you think this stuff would stick around, I had asked him, when you took me to see it forty-something years ago? No way, he said. No one was less equipped to comprehend the ongoing fascination with the Star Wars universe than my father, despite having launched me headlong into the first wave. He did have a sense of the vast scale of the world beyond the movies, the products and merchandise, he’d seen my toys as a kid, of the existence of all of the other movies, sequels, prequels, novels, shows, even comics, fan fiction, graphic novels. He may have known it was all out there. But for adults?
Were my kids destined to be Star Wars fans? Would it have happened anyway, even if I hadn’t helped it along? I did wonder about the effects of what they were seeing. I took the older to the theater to see Rogue One (2016) when he was four. Everyone dies in Rogue One. It’s among the darkest movies in the franchise. Not only that, but whole planets get destroyed, as they bring back the planet-destroying capabilities of the Death Star from the first film, only now they give it to you from the perspective of being on the planet. Everyone and everything dies, and more than once. Holy hell, I did that to my kid!
The destruction of Alderan, Princess Leia’s home planet, in the first movie is a devastating scene, but we’re removed from the actuality of it and experience it through Leia’s reaction. Those deaths and the death of Obi-wan are intense, but as parts of the plot, they’re set up in a way that guides one’s emotions. We’re aided in response by the flow of the movie, the music and other character’s reactions. And in those two scenes we’re spared from gore, unlike in the most shocking scene, from the first part, when Luke returns to his family’s home to find the charred remains of his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. As a five-year-old, I couldn’t quite process that one. I knew I was looking at smoldering bones, but I couldn’t allow myself to see it as such.
Did my kids do something similar? Some mental gymnastics to deal with the images of death and destruction? Was four too young? Was five too young? I had a good friend who didn’t grow up with Star Wars the way I did. He wasn’t from the U.S and was too young for the first wave, and considering there was basically no activity between 1983 and the mid-nineties reboots, too old for any other wave. He questioned the sanity of Star Wars for little kids, rightfully so. Wasn’t it too dark? He certainly wasn’t going to show it to his kids. But would they find it on their own? If so would they experience it in the same way? If not, would they be better off not having seen it? If they could somehow avoid it, then maybe it wasn’t inevitable that Klepper’s kids grow up Star Wars fans either, not without his help.
Star Wars was by no means the most questionably appropriate movie my dad took me to see, and Uncle Owen’s smoking corpse was nowhere close to the most horrific image. He’d been taking me to movies for a few years by 1977, in addition to some memorable home screenings as a very young kid. My very earliest movie memories include King Kong (1933) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1936). Basically he’d started me as kid on movies for adults. Also around that time was The Adventures of Robin Hood (1936) which was where I first recall people getting killed onscreen. Men are hit with arrows and fall dead. There is no blood. They get stuck with swords and fall, all without blood. In Star Wars the rebel soldiers and the stormtroopers get hit with lasers and fall dead, sometimes with the smoke, but always without blood. It’s an old way of depicting death in films, and in TV westerns, and I had been introduced to it very young. Also in those early years was She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), which set up not just a way to read some of the plot and action of Star Wars, but which crucially led to my understanding, years later, of the Uncle Owen scene, and its direct connection to a scene in The Searchers (1956). It’s the key scene from the beginning, the shocking discovery of a burned homestead and the abduction of a young girl, played by Natalie Wood, which sets up the plot. Similar positioning in the arc of both films, similar desert backdrop, similar smolder. (I’m not the first to notice. I think George Lucas may have even talked about it.) Also around this same age my dad took me to Kurosowa’s The Seven Samurai (1954), and a few years later when we saw Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), we discussed the similarities of the plots, the assembled ragtag band of fighters, David v. Goliath. We lived in Los Angeles at the time. People had stayed for the credits, like we had, and clapped and cheered for names they knew during the end credits.
Empire hit me like a ton of bricks. Nothing I’d seen in movies up to that point had prepared me for a sequel that was better than the original. The new settings, Hoth, Dagobah, Cloud City. New plotlines, I didn’t love Han and Leia kissing, but I liked that the battle station was crumbling around them as they did. Yoda might have been on the cute side, but he wasn’t cuddly, and the Dagobah training scenes are dark and creepy. New characters: how badass was the assemblage of bounty hunters? Lando was amazing as well. New costumes. I had collected the original action figures and had saved the proofs-of-purchase and sent in for a special bonus figure, a Boba Fett, in what must’ve been one of the first Kenner promotions. The new figures came out before the new movie. We were left to imagine what roles they would play. And the Cloud City finale, wow. Han encased in carbonite can’t be beat. Should’ve ended the franchise right there, mic drop, but it was already setting up another one. The bad guys were winning, and money was pouring in.
Around 1981, firmly in the throes of first-wave fandom, my parents took me to a wallpaper store for an unavoidable and boring weekend outing. Hard to conceive of now, but wallpaper was once so vital that it had its own stores. What a cool surprise it was then when idly flipping through the binders I found an Empire Strikes Back wallpaper print that I had to have. My parents relegated it to one wall of my bedroom, but what a wall! A repeating collage of images including Luke mounted on a Ton-Ton, and a face-to-face Han and Leia about to do the deed. We moved from that house not long after, and I wondered how long future occupants kept that paper up.
I didn’t remember the exact order of events of my kids’ introductions to the franchise. The Force Awakens had come out in 2015. The older had seen that one at home before I took that chance on going to the theater for Rogue One. Either way by the time he was five, and the younger was three, he was fully immersed in the Star Wars world, knowing all of the main characters, their backstories, the basic villains, and even how the movies relate to one another, the lineage of the heroes and villains and understanding the cut-up chronology of the feature films. The fact that the older had absorbed all that didn’t necessarily say anything particular about Star Wars. Absorbing fantasy worlds was his thing, mainly through books. The first had been Harry Potter. The way that his emerging reading life had coincided with some of the move versions in that franchise ensured that that world would be his first big experience with an all-encompassing, multi-genre fictional universe. It hit hard. He went for two Halloweens in a row as Harry Potter. Star Wars was next, second only in that regard. In scope, scale, size, in total convergence of real and imagined worlds of boundless narratives and endless consumerization, what else was there that could even compare?
We had a DVD box of the trilogy and watched all three regularly. The older put it all to memory and arranged it in his head. His little brother came along because he had no choice. Soon he was learning the ways of the force as well. It wasn’t long before they were telling me things I didn’t know about the Star Wars universe. A lot of it came from a book, an illustrated atlas of the worlds and planets of the Star Wars galaxy. They had given it to me as a gift, but they got more use out of it. It was a great book, with large, meticulously illustrated planet maps. They studied it closely. I would send them to it when questions came up. Sarlac or Rancor? Check the bestiary in the atlas. Darth Maul’s home planet? Check the atlas. The spine on the hardcover eventually split, and I repaired it with black duct tape.
This was the era of the Jedi Academy kids’ book series, by Jeffery Brown, ingenious little graphic-novel/comic-book hybrids that told the tales of young padawans far from home learning the ways of the force, while experiencing the tribulations of a prep-school-like setting. Titles in the series include “The Force Oversleeps.” Another popular book was by the same author (this guy did some heavy lifting!), called Darth Vader and Son. In this one, Vader solo-parents Luke as a little kid. They use the force to make breakfast, bury the droids in the sand, and visit the zoo to look at mythosaurs.
By the time of The Last Jedi (2017), they were primed. The older was five, the younger three. We went to the theater to see it with a family group that included their grandfather on their mother’s side. We took a photo in front of the cardboard promo cutouts in the theater lobby, everyone doing an action pose, the younger with an imaginary light saber. Soon they had matching Kylo Ren toothbrushes that lit up and contained little voice snippets of some of his lines from the movie. I feel it again, the pull to the light. Brush brush brush. Let nothing stand in our way. Spit, rinse. The grocery store ran a promo, hologram collector cards and a binder to hold them in with points from purchases. Old school, I loved it. They noticed the cardboard cutouts in the store, Kylo and BB-8 lurking around the aisles, popping up from behind a tower of Sprite. Why is Star Wars in the grocery, they had asked? Good question, tough to answer. They were starting to get the picture.
The Last Jedi wasn’t good, but the scenes at the end with Luke’s grand deception and Leia’s drawing on the force to ensure yet another alliance victory were powerful and hard to deny, even as a jaded older fan. Mark Hammill and Carrie Fischer had had roles in The Force Awakens, but it was in The Last Jedi when they seemed to recatch their vibes from way back when. I never liked how the franchise turned to raw nostalgia, seemed too cheap and easy, but Awakens did its job in packing theaters with Gen Xers and let us share some moments with our kids. Last Jedi was enjoyable enough. The Rise of Skywalker (2019) was the worst abomination of a movie I’d ever seen, seemingly written by an algorithmic poll of moronic fans and clueless studio executives. It saddened me that that was the conclusion of the saga, for the moment at least. I liked Adam Driver as an actor, but his Kylo was a bore, too serious and overblown. Star Wars villains need a little more mischief to them, a little more fun. That said, when Driver is Hammill’s age, at least he won’t be trading exclusively on that one role. There was something slightly pathetic about Hammill seeming to need that role so badly, something akin to a grown man collecting action figures and keeping them preserved in the packaging. Fischer we know had a whole other acting life to speak of. But I did enjoy watching the two of them in those last scenes of The Last Jedi. Fischer died in 2016, before the move’s release. The boys’ grandfather died in 2021.
The Ewok battle had ended and the celebration was underway, a freaky treehouse party. There was one more brief cut of the baby Ewoks, which elicited more Awwws from the boys.
“Is this your favorite Star Wars movie?” I asked the older.
“Hmm,” he thought for a minute. “I like all of them except for Revenge of the Sith.“
“Why not that one?
“Oh my god, dad, don’t you remember? Anakin’s face is burned and it’s like melting off. Ugh.” He shivered a little just thinking about it. “It was awful.”
“What about Phantom Menace?” I asked. “Wasn’t Darth Maul pretty scary?”
“Yeah, but he was the only bad part in that one, and he gets killed. The rest of it was pretty good. Not like in Revenge of the Sith. That whole thing was just terrible.”
A couple years back the younger had dressed up like Luke for Halloween. His sandy brown hair had grown out to a perfect Luke length. He knew exactly which Luke he wanted to be: black-clad with the green light-saber, from Return of theJedi. In pictures from that night, he’s got the stern face and the extended-arm, angled-up saber pose.
For my fiftieth birthday my mother gave me a color illustration of the major Star Wars characters from the nine main movies, done by a friend of hers. She had played a little joke by hanging it up in her place and waiting until I commented on it to give it to me.
“I hope you like it,” she had said.
It definitely looked out of place in her home, but in mine it looked okay, We already had a Star Wars shower curtain in the guest bathroom. Mom did have some experience with Star Wars-themed wall decorating. The illustration hung in our kitchen just above the sheet where we kept track of the movie-night picks. The older noticed that Kylo was on there twice, once with and once without his mask. I could identify most of the characters, but I needed their help with a few.
The trouble began during warm-ups, for them and for us.
The blue team driver had crashed his Lego go-kart during a trial run and some pieces of the frame had come off. The show was Lego Masters and the boys were both rooting for the red team, the older because they had the better personalities in his view, the younger because, well, we weren’t really sure why. All we knew was that he wanted red team to win the challenge, and if they didn’t things could get bad.
“Yes!” the younger exclaimed as the result of the crash became clear. He stood on the couch, too excited to sit, shirtless and in blue jeans. He rarely sat, preferring instead to spring from chair to couch to chair and back again, practicing his animal moves, knocking the couch back off the corner of the rug.
“Too soon to tell,” the older said. “Both cars look good.” He sat on the corner of an ottoman, mostly safe from getting sprung onto.
We sometimes had trouble with reality competition shows in the form of temper tantrums and meltdowns over the results. They’d get intense at the end, and the younger would be heavily invested in one team. Sometimes it came on too late for us to realize how invested he was. If we could tell what was happening, we could get him to go to another room when the final result was revealed. He went without much protest. He didn’t like getting all worked up either, even though his brother thought a lot of it was performative. I didn’t think so. The shows were intense and he really wanted one team to win. He had difficulty controlling his emotions around disappointment. We were working on it.
The red team had chosen a smaller, lighter person to be their driver. And their car hadn’t been damaged in the trial run. Things were looking good for them as the race was set to begin. It had become apparent to me during that trial run that passing on the little track was going to be difficult. Whoever got in front would likely take it, and red team had won pole position in the aesthetics portion of the Lego go-kart building competition.
Sure enough, when the race began, red team shot in front and was on their way to an easy win, coming close to lapping blue team’s car. But then an unexpected twist: the cars had to take one mandatory pit stop. Damn Will Arnett and the crafty writers and producers of that mega-hit show in its third season on Fox!
During the pit stop the teams had to disassemble and reassemble the wheels, as a sort of changing of the tires. Oh yeah, they also had NASCAR legend Jeff Gordon on the set, calling the race, and doing some other bits with Arnett. The Rainbow Warrior had gained some weight, but he was telegenic and could deliver a line. And he still had no problems driving a car at 200 m.p.h. as demonstrated in an opening bit with Arnett strapped in beside him.
The pit stop proved to be a real monkey wrench, as blue team simply had a better technique for stripping down Legos and snapping them together in a hurry. They pitted out before red team and even though red was faster, the red car driver could not find a way around the blue car. There just wasn’t room enough on the track.
“Come on, come on!” Everyone was shouting. All of the contestants on the show and all of us watching it in the living room.
“She can’t get around! She can’t pass!” I couldn’t help but to trumpet my prediction from earlier.
“Shut up, dad! We know! We can see! We’ve got eyes!” The older had great phrases. I was never allowed to call my shot, especially right in the moment just before. I wasn’t sure why, but the older would always get mad and tell me to shut up. I think he thought that my predictions would upset the younger and lead to a meltdown.
But nothing was going to prevent this meltdown.
He sat (which was already a bad sign) with his hands over his face, his fingers half covering his eyes, pulling down on his cheeks, like that emoji, the one for complete and total horror, and erupted in agony as blue team crossed the finish line. I leaped up and gently took the remote from the hands of the older and quickly turned the TV off. No need for the post-race finale. The show had done its job. It had brought us together as a family for some quality time and entertainment. It had brought us to the edge of our seats in excitement on a weeknight after dinner. And now it had left my younger son wailing in sheer agony.
“The red team won! The red team won!” he screamed, his face turning red and tears starting to stream.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “Red team won. They won. It’s fine.”
“No, they didn’t” the older countered. “Why does he always get to have it his way?”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “I’m just trying to cam him down.”
“Red team won! Red team won!” the younger was milking it now. His brother was kind of right about that part. But what was the difference? Whether you accidentally got mad or intentionally made yourself more mad? The result was the same, screaming, yelling, throwing stuff, which is what the younger was now doing, slamming his blanket to the floor, throwing a book across the room.
“No they didn’t,” the older insisted. “You’re just being a baby.”
“What!!! What did you call me??”
Oh, no, now he had gone and made it worse, and he was in no mood to quit making it worse.
“Are you nuts?” I said. “Stop it.”
“Why does he get to act like that? He is being a baby, and the red team lost!”
I had no answer. When it came to philosophical and moral arguments, the older had me beat. He could twist us all into knots.
For the younger, there was only one thing left to do: start punching.
He landed a few shots, but the older still had him size-wise and crunched him to the ground, which ended the fight, if not the tears.
“Okay, okay,” I said and picked up the pieces and moved us all toward bath and bed. The younger’s hurt feelings lasted all the way until lights out. Then he finally gave it up and let me kiss him goodnight.
The older liked Lego Masters but not nearly as much as he liked The Masked Singer, which is a story for another day. It was the younger who actually loved Legos. The older had never gotten into them. The younger had caught the bug pretty hard sometime around age 5. He loved putting the sets together. When he got one as a gift, he couldn’t rest until he had completed the build. Some of the builds took several hours. We had to factor that time in whenever he might receive one as a gift. Lego sets were at the ends of his sticker charts for chores. He obsessed about them, probably not to an alarming degree, not to the degree of the adult contestants on the show. But Lego could be all consuming to him at times.
Some of the sets he kept together, the “mechs” and the big vehicles. The rest he would build and then take apart and play with in pieces. He had started making his own original builds more, vehicles and such, some of it from different Lego books, some of it perhaps inspired by the show. He had a lot of older builds that were partially deconstructed. They weren’t in the regular play rotation, put away or to the side. Using the Lego Masters set as inspiration, I decided one day to reorganize his Lego bricks by color. I thought it might freshen up the play area and bring some toys back into rotation.
I sat down with some morning NPR on started disassembling the chunks and pieces of the unused old builds. Some of the bricks were impossibly tiny, little single Lego dots, thin layers of two-stud bricks stacked together in intricate ways, tiny gears and arms and specialty pieces, wheel casings and axels and hooks attached to spools of string from a crane model. Those models were never going back together, I thought, even with the instructions, which we had saved, which he had called the “constructions” when he was younger. I thought about his active little mind spending all of those hours focused on snapping all those tiny pieces together in precise fashion. The models may never get put back together. Or maybe they will. Maybe he’ll use the pieces for new builds, or maybe he won’t. They weren’t getting any use anyway. What was certain was that he had spent the time putting them together, and I had spent the time taking them apart and thinking about him putting them together. We had all watched Lego Masters and had enjoyed it, even though we got mad and fought sometimes at the end. We always made up by lights out.
On NPR I heard a story about adult toy collectors and how much money they were spending on toys for themselves this holidays, and how the toy manufacturers were marketing more and more to adult buyers every year. A man being interviewed was, of course, a Lego collector, who said that he had spent over a thousand dollars on Legos for himself this year.
Holy hell, what a loser.
Happy holidays, everyone!
PS Thanks for reading this fourth and final installment of Xuladad for 2022. My goal for 2023 is to publish at least five! So there’s that to look forward to. Peace.
I lived in the same neighborhood as Michael and his family from 2010-2018. His house was on the most inviting, tree-lined block in the neighborhood, and it stood out. During the holidays, their house would attract spectators walking and driving by to admire the over-the-top lights display. Other houses had big, bright displays as well, but those houses seemed to feed off the energy of the Homan’s. There was putting up Christmas lights and inflatable yard decorations, then there was doing it Michael’s way, with humor and irreverence, with little visual jokes and references built in. For instance his displays consistently referenced the old holiday TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the stop-action-animation one with Burl Ives narrating. I believe Cornelius the Dentist was represented, as was the Abominable Snowman character. This may not sound extra-ordinary, but a few things made it so. One was the vintage white four-door sedan in the driveway (forgive me for not recalling the make and model), not part of the display, you may be thinking, except that it was. Along the wide panel in those old sedans that ran behind the back seats , an Abominable Snowman scene complete with fake snow was visible through the large back windshield. Not the kind of detail that would stand out at night amidst flashing lights, but one that always made me smile when I walked by in the day. There was another Abominable Snowman as well, poised climbing up the balcony railing. That one tended to stay up if not year round then longer than the rest.
Michael didn’t just buy a bunch of stuff from Home Depot and throw it up. Instead he put his love for that show into it. Maybe he identified with that snowman character on some level, or at least loved that show. The point is, he put himself into it, completely unpretentious, humorous, winking, knowing. I never talked to him about the display or that TV show. One didn’t need to to see what was going on. He put it all out there in the yard. One only needed to give it the slightest moment of thought and attention to understand, and to be rewarded, enlightened for having done so.
That was Michael. He worked on that level, lived on it. If you were smart, had enough of an attention span, and took a little time to engage, then just knowing him, interacting with him, peeking into his world for a moment was rewarding and enlightening. And if you weren’t sharp, didn’t bother to take the time, couldn’t muster the requisite attention, then Michael probably wasn’t going to be your cup of tea. He was quick, but it came dry. You had to pay attention.
After I had kids of my own, I began to view Michael’s holiday display in a new light. Where the heck did he find the time to put all that stuff up? And how did he get on his roof? That was a tall house! Yet year in and year out he found the time within his teaching, scholarly work, family life, writing, playing, and recording music, not to mention Saints season, to take out all those lights and decorations, break out the ladder, do it all with care and heart. I would make plans to put up some decorations, then after the whirlwind of the holidays and finishing the semester and settling into the new year, I would make more plans to put up some decorations next year, while Michael had already taken his down and put them away.
All except for that Abominable Snowman on the balcony rail.
I understood then that the family piece for Michael was a big one. I learned more about Michael as a father when I visited his home for the first time. Many people will recall the parties the Homans threw in the springtime, around the time of the release of what the hurricane names would be for the season. Michael would probably object to this juvenile term being applied to those parties, but they were epic. (If the Epic of Gilgamesh was epic, he may have argued, how can a party also be epic?) What left the biggest impression on me wasn’t the beautiful home, the fine musical instruments, the army of handle-bottles of booze amassed like a battalion atop the bar, the top-notch spread, their large contingent of friends who partook in it all, or the graciousness of the hosts, as impressive as those were.
What struck me most was the rope swing on the big oak tree in the back, thick, ship-grade rope tied around the hefty part of a huge branch, with around eight feet of dangling swing, ending in a knotted seat/foothold, and a diagonal swing arc that went from a high corner out over the center of the yard and back. Now how did he get that up there, was my thought at the time. But it was more than the how of it. That swing told me all I needed to know about what kind of father he was, and later, when I had kids of my own, I thought about where I was going to try to put their rope swing, and how I was going to get it up there, all inspired by Michael.
Before I knew Michael as a neighbor and party host, I had already known and admired him as a colleague and a scholar. He was a natural as a scholar, born to read, write, and think. One of the first faculty colloquiums I attended at Xavier featured Michael lecturing on the ancient origins of social justice as a concept, which had stemmed from his recent travels and studies in the Middle East. The Q&As at those affairs could be quite intense, and Michael handled some probing questions with total ease. He had a real gift for extemporaneous efficiency. That was part of my introduction to Xavier culture, and he was an integral part.
We all enjoyed when he rose to speak at faculty meetings, knowing we’d be in for succinctness and wit. He got more laughs than anyone else in those meetings, who knows how, it was a tough room. Maybe Cliff Wright was in contention, but Cliff had had a big head start, and no one else even came close. One laugh in particular came at my expense, sort of. I was running for a seat on the College Coordinating Committee, unopposed, and Michael was charged with reading off the candidate names ahead of the upcoming elections.
He read the position, then my name, then a brief pause: “And let me be the first to congratulate you.”
That was it, one little line, and the pause, all that was needed to crack everyone up and let them enjoy a faculty meeting, if just for a moment.
My favorite Michael Homan moment in a faculty meeting is one that I’m sure others will recall. The committee was faculty salary, I believe, and the issue was that staff and administration pay had gone up and up, at least as a percentage of the budget, while faculty salaries had fallen behind national averages. The administration had grown exponentially, was the point, and the visual aid Michael used to make this point was a photo of the administration from 1980. Not of photo of a list of the administrators, not a bunch of small headshots. He put up a photo of the three individuals who comprised the entire administration, posed together, smiling and standing on the famous front steps. One of the people in the photo of course was Norman Francis, who now sat in the front row during the meeting, as he always did, grinning at the photo of his younger self, as the audience got a good laugh. Michael’s visual primer had nailed it, and no one appreciated it more than Norman Francis.
Later I got to know Michael as a musician and songwriter. With his partner, Editor B, he wrote, recorded, and released the debut CD of Half Pagan in a burst of creative energy. I marveled at how quickly they’d got it done. They had a theme song that told their origin story: they were two friends, one of them was Pagan, the other wasn’t. They were Half Pagan! They had a great live act. Editor B had a commanding presence as a frontman. Michael played plugged-in acoustic guitar run through heavy distortion. The bass player was from Egg Yolk Jubilee, a great local band that we both liked. If you know me, you know I like to bond with people over music. We watched Egg Yolk together at Banks Street Bar. He came to see my band play. I went to see his. He played in punk bands in Omaha. I did the same in Tuscaloosa. We talked about Husker Du, eighties punk rock that burst out of the Midwest and spread through a DIY network to small towns and impressionable young ears all over the country. Same way I’d heard it.
Michael was effortlessly cool, the cleverest chap in the school. A man of letters, as his Twitter bio said. He’d get traction on Twitter without even trying. It was around the time the Confederate statues were coming down, I believe, when he had a Tweet get retweeted like 250 times, which, for New Orleans Twitter, was bigger than Michael Tisserand gets on his best day. It was something along the lines of, I hope the people who say they aren’t going to visit New Orleans anymore don’t visit New Orleans anymore. That was it. The pith, the zeitgeist, the finger on it. Without even trying. Effortless cool. The person you look at and just marvel because you know he’s got it, the wit, the knowing, the inside edge. He was the one who could wear a Saints fleur-de-lis patch on his academic robe and pull it off. The vintage white sedan, the scooter, the sweater vests, the style. We looked up to him. He set the pace. We’re all much poorer for his being gone, the school, the neighborhood, the community. We’ll miss you. I’ll miss you. You were a cool dude. You left a big mark. You won’t be forgotten.
“You’re an overly dramatic creep and totally scary.”
The older kid was not impressed by Dennis Quaid’s arrogant pilot character, Tuck, as he makes a drunken scene at a formal event in the beginning of 1987’s Innerspace.
I’d been looking for an eighties comedy to show them. Not sure why. There was a certain duty to be upheld with my movie-night picks. I wasn’t going to pick one of theirs, no Disney (at least not modern Disney), no Pixar, no Trolls. Those movies were great. I enjoyed them, but those were the kids’ picks. I had to give them something different, something that I really hoped wouldn’t suck.
I turned to the eighties with some degree of confidence that there was good stuff there. We’d had some success with Back to the Future (1985) but had struck out with everything else, including E.T. (1982), Ghostbusters (1984), and The Goonies (1985), which were all too scary and had to be turned off, basically within the first few scenes. I didn’t want to give up on the era. I didn’t realize then that what I wanted from the era wasn’t to be found in the very top-grossing films.
I was thinking about what had worked for me when I was their age, but using myself as a model was a terrible idea. I had from an early age what I gradually came to realize was an abnormally intense relationship with films, particularly films I should have never been allowed to see. Some of it was the times, for sure. In third grade a kid’s mother took a group of us to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). Some of it was the age gap between me and my younger sisters. They took up the bulk of the parenting while I was upstairs watching HBO which had recently come into the house. Some of it was the parenting itself. My father regularly took me to movies that either he knew nothing about, that he himself wanted to see, or that he for some reason thought were age appropriate.
Through a combination of these modes, by the time I was 10, the age of my older kid, I had seen movies like DressedtoKill (1980), Excalibur (1981), Blade Runner (1982), Beastmaster (1982), and even thanks to HBO a film called Equus (1977), which I was pretty sure no one of any age was supposed to see, ever. These were on top of watching Donald Sutherland smash that alien humanoid’s head in with a shovel in the greenhouse. That scene stuck with me.
My older kid was a different kid, and I was a different parent. I valued my early film education. It wasn’t all sex and gore, either. I also got to see films such as A Hard Day’s Night (1964), King Kong (1933), and The Four Feathers (1939), which all had profound impact.
But I wasn’t going to show my kids any of that, under any circumstances, and not because I wouldn’t want to scar them or impact them in the same way. I wasn’t scarred, and the impact was super valuable. It was because they simply would not stand for it. They wouldn’t watch. They’d leave the room, or the theater, or otherwise make any attempted screening futile. They were different kids. I knew better.
“I’m a fourth grader, dad. I’m fine with bad words and cigarettes.”
The older kid said to assure me that the adult aspects of the film wouldn’t bother him. He’d come a long way. Those two things had been exactly what had bothered him about Grease (1978) only a year or so earlier.
I had always thought that the plot of Fantastic Voyage (1966) was cool and interesting. A spaceship shrunken down and travelling through a human body. But that movie was boring. Not even Raquel Welch could save it. I knew the kids would dig the plot, but not the movie. If only there were a movie that updated the concept and hit it with some big-screen glitz.
I had only seen Innerspace once, in the theater at age 15. I remembered it as enjoyable but forgettable, a really cool plot idea that somehow left me wanting for what they might have done with it. So much time had passed, though, that I didn’t have total confidence in my assessment. Turned out my 15-year-old critical skills were spot on!
I knew the movie would contain elements I hadn’t recalled. Common Sense Media indicated that the scenes to watch out for were of Dennis Quaid’s bare ass and some foul language. They gave it an age rating of 11+. I figured there’d be other inappropriate stuff in there, but I wasn’t going to pre-screen it, and I was keying in on the plot. I gave it my best pitch, and they were intrigued by the ship-inside-a-human-body angle.
After the opening scenes, which in addition to a drunken Tuck, feature a stunning Meg Ryan, at her absolute eighties best in a black mini-dress, and the aforementioned shot of Quaid’s naked backside, Tuck accepts an experimental miniaturization mission to be injected into a rabbit. He doesn’t have a lot of choice. During the experiment, the bad guys bust in, Die Hard-style (1988). (I know it came after, but what else so perfectly captures that eighties trope of well-dressed and well-organized baddies?)
The lead scientist makes a break for it, into a nearby mall, holding the syringe with Tuck inside, and just before he’s killed (in a somewhat intense scene), he injects Tuck into unsuspecting bystander Jack, played by Martin Short.
Hilarity ensues.
Tuck, thinking he’s in the rabbit, pilots around until he can latch onto an optic nerve and get a view. We see the first effects sequences inside the body.
“It’s not realistic. I told you it wouldn’t be realistic.”
The older kid is confident in his knowledge of the human body. The younger feels like he knows about as much, too.
Tuck hooks into Jack’s ear as well and starts communicating with him. The nervous, hypochondriac grocery-store clerk played by Short believes he’s going insane. He responds out loud to the voice only he can hear, while he’s in a doctor’s waiting room.
At moments like that the producers’ and director’s thought process seems to reveal itself. Let’s put Quaid’s voice inside Short’s head and just have him react to it. The rest writes itself. Comedy gold.
“What’s going on? What is wrong with that man?”
The younger got confused by the plot, or maybe just confused in general by watching Short in action.
“Scientifically Inaccurate!”
The older remained indignant.
Things pick up as the two characters begin to work together to solve their common dilemma. Jack goes to Tuck’s apartment, and after establishing the basics of what’s going on, is convinced by Tuck to have a drink to relax. Tuck has one along with him from his handy flask. Jack then does a ridiculous dance to Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away,” hopping onto furniture, doing his Ed Grimley-style twist, hands up, knees swinging.
It’s good for a few chuckles. Jack then collapses onto the couch with a buzz on and ponders the “gastric mucosa” and “intestinal villi” that he’ll never get to see, as if they’re far-off destinations. Those lines made me laugh, the way Short delivers them with his pseudo-stupid, dazed style, the same one that was good for many laughs on SNL.
Tuck realizes he doesn’t know what the face looks like of the host body he’s in, so he tells Jack to go to the bedroom mirror. The mirror is where Short is at his best, slapping himself into sobriety, to rise to the challenge! He smacks himself in the face. The younger laughs. Tuck’s ship shakes.
“Harder!” Tuck yells.
Short slaps himself out of the frame and onto the floor. The younger cracks up. The gift of physical comedy shines. It cannot be denied. Martin Short slapping himself in a mirror, Peter Sellers falling backwards off a veranda roof, Moe Howard swinging at Larry Fine, missing and catching a two-by-four to the noggin. These are scenes that transcend the years and the ages. Plenty other stuff is plenty funny, Keaton, Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, comedies of wits, manners, situational, dark comedy, Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor, on and on.
But one, my kids weren’t going to stand for, let alone laugh at, any of that.
And two, like The Simpsons once put it, those other movies have a lot going for them, but Football to the Groin has a football to the groin. We have a clear winner.
The laughs slow down after that. There are a few funny moments in the wild special-effects scenes that have Jack’s face morphing and contorting as his nerves are “programmed” by Tuck. The special effects are quite good, cutting-edge camera and editing wizardry for the time, which the kids just read as “old” for their stark difference from current digital effects. With eighties movies, I feel like I can see the technology at work, even though I don’t understand how it’s done any more so than I do with CGI. It looks like it was at least done with cameras, something mechanical is in play, as opposed to the completely frictionless experience of watching modern effects-driven films.
Then there is the horrific death scene of the villain henchman Mr. Igoe, who had been miniaturized and injected into Jack to kill the miniature Tuck. Unfortunately for Igoe, Tuck had positioned his ship in the esophagus, so when Igoe comes in, sort-of Moonraker-style, in a jetpack, Tuck is able to send him into the gurgling green acid of the stomach below. Flesh digested, his skeletal remains then pass across Tuck’s window, and our screens.
We all exclaimed and winced at the sight, which as per eighties movies, was the intended effect. If the movie were any kind of part-action or part-thriller, it had to contain at least one ghastly death scene. Even a sci-fi-comedy-action movie, maybe especially one of those.
After more shrinking-technology hijinks and switcheroos, Tuck is finally re-embiggened and reunited with Meg Ryan’s Lydia, who of course had had a brief flirtation with Jack, enough for a couple of kisses to further the plot, but who ultimately must marry the cocky, handsome pilot Tuck. As they ride off from the wedding, Jack notices they’re in trouble and, newly confident, rushes off to save them.
The kids were glad when it ended.
It was an interesting pick, not a bad film at all, and very representative of the eighties. It won’t become a family favorite. It’s not that kind of movie. What had I hoped for the pick to accomplish? To demonstrate that older movies could be good, entertaining, even compelling? Maybe that had been accomplished, but that was a pretty low bar.
To open up more mature themes? Curse words? Different blends of genre? Funny old physical comedians? To get us to the eighties in general just to give myself more old picks to work with? To see Meg Ryan in her prime running around in a black cocktail dress?
Any of those was a worthwhile goal, and it could be argued that Innerspace does a decent job with all of them. Of course many better examples could be presented toward any of those goals as well.
The problem with trying to find an eighties movie that the kids would like was the problem of trying to graft an entire sensibility onto a completely different era. Eighties movies are problematic in all kinds of ways, but the biggest way had to do with the moment in which we originally encountered them. Eighties movies could be offensive, mature, sexist, misogynist, explicit, racist, shocking, or just weird and off-putting. We had to process these jarring moments in films that were otherwise not filled with such moments and were often marketed directly to us as age-appropriate content. We’d see questionable stuff and just keep moving. Our worldview, particularly our view of adult society, expanded a little and was slightly warped along the way. That was the eighties. That was eighties movies. Kids today will not accept that level of questionable content when the film so clearly is not marketed to them, but rather was marketed to their parents. That their parents might have been their age at the time matters not. It’s the sensibility that the film is being marketed to. They read such packaging intuitively and know that it’s not for them.
We love eighties movies, or the movies of whatever era we came up in, not just because they remind us of being young, but because they in fact played an integral part in how our understanding of the world unfolded. Moments of strangeness in movies stick with us, even if we remember the film as light-hearted or funny. Parents remark on how they had forgotten the offensive parts of eighties movies when they re-watch them with their kids. But what we also forget is that what we loved about the movie is often tied to how we understood the world at the time and how the movie altered that view.
Kids today already understand the world differently. The same moments can’t impact them in the same way. They’ll have their own movies that do that, with strange, forbidden scenes that spin the clock for them toward the wide, grown-up world.
Of course all of these movies could be appreciated in different ways and at different ages. Maybe one day the kids and I can watch an old movie of theirs and I can try to appreciate it as being formative to them. Then we can watch one of mine, and I can finally show them Raging Bull. Or maybe we’ll re-watch one that I tried to show them when they were little, and we can look at it through that lens. Maybe we’ll even re-watch Innerspace and see it in a whole new light.
The younger sobbed uncontrollably, his hands a bright shade of red, as his little bike came to a stop along a paved path through the woods. It was 7:30 in the morning, and the temperature was 35 Fahrenheit. I knew because I’d been checking it on my phone since four-thirty a.m., and it had ticked up exactly one degree since then. The sky was clear, the sun not yet over the treetops. My heart sank for the kid. He’d reached his limit and was in a completely dissolute state over it, his chest heaving in long, deep cries, tears streaming. My younger son, seven years old. I’d brought him there, and now I needed to get him out.
“Alright, buddy. It’s okay,” I said, sandwiching his burning-cold hands between mine. I lifted the ice chest filled with a day-and-a-half’s food and drinks that we would no longer need out of the wagon that was attached to my bike by a length of woven orange nylon rope. I set the ice chest off the paved path. Then I set his little red bike by the ice chest.
“Here, you get in here and I’ll bike you out,” I said as I pushed a few bags to the front to make space for him in the wagon. “Put your hands in your pockets.” I tried to pull his arms from between his legs and stick his hands in his hoodie pockets.
“It’s okay, dad,” he said, as the sobs slowed. “My hands are okay.”
He had some toughness in him and wasn’t going to stay at the bottom for long. We were .25 miles along a 1.25-mile path back to the car. Every quarter mile was marked. With a big pump down on the pedal, we started off and soon came to the older, who was just ahead on the path.
“I can’t do it,” the older said, starting to cry. “I can’t make it.”
“Did you try pulling your sleeves down over your hands?”
“Yes!” he yelled. “That makes it worse!”
“Okay. Stop and wait right here,” I said as we rolled by. The loaded-down wagon on a rope was easier to keep going straight than to get going straight. That was one of the things I’d learned in the past sixteen hours. “I’ll bike him out and come right back and get you.”
Sixteen hours since we’d pulled into the parking lot, and that moment marked the low point, for them, at least.
A friend of mine had a theory about campsites. If you can get a mile in, away from the road, from the parking, from bunches of people, from civilization, just one mile, then the whole camping experience opens up. The skies, the elements, the outdoors that you’re looking for — all of it comes readily if you can just manage to get yourself that far into it.
A few years out from my fiftieth birthday, I started looking for spots like that. I wanted a trip for me and the boys that would put us off the grid, that would let me wake up on that day in a beautiful place with my sons, doing something we loved to do, in a new special place. I had an idea at that point that they’d be old enough for a heavier adventure, seven and nine, old enough to carry a pack, to help out, to actually contribute to our survival, instead of strictly the earlier version of their camping selves, okay to sleep outside, as long as the car was right there, and daddy did all the work. I wanted a test, to gauge where they were in that regard, and a camp with a hike-in would surely be one. I also knew that if I never asked, then they’d never have any reason to answer, and we’d never know.
Looking back at what unfolded from there, I got exactly what I wanted.
Winter camping on the Gulf Coast was great, so good at times that it felt like a little secret to be guarded from the masses. We’d camped at Fort Pickens in November, near Pensacola, every year since the boys were born, except 2020 when the campground was flooded by Hurricane Laura. I’d camped there before the boys. It was one of my favorite places, the thin strip of land between the bay and the gulf that runs right up to the entry to Pensacola Bay. In all those years I’d only had one really cold night there, low thirties, and even that day, by noon I was in short sleeves. We swam in the gulf every trip. The gulf was warm, stayed even warmer in recent years, the air temperature when you emerged being your only concern, and the boys never cared. They were hearty in that way, despite the younger turning blue while drying off at times, his thin, bony frame shivering until the sun’s warm rays stabilized him. E.B. White’s chill of death lurked nearby.
Fort Pickens was our regular spot, and it was car camping. I wanted something different for the fiftieth. I’d seen some good hike-in spots. John’s Rock in Pisgah National Forest looked like an amazing place to hike and camp, but that was in North Carolina. Winter camping in the mountains wasn’t what I had in mind. I searched the warmer climes, the areas we knew, and when I came across the Outpost camps at Gulf State Park at Orange Beach, Alabama, it seemed like I’d found the perfect spot: primitive camp, army-style canvas tents already in place, no RVs, hike-in/bike-in on a paved path, and near the beach, with the moderating, gulf-coast weather patterns we were familiar with. This spot had it all. I booked it almost a year out.
About a week out, the forecast turned bad. Thunderstorms followed by a cold front were coming through, on a course to hit that exact area at the exact time we would arrive. I got depressed. How could it happen? The coming front was a topic of conversation around New Year’s across the gulf coast, not because of its severity, but because of the mass of warm, humid air it was going to slam into. In New Orleans, the temperature was 83 on Saturday, the overnight low for Sunday was predicted to be 35 — a fifty-degree temperature drop in twenty-four hours. Tornados would surely follow.
We weren’t coming from New Orleans, though. We were coming from the east, where we’d spent New Year’s Eve with family on the Florida gulf coast. On January 2nd, radar indicated that the heaviest rain had shifted north. We could drive through the tail end and arrive after it’d mostly cleared, to what looked to be a pretty nice evening. The temperature would drop overnight, but we’d bundle in the tent, and then the next day was all sun, with highs in the mid-forties. We’d be fine!
I checked in at the entrance to Gulf State Park around 3 p.m. The boys waited in the car. The woman in the office was a little unsure. The Outpost camps weren’t marked on the trail map. She pointed to the trail she thought they were on, but there was another trail just north of there that might’ve been it. All of that was back a few miles east on the beach road, the way we’d come. You had to take a left, or maybe it was a U-turn then a right, then look for the trailhead parking, which she was pretty sure was marked. She pulled out a basket of keys and rifled through them briefly, saying she was pretty sure the gate would be open. When they knew someone was coming, she said, they would go out and open the gate. It was unclear if they knew we were coming, but it was clear that we’d be the only ones out there.
“Is there firewood?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, definitely”, she said, her most confident statement thus far.
“We’ll be fine, then.”
We found the first trailhead, but none of the signage indicated there was a camp down that path. I asked some hikers if they’d seen a camp. They hadn’t, but they hadn’t gone far. This camp was so far off the radar that its existence could not be confirmed!
I looked at the trail map again and the general area where the woman in the office had pointed and figured we were probably at the right trail. I unloaded the bikes, had to screw one handlebar back up after unscrewing it to fit it in the car, loaded up the wagon, and we set off. The path was smooth, and the weather was nice. Rain had passed and late-afternoon winter sunlight splashed the woods of Orange Beach. The heavy wagon was tricky to maneuver, and when one of the plastic wheels went off the raised lip of the path and dragged sideways threatening to break off, I stopped and shortened the length of the pull rope. The wagon was one of those nylon-sided, pop-up deals, with a metal frame, but with plastic wheels, with an inch-wide rubber-band of “tread” stretched around each one. If one of those plastic wheels broke off, everything would get much harder.
When we found the site, we were filled with joy! It was great to be there! The canvas tents were roomy and nice. They were set up off the ground on wooden decks, with little front porches, with plastic Adirondack chairs. The fire pits were down from the tents, through the sand, with benches built in. Our tent was called “The Duke.” It was the farthest back off the trail of the three, past the firewood, the outhouses and sink, and the other two tents. The ground was sand, and the wagon wheels wouldn’t turn on it, so after dragging the wagon with the ice chest in it all the way to The Duke, I was winded and sweating. But I didn’t care! We were at a camp away from everyone, and it was a gorgeous evening. We would have a fire, make some dinner, and be in the tent by the time the temperature started dropping, just as soon as I biked back to the car to get the rest of the stuff.
Back at the car I contemplated the second load. Would I need both the cast-iron pan and the Dutch oven? I could just do all the cooking in the pan, but that oven with the lid was nice to have. The boys liked their Pilsbury cinnamon rolls in the morning, and they did better in the oven. I put them both in the wagon. What about the guitar? I did bring it all that way, no point leaving it then. By the end of the third mile-and-a-quarter trip, I was glad to be done with biking and with dragging stuff over the sand to The Duke.
I made a fire, and the sun went down. The wood wasn’t wet, but it had been wet. It burned, and eventually burned hot, but it wouldn’t put off much flame, no roaring, crackling fire. I cooked a few hot dogs on long forks, and I used a little cast-iron “camp cooker” to make the older a pizza kind of thing, with Pilsbury pizza dough, sauce, and cheese. It was a tradition, but they didn’t always come out good. This one did.
I thought the traditions would help the boys remember the trips. I didn’t know why. We took some camping trips when I was growing up, but I don’t remember any specific traditions that went along with them. Nor do I remember returning to a particular spot time and again. Beyond memories of cold creeks, starry skies, and dirt mixed in with the food, along with general memories of just being together with my family, a feeling of functioning as a unit, moving about together. My most specific memories were of the van we used to get there — the weight of the sliding door, the texture of the curtains my mother had sewn and affixed to the inside on little, telescoping rods, the feeling of being in the back of the van while it rolled down the highway. The bench seat was a wall. The back was a room. I didn’t know what my boys would remember from our trips, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be the car, a generic midsize SUV, one of an interchangeable few that they’d already known in their short lives. There was no way to know what they’d remember. Maybe I made the pizza pockets every time so that I’d remember.
By the time I went to use some of the dough to make the younger his blueberry pie, with berries and preserves inside, another tradition, a cold mist had started falling. The temperature dropped quickly as I moved the dry bags to inside the tent. We opened our sleeping bags onto the cots, and I went out to check the pie, while the boys got in their bags. Cold, misty rain was coming steady, so I brought the camp cooker back into the tent to open it, but I was a little late — the pie was golden brown on one side, but black on the other.
The younger was disappointed, but I told him not to worry. I had enough dough left to do another one. The dough was there in the tent with us. It had only gotten a little wet. I could tell they were getting tired, though, so I made them get up and put some layers and extra socks on before they got back in their bags. I sat outside minding that pie. The fire was hot, but only right in the middle. I could put my hand right over it, up to just a few inches from the wood.
By the time I got back to the tent, the younger was asleep. It was around eight p.m. I opened the cooker and used a flashlight to inspect the pie, still a little doughy on one side, but the boy was asleep, so I just left the cooker closed on the wooden deck floor. I chatted with the older for a short time in the lantern light, and then he was drifting off to sleep. There wasn’t much to do when it was too wet to sit out by the fire, and the kids were asleep in the tent, so I turned out the light and eased onto my cot, using a folded-up sweatshirt for a pillow. I had forgotten pillows. Or maybe I had meant not to bring them.
The wind picked up and whipped against the canvas walls, knocking the guitar in its case to the floor. I saw the younger twisting and turning, head buried under the bag, feet scrunched up., whimpering softly. I dozed off for some time, and when I woke with the noise of the wind, the younger was sitting up.
“You okay, buddy?”
“It’s too cold. I can’t sleep.”
I had suspected as much. The cots were nice for allowing air to flow underneath, that is, when it was warm out, but it was hard to stay warm on them in the cold. The floor might have been a warmer option, if the floor itself hadn’t been designed to do the exact same thing. The raised decks that the tents sat on worked great to allow air to flow underneath the tents. The tents were like the shotgun houses of tents, designed to stay as cool as possible in the mostly warm coastal climate. As it was, they didn’t trap any heat at all. We’d have been better off in a regular tent, on the ground, together on one bed and sharing blankets. But we were in The Duke, on cots, spread out from each other. Whatever the temperature was outside, that’s what it was in The Duke, and it was dropping quickly.
“Why don’t you come get in here with me?” I said.
He got up and came over, and I zipped us up together in my bag, which was a warmer one than his. On a different kind of bed, I could’ve slept with us both in one bag, but on the cots, the canvas sagged while the metal rails held firm against my back. We both tried to keep our faces covered, as the air in the tent was now too cold to expose your face to.
Some time passed, maybe an hour. I thought the younger was asleep, but then when the older woke up and sat up in his cot, I was wide awake.
“What’s the matter?” I said, already knowing the answer.
“It’s too cold. I can’t sleep.”
“Okay,” I said, and slowly unzipped my bag and pried myself from the younger and up.
“My feet are frozen,” he said.
I fumbled around in a bag for the last pair of socks and put them on his feet. I felt the cold air coming up from the half-inch gaps between the floorboards. I took his bag and the younger’s and unzipped them both. Maybe if I could sandwich us between two bags, there might be a little more room for two of us to sleep on one cot. That was the best idea I could think of. That or try to bike to the car.
I laid out one unzipped bag and told the older to get in. Then I got in and put the other on top of us blanket-style. It was warmer, but my torso was still smashed against the metal rail, and there was no place to put my arm except out and over the bar. After some time like that — twenty minutes? forty-five? trying not to cramp, no room to rearrange even slightly — I got up. I had no sleeping bag. I sat in the dark, cold tent.
I had wanted to see how grown-up they were, which in a way was a gauge of how tough they were. But how tough was I? I was their father, and they trusted that I would never put them in danger, would never put them in a situation where they wouldn’t be okay. But could I trust myself not to do that?
I once met the writer Scott Russell Sanders at a conference. He was one of the most remarkable people I’d ever had a conversation with. In a crowded cocktail party after his address, I got his attention and spoke with him about something, I can’t even remember what. What I do remember is how fully present he was in that conversation, in that moment. There were people waiting to speak with him, conference planners and board members, way more important people. I could see them and feel them waiting for a moment to cut in. But he couldn’t. He didn’t. He was talking to me, and that’s what he was doing at the moment. He gave that conversation his full self, undistracted, until it was done. It wasn’t about me, or what we were talking about, or some way he was trying to be at the time. It was just who he was, a completely mindful person, tuned in to every spoken word, his own and those of every person he spoke with. His comfort in the world was like none I’d ever seen.
During his keynote address, he’d told a story of an adventure with his son. I didn’t recall the exact details, but it involved a strenuous and challenging trip, to mark an occasion, a birthday, perhaps, or graduation. He must’ve been in his fifties at the time, and the picture he painted was one of a series of challenging adventures with his son — long hikes with backpacks, remote destinations, different continents — impressive and inspiring stuff. I didn’t have kids at the time, but his speech surely put some ideas in my head. When he came to the end of the story, he and his son were on top of mountain somewhere, and he had a moment of realization there. In choosing to have a child, he had internalized the responsibility of making that child’s life a good life, and he’d accepted the joy and hope, as well as the fear and worry, that went along with that. But there was another truth that he hadn’t realized up until that moment on the mountain — that his son would also one day face his own death. That in a way, in creating that life, he’d also created a death. That in way, by bringing his son into the world, he’d also sentenced him to die.
I fumbled in the dark for my phone. It was 4:30 a.m. The wind had calmed down some. I went out of the tent. The sky was filled with dark, orange-tinted clouds. No stars. I walked to the front of the Outpost to get some wood and stuffed a few singles into the honor-system box that asked a dollar for two pieces. I arranged the wood into a log cabin in the pit and lit it with a plug of sticky fire-starting material. As I waited for the fire to heat up, I checked the phone: 34 degrees, sunrise at 6:47 a.m., high for the day of 44 degrees, the next night’s low of 33.
I sat in an Adirondack, but the fire wasn’t hot enough to sit that far back. I stood, paced, walked around it, changing spots to get out of the smoke, put my hands deep into my pockets and bounced up and down. I pulled my sweatshirt hood over my head and cinched up the drawstrings with the little tabs. I reached into the ice chest and fished around for a can of peach-flavored Red Bull. I opened the podcasts app on the phone and resumed an episode of The Plot Thickens about Lucille Ball.
Lucy had wanted a normal family life more than almost anything, second only to how badly she had wanted a successful career in showbusiness. Unfortunately, those two big wants smashed into each other. She had trouble getting pregnant. She and Desi had Desi Junior when she was forty. I had the older when I was forty. Time and again her career took precedent over her kids and family life. Desi was a great entertainer, almost single-handedly popularizing the Conga-line craze in the U.S., and he was no doubt a shrewd businessman, building an empire with Desilu. But he was a terrible father and husband, drinking heavily and sleeping around, picking up women at parties at the couple’s own house and taking them to their bedroom. At least go fuck them in the maid’s room, Lucy had told him, or something like that. But as doomed to misery as that Hollywood family was, they still had a moment, a few years in there when they decided to take time out to raise the kids, to take them on vacations, to teach them to fish. They did it, as brief as it was, before the whole thing fell apart.
The sun began to come up around the time the phone had predicted, and the temperature ticked up that one degree. I unzipped the tent to stick my head in and check on the boys, and it was colder in the tent than outside. They sat up, the younger’s teeth chattering, and when I told them I had a hot fire going, the older jumped up went straight out. I pulled a sleeping bag out and draped it over them as they sat by the fire.
“Who wants cinnamon rolls?”
They were in good spirits. They had slept some. They were eager to have our traditional camp breakfast, and I even managed to burn the bottoms of a few as usual.
I explained the situation. The next night was going to be the same. We didn’t have the right gear, and we weren’t in the right kind of tent. We could make a day of it, go check out the nature center, maybe the beach, and then drive home. The older was disappointed, but he understood. The younger understood, too, but he was already thinking about the bike ride out. He couldn’t do it, he said. It was too cold to ride the bike. I told him we’d pull our sleeves down over our hands and take our time, and just walk if we had to. He was willing to give it a try, so I moved quickly, not breaking down the camp, but just putting the ice chest and a few bags into the wagon and dragging it to the front.
We didn’t get far before I had to leave the ice chest and bike out the younger. The older managed to bike himself out, and once they were in the car watching videos on their devices, they were fine. They were not concerned in the least with what daddy had to do.
I started back to camp pulling the empty wagon. I’d break down the camp first and try to load all of that out in one trip, then go back for the ice chest and the younger’s bike. Some people were out walking the trail by that point, bundled up and breathing steamy breaths, watching me go back and forth like a crazy man. I approached a man who I’d already passed. Now he was carrying the little red bike toward the parking lot.
“Did you lose a bike?” he said. “You look like you’re having a bad day.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “I’m on my way back to the camp, though. You can just leave the bike and I’ll get it later.”
“I’ll set it there by the swing for you.”
“Good, thank you.” The swing was at the .75 marker. I had left it at the one-mile mark. He had carried it .25 for me.
At camp, I managed to get everything else into the wagon, with the sleeping bags unrolled, draped across the top and stuffed into the corners. I laughed as I retrieved the last item, the guitar, now symbolic of my dashed hopes for the trip. At the car I mounted the bike rack and loaded the older’s bike and the fourth bike. My girlfriend had planned to come but couldn’t at the last minute and not because of the weather. She would have had fun, but I would have felt bad putting her through that. I rolled up the bags, stuffed them into the hatch and closed it quickly. I opened the passenger door and stuck my head in.
“I’m almost done, boys. I’ve just got to go get the other bike and the ice chest.”
They couldn’t hear me because they had headphones on. Back on the path, I tried to get the bike and ice chest both into the wagon, but along the way the bike fell out and by the time I looked back I didn’t even see it, so I pedaled the ice chest out, then went back for the bike. In all I pedaled 7.75 miles that morning. The full load-out took me almost three hours. My hands stung for about a week after.
We visited the nature center, which was quite nice, and walked by a lake that was near the regular campground. There were no tents, though, only R.V.s.
“What do you think about these R.V.s, boys? All of these people had a warmer night than we did. Do you think you’d like it in one of those?”
“I think it’d be good,” the younger said.
“I liked our tent, too,” the older said.
“Maybe when I’m sixty,” I said. “I figure daddy’s got about ten more years of tent camping in him. Then we’ll get an R.V. and just park and sleep. How’s that sound?”
The sleep deprivation and exhaustion were kicking in. I had squiggles in my eyesight in the bright sunlight.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) wasn’t a very good movie, but it did have a few good scenes. Of course, the money scene at the end is the one the whole thing is building toward, when she’s old and he’s a baby, and they can’t communicate. All they can do is look at each other and remember the life they’d had together. But I also liked a scene in the middle, when they’re both around the same age, and they’re dancing to records in the living room. Truth be told, I liked just about any scene in any movie involving playing records, but there was something touching about that one, that brief moment, again, like with Lucy, how fleeting it all is, when you can dance and sing and play and fish, and be together.
The drive back to New Orleans was difficult. I had little moments of snapping myself awake. I thought about stopping at a rest area to nap, but then I got a second wind when we passed the rest area, and then a third wind at the next one, and so on. I stopped once for gas and bought a can of Starbucks Triple Shot. It tasted like vanilla and chemicals, but it worked. I finished the Lucy season of the podcast. Lucy’s last public appearance was at the Grammy awards. She’d been asked to present by Bob Hope, and she couldn’t say no to Bob Hope. She wore a black, sequined dress cut high up the side, and after the show she got a big round of cheers from fans outside when she flashed them her leg. She still had great legs. She died in 1989, the year I graduated high school. I cried as I listened. She was good person, and I hadn’t slept.
At home, after an hour or so snooze, I got up, and the boys were in the living room, just doing their thing. I was fifty. We ordered pizza from Papa John’s and watched Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) with Jim Carrey. “Grownups are always talking about actors,” the older said. They thought he was pretty funny as the bad guy.
That was the first reaction. I had talked up what would be their introduction to Universal Horror, my movie night pick, and now they were freaked out good. They had begged me not to, had insisted that they hated horror and were terrified by it. But they already knew the characters, I said, which they did from countless references to Dracula and Frankenstein in books, movies, and cartoons, and this would be like that, a horror-comedy. So as the Universal International globe spun in black and white (the cover image had misled them) just ahead of the title sequence of 1948’s Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, they were in a heightened state of panic, and entirely irked at me. But it was time.
Around forty years ago in a house in New Orleans just a few blocks from where we sat, my father had introduced me to Universal Horror by borrowing a projector and a two-reel copy from the library and showing The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) on the living-room wall. I wasn’t more than seven. I can’t say I didn’t have to hide my eyes at some parts, but other parts, when the monster roams the countryside and meets people, were enthralling. That is among my earliest recollections of film. Another would be when he screened King Kong (1933) on that same wall. Suffice to say that monsters were a significant portion of my early movie life. With this I gauged that my own kids’ level of disturbance would be endurable, if perhaps uncomfortable. What could it be, I thought, that’s worse than the ends of Harry Potter movies that they watched all of the time.
I was wrong. The younger went into a state of hysteria, making wild contorted faces, yelping and shrieking, covering his face with his blanket, which resulted in the older yelling for him to shut up. The younger leaped out of his seat and ran around the room, covering his face and screaming in fright. This is during the opening scene, in which Lon Cheney Jr. transforms into the Werewolf. The older said how stupid it looks. He’s more in tune. Later he’d tell me that he was terrified the whole time. The younger calmed down, some. He couldn’t stop watching. When Dracula appears, finally popping out of his coffin after a little stop-start bit with Lou Costello seeing it and Bud Abbot just missing it, the younger mimics his cape over the face, going around the room and popping up behind us on the couch. At one point I offered to stop the movie, but he declined. He couldn’t stop watching. They couldn’t stop watching.
Bela Lugosi still has the power to transfix us, even in the modern digital media world in which we live. There’s something essential, our original filmic understanding of terror, of fear, of horror, when Lugosi appears onscreen, the eyes, the hands, the music and atmosphere. The films wove their way into my life in remarkable ways from that living room wall on. Despite my early introduction, as a kid I didn’t want any part of current horror movies. A kid’s mother had taken a small group of us to the theater for his birthday party. We watched Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). Why she did that to us I’ll never understand. A few friends somehow managed to get in to see Friday the 13th, Part III, in 3-D! (1982). I heard that an eyeball flew right at you from the screen. By the time Friday the 13th, Part IV: The Final Chapter came out in 1984, kids were regularly getting into R movies at the downtown single-screen in the small town where I lived. The idea of going terrified me, and I may have had to put up an excuse to avoid the trip. My fear must have been rooted in what I perceived to be the gore of those movies, though, because the one that got me hooked on horror was 1983’s Psycho 2. A friend’s dad took us to the mall theater to see it. (What was it with parents showing us those movies? I mean, I showed my kids Abbott and Costello, but it wasn’t like I was taking them to the theater to see It (2017).) Psycho 2 had the suspense, and the crazy plot of the first film as backstory. It had the thrills without a lot of gore, and that was the key. Same for Halloween (1978) which instantly became an all-time favorite when I first saw it on cable a few years later. The early sequences in Halloween, like the one when Michael Myers appears between billowing sheets hanging on the clothesline, with Jamie Lee Curtis seeing him, then not seeing him, remain great fun.
Slasher flicks and gore flicks have some dark comedic undertones, but nothing compared to the black comedy in the original Psycho (1960). The Universal monsters of course begat the world of B-horror, monster, gore, and slasher movies, but at their core they worked on a sense of suspense, created by creepy sets, lighting, and music, playing on our edginess at not quite being able to see what’s moving in the dark. The monsters are always scariest before they’re seen in full. In this way they also gave us the idea of psychological horror, the terror of the unknown, a glimpse of madness. That’s where the line to Psycho is. The monster in Psycho is a crazy man, which makes his insanity, and the terror he unleashes, a mirror of our own relative sanity, and that’s where the dark, morose comedy of Tony Perkins and Hitchcock’s creation comes from. That’s the good stuff. The twisted playfulness. The straight-but-awful line played for uncomfortable laughs. The deft camerawork, and integration of the score, used like a sound effect. From the black comedy of Psycho is another line, straight to the films of the Coen Brothers, some of my absolute favorites, as well as great stuff from people like Aronofsky and many others. I’d even say you’d have to look to Hitchcock, as much as to Universal, for influence behind classics like The Shining (1980), TheOmen (1976), TheExorcist (1973). A world of cinematic joy awaited my boys. They needed to start somewhere.
But I wasn’t going to show them The Shining.
“I’ll tell you the scariest monsters in the order of their scariness,” the older tells me. “And I’ll give you ratings of their scariness, from 1-5 with one being the least scary.”
“Okay, shoot.”
“Zombies are a one, they’re not smart. Werewolves and Frankensteins are a two. They’re scary, but easy to get away from. Vampires are like a three. They’re pretty scary. Mummies are a zero. They’re not scary at all, and it’s insulting that they’re even considered monsters.”
The boy was heavily into ancient Egypt.
“What are the scariest monsters?”
“The scariest ones are ones you can’t really see, like demons.”
Dang, he sure figured something out with that one.
“So this movie isn’t really scary for you?”
“Oh, no, it’s terrifying.”
“Terrifying? Really?”
“Yes, every moment.”
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is one of the last films Lugosi made. Within five years he’d be appearing in Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda (1953), and within eight years he was dead. The film was actually a late high point of sorts for him, after years of clinging to the very bottom rungs of showbiz, taking any part he was offered, in any cheap-o flick, and often being too sick and morphine-addled to do much acting in them. There’s many angles to Lugosi’s story, some sad and some fascinating. I loved Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994) with Martin Landau’s superb performance as Lugosi, but at the time of Ed Wood I hadn’t seen many Lugosi films, not even Dracula (1931). I basically knew that the original Dracula was the inspiration of The Count on Sesame Street, and that was about it. Since then my appreciation for Lugosi has only grown. Watching White Zombie and The Black Cat, while listening to the Bela-and-Boris season of the excellent podcast You Must Remember This, has given me new understanding of the man and his weirdly outsized film legacy. If you’ve ever enjoyed the experience of watching Ed Wood followed immediately by Plan 9from Outer Space (1959) (or vice versa, works pretty well either way), then you’ll definitely enjoy listening to that podcast and re-watching all of it!
In Meet Frankenstein, Lugosi does his thing with the coffins and the hands and eyes, which apparently still packs a punch upon seeing it for the first time, as evidenced by my younger son simultaneously hiding his eyes and watching. But if the film is a success, it’s because of the comedic acting of one Lou Costello. This guy is a great physical comedian. He skips, prances, pirouettes, bats his eyelashes at the beautiful women who pretend to adore him, but are secretly plotting to either steal his brain or to uncover the plot. He’s the foolish pawn in the ridiculous plot, the type of role that people like Peter Sellers or, later, Jim Carey would excel in.
There are a few disturbing scenes. The evil woman gets thrown through a window by Frankenstein’s monster, after which she is presumed dead. I kind of wish they hadn’t seen that. Even in Harry Potter movies, there’s nothing quite as raw as that. Later Frankenstein’s monster is killed by being consumed in flames, and that was disturbing to watch as well.
Afterward the boys were pretty disappointed with me and with the whole experience. Maybe they’ll be talking about that night from a shrink’s couch years later, but I don’t think so. They got to see Lugosi rise out of a coffin and got a thrill from it. I’ve got to believe that the magic of that will stick with them long after the fear subsides.
“It wasn’t that bad, was it?” I hesitantly asked at bedtime. I wasn’t going to bring it up again, but they were still talking about it.
“Not at the age of seven,” the younger said.
Maybe not, I thought, but on the other hand, he was old enough to use the phrase “at the age of seven.”
PostScript.
A few more angles on the film: Martin Landau deserves additional mention in the line that runs from Dracula to Ed Wood for his appearances in The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, two key small-screen pieces in the evolution of psychological terror and suspense. Landau stars in several classic episodes, but his turn in The Outer Limits S1E6, “The Man Who Was Never Born” is a must see.
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was a favorite film of Jerry Garcia’s. He gave an interview about it for an AMC show called The Movie that Changed My life. It and The Bride of Frankenstein feature prominently in the Grateful Dead documentary series called Long Strange Trip. Garcia identified with the freakishness of the monsters and the way they were cast out of mainstream society. And how in their grotesque destruction they maintained some piece of humanity. And while the Dead doc mentions and even expands on those films as influences on Garcia, that Dead doc is the only rock doc I’ve ever seen that doesn’t mention any blues, rhythm and blues, or rock and roll artists as influences. I mean none! No Robert Johnson, no T-Bone or Lightning, no Howling Wolf, no Leadbelly, no Jimmy Reed, no Chuck, Fats, or Bo, or even Elvis. And that, folks, is my problem with the Dead in a nutshell.
Lou Costello was a friend of Dean Martin’s from their pre-stardom days and actually helped get Martin into showbiz. Lugosi made one other film after Meet Frankenstein and before he met Ed Wood, called Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952). To give you an idea of where Lugosi was in his career, and what kind of high point Meet Frankenstein was, Brooklyn Gorilla also starred Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, who were Martin and Lewis impersonators. And that, my friends, is what we call a full circle.
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