Movie Bully Spooktacular!: Little Shop of Horrors!
"I keep asking God what I'm for And he tells me "Gee, I'm not sure Sweep that floor, kid."
Little Shop of Horrors: The Director’s Cut (1986)
Directed by Frank Oz
Screenplay by Howard Ashman
Lyrics by Howard Ashman
Music by Alan Menken
Based on the Off-boardway musical of the same name by the same people
Based on a Roger Corman movie starring Dick Miller and Jack Nicholson
Starring Rick Moranis, Ellen Greene, Levi Stubbs, Vincent Gardenia, Steve Martin, Tichina Arnold, Tisha Campbell, Michelle Weeks, etc
I don’t know what I was doing before seeing Little Shop of Horrors a week ago but I suppose it explains a lot of spiritual misfortune and clears up the shunning as actually justifiable. I don’t have an excuse. Especially since that question is cohabiting with the query of why I wasn’t a They Might Be Giants guy in high school when I met the perfect size to fit into a garbage can. Little Shop in comparison probably the least unforgivable. TMBG would’ve been a blemish in character either a demerit when applying for a loan or the Johns showing up to my “birthday party” telling me with pauses it was Istanbul not Constantinople as I’m tied up and blindfolded. Admiring this instead of that feels less…clogged with gummed residue as more regrets make a pile. I could’ve been cooler.
The work doesn’t pretend to be delicate. Webbed up in the notion that to resemble what’s successful in a system of disenfranchisement is to be sociopathically ignorant or a bucked up but traumatized participant. Capitalism as evolved from the carnivorous mechanics that went away from the essentials and the means for which to survive basically as it gnaws on the possibility of more. Audrey II growing in a display window as this primeval icon to what attitude festers out a value, markets blame into a reason, hidden in intimacy to shroud what it recognizes in ugly forces it points at in the huddle as it drifts from what is holistically menacing to endear a false proposition of nurturing worse impulses to pitch them as natural. Exploiting modesty as undeserving when the unobtainable is closer if—to refrain from just the image of selling your soul because we’re living with that already signed—a person imagines human performance played out totally in a showroom with tags on everything. Hoisting dreams made in abject suffering as the truest evil the foundation aspires in. Made indiscernible from what fascinates in the ear listening to pop songs. Campy but too cordially felt. Tragedy the only affordable happy ending but more fun as art than how you talk about it.
Like Watchmen in the same year—not as nervous with the ending they could’ve shared sooner—grander anxiety turns to kitsch not as a cure but as a sedative. Whatever imagined at that stage in modernity—the mutations after the atomic bomb and how pop culture in pulp or at the drive-in reminds and threatens the investment afterwards—can’t think beyond the plastered rendering of the metaphor assuring destruction. Instead of suburbia or a small town, cobbled up in what Republicans canvas around to avoid. A façade of New York hung out in the same way as Sesame Street (which is an obvious point no one makes with Oz) designed for a louder irony or a chaotic sincerity uncensoring the suffering that goes along quietly but still seems to rattle. An intention in the work crystallized in the unreal range of Ellen Greene as Audrey travelling from affected to eruptive. Bathos believed like opera confusing this idea of camp as laughing at how people seem to happen in a shacked existence awkwardly. Whatever artifice actually raw and sadder than what critical gaze observes as silly.
Even though I’ve maybe moved ten centimeters in the last thirteen years and how I experience art has always been something of an unchanged motion of being hopeful while incredibly isolated, I can still be regretful when it comes to not getting into this quicker than now. That I didn’t live with this seems shameful as it not only offers a clarity in both motive and appreciation in what I find mean enough and funny, but how I can recognize it. The way in which Seymour interacts with Audrey II and Orin Scrivello* is an authentic rendition of a bounce back of how a sociopath constructs a friendship he (it’s a he) can profit from but also use to deflect any bad behaviour with the reverb of another person making muted reactions out of being polite. Being that receiver on more than one occasion (at work, at parties) as you’re invited to witness the total barely disguised masculine unfelt motives of what is still taken as successful or leading towards it. Seeing whatever they want in you as that’s limited. Thinking there is a safety unspoken in confidence even when what they say or do is repulsive** and turning your gut. And the kicker ultimately being these guys having that fortitude—maybe they realize it maybe they don’t—that’s promoted as casually strived for even when conscience isn’t required or merited. That behaviour mutated further from this point.
Art of a forty year old vintage (and as a remake) still as venomous as the first night and lived with in a way that’s rarer to feel. Being fun but never conceding. Never intended to have faults where the opposition—what it hates and opposes—can worm out. Where you don’t have to give over time for a blanket nicety to cushion the job. What’s been made of recent material and how a lame base that’s only getting lamer are made to react to it. The rich family are victims of capitalism too***. It’s an Anti-Hate Satire. Sure I’m a racist cop but that’s not fair I have cancer! Aaron Sorkin (A fog horn and A toilet flushing). What’s to gain in wavering when you can always and could be a lot meaner? There is plenty to be mad about. In art and elsewhere.
Also Ladies like this movie that’s cool.
Next Time: Cure, The Normal People Finale SPECTACULAR!, Maybe Devilman Crybaby, Other Unpopular things!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYBODY!!!
The End Notes!
*I knew about the Dentist song via one of those talking head “I love the movies!” shows
**and what I’m referencing is very small in comparison to something more heinous. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t actually call it out. I need to work on that.
*** This is more of a reaction to Parasite than Parasite. Also these are people who say “Director Bong”.