Movie Bully v. Quarantine Part 1
“Wouldn’t it be nice to arrive at the beginning of something for once?”
I don’t need to tell you that things have been horrible. I feel lousy. You feel lousy. It’s been hard to focus because it’s been hard to find value in a distraction. I stay home or I go to my part time retail job that was until recently still open to the public (and soon to be open again) and a walk-in nightmare that made you realize George Romero was too subtle. That’s been my main function right now. Stripped out and just the gears. All the distractions that kept me hopeful and kept me from feeling like a complete failure or at best a screwdriver are gone. The motivations to do a newsletter about movies the way I wanted to do it— focusing on the routine of going to a theatre, engaging with a piece of art I’m curious about, feeling like I’m still part of an experience and belong there even when my reality tells me otherwise, going home feeling different and realizing the spark I once had has only faded and not gone away completely, and writing about that—are non-existent.
But then I hear a podcast.
White people saying “Director Bong” gleefully like they’re getting away with murder instead of hate speech. Burnt out theatre children giggling over someone’s first name because it is either the sound a bell makes or the thing you use to smoke weed. Feeling that rush they haven’t felt since watching Sixteen Candles in a twelve bedroom summer house in East Egg on a family trip away from it all some three weeks ago.
“I like how the rich family wasn’t vilified. It’s about the system!”
“Really wish there was a Green Day album to help us with all this discourse.”
“I like Bernie and I bother a lot of cool left-leaning women online but I don’t believe in anything and I’m too lame to even try.”
“Prince Harry has done more good in the world than I ever will.”
“What’s going to happen to The Oscars now?!”
Then I go online.
My boyfriend made me watch The Sunshine Boys. The ending of the Zapruder Film explained. I like that Tom and Jerry can talk because now they can go to therapy. The haunted meaning behind the Zapruder Film. That Sonic The Hedgehog movie was really shallow. Jojo Rabbit is a flawed masterpiece.
Why is horror so scary? For years, men have ordered me to watch this work of stunning genius [Babe: Pig In The City]. Having finally succumbed, it turns out they were wrong. Watch Jim from The Office on his new youtube show The Benghazi Positivity Zone. I found Terminator too blurry. How David Fincher tricks you by making great movies.
The Hidden Masterpiece of Life is a House. The Secret Masterpiece of Life is a House. Josh Gads’ web series where he interviews serial killers about pop culture as Olaf is what we need right now. How does an editor feel when we splice them up into little cubes? I met my wife at Burning Man. I just love saying “Director Bong.” That’s his name!
This wasn’t healthy before going to a grocery store was a Zulawski routine but now it feels like a further synecdoche in the way things are always going to get worse. But even at my lowest, I know I can do better than this (maybe not The Burning Man part). I either add to this or subtract myself from it. I know with the barest of resources I can still sustain a better experience of writing something engaged than something meant to melt your brain into a mould of thinking that permits the lower standard and makes you miserable. We all can. Even if this thing I want to build here shrinks before it balloons. I might need to do this to keep me going.
Babe: Pig in The City (1998)
Directed by George Miller
Written by George Miller, Judy Morris, Mark Lamprell
Babe: Pig in The City should be a bigger deal even when it already has evangelists (the most toxic of men). Always running within this process of trying to articulate the estranging actions that goes into creating a sequel to a classic of children’s art that not only has an ending planted in the ground but components too solid to change or maneuver, the film is the best representation of those odd sequels that threat the original moral. Adapting a book that doesn’t exist while still mimicking the structure of being read, it is a work naturally antithetical, radical but existing within a tradition, organized but living sentence to sentence as plot gives itself over to sensations of total anarchy.
It is a deliberate dismantling. A part of the life-long project devised by George Miller of constantly re-affirming the Hero’s Journey through its redundancies. How mythology gives smaller moments order in a grander idea but how a reality blows those actions apart through time or living a life longer than a story of fading significance. The first Babe dwells within the pristine feelings of a fable. The Sheep-Pig’s absolution is this small gesture given a mythological shape and weight the sequel film has to destroy immediately when Babe almost kills the man he had to appease to live. The boon of kindness finally felt shrinks when a small mistake becomes a colossal failure making life harder in rapid haze. Much like how Mad Max exists through legends of his victories while also living with sins that naturally punctate louder so too does the Pig who acts like a sheep-dog.
The on-holiday farce—a sequel idea in a lot of children’s literature where the now iconic character responds to a public in some light reflective form of misunderstandings and ironic gags dismantling relaxation—becomes more menaced and forced upon. Babe’s context doesn’t disappear completely in the city but he becomes an occupant in an unfamiliar world sharing space with strangers of echoing experiences. Dogs bred for a job guarding empty dark alleys (“I have a professional obligation to be malicious”). A circus troupe of apes made to perform by a deteriorating master (Mickey Rooney) who stops to function at a certain point. Smaller creatures felt abandoned and scarred by the cruelty of people (a little dog mentioning their owner put them in a bag and threw them into the water). If the farm is a place of fatalism and giving life purpose through the function and occupation (and upending that process through devising another function), the city as it exists in deep black canals and lacquered shadows is a physical commonality of the dread that comes with surviving after destiny and finding nothing else. Which is a great thing for children to process.
The upending here becomes a total anarchistic procedure. Not an acceptance of insanity but a collision of narratives equal in importance. Forming community through a chaotic necessity and want to help each other. Forcing absurdist terror into meaning through a will and energy felt before and felt again through an acceptance towards absurdity. A city skyline representing total universality—anti-Joycean in that it forgoes finding universal feelings in the specific—once representing overwhelming estrangement transforms into an embraceable symbol of the beauty of a chaotic reality. Changing that image into the only other thing it could mean.
The culture of the film deepens as a result. The primal machinery of the filmmaking can now articulate textual references that becomes more fuel for the engine. Starting to reproduce the energy of Edward Lear with a bestiary more expansive outside pastoral environments. Fluent in the same satirical representations of Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard Grandville as an Orangutan puts on a tuxedo and sits beside a time-locked Victorian rich lady at a banquet as she comments on the barbaric actions of animals crashing the party without looking at him and thinking she's talking to her husband. And the mayhem of the climax resembling both Miller’s work in Beyond Thunderdome and a Chuck Jones short formulating an ecosystem of gags that flow within carnage. The film ending back at the farm with the same last line because it has to remind itself and the audience where it came from. Becoming a work of myth once again.
Next Week: Kentucky Route Zero Act 5 and whatever else I watch.
As always: I hope this was good.