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For a very long time, I didn’t know that Death to Smoochy was supposed to be bad. For me, Death to Smoochy was just a strange movie I liked, one that I never heard anyone talking about. I didn’t know it had been such a huge critical and commercial failure. And It’s interesting how much of a difference that ignorance made in my relationship to the film. It was never a guilty pleasure for me. It was just a strange little film that happened to match my sensibilities, one that I got to enjoy watching without any of the added baggage of what other people thought about it. I now get how it might have struggled to find an audience. It’s a really big swing of a film. It’s a high concept, silly, dark comedy set in a surprisingly violent world, played like an extended Mr. Show sketch, that also just so happens to be a film that is sincerely concerned with the importance of education and positive messaging in children’s television. Who is that for? Me, I guess. The funny thing about Death to Smoochy is that it’s kind of a surrealist Frank Capra movie. It follows something awfully close to the plot of 1939’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington , but instead of being set amongst the machinations of the U.S. Senate, Death to Smoochy is set in the dark and seedy world of children’s television production. In both films, a young idealist is unexpectedly plucked from obscurity, and installed into a position of great public importance, because the people making that decision believe someone so naive would be controllable in a way that will make it easy to protect the grift they’re engaged in. However, our hero’s idealism happens to resonate with the public far more than the backroom dealers anticipated, making this idealist more challenging to control than they would like, so his downfall is quickly orchestrated. The plan backfires, though. In the end, our hero is saved by the children who believed in him all along, and by a formerly cynical woman who had been reluctantly shepherding our hero through this new world up to now, and had her own faith and idealism restored by having met someone so sincerely noble. In the end, goodness triumphs over evil, paving the way for a brighter future for all, while the bad guys all get what they deserve. All that said, when you get into the finer details of tone and plot of these two films, they diverge about as wildly from one another as one could imagine. Spiritually, though, they’re so close to the same story that the resemblance feels like it has to be something more than an accident. Death to Smoochy opens with a very brief flash-forward to what appears to be the murder of our titular hero, Smoochy the Rhino, in his costume, backstage at his show. Then, flashes back to the beginning of the story, where we see how a different beloved children’s television host, Rainbow Randolph (Robin Williams), loses the job that will go on to become Smoochy’s. Randy is a beloved and popular host, but he gets busted in an undercover bribery sting in which he is found taking a suitcase full of cash in exchange for plum spots for children of parents desperate to see their kids on TV. To get over the scandal, the executives at his network, KidNet, need to immediately find a children’s entertainer who is, if nothing else, “Squeaky. Fucking. Clean!”; bringing them to Sheldon Mopes (Ed Norton) and his purple, foam-suit character, Smoochy the Rhino. Like Jimmy Stewart’s Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington , Sheldon Mopes seems like someone too good to be true, a “harmless, ethical cornball”. We meet him performing at the Coney Island Methadone Clinic, in costume and playing songs for the patients. It may seem at first that we’re seeing a struggling Sheldon, but even here Sheldon fully believes he is doing good and useful work. Nora Wells (Catherine Keener), a young executive hardened over the years from dealing with her cynical and duplicitous coworkers in the children’s entertainment industry, has been dispatched to find Sheldon and offer him his own show at KidNet. Over a dinner of organic gluten-free soy dogs, with his homemade spirulina and almond butter sauce, an elated Sheldon pitches Nora on the kind of show that he has always wanted to give kids: An educational and entertaining show, with integrity, and a positive message, but without all the overly-commercial “bells and whistles and ricketa-racketa.” Sheldon gets the job but is rudely awakened when he discovers that he and KidNet are not at all on the same page about how to educate children. What Nora and KidNet are looking for is someone who can capably fill a timeslot, but primarily they just want someone to bridge the gap between commercial breaks. Additionally, Sheldon discovers that there is an expectation from scary, local, mob-like charities, such as The Parade of Hope, that he will make himself available to perform for their charity events, which themselves are little more than vehicles for selling kids cheap toys and sugary snacks, while the organizers skim all the profits they can off the top. As the film unfolds, the story turns ever darker as agents, executives, gangsters, and former kid show hosts, are all plotting to bring Sheldon down, even fatally if necessary. But, through it all, Sheldon perseveres, guided by an unwavering mission to help educate children. It’s this last bit that is the key feature of how a film like this works as much as it does. Whether it’s Frank Capra, Aaron Sorkin, or even Death to Smoochy , an audience will only forgive a message this schmaltzy, from a fundamentally good protagonist, if they really believe that the message is of actual importance. We can forgive some of the sentimentality and idealism of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, or The American President, or Dave, because good government and selfless public service are evergreen things that people actually do want to see more of. We can forgive the uncomplicated goodness of a character like Sheldon Mopes, because we have no trouble accepting the importance of his mission to teach children in a loving way. The film also gives Sheldon more dimension than, say, a Mr. Rogers, which helps us better connect with him. We learn that Sheldon started on his path toward becoming Smoochy because of a court-ordered anger management class he had to take in college. We also see Sheldon pushed well past his breaking point, to a place where the audience could even accept him caving in to do a just but terrible thing, but he is fortunately rescued from the situation by his friends just in time. Sheldon isn’t perfect, but neither is anyone else. He’s doing his best every day and trying to teach kids how to do the same. Tonally, the movie does get incredibly dark, but that helps underscore Sheldon’s message throughout. The thing he says the most often in the film is “You can’t change the world, but you can make a dent.” It’s meant to be a bit of a joke that Sheldon is initially performing at a methadone clinic, but they double down on the idea when that is the organization he ultimately chooses to donate all the proceeds from the charity ice show he ends up putting on himself. This helps underline the idea that literally everyone is worthy of a helping hand. Also, with Rainbow Randolph, It’s way over the top with the amount of awful things that he tries to do in order to bring down Sheldon, so much so that it does strain credulity when Randolph is redeemed and forgiven by the end of the film. Even the actual portrayal of Rainbow Randolph is frequently hard to take in the film because of how Robin Williams plays him, leaning into some of the more grating parts of his schtick from that era, particularly an uncomfortable amount of gay panic jokes. But all of that helps highlight the idea that anybody who is truly sorry, and sincerely tries to do better, is actually worthy of forgiveness, even someone as deplorable as Rainbow Randolph. The core of Death to Smoochy , despite the numerous horrific people that populate its world, is about someone trying to do good in a world that can make that hard, while also advocating for something that does truly matter. In the long view, the lasting impact of a character like Smoochy, or the real world character he is meant to represent, is in teaching the next generation of children not to give in to darkness and to find a way to make their own dent in the world. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

I’m a little late to be writing about Pixar’s most recent film, Turning Red, but I worry that its straight-to-streaming release may have resulted in this extraordinary film not garnering all of the attention and praise that it deserves. Now, of course, it’s no surprise that the best stories often work for any audience, but for a film whose themes are so overtly pitched towards young teen girls, I was astounded by how much Turning Red resonated with me. Throughout, I was very clearly reminded of my own experiences contending with the bubbling cauldron of emotions that come from being that age, as well as my current experiences watching my own younger children come into their own emotions. For so specific and fantastical a story, it’s impressive how universal this film manages to feel. Meilin Lee is a thirteen-year-old girl living in Toronto with her mother and father. Her family runs the Lee Family Temple in Toronto, dedicated to honoring their family’s ancestors, especially their most revered ancestor, Sun Yee. Sun Yee was “a scholar, a poet, and defender of animals. She dedicated her life to the creatures of the forest. Especially the red panda.” As Meilin would soon discover, Sun Yee loved red pandas so much that she asked the gods to turn her into one, and they complied, giving her the ability to harness her emotions to turn into a giant red panda. And Sun Yee passed this ability on to all of her female descendants, something Meilin first discovers one morning, via a very well-worn film trope, when she looks in the bathroom mirror and finds a giant red panda staring back at her. After the initial shock at discovering her metamorphosis, Mei is a little relieved to discover that at least the change isn’t permanent. By forcing herself to calm down, she can slowly transform back into her old self - aside from her now permanently red hair. And, as long as she can keep herself from getting too emotional, she won't unexpectedly change back into the panda. Soon, she even learns that with practice, she can change back and forth between her human and panda forms at will. Now, an untold number of stories and films have tackled the changes kids go through at this particular stage of life, moving from adolescence into puberty, but what Turning Red handles so wonderfully while showing how tumultuous these new roiling emotions can be, is that this isn’t a blip in our lives we’re supposed to get past, but one stage in the lifelong emotional development everyone goes through. The story places Meilin in an intergenerational context with her mother, grandmother, and aunts, who all share having gone through this same experience and, to varying degrees, are all still contending with the constant reminder of having experienced this to the present day. In one sense, Turning Red is something like my favorite kind of X-Men origin story. Mei is a young girl who finds herself unexpectedly transformed by entering puberty. She’s going through powerful and terrifying changes that fundamentally alter her relationship with the world, her own life, and the people in it. And, to a great degree, what is unleashed by this change is shaped by having the right people in her life to support and mentor her throughout this transformation. Part of how Meilin relates to her new superpower is shaped by her family. Her mother knew this was going to happen to her someday because she had gone through it all herself, but she kept it a secret from her daughter, thinking it was something to be frightened and ashamed of. Meilin’s grandmother and aunts are on the same page: this power is something dangerous to be eliminated with a particular ritual at the first opportunity. Importantly, though, the greater part of what shapes Mei’s relationship to her power, the element that makes her experience so different from that of her relatives, is the unwavering support she gets from her friends and peers. When Meilin first transforms into the panda, she panics. Her mom hears her and comes running. Meilin manages to hide in the shower, and through the curtain, her mother wrongly intuits that what’s happened is her daughter has had her first period. It’s interesting that her mother goes immediately into crisis management mode. She has a large pile of pads and remedies and is smotheringly amped to manage the situation for her daughter. Conversely, when her friends knock on her window and discover that the reason that Mei hasn’t been to school is that she’s now a giant red panda, they aren’t the slightest bit scared, or embarrassed for her; they are thrilled. Mei’s friends so embrace this new discovery about their friend that she feels so safe with them that she changes back to her human form without even trying. When her parents later test her ability to control her emotions and control the panda, it’s thinking of the love and support of her friends that grounds Mei enough not to transform. One of the interesting quirks of human beings as a species is how helpless we start out. Unlike some creatures that are self-sufficient at birth, humans are incredibly helpless for a very long time. Part of the peril/benefit of this is that humans, though starting out with many fixed traits, are incredibly responsive and adaptable to our environment; and the biggest element of our environment is that we are each uniquely shaped by the social features of our world: our friends, our family, and our neighbors. We get to see this in how much Mei’s friends shape how she processes the things she’s discovering about herself, but we also get to infer how much the absence of that kind of support influenced how Meilin’s mother and grandmother processed going through the same experiences. The finale of the film is a fairly impressive battle that occurs when Meilin’s mother, Ming, gets so upset with her defiance about giving up the panda, that her own panda bursts free from the pendant she has it trapped inside. This is not made explicit, but her mother’s panda is vastly larger than everyone else’s, seemingly because of how tightly Ming has had to contain her own emotions. While Meilin’s panda is larger than the average adult, Ming’s panda is larger than most buildings. It also would be a bit of a mischaracterization to characterize the ending of the film as a battle, per se, as the conflict between Meilin and her mother is fairly brief, stopping when Mei realizes that what Ming needs from her is the kind of support that Meilin got from her friends. She isn’t powerful enough to handle her mother alone, so Mei's grandmother and aunts break the pendants containing their own pandas, giving them the strength to help perform the ritual that will allow Ming to transform back into her human form. The thing that most makes this a battle is that Meilin is both trying to help her mother, and fighting to also assert her new identity as something other than the perfectly obedient girl that Ming wants her to be. Part of the ritual that contains the panda involves traveling to a magical bamboo forest where they meet Sun Yee and are given the choice to relinquish their panda power, trapping it into a pendant. What first caused the conflict between Meilin and her mother is Mei's refusal to relinquish her power. After performing the ritual again to help her mother, Ming, Meilin, her aunts, and her grandmother, are all transported to the magical bamboo forest again. Once in the forest, Mei goes searching for her mother. She finds Ming, but she doesn’t find her as an adult. Instead, Mei finds her mother as a girl, the same age she was when she first went through the ritual herself. Ming is a young teen girl, laying on the ground, sobbing over getting so angry that she accidentally hurt her mother right before going through the ritual for the first time. Mei hears her mother, now a girl her own age, recounting the exact same struggles she is going through now: Feeling like she has to bottle up her emotions, that she has to be perfect to please her mother, that she’ll never be good enough for her, or anyone. It’s amazing how empathic a moment this is. Meilin gets to discover that her mother actually understands exactly what she’s going through because Ming has been struggling with the exact same feelings her entire life. Additionally, Mei gets to gain a new perspective on those emotions in herself because she sees someone else who is struggling with them and needs help right now. In a fantastic visual, Meilin takes her mother’s hand and walks her through the bamboo forest to meet Sun Ye, all while Ming slowly calms down and ages back to adulthood as they pass through the forest. The film has the most wonderfully nuanced take on emotions, understanding the important difference between managing our emotions and the dangers of simply bottling them up; and the film understands how important the people in our lives are in our figuring that out. Lastly, and most importantly, everyone leaves the bamboo forest on the terms that work for them. Meilin’s mother, aunts, and grandmother accept that Mei is going to keep her panda, while they all choose to once again relinquish theirs. Mei is proud of what she’s become, and her mother has now come to be proud of whatever makes her daughter happy. May everyone be so lucky, as to be able to find themselves, despite whatever trials they may meet, and may everyone find themselves surrounded by people in their lives who can unconditionally love and support them for who they are. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

With Severance , AppleTV+ is continuing to establish itself as an important platform at a time when the world of streaming entertainment is in serious flux. Netflix stock is in free fall as they are hemorrhaging subscribers they had picked up during the heights of the pandemic, and some new streaming platforms are shuttering almost as soon as they launch, yet AppleTV+ and their deep pockets are riding high on the successes of Ted Lasso , the Best Picture-winning CODA , and now adding to their offerings one of the best new dramatic series in recent memory. Created by Dan Erickson, the pilot script for Severance appeared on the 2016 Bloodlist, a Sci-Fi/Horror equivalent of The Black List that recognizes the best unproduced genre screenplays of that year, before being optioned by Ben Stiller’s production company in 2017. Stiller and Erickson would spend the next 5 years developing the show, finally coming out earlier this year at a time when the show’s look at the nature of identity, office work, and work-life balance, couldn’t be any more topical. Inspired by his own experiences working suffocating office jobs, Erickson’s pitch for the show asks what if there was a way to turn off your brain when you got to work, and then turn it back on again when it was time for you to leave for the day, allowing you to do your job without having to actually experience any of the drudgery involved? Once Erickson had this idea about his own job, he immediately recognized, both how tempting such an option might be to people, as well as how terrible his own job must be if he were actually willing to give up whole chunks of his life rather than have to live through the experience of being at his job. Erickson also wondered what must this experience be like for whatever part of him that would still have to be conscious in order to do that job? What the show he created posits is a biotechnology company called Lumon Industries that offers a procedure to employees called "severance." The severance procedure involves installing a chip into a new employee’s brain that is capable of initiating a limited dissociative state when the employee is on Lumon Industries' property. On the employees' first day of work, after their chip is implanted, they will wake up to find themselves laying on a conference room table, unable to remember their name or any of the personal details of their lives, born into a whole new life at their new job. Now, who exactly would actually sign up for such a procedure? We are introduced to a number of Lumon employees over the course of the show and are even given a little insight into their lives and motivations for joining Lumon, but our protagonist for the show is Mark Scout (Adam Scott), known only as Mark S. while inside the world of Lumon. We learn that Mark was moved to join Lumon out of grief for his deceased wife. In his old life, he had been a history professor, married to a professor of Russian literature, but when she died, Mark couldn’t bring himself to teach anymore. Needing some kind of work, though, the only thing available to him in his condition would be a job where it wouldn't be possible for him to grieve; a job where not only would he not know his wife had died, but a job where he wouldn't remember having been married at all. The show makes an effective case for how someone could talk themselves into opting for severance. It may not be the most healthy or helpful way for Mark to process his grief, but it may be the only way for him to pay his bills while he heals. The show also does a great job of exploring how terrible life would be for the part of the severed employees that still have to go to work every day. Even if we were to take away the more mysterious elements of the show, like whatever it actually is that Lumon Industries does, or whatever their long term plans actually are, or why everything at Lumon is so strikingly odd, it does still seem like life as a severed employee would be some kind of nightmare existence; an experience that not too subtly mimics the very worst feelings of working at any toxic and aimless dead end office job. In the language of the show, the part of the employee that actually experiences work is referred to as an "innie," and they know the other parts of themselves as their "outie." Interestingly, only the innie needs this kind of language, because they understand their identity as being wholly dependent upon their outer self, while the outie doesn’t have any reason to think of their innie as being in any way significant to their identity. While the outie shows up at work, blinks, and then goes home; the life of the innie happens in that blink. They finish one workday, they blink, and then start another one, without weekends, sick days, or vacations. There is only work and any thoughts of quitting would be a decision for their outie to make for them. In one sense, the innie is something like the outie’s child, brought into the world without their consent, and at the mercy of their outie for their survival. The nature of this existence informs a lot of how Lumon structures the severed employees' environment. Besides whatever nefarious motivations Lumon may have to keep employees in their positions, it would also be cruel and unproductive to let the employees know too much about the world and lives they will never get to experience for themselves. The workspaces for the severed employees have no windows, there are no televisions or phones, there is no internet, and they cannot contact their outie selves or anyone at all outside the hermetically sealed world of their job. For many of the reasons that would motivate their outie to become severed in the first place, it would be impossible to get an innie to do their work if they truly understood how much they were being deprived of by their work-life situation. Thus, life inside Lumon, specifically inside the one department where we spend most of our time, Macrodata Refinement, is incredibly regulated. All inputs and stimuli are incredibly controlled and sanitized to eliminate FOMO and maximize productivity. Like the very worst corporate environments, the only culture allowed is one that is intended to yield obedient, dutiful, and enthusiastic employees. The only book allowed is the employee manual, and the only decor is provided by the optics and design department at Lumon Industries. Where the show picks up, we meet Mark S. as a loyal cog in the Lumon cult of industry, unaware of what else there is to be, but the engine of the show is seeing what happens when outside elements begin to breach this isolated ecosystem. Now, all of this setup has been to talk about one particular part of the show. This is a minor spoiler if you haven’t seen all of the first season yet, but, to me, the most interesting of these breaches into life at Lumon is a self-help book called, The You You Are, that accidentally finds its way into the Macrodata Refinement offices. The book happens to be written by Mark Scout’s brother-in-law, Dr. Ricken Lazlo Hale (Michael Chernus). Ricken is one of the most interesting characters in the series to me. In the view of Mark in the outside world, Ricken is a pretentious buffoon. Compared to the rest of the characters in the show, it’s almost cartoonish how much of a parody of a new age self-help guru he is. As written, Ricken sometimes comes off as almost too over the top to fit in with the rest of the outer world of the show. He wouldn't be that out of place as a broadly comedic character in a Mike Schur show like Parks and Recreation or The Good Place. At the same time, because of how devoid of culture life inside Lumon is, the cliched and pretentious self-help claptrap in Ricken’s book is literally revolutionary for the workers in Macrodata Refinement. Finally given something other than empty, loyalty-focused, corporate speak, Mark and his fellow innies become sufficiently self-actualized by reading Ricken’s book for them to actually be motivated to try and better their circumstances, whatever the very real consequences for them might ultimately be. I love this contrast, that in the outside world Mark good-naturedly looks down his nose at this brother-in-law, while inside Lumon, Mark has an awed reverence for this towering intellect that has completely opened his eyes to a whole wide world of possibilities. Neither is the whole truth of the matter. Ricken is being seen in two diametrically opposed ways by two people who are actually the same person, and the show is confident enough not to hold the audience's hand telling them what to think about this. The very first words of the show come from a voice that we don’t yet know belongs to Mark S., asking a newly severed employee who is just coming to their senses on a conference room table, “Who are you?” And we learn shortly after that the correct answer to that question is, “I don’t know.” The main story of the show is interested in much bigger mysteries, but those all build off of much smaller questions about what makes someone who they are. Are Mark and Mark S. two different people sharing one body? Throughout the show, talking about an outie deciding to quit their job at Lumon is as if they were ending the life of their innie. We get one storyline of a character trying to reintegrate their severed selves to disastrous effects. It’ll be interesting to see if the show ultimately comes to a definitive answer to this question. In the case of Ricken, we get a character that isn’t severed but who is seen in numerous different ways. The audience is on outie Mark’s side that Ricken is a buffoon, but it’s not just innie Mark that sees him differently. We have a higher opinion of him from Mark’s sister, and she has her husband's back. The people who come to Mark’s book reading seem genuinely interested in what he has to say, and during a break at the book reading, we see Ricken being self-critical in a way that suggests more personal depth than had been previously suggested. Like with Mark, it’s not clear that we’re meant to take Ricken, or anyone in the show, as having a true and uncomplicated self. Or, maybe I'm overthinking this. It may not be an accident that the writer of this article is so interested in the pretentious writer character in this series. I love that this show invites these kinds of takes though, and I look forward to seeing how all of the show’s complicated characters unfold in seasons to come. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

A Review of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. It’s real damn hard being a person. For everyone. Everywhere. At least, sometimes. It’s hard in its own way for everyone, and it can be unfathomably harder for some than others, but it’s always, at a minimum, hard. Even that person you may already be thinking of, who has seemingly gotten all the things they’ve ever wanted, without pain or hardship, even they have to contend with everything they hold dear being temporary; even they have to contend with, however much they may enjoy the life they have, the awareness of all the lives they didn’t get to lead, all the opportunities they’ve had to pass up, and that the idea that eventually, all things must pass. The challenge to talking about these unpleasant truths, to telling stories about the entropy of life, is to find a way to treat those things seriously and to also convey how joyful life can still be. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is the story of an older woman that we know for most of the movie as Nancy (Emma Thompson), a name she has assumed because she has hired a male sex worker, Leo (Daryl McCormack), who is also working under an assumed name. Nancy has come to realize, since the death of her husband, how impoverished their sex life had been, and she’s looking to rectify that while she still has time. This desire for adventurous sex is sincere and serves as the engine of the story, but the film is also quite overtly about a kind of general dissatisfaction with one’s life that primarily comes just from being older, And not even older in the sense we usually mean. Nancy, assuming she’s about the same age as the actress portraying her, is in her early 60s, in good health, with seemingly full use of her mind and body. The conflict for her isn’t things she wants to do that her body won’t let her do anymore, but rather the things she wishes she could do and experience now, if only she had made different choices in her life to date. It is a story about connection and need and aging and second chances and finality, told over a series of intimate encounters in a hotel room between Nancy and Leo Leo is a fascinating character in the story, given how integral he is to Nancy’s character arc, yet also being largely inaccessible to the audience. We are given the impression of a man who greatly enjoys the work he does, trying to find ways to connect with people in order to give them the fantasies that they’ve paid for. But, because that is his job, and we can plainly see that he is quite good at it, almost everything we see of Leo is being mediated through a performance he is being paid to give. He may be being genuine with Nancy, which may be a necessity to be as good at his job as he is, but like A.I. ’s Gigolo Joe, he has to transform for each of his clients to fit the needs of their particular fantasy. Leo reveals parts of his life that seem true, but the only moment we get with him where we can feel confident that we are seeing something of the real him is when Nancy reveals that she has researched him, learning his real name, and breaching his professional anonymity. At that moment, he rages at Nancy, making cutting comments that are informed by her intimacy with him, and he storms out of the hotel room, asking her not to contact him again. They will reconcile for the film's final act, but again, we can’t say that we are seeing anything more of him than his professional mask. Even if we take Leo as being wholly sincere, he doesn’t have much of an arc in the film because he is already young and self-actualized. He has lingering unresolved issues with his family around his work, but he is enthusiastically doing what he wants to do and helping others do the things that they want to do. He has a small character arc in that he does eventually confide in Nancy that he did tell his brother what he actually does for a living, but otherwise, he doesn’t change much because he doesn’t need to. He is living the life he wants and he already has that feeling that Nancy’s after, that feeling that everything is still ahead of him, because it is. Nancy comes to Leo because she is struggling with having reached her age. I could add an ‘and’ there, but at its heart, it’s really just that. All else aside, there are points when we age when we see the things that are and are not behind us, and what is or is not still ahead of us, and those realizations can be hard. Nancy, while trying to articulate to Leo what it is exactly that she’s after, says that she doesn’t want to be young again. She has enough sense to remember that being young is a trial all of its own. What she wants is the feeling of being young. The feeling of still having everything ahead of you. This is a desire we all will become ever more familiar with as we age, and the pleasure of this film is that it finds an honest and useful way to depict how we might contend with that desire in a healthy way, without ever pretending that we could ever achieve the actual feeling that Nancy is after. We would be delusional if we were to convince ourselves that we could feel that young again, but we can always feed that feeling that at least there are some things worth looking forward to that are still ahead of us. Right now, wherever we are in our lives, we are living in a comparative youth that we will one day look back upon fondly, and there are still things to do, and see, and choose that we won’t be able to later. We may see the lines and blemishes in the mirror that weren't there before, but we will one day be nostalgic for the way we look today. There are opportunities and experiences that are closed to us now, but one day, we will look back warmly at the opportunities that were still before us. There is a reductive sense in which we could say that the film's message is just one of carpe diem , but more at work here is making peace with the dwindling kinds and number of diems we have left to carpe. Emma Thompson gives us a pretty fearless performance. She’s willing to let Nancy be complicated, and we don’t always sympathize with her as she complains about her husband, and children, and students. She lets us take a long, lingering look at her 63-year-old naked body, but to see it as an alive and still sexual object. Something like Rodin’s ‘The Old Courtesan,’ a woman whose body has aged but is still part of a continuum with all the younger selves she once was. It’s not played for laughs, or drama, which would each give Thompson something to hide within. Instead, it’s something more immediate and visceral. This is simply a defenses view of what a 63-year-old woman looks like. It’s interesting that Nancy, in her old life, was a religious education teacher, in part charged with teaching children about the morality around sex and how women ought to present themselves. We now watch her experience her own re-education, and having to grapple with how she might have led her student astray. This point is brought home with the third character in the film. We spend most of the running time with just Nancy and Leo, but in the final scene, while Nancy is trying to make amends with Leo for violating his privacy, she’s waiting for him in the hotel bar, and she is unexpectedly waited on by one of her former students, Becky (Isabella Laughland). Initially, Nancy spars with Becky. Perhaps Nancy’s just being defensive, having run into someone that knows the real her while she’s waiting for her assignation with Leo. Perhaps there is something triggering for Nancy in Becky’s comparative youth, a feeling that perhaps informed her previous relationship with her students. But, Nancy has grown. Before she and Leo leave to head upstairs, she stops to tell Becky exactly what she’s come to the hotel for and that she was wrong to teach her the things she did about female sexuality. It’s not said explicitly, but while Nancy is seizing the day in regards to her own needs, staking a claim on what will make her happy, she’s also stopping to do what she can to make sure that Becky doesn’t make the same mistake with her life. The time goes quick, so whenever possible, make an effort to seize joy where you can, and don’t let anyone tell you different. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

The Muppet Movie is a consciously meta work of art. It’s the story of how a bunch of weirdos found their people, and came together to make a film; being told by a bunch of weirdos who found their people, and came together to make a film; being told by a bunch of weirdos who found their people and came together to make a film. The framing device of the film is that The Muppets we all know and love are settling into a theater to watch the movie they’ve just made - their first, which tells something like the story of how they found one another and came to Hollywood to become ‘rich and famous.’ That film within a film, begins with Kermit the Frog sitting on a log in a swamp, strumming his banjo and singing one of the better songs to ever open a film, “Rainbow Connection;” and concludes, with Kermit having collected his troupe, the Muppets signing their rich and famous contract, and, now on their very own soundstage, proceeding to create the story we’ve just watched. All of this culminates in a musical finale, being sung while, in typically anarchic Muppet fashion, their film sets collapse all around them, leaving the audience with this final message: “Life’s like a movie Write your own ending Keep believing, Keep pretending. We’ve done just what we set out to do. Thanks to the lovers, the dreamers, and you” The film is so knowingly self-aware that, more than once, part of what moves the plot forward is the characters in the film reading the screenplay of the film that they are currently living through in order to figure out what to do next. Beyond The Muppets themselves, though, we can delve even one layer further, because of how much the story of Kermit and friends also doubles as the story of Jim Henson and his friends, and how Jim started out as a kid in Mississippi, and went on to collect his own bunch of weirdos to create the world and characters and stories that we’ve been enjoying all of these years. This idea is highlighted a bit by that chaotic musical finale mentioned above. The scene winds up being a bit of a mid-career capstone to everything Henson had done up to that point. As the final song swells, we pull back to see more Muppets than had ever been on screen before - not just the characters from the film we’ve been watching, but also characters from most of the projects Jim and company had done to date. By one account, 250 Muppet characters appear in the scene, from projects like Sesame Street, Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, and even the Muppets from The Land of Gorch sketches that Jim did for the first season of Saturday Night Live. Much of the Muppet production family is on screen, or at least their Muppet clad arms, because of just how many capable puppeteers Jim needed in order to pull this scene off. In the film, we’re seeing something of Kermit’s dream come true, as he is surrounded by everyone that helped get him there, while in reality we’re also seeing something of Jim Henson’s own Hollywood dream come true, as he too is surrounded by everyone that helped him get there. The Muppet Movie was made on the heels of the breakthrough success of The Muppet Show, the TV program that ran for five seasons starting in 1976. The show was an unexpected phenomenon when it launched, but hardly an overnight success for Jim Henson, as it debuted over 20 years after his first tv performance as an 18 year old puppeteer on The Junior Morning Show in 1954. It’s interesting to go back to watch Jim’s earliest work because you can see how much of his voice and sense of humor were already present, along with the novel look and feel of his expressive fabric hand puppets. But you can also see how much had yet to be filled in, too. His wife, Jane Henson, was already working with him early on, but it was a while before Jim collected other familiar voices like Frank Oz, Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt, or Dave Goelz to bounce off of; Or someone like Jerry Juhl to write with; Or a master craftsman like Don Sahlin to build Muppets and creatures for him; Or someone like Paul Williams to write songs for him; and so on, and so on. It took decades of collecting and playing with these kinds of weirdos, working with them all, over and over again, before Jim evolved The Muppets into the cultural institution they would become; An outcome that would have been impossible for Jim working alone. The actual plot of The Muppet Movie is a bit of a curiosity in how besides the point it ends up being. The film is built from scenes and songs that are strung together to get the audience from Kermit’s swamp to that Hollywood soundstage, but the film’s priority is always having fun and being entertaining in the moment, as opposed to obsessing over how those scenes tie together. Paul Williams has even commented on how Jim didn’t even want to hear the songs he was writing while they were still in progress, trusting that Williams would do his best work without needless interference, and that it wouldn’t be a problem to find a way to make whatever he came up with work within the film. Jim’s underlying idea seemed to be that, if all the pieces worked and were entertaining on their own, then the whole film would work, regardless of any minor mismatches and inconsistencies. That bears out, as the film does hang together just fine, but it’s interesting to actually break down those pieces to see some of the fraying at the edges. The points I’m going to make may wind up sounding like criticisms, but I do think everything in the film works like gangbusters independent of these quibbles, and I only bring them up to make a larger point about why I think the film works anyway. At the beginning of the film, Kermit is singing his ‘I want’ song, “Rainbow Connection,” in his swamp, however, based on that song, Kermit isn’t really thinking about anything like going to Hollywood until the Hollywood agent inexplicably rowing through his swamp happens upon him and tells Kermit about the upcoming auditions for frogs interested in being rich and famous. There’s even some hesitancy on Kermit’s part, as the idea of being ‘rich and famous’ doesn’t get him to jump, but the idea of making millions of people happy does. So, he sets out for Hollywood. Kermit interrupts his trip almost immediately to stop at a dive bar - ostensibly to eat, although he never gets around to doing that - where he comes upon Fozzie Bear bombing in front of an increasingly angry audience. Kermit jumps on stage to help him out, but fails spectacularly, making the audience even angrier. The new duo flee the bar to climb into Fozzie’s Studebaker, and hit the road together. Fozzie even makes a joke about how little reflection it takes him to decide to join up with Kermit. It’s what the plot demands, though, so on we go. Now Kermit and the troupe aren’t just traveling to Hollywood; They’re being pursued. Early in the story, shortly after beginning his journey, Kermit is spotted by Doc Hopper, the owner of a chain of restaurants specializing in deep fried frog’s legs. Over the course of the film, Doc Hopper becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea that if Kermit was his restaurant’s mascot, he could grow his business into a nationwide chain. It’s not exactly a coherent plan, but it is an effective plot engine to lend some stakes and urgency to Kermit’s quest, while also being overtly silly enough to make clear that neither this device, nor anything in the film really, ought to be taken all that seriously. After connecting with Fozzie, the two of them come across the all Muppet band, The Electric Mayhem, who are practicing in an abandoned seeming church. In lieu of bringing the band members up to speed on what they’ve been through so far, Kermit and Fozzie give the band a copy of the screenplay to the movie, which they read while Kermit and Fozzie nap. The band learns that Kermit and Fozzie are being pursued by Doc Hopper. To help the duo evade Doc Hopper, the band decides to give Fozzie’s car a psychedelic makeover, accompanied by a music montage with the song, “Can You Picture That.” Like Kermit’s plan to rescue Fozzie from the angry crowd, this plan also fails spectacularly as immediately after leaving the Electric Mayhem behind to continue their journey, they are instantaneously spotted by Doc Hopper. All of the scenes of the film have this kind of self-contained consequence-free vibe. Kermit and Fozzie meet Gonzo by crashing their car into his, only for his car to flip perfectly on top of theirs. Gonzo climbs down from his car into theirs and immediately joins up with them on their journey. They go on to meet Miss Piggy by seeing her winning a beauty pageant at a local fair, but it’s never mentioned why they’re interrupting their trip to stop at the fair in the first place. Miss Piggy and Kermit go out for a date that night, just the two of them. Piggy leaves to take a phone call, seemingly abandoning Kermit, which allows him to meet piano playing Rowlf the Dog, who will also go on to join their troupe with little discussion. Miss Piggy didn’t ditch Kermit, she was actually kidnapped by Doc Hopper. Kermit goes to rescue Piggy and is captured himself. The pair are tied up, and Kermit is doomed to have his brain scrambled by the Nazi-seeming doctor that Doc Hopper has secured to force Kermit to be his mascot. When Kermit is being taken to the machine that will scramble his brains, Piggy gets a surge a emotion that allows her to break free of her bonds and single handedly defeats all of Doc Hopper’s henchman, raising the question of why she couldn’t have just done that sooner. The moment the two of them are free, Piggy gets another call from her agent, and she unceremoniously takes off to film a commercial to end the scene on a laugh. Their separation is very short, as they’re reunited only moments later, when Kermit and the troupe see her unexpectedly hitchhiking on the side of the road. What’s happened in the interim is not explained, but she gets in the car and immediately rejoins the troop. They’re on the last leg of their trip, seemingly with a clear path to Hollywood, when Fozzie’s car breaks down, stranding the troupe. They build a campfire, feeling forlorn that they’re going to miss the auditions, Kermit in particular struggles with the idea that he’s let himself and everyone down. Structurally and tonally, it’s a scene that makes sense going into the final act of the film, but its resolution is The Electric Mayhem showing up to rescue them, having read the script from earlier. Again, everyone takes to the road, but we still need to wrap up the storyline with Doc Hopper. Kermit agrees to face him in a conveniently located old west ghost town. Before Doc Hopper and his gang arrive, Kermit and company meet Beaker and Bunson Honeydew, who have set up a laboratory in this old west town to work on inventions. Kermit goes out to stand up to Doc Hopper, and he makes a fine speech illuminating the importance of having friends and following your dreams, and that if Doc Hopper is going to stand in the way of Kermit following his dreams, he might as well just kill him. And, again, like most everything Kermit has set out to do in the film, his plan fails. Doc Hopper orders his men to kill Kermit, but Kermit is rescued by a last minute Deus ex Muppet as Animal, who has gotten into Bunson’s insta-grow pills, briefly grows taller than the buildings of the ghost town, scaring Doc Hopper and his men away. Unencumbered, the group heads off again, finally making it to Hollywood. I go through all of this, not in a nitpicking way, to say that nothing that happens in the film matters to the story. Because there is one decisive choice that Kermit and the characters make again and again throughout the course of the film that is very important. Every time Kermit encounters a new character that wants to join him, however odd they might be, he welcomes them with open arms. In that sense, the decision that friends are the family that you get to choose, he chooses these weirdos over and over again. And they choose one another. They all sign onto Kermit’s dream, and it becomes their dream. They’re all heading to this place where they’ll get to make things together that they hope will make other people happy. In many ways, despite some occasional creakiness, The Muppet Movie, winds up being the purest and most successfully executed project of Jim Henson’s career because of how well it understands the themes it’s working with, and so, it perfectly reflects the sensibilities of both Jim Henson and The Muppets. A big part of what has made The Muppet Movie so relatable and loveable, for so many, for so long, is how strongly the themes of the film echo the very same motivations that animated the lives of the people behind the scenes: finding and accepting your people, chasing your dreams while helping others chase theirs, and reveling in any opportunity to put on a show. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

One of my family’s most pleasant surprises last December was that, unexpectedly, for about a week or so, you could find iffy quality uploads of a few scattered episodes from the newest season of the Australian children’s show, Bluey, on YouTube. The deliberately odd formatting of these videos made them a little annoying to watch, but that also likely helped keep them from being immediately found and taken down by an algorithm. I warned my kids before I let them watch any of the episodes that this was probably a very short-term occurrence and that they shouldn’t get too attached to these because they were sure to be taken down in a few days, if not hours. Just the same, we burned through all of the episodes we could find that night before bed and kept rotating through them over the next few days until they were finally taken down. If you haven’t seen Bluey , I could imagine this behavior seeming odd, but I’m pretty sure anyone who has seen the show would understand. Unexpectedly, these 8-minute episodes about an anthropomorphic family of Australian cattle dogs named The Heelers, make up one of the best shows on TV. Not one of the best kid’s shows, but one of the best shows, full stop. Like an all-ages Ted Lasso , Bluey is a genuinely funny and emotionally-intelligent show that works for audiences from preschool age and up. It’s hard to overstate just how much of a creative feat that is. How good is Bluey ? The morning the new season finally dropped on Disney+, I didn’t wait for my kids to wake up before I started watching the new episodes on my own. There are three episodes from season 3 that I want to take a close look at to tease out some of the elements of this show that I think help explain why I think it’s the best show on at the moment. In the episode, “Omelette,” Mum, Bluey, and Bingo are planning to make breakfast in bed for Dad’s birthday. Mum has everything for the morning planned, with each of the children having a task to keep themselves busy, while she takes care of making breakfast. Bluey will take care of preparing the tray for the food, and Bingo will make Dad a birthday card. Where things go awry is that Bingo already has the card ready and wants to help mom make breakfast. One of the more real and regular challenges of parenting is in navigating children that want to do things they aren’t able to yet. On one hand, as a parent, you want to be there to help teach your child how to do things, but often working against that desire is just how much easier and faster it would be to do the thing yourself without making it a teaching moment. If you envision how this scene would go down on some PBS KIDS' show, like Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood , the beats of the story would be something like: (1) Daniel would like to help mom; (2) Unflustered mom would happily let him help; (3) Daniel would make some small mistake, which mom would correct, teaching him a lesson about mistakes being a part of learning; and then (4) mom and Daniel would finish the task together without further incident. And there is a place for that kind of lesson, but Bluey opts to do something different. The show doesn’t hide that Mum isn’t thrilled that Bingo wants to help, but she’s game to let Bingo try. Bingo drops half the eggs while getting them from the fridge, and lets another one roll off the table. She scatters most of the bowls over the kitchen floor, getting the one they need to mix the eggs, and then, after pleading to help crack the eggs, she covers herself and mum in yolk. At this point, Mum kindly tells Bingo that it would be best if she finished up on her own. Bingo’s a little sad, but understands, and Mum knows this is the best way to finish quickly. Bingo moves over to play with the breakfast tray, to which Mum is half listening to while she works on quickly whipping together breakfast. The game Bingo is playing is with a pair of knight salt and pepper shakers on dad’s breakfast tray with a glass of orange juice playing the role of the queen. The scene is a heartbreaking reinterpretation of what just transpired for Bingo while trying to help make breakfast. One knight wants to come with the other knight to help guard the queen, but the second knight explains to the first that they aren’t really a proper guard, and it would be best if they stayed behind, and the second knight accepts this. Bingo isn’t especially emoting while playing the game, but this kind of play is how kids actually process their feelings and frustrations. Bingo isn’t sniffling back tears, because she understands the lesson: she may want to help, but she’ll just slow Mum down, so it’s better if she keeps out of Mum’s way. Mum sees all of this play out and recognizes she can’t let that lesson stand. She sets aside the breakfast she just finished making, and tells Bingo that it isn’t quite right and that she needs her help. We get a quick montage of Bingo helping and all of the disasters repeat again: dropped food, egg yolk everywhere, two separate trips over to neighbors to borrow more eggs, and the final product is a shell-ridden mess. But, it’s a success. A completely believable success. Unlike with our hypothetical Daniel Tiger episode, you get an ending that actually makes you feel something because the outcome actually feels more true to life; the kid that wants to help probably isn’t going to do a great job, and it’ll take more time and resources than planned, and the final result is going to be far from perfect, but it’s the kind of experience every kid needs, and every parent is fated to endure. The second episode I want to look at is called “Sheepdog.” In it, we get a parenting moment more real than anything I’ve ever seen on a kid's show. Mum is in the kitchen, cleaning and solo parenting, while Dad is out getting a haircut. Bluey wants Mum to listen to her loudly play a song on her recorder, while Bingo is telling Mum an endless string of incoherent knock-knock jokes. This is already pretty true to life, but it takes an unexpected step when Bandit arrives home, and through almost gritted teeth an overwhelmed Mum tells Dad in front of the kids, “I need twenty minutes where no one comes near me.” I don’t know a set of parents that haven’t had this exchange, and I don’t know another children’s show that could get away with depicting it. The rest of the episode is Dad doing everything he can to keep the kids occupied so that they will leave Mum alone, and failing repeatedly, while Bluey is trying to wrap her head around the idea of Mum sometimes needing a break from them, and that it doesn't mean that Mum doesn’t love them. Parenting is relentless. Even if most days are great, it’s a grind, and it’s impossible to keep kids from ever seeing the strain. But, you’re never going to see Daniel Tiger’s parents have to apologize to him for losing their temper, or need to walk away from him for a few minutes to regroup. Bluey can do that though because their crazy tonal alchemy lets them have a story beat like this without it having to be a very special moment, or something traumatizing to young kids. They are able to surround a moment like this with jokes and a good enough payoff to the episode to let the lesson being told go down smoothly. The last episode I want to talk about is “Rain.” This is an almost entirely silent episode. Bluey and Mum are on the porch saying goodbye to Dad and Bingo as they pull out of the driveway. There’s a rumble of thunder and rain, and the score is all we hear for the rest of the episode. A core feature of a lot of children’s shows is they usually have a fairly rigid structure. Sometimes, the structure is just that all of the episodes unfold in kind of the same way, with the same catchphrases, but in the case of a show like Bubble Guppies , every episode is rigidly broken down into smaller segments that recur every week, in the same order, to help hold a kid’s attention. It’s a comparatively big swing for Bluey to attempt a silent episode, but they manage to put together something funny, joyful, and beautiful, that plays for a preschool audience, and they pull it all off in just 7 minutes. When the rain comes, Mum runs to gather the laundry that’s outside drying, while Bluey runs to play in the rain. We watch a stream of water start to form that runs down the side of the front walk, and Bluey invents for herself a game of trying to block the stream from going down the walk. A typical children’s game, thought of on a whim, with no real stakes other than the deathly serious end of keeping the game going. On Bluey’s end, she keeps coming up with things to try to stop the water, while Mum progresses from the parent mode of trying to keep Bluey from tracking water into the house, to becoming bemused, and then becoming invested in watching Bluey’s game unfold. There are two kickers to this episode. The first is the one you might expect, Bluey can’t actually block the water on her own. She’s stretched out herself and every toy and towel she has, and the stream of water is swelling up to pass her, but just in the knick of time Mum comes out with an umbrella to help her block the rest of the walkway. Mum even sets down her umbrella to use her hands to block the parts that her feet can’t reach. They’ve done it. The rain stops. The water’s receding and they watch a double rainbow form in the newly clear sky. They move to make their way inside, but the sky starts to darken again. The sky opens up, and the episode ends with them exchanging a look before running back to their spot to reform their dam. The thing that this episode captures beautifully is seeing the parent all but disappear, leaving viewers watching a kid and a "kid at heart" play together. No parent ever truly feels as old as they are, and you can see that best when they lose themselves playing with their kid. Mum isn’t running back to their dam out of some sense of obligation to play with her kid, she is bought in entirely on the game she and her playmate were playing and she can’t wait to get back to it. Part of why Bluey works so smashingly for parents as well as kids is because of how well it recognizes how parents often are, in so very many ways, just really big kids themselves. It’s this spirit of play that ties together everything Bluey does. A small criticism that the show has received is that the parents, especially Dad, set an impossibly high bar for their willingness to throw themselves entirely into child-directed play, but the show plays with that idea in a healthy way, too. They do often show dad so wholeheartedly committed to some activity that it makes you want to up your own game as a parent, but it also shows Dad feeling too tired to play, or too embarrassed to go all out because another dad can see him, or sometimes he is just screwing around on his phone while the kids amuse themselves. One episode is even built around the conceit of Mum and Dad being too wiped out to play because they played a little too hard at a New Year's Eve party the night before. Mum and Dad are world-class playmates, but the show doesn’t hide that even for them, it’s sometimes a grind to keep up with their kids. The show just gets play in a deep way. It largely avoids the kind of magical realism other shows employ, where the main action is taking place in some kind of imagined world. The games being played are in the real world, and can all be replicated by the audience at home if they are so inclined. The show also gets the role that play holds in our lives, not just for kids and parents, but for everybody. Play is something kids do to amuse themselves and fill time, but it’s also the best way for them to learn something, process ideas and emotions they are struggling with, make friends outside their family, and, maybe most importantly, play is something that we never outgrow whether we recognize it or not. What makes Bluey so special is that it’s not merely a kid’s show that parents can watch too, but a funny show for literally everyone, that reflects both the kind of play kids want, and the kind of play that grownups may have forgotten that they often still want, too. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

The Gory Joy of the Horror Musical I rarely watch traditional horror films. I’m a poor audience for a lot of what they’re aiming for. Perhaps at its most oversimplified, a horror film is thought to be looking to scare its audience, to really frighten people, and, honestly, sometimes even traumatize them. There can be value in that. The phrase ‘emotional roller coaster’ is a cliche, particularly when applied to films, but it’s still a good way to capture something of what’s going on when someone is watching a scary movie. Rollercoasters and horror films are a safe way to take your brain for a ride, to play with feelings and experiences you wouldn’t ever want as part of your day-to-day life. Horror as a genre can be more than just scares, though, and some rides can still be fun without being extreme. Recognizing that I am hypersensitive to people in realistic pain or distress, a lot of horror films are just off the table for me altogether. Not all of them though. Unless you’re the hardest-core horror purest, there is still plenty of room to play with the experiences of the horror genre without dialing up that visceral discomfort up to eleven. A pretty good example of this is the horror comedy, which I will discuss briefly in a moment, but an even better example for me would be one of my very favorite horror sub-genres which I’ll be discussing at greater length: the horror musical. Genre can get pretty fuzzy at its boundaries. Looking at a film like Young Frankenstein , it’s pretty clear that it’s a straight comedy and not a horror comedy. It’s playing with horror elements, but it’s an unambiguous spoof of horror films themselves, without playing with any of the feelings that horror movies are trying to evoke. Cabin in the Woods , on the other hand, is more straightforwardly a horror comedy because, besides being funny, it’s also genuinely scary in parts, and it is deliberately playing with ideas and images that make people uncomfortable. Perhaps the most well-known horror musical is The Rocky Horror Picture Show , but it is also a case, like with Young Frankenstein , where it is not entirely clear whether it should be considered a horror musical or just a musical sendup of classic horror and sci-fi films . While much of the film is silly and camp, there are a few sequences that are disturbing in a way that would otherwise derail a straight comedy. We’re aiming to be light on spoilers here, but, besides the bleak ending, there is a gory ax murder and a somewhat infamous dinner sequence, that are each disturbing enough to signal that the film is pursuing something more than just straight comedy. This seems like a useful benchmark for identifying what distinguishes a horror musical from a more traditional musical: that it’s deliberately playing with ideas and images that would be likely to turn off all but a horror-friendly audience. There can also be a reductive impulse to think of all horror musicals as being horror comedies, but that doesn’t have to be the case. You might laugh at some moments in Tim Burton’s adaptation of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street , but it’s largely a nasty and brutal piece of work. Adding music is generally antithetical to realism, but in Sweeney Todd, there are moments that hit all the harder because of how much they stand in contrast to the songs. Of particular note is the juxtaposition of Johnny Depp’s Todd singing as he slices a passive customer’s throat and fluidly slides their body from his barber chair down a trapdoor in his floor, set against the extremely realistic sound of that 200 lb body hitting the hard basement floor below. That sickly squelching thump of human meat and bone hitting the ground sticks with me as much as anything I’ve seen in any traditional horror film. Sweeney Todd is a lot of things, but what scenes like this make clear is that it is most certainly not a comedy. It’s these sorts of ideas I’ll have in the back of my head as I’m examining what I think some of the most effective horror musicals are. I’m looking at musicals with good songs, but that also have some demented bend to the stories they’re trying to tell. The importance of the music being solid throughout can’t be underestimated. Interrupting the narrative is risky, and to do so for a song that falls flat is riskier still. It doesn’t take much to lose an audience altogether. Think of the fairly baffling song, “Cheer Up, Charlie,” from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (not a horror musical, but my goodness would it not take much to recut it into one), a slow maudlin song that all but brings the film to a standstill as it’s simply underlining for the audience an idea that the narrative has already made more effectively. As mentioned above, The Rocky Horror Picture Show may be the most well-known horror musical. In it, a recently engaged couple gets a flat tire on a rainy night and picks the wrong house to go to for help. Adapted from a highly successful stage show, the film is famous for having been a flop upon its release before developing the cultiest of cult followings. Around the country, as Halloween approaches, theaters make plans to show the film, sometimes with shadow cast on hand to act out the film at the same time, with the more adventurous theaters also providing props to the audience for their participation. Lots of other culty films have developed lesser versions of this kind of following, but they’re all following a template first laid out by the Rocky Horror fandom. I’ve written about The Rocky Horror Picture Show twice before. Once as part of a career retrospective article on the film’s star, Tim Curry , and again in an article noting similarities between it and Sunset Boulevard . It’s a film I have a lot of fondness for, coming back to it every Fall. Few people have been as good at anything as Tim Curry is here as Dr. Frank-n-furter, and few experiences feel more like Halloween to me than seeing this film with a live cast. Though perhaps a little less well-known, what may actually be the best horror musical is another film I’ve written about before, 1986’s Little Shop of Horrors . Continuing a theme, this was also adapted from a stage production, written by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. Adapted from the ultra-low budget (and unexpectedly great) 1960 Roger Corman film of the same name, where a stock boy, named Seymour Krelborn, working at a Skid Row florist, finds a strange and unusual plant with strange and unusual appetites. Things start to go right for Seymour when he starts giving the plant what it wants but starts to unravel as he has to go to ever greater lengths to satisfy the plant's hunger. Ashman and Menken are both musical and musical theater royalty due to their collaborations here, as well as on The Little Mermaid, Beauty & The Beast, and Aladdin ; and it’s the quality of the music that most sets Little Shop of Horrors apart from other horror musicals, working in numerous musical styles and delivering lyrics that can swing widely between, poignant, funny, sweet, and sinister. The standout of the otherwise star-studded cast is Ellen Greene, reprising the role of Audrey that she had originated on stage. Also working in the film’s favor is Frank Oz as the perfect director for the practical effects and puppetry the film required, in his first non-Muppet project, along with supporting appearances from the likes of Steve Martin, Bill Murray, and John Candy. My favorite horror musical, and a significant motivation for writing this article, is the criminally under-seen, Reefer Madness: The Musical. Again, a stage adaptation, this time loosely riffing on the anti-drug propaganda film from 1936, Reefer Madness. Starring Alan Cumming, Kristen Bell, and Christian Campbell, part of the film being somewhat lost to time is that it premiered on cable on Showtime, and had an extremely limited theatrical run. The original Reefer Madness has itself long become a cult film because of how hyperbolic of a morality play it is about the dangers of marijuana use. This musical adaptation raises those extremes to even more absurdist heights. Where the original saw weed turning kids into zonked-out zombies, the opening number of this film sees kids in the grip of marijuana being turned into literal bloodthirsty zombies out to eat their parents. Christian Campbell and Kristen Bell play Jimmy Harper and Mary Lane, two all-American high school kids whose budding romance crumbles as Jimmy falls into a depraved marijuana addiction that captures Mary Lane as well when she tries to save him. Tony award-winning Cumming is unbelievable in multiple roles here, and it will never get old hearing Bell’s Princess Anna voice sing about sadomasochism in a reefer den. An unusual touchstone for musical theater is Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel, The Phantom of the Opera , about a mysterious figure haunting a Parisian opera house, who becomes obsessed with a female performer there. Three films that have tackled versions of the story are: Joel Schumacher’s 2004 adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash hit Broadway musical Phantom of the Opera , Brian De Palma’s 1974 Phantom of the Paradise , and 2014’s Stage Fright . Webber and Schumacher produce a fairly faithful adaptation of the novel, yielding something of a gothic horror. De Palma relocates the story to a more modern setting, mashes it up with the story of Faust, and sets it in a rock club. Stage Fright turns the story into more of a summer camp slasher film and sets it at a youth theater camp. The 2004 Schumacher film earned back double its budget at the box office and enjoys a very strong fan base, but was savaged by critics at the time. What is without question though is that it has some of the most spectacular art direction and set design you’ll ever see. What’s the best way to create the effect of the opera house burning down? To actually build and burn down an opera house. It is the least of a horror movie of these three films, though Phantom of the Paradise is a wild film. In many ways, it shares a lot of the same DNA as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, wallowing in 70's excess and pretty overtly wearing all of its earlier film influences on its sleeve, but leaning a bit more into the psychedelia of the era. Here, the phantom of the title is a songwriter named Winslow Leach, who was screwed over by a record producer and club owner named Swan, played perfectly by the film’s actual songwriter Paul Williams. The phantom comes to haunt Swan’s rock club, which is preparing to open with a performance of music that Swan has stolen from Leach. This musical is a little unusual in its structure in that so much of the music from early in the film is more sketchy and underplayed because what we’re seeing is songs being written, and rehearsed by performers still figuring their parts out. This does serve to somewhat mute the impact of the music early on, but the delayed gratification more than pays off when we finally hear everything fully developed in the climactic performance at the end of the film. This stylistic choice may have contributed a bit to the film having trouble finding an audience when it was initially released, but it also serves to make the finale something incredibly explosive. Stage Fright is a little shaggy compared to most of the other films that I’m discussing here, with an ending that only kind of works, but it gets major bonus points for its infectious theater kid energy. Meat Loaf plays a theater camp owner who used to be a major theater producer, having fallen on hard times when, after the opening night of a production ‘The Haunting of the Opera’ that his wife was staring in, she was murdered, leaving him the widowed father of two. Now, ten years later, he is trying to stage another production of that work, this time possibly starring his daughter, only for further bloodshed to follow. Another figure who features prominently in this world of horror musicals is Tim Burton, who has made three films in the genre: his two stop-motion animation films, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride , along with his adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Being PG-rated animated films, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride are both fairly family-friendly. There might be some temptation not to consider either of them horror films, but I think it’s more helpful to think of them as starter horrors, films pitched to younger audiences that give them a point of entry to the genre, with scares geared toward what they can handle at their age without being overwhelmed. A marvel of The Nightmare Before Christmas is the degree to which it follows the story arc of a more traditional Christmas story. Something happens to disrupt Christmas, but at the last minute, the characters we’ve been following work with Santa Clause to restore everything to how it’s supposed to be, thus saving Christmas in the St. Nick of time. In this case, Jack Skellington, the most important figure in Halloween Town, who has come to be bored by his many frightful annual accomplishments, discovers a portal to a different holiday world that gives him some new ideas. Burton makes an interesting choice to split up the role of Jack Skellington between Chris Sarandon, taking on all of Jake’s spoken dialogue, and Danny Elfman, who wrote the music for the film, doing all of the singing. The two performances blend together seamlessly, combining to make for one of the better voice performances you’ll hear. Corpse Bride tells the story of a young man and woman who meet on the eve of their arranged marriage, but, while the man is outside practicing his vows for the ceremony, he accidentally proposes to and weds the corpse of a bride that was murdered and buried by her husband the night of their wedding. Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Watson, and Johnny Depp play the three parts of the love triangle that are trying to navigate the world and underworld as they untangle the mess. Stephen Sondheim had said once that Burton’s Sweeney Todd is the only adaptation of one of his shows that he’s fond of. What Sondheim appreciated was Burton’s dedication to trying to faithfully transpose to show from stage to screen, without being pointlessly beholden to choices Sondheim only had to make in order for the show to work on a stage in front of a live audience. What Sondheim loved is how Burton found a way to stay faithful to the show, while having the confidence to also excise and change whatever needed to be changed for the show to work as a film and finding a visual language that only ever adds to what Sondheim was going for. The story is of a once-young married barber, who is falsely imprisoned by a judge who is after his wife. After many years in prison, the barber is finally released and returns to London with eyes on revenge. Johnny Depp plays the barber, and Helena Bonham Carter plays the woman who rents him space above her meat pie shop, a shop that also happens to provide them with a lucrative means of disposal for the bodies that start to accumulate. This last section is comprised of films that don’t form a tidy group, or that I might not rate quite as highly as all of the ones I’ve listed above, but they are still films that I think are great examples of this sub-genre and well worth your time. Anna & The Apocalypse is a musical teen drama set in and around a high school at Christmastime, during what turns out to be a zombie apocalypse. Tonally it feels like it owes its biggest debts to TV shows Glee and Buffy the Vampire Slayer , as well as the film Shaun of the Dead . The cliche of being a teenager is how much it can feel like the end of the world when things go wrong, and that proves to be no less true when it’s the actual end of the world. The film manages to pack in the high school experiences of how it feels being disconnected from others, how it feels to find that friend group that makes you feel like you can take on anything, and how it feels when that friend group starts to break apart as people move on, all into one heightened bloody two day period. Suck is an incredibly odd artifact of a film. The elevator pitch for the film is, what is it like being on the road with a struggling rock band when one of your bandmates has a substance abuse problem, and what if that substance is human blood? With unlikely cameos from Alice Cooper, Henry Rollins, Iggy Pop, and Moby, this film does a good job capturing the sense of being in a band that is just successful enough that nobody involved can admit to themselves that they should move on. Dave Foley is a scene stealer as the amoral agent with a surprisingly accepting attitude towards vampires. Cannibal! The Musical was a student film Trey Parker wrote and directed while at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The film purports to tell the story of Alferd Packer, who was accused and convicted of murdering and cannibalizing a party he was leading through the mountains of Colorado during winter. The scenes of murder and cannibalism that bookend the film do get a little gory, but this is otherwise mostly a comedy in the spirit of other musical comedies that Parker would go on to do like South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut, and his Broadway show, The Book of Mormon . Being a student film, it’s pretty rough around the edges a lot of the time, but even early on, Parker shows a great ear for musical comedy. Repo! The Genetic Opera has a strong following, some fascinating casting choices, and an interestingly maximalist visual style. I would highly recommend it if you wish the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Once More with Feeling,” had a sequel. The film takes place in a future where anyone can buy replacement organs from a company called GeneCo, but if you can’t keep up with your payments, a repo man will find you and take those organs back. The story itself is rather operatic with the incredibly violent family that runs the company squabbling amongst itself over who will take over the company when the patriarch dies, entangled with the story of a man who is being blackmailed to work as a repo man, and the daughter he is trying to keep that a secret from. At the outset of this, what I said of horror films is that they were a way to play with feelings and experiences that we wouldn’t want as part of our day-to-day lives, playing with the images and ideas that frighten and disconcert us. What horror musicals nail more than anything else is that spirit of play while engaging with the ideas at work in horror. There’s a place for extreme and traumatizing horror, and I won’t argue too hard against someone that wants to insist that’s all horror is, but I love that there is a room somewhere for films that can also play with the things that scare us with a spirit of gory joy. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story What I thought of when I first heard about Weird: The Al Yankovic Story , was Milos Forman’s 1999 film, Man on the Moon, about stand-up comedian and performance artist, Andy Kaufman . I grew up loving Andy as a form-breaking comic talent and I remember being incredibly excited by the idea of someone like Forman making an Andy Kaufman movie. What I was disappointed to discover when I sat down in the theater, though, is that isn’t quite what Man on the Moon was. It was a movie about Andy Kaufman’s life, but aside from a somewhat daring opening sequence, it wasn’t anything like what I realized I actually wanted: a movie in the subversive spirit of what Andy himself would have made. That was kind of a lightbulb moment for me when it came to biopics, and how big a difference there is between a biopic being an accurate representation of the events of someone’s life versus being an authentic representation of what that person was all about. Man on the Moon succeeds on that first measure, but it couldn’t help but fall short on the second because it was core to who Andy Kaufman was that he never let the audience in on a bit. A just-the-facts account of his life is about as antithetical to who he was as you can get. “Weird Al” Yankovic has been a pop culture fixture for almost 40 years, and the theme of his work throughout has been bringing craftsmanship and a relentless silliness, even self-described stupidity, to his song parodies and other projects. The concern with a “Weird Al” movie is that stuck within the confines of a biopic, it would either be unwilling to be as silly and stupid as it needed to be authentic to “Weird Al” as an artist, or that it might go so far towards the opposite extremes of silliness that it wasn’t sufficiently rooted in anything real to give an audience something to care about. As it turns out, though, I needn’t have worried. In many ways, this film, for all its absurdity, is the most authentic expression in his career of who “Weird Al” Yankovic is. Rather than wade too far into spoilers for a film that’s only been out for a little bit, I wanted to try and talk about Weird , by discussing how it relates to some other films that are working in this same kind of space. Given how directly Weird is attacking the tropes of musical biopics, the film it might most easily be compared to is 2007’s, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story . That film picks and chooses from a number of biopics about musicians to invent its titular Dewey Cox, blending together some of the most hackneyed tropes of those films with some of the assorted artist’s most outrageous stories, to create something wonderfully absurdist that amounts to a retelling of the previous 50 years of popular music. What seems so much more subversive about Weird , though, is the idea of a real person like Weird Al, using his own life to create something similarly absurd. Weird isn’t entirely fiction, using funhouse mirror versions of the events from Al’s life to tell this story, but what starts out as a sendup of musical biopics winds up being something a bit more abstract like a Charlie Kaufman film about a famous parody artist with nothing left to parody but himself. Another film very much in this spirit is George Clooney’s 2002 adaptation of Chuck Barris’s “unauthorized autobiography,” Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which purports to tell the story of Barris’s life as the tv host and producer that created The Gong Show , as well as his supposed secret double life as a CIA assassin. In both films, it’s someone presenting their own fabricated autobiography. Still, Barris’s story is a bit more performance art as he has never been willing to acknowledge his story as being made up. Clooney and the film are aware they are making a comedy, but doing so by taking Barris’s story seriously. In Weird, conversely, the performances are played straight for maximum comedic effect, but never to the point that the audience needs to take any of the events depicted in the film at all seriously. “Weird Al” has always been fairly overt in his work. Part of his mass appeal is that he wants everyone to be in on the joke. He famously asks permission from artists before parodying their work because he’s looking to be inclusive and to work with people that are in on the joke. The vibe of the film throughout is, “isn’t it wild that we get to make this.” And lastly, there’s something I see in Weird that I also saw in David Wain’s 2018’s film, A Futile and Stupid Gesture , about Doug Kenney, the co-founded National Lampoon magazine. It would be a spoiler for that underseen film to say too much about it here, but A Futile and Stupid Gesture is more straightforwardly a biopic that makes some incredibly bold choices with its narrative framing and with a twist of the ending that makes the film something much more interesting than the standard fare. Weird does something like this in that, in the beginning the film is loosely telling something like “Weird Al”’s story. He really did start to learn to play the accordion because of a door-to-door accordion salesman that came to his house - though in real life his dad didn’t nearly beat that salesman to death for bringing such a devil instrument into his house. There really is such a thing as the Yankovic Bump, where recording artists saw a surge in their sales after he parodies their work, but it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing that “Weird Al” had to worry about being stalked and murdered over. Narratively though, each of these jokes starts to add up, such that you end up in a narrative space very far afield conceptually from where the film begins. In both cases, the ending isn’t real, but it’s the one most satisfying for the story being told. The biggest factor in how successful the film is, though, is how committed Daniel Radcliffe is. He can do a thing in this film that “Weird Al” can’t, which is, deliver on the comedy while playing this heightened reality completely straight. “Weird Al” is a charismatic presence and can sell his own brand of humor in his songs and music videos, but there is always a very overt wink to the audience with everything he does. Because a part of the target of this film is Oscar bait biopics, what was needed was someone who could throw themselves entirely into the wig and mustache and Hawaiian shirt of it all of the ridiculous “Weird Al” character, but also be able to play the scene where he puts out a cigarette in the hand of a record executive with enough menace and over-seriousness for the absurdity of the moment to hit, yet not so real that it pulls people out of the movie. Radcliffe balances this perfectly throughout. Comedy roles never get the consideration they deserve when award season rolls around, but Radcliffe really is doing some wonderful work here. Everyone surrounding Radcliffe is wonderful as well. Toby Huss is superb as “Weird Al”’s weirdly angry father. Evan Rachel Wood is so good as bizarro Madonna that I kinda wish she were the one cast in that biopic about herself that Madonna currently has in development. Part of the bending of reality of the film is how many of his famous friends and fans “Weird Al” has appeared in cameos throughout the film. Many of them are surprises that ought not be spoiled, in particular an especially star-studded pool party. Everyone in the film understood the assignment and to a person seems to be having the time of their life. There is something that just makes sense about this being the film that “Weird Al” would make. It’s so fitting that someone who has made his career parodying other people’s work would find the perfect capstone to his career parodying himself. Even more fitting, though, is how well it turned out. For an idea that began its life as a fake movie trailer, there’s every reason to think there wouldn’t ultimately be enough there to stretch that short skit of a joke into a film, but boy is there nobody in the world better at wringing every joke there is to be found out of a funny premise. There has never been anyone better at turning the silly and stupid into the sublime. Here’s hoping this isn’t the last film we get from him. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

Christmas in Eyes Wide Shut Every year, as we get closer to the holidays, you’ll start to see and hear people discussing holiday movies, and a contemporary part of that discussion is quibbling over whether such-and-such a film is a Christmas movie. The archetype of this argument is that the film, Die Hard , because it takes place at an office holiday party on Christmas Eve, should be considered a Christmas movie. I’m not that interested in this part of the conversation, but what I do find interesting to look at is what the motives and implications are for setting a movie like this at Christmas. In the case of Die Hard , there are structural and thematic reasons why this choice makes sense. A late night holiday party gives a reason for a small group of people to serve as hostages to be in this office building after hours; and, since part of the emotional core of the film is Bruce Willis’ John McClane trying to reconcile with his estranged wife, Christmas is a great backdrop for that kind of homecoming. Setting aside the question of whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie, that it is set at Christmas does play an important role in the story being told. Another film that has taken on some prominence recently in this conversation around unconventional Christmas movies is Stanley Kubrick’s final film, 1999. Eyes Wide Shut . Like Die Hard , and the other films in this discourse, Eyes Wide Shut is a film that is very overtly set at Christmas, but isn’t interested in engaging directly with traditional Christmas themes. This is a choice of some kind as this shift of setting is one of surprisingly few changes from the novel the film is based on, with just about every scene in Eyes Wide Shut dressed so that you never forget when the events depicted are taking place. There is a danger of overinterpreting Kubrick in these kinds of choices, but I do think that in this case he is trying to say something here, and I’m interested in exploring what that might be. The film is based on Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler’s novella, Dream Story . It’s a story about, among other things, dreams and class and marriage, mostly told through a dark night a husband has after his wife confesses to once contemplating being unfaithful to him. The story begins with the husband and wife reading to their young daughter as she falls asleep before they plan to head out for the evening. The one scene of the nighttime story we hear described is of a galley ship out to sea, with a team of slaves rowing below deck, while a prince lays by himself up on the deck, wrapped in his purple cloak, staring up at a starry night sky. As the couple finish reading this bit, the two parents observe that the child’s eyes have shut while she wears an expression “as if she had been caught getting up to mischief.” It’s a sweet domestic moment before the father and mother leave for a masquerade party that night to mark the end of the carnival season. The film does begin similarly, but even before this scene, the very first shot we get during the opening credits is of the wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), from the back as Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2 plays. It’s night. She’s in the bedroom of what seems to be an expensive city apartment. She’s presumably coming home from a night out, undressing, letting her dress fall off her body to reveal that she’s naked underneath. It’s only a 7 second shot, but it’s enough time to play with an audience’s expectations of what this film is going to be. It’s a moment out of time from the rest of the film that you could read almost anything you like into. It can seem sexual because it’s someone as famous and beautiful as Nicole Kidman getting naked, but it’s not filmed in any especially sexy kind of way. She’s simply a woman standing in her bedroom, casually undressing, but the audience can’t help but project something onto what they’re seeing, unavoidably reading something, probably too much, into the behavior of a woman, caught in a private moment simply existing in our gaze. When we next see Kidman, it’s a different time. She and her husband Bill (Tom Cruise) are now getting ready to go to a party. Bill putters around their bedroom in his tuxedo, talking to Alice, looking for his wallet, before walking into the bathroom where Alice, in another fancy black dress, is sitting on the toilet, finishing going to the bathroom. They have such a lived-in domesticity and comfort with one another that this intimate moment plays as the most unremarkable thing in the world. Similar to the book, as Bill and Alice make their way out of the apartment to head to the party, they stop in the living room to give their young daughter a kiss goodbye and some last minute instructions to the babysitter, before heading out for the night. In one sense this is where the film and the book start to diverge, but more as a matter of emphasis and pacing than content. This next party set piece of the film is mostly faithful to the book, and serves the same function as setting in motion everything to follow, but what Kubrick will take twenty minutes to unfold, the book will dispense with in a paragraph. It’s also at the party where Kubrick introduces his biggest addition to the narrative, the wealthy host of this incredibly lavish party, Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack). We can tell that Bill and Alice are wealthy in their own right from their NYC apartment, and we will learn that Bill is a high end doctor catering to affluent patients, but the wealth of the Zieglers is another level altogether. The contrast drawn out by Bill and Alice not knowing anyone at the party and feeling out of place. They get separated when Bill spots someone at the party he does know, and goes over to talk to him while Alice goes to the restroom. The person Bill spots isn’t another guest at the party, but rather one of the hired help: a piano player with the band that Bill recognizes as an old med school classmate of his, Nick Nightingale (Todd Field). We see Bill blossom a bit talking to Nick, presumably in part just from seeing a friendly face, but also clearly because Nick is someone at this party to which Bill can feel more successful. They talk briefly, making plans to catch up at one of Nick's other upcoming gigs in the city, before Nick is pulled back to rejoin the band. Now separated from one another at the party, both Bill and Alice each experience a small adventure. Alice is by herself at the bar waiting for Bill, drinking champagne to try and get comfortable, when a suave older Hungarian man begins to hit on her. Alice appreciates the attention, agreeing to dance with him, all while his advances become increasingly blunt. Bill is elsewhere, talking with two young models who openly flirting with him, and will ultimately try to lure him upstairs for sex. Alice will eventually resist her pursuer’s advances, leaving him on the dance floor to go look for Bill. We don’t see as definitive a resolution between Bill and the two women interested in him, as he is interrupted right as it becomes clear what’s being offered to him. Before we can be sure that Bill will say ‘no’ to these two models, he is summoned by one of Ziegler’s assistants. What we will learn when Bill makes his way upstairs, is that sometime after we first met Ziegler, when he and his wife were welcoming Bill and Alice to the party, he had apparently snuck upstairs for an assignation with another woman. When Bill finds them, Ziegler is dressing, and his mistress, Mandy, is sprawled out naked on a couch, unconscious from an overdose of cocaine and heroin. Because I’m specifically looking at Eyes Wide Shut through the prism of Christmas, a connection I made this time that I hadn’t before is some of the resemblance between this scene and a key scene in Billy Wilder’s 1960 film, The Apartment. In that film, C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemon), is a low level employee at an insurance firm who is letting executives at the company use his apartment to meet their mistresses, in order to try and get a leg up at the company. The night of Christmas Eve, Baxter comes home after his boss, who had been scheduled to have been using the apartment, should have been finished. Once there, Baxter finds the woman from the company he likes, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), unconscious in his bed, having taken an overdose of sleeping pills after meeting up with his boss. Baxter has to run to the apartment next door to ask the doctor that lives there, Dr Dreyfus, to come help Ms. Kubelik. Dr. Dreyfus is able to revive her, and Baxter spends the next few days nursing Ms. Kubelik back to health. When Bill is summoned in a similar way to revive Mandy, he is also able to do so. He gives much the same sort of instructions to Ziegler that Dr Dreyfus gave to Baxter, with the difference being that Ziegler can barely hide how put upon he is to not be able to just have someone put her in a cab and send her home. Ziegler will do what he has to in order to extract himself from this situation, but he cares as little about Mandy herself as Baxter’s boss cared about Ms. Kubelik. In both the book and the film the husband and wife go home from the party and are both romantically charged up for one another after having been sexually pursued by their respective strangers at the party. In both the book and the film, the couple makes passionate love, and again in both book and film, this passionate outburst is tempered for each of them when they wake up the next morning to return to their less exciting everyday lives. It’s the next day, as they are each stewing in the ordinariness of their lives that they each begin to dwell on the excitement that could have been theirs, seemingly having lost sight of the passionate night they actually did have with one another. The way it’s phrased in the book, “And all at once, those inconsiderable experiences were bounded magically and painfully by the deceptive appearance of missed opportunities.” After this long day, they put their daughter to bed and retire to their bedroom. Perhaps chasing something of the excitement of the night before, Alice grabs their small stash of marijuana from a Band Aid box in the medicine cabinet. We next see the two of them in bed (in admittedly one of the more bizarrely acted scenes ever put on film), seemingly quite high. Alice asks Bill about something she’s clearly been stewing about since the party. She had seen him with the two girls at the party, noticed that he had then disappeared for a long time, and wanted to know if Bill had slept with them. Bill plays dumb. “I wasn’t hitting on anyone,” he says. We know otherwise and, importantly, so does Alice. This may be the choice Bill makes where things start to devolve for him. Bill could have chosen to be honest with his wife here, but he doesn’t. This dynamic will underpin the rest of their interactions in this scene and the remainder of the film. While Alice is willing to be brutally open and honest with Bill, to a fault even, Bill is not willing to do the same. When Bill deflects about the two models and misleads about why he was upstairs with Ziegler for so long, He asks Alice about the man she was dancing with. Alice tells Bill that he tried to get her into bed at the party, but she is deeply troubled by how unthreatened Bill is by this confession. She’s hurt by his complete lack of jealousy in this moment, feeling taken for granted, feeling like she’s been filed away in his mind as just a faithful wife and mother, and not as a sexual being, not as someone that another man could find interesting enough to try and steal away from him, not as someone capable of being tempted to let herself be stolen away. So, Alice makes a confession. She asks Bill if he remembers a trip they took to Cape Cod the previous summer; if he remembers one night sitting in the dining room of the place where they were staying at a table next to where three naval officers were sitting. He doesn’t remember because the moment Alice has in mind meant nothing to Bill, but she tells him why it’s so burned in her memory. She had seen the naval officer earlier that morning and they shared a glance that shook her to her core. She reminds Bill that they had gone up to their room and made love that afternoon while their daughter went to the movies with a friend, but confides that she was thinking about the naval officer the entire time. So built up was this infatuation in her mind, that she tells Bill that she felt like she would have been tempted to give up everything - her marriage, her family, everything - to be with that man, even if it was only for one night. But she also adds: “And yet it was weird, ‘cause at the same time, you were dearer to me than ever, and at that moment my love for you was both tender and sad.” The next morning she says she woke up in a panic, uncertain if she was more worried that the naval officer had left the hotel, or that he hadn’t. By dinner that night, when she realized the man had left, she says she felt relieved. Bill is silent for this whole confession, and as we will discover more and more over the course of the film, his world is shattered by this revelation. There’s no time to discuss though, because a phone call comes right then, summoning him to the bedside of a patient of his that had just died. Bill will go out into the night, and all of his misadventures that follow will be motivated by the sudden jealousy, and fear, and emasculation that came from what his wife just confessed to him. For our purposes, we don’t need to belabor all of the shenanigans that Bill will get up to over the course of this night and the next day, but I will briefly list them here. At the bedside of his dying patient, his grieving daughter will throw herself at Bill. Bill will be accosted by some drunk frat guys on the street that will insult him and question his sexuality. He’ll let himself be picked up by a young sex worker, named Domino, and brought to her apartment, but will chicken out when he gets a checkup call from Alice before anything can be consummated. Leaving there, he’ll stumble across the jazz club where Nick Nightingale is performing, where Nick confides in Bill that he’ll be playing blindfolded at some kind of high end sex party that night, and Bill pressures Nick to help him sneak in. Nick caves, telling Bill that the secret password for the party is “Fidelio” - An opera by Beethoven about a faithful wife who disguised herself as a man to rescue her husband from prison. Bill secures the costume he needs and sneaks into the party. He is warned almost immediately after he arrives by one of the women who recognizes that he doesn’t belong there, and she tells him that he’s in danger if he doesn’t leave immediately. Bill doesn't listen, and circulates through the party, among the other masked and cloaked observers, watching the different groups of men and women have sex. One of the naked masked women approaches him, asking him if he wants to go somewhere more private. He agrees, but is pulled away before anything can happen by the first woman who warned him earlier. She tries to warn him again, but it’s too late. Bill is brought to a room where most of the cloaked figures have assembled to confront him. Before he can be punished, the woman who had been warning him all night offers herself up to be punished in his place, and Bill is allowed to leave with a threat to never discuss what happened. Bill arrives back home at four in the morning, their Christmas tree the only light on in the apartment. He hides his cloak and mask before going into the bedroom where he finds Alice laughing in her sleep. Bill wakes her and she jumps, shifting from laughter to fear. He asks her what she was dreaming of, and she describes a nightmare where the two of them were frightened and naked, and she thought it was his fault. In the dream, Bill went looking for her clothes and she suddenly wasn’t frightened anymore. She was now lying naked in the grass when the naval officer came out of the woods and saw her there and started laughing at her. Alice stops here, but Bill knows there is more to her dream, because she was laughing when he came in, and he presses her to tell him the rest. Now holding onto Bill, on the verge of tears throughout, Alice describes how the naval officer starting to kiss her, and then they made love; And how there were all these people watching. Then she was having sex with all the other men there, she didn’t know how many. She knew Bill could see her and what she was doing, her impulse was to make fun of him, to laugh in his face, so she laughed as loud as she could. She’s crying now as she tells Bill this, and he doesn’t know what to say. The remaining hour of the film is mostly Bill retracing his steps from the night before. Discovering just how badly things went, or could have gone. At Nick’s hotel, Bill learned that Nick showed up bruised and scared at 4:30 in the morning to check out, and in the company of two large men. Bill goes to the address of the party from the night before, and someone comes out and hands Bill an envelope with his name typed on it. In it is a letter warning him not to investigate any further. He returns to Domino’s apartment, and meets her roommate Sally, who seems to also be a sex worker. Bill seems to be interested and on the verge of hooking up with Sally, when he learns that the reason Domino isn’t there is that she just learned that morning that she was HIV-positive. From a newspaper Bill learns that Mandy from Ziegler’s Christmas party - who it turns out was a former Miss New York, making her prominent enough to warrant an article in the paper - had died of a drug overdose. Pausing to read the article, you can see that she had been seen returning to her hotel in the company of two men about the same time that Nick was being brought back to his hotel. Was Mandy the person who tried to warn him? At this point, Bill gets a phone call from Ziegler, summoning him to a meeting. Once at Ziegler’s, Victor tells Bill that he knows everything and that Bill needs to stop looking into this. He’s talking out both sides of his mouth a bit - on one hand telling Bill that these are dangerous people that he needs to be real careful not to cross, and at the same time trying to reassure Bill that Nick is fine and that Mandy’s overdose was just an inevitable accident. Ziegler is trying to weave a narrative for Bill that will both let him go home not thinking he got two people killed, but also still scare him enough to keep his mouth shut. Bill does go home. Maybe this would have been something he could have put behind him, until he walks into his bedroom and sees his mask from the party resting on his pillow, next to his sleeping wife. He breaks. His crying wakes up Alice, and he says he will tell her everything. We presume that he does, because the next shot we see is Alice, her eyes bloodshot and smoking a cigarette. The room is sunlit, suggesting she’s been up all night hearing Bill’s tale. Perhaps there’s more to discuss, but Alice says their daughter will be up soon, and is expecting for them to take her Christmas shopping today. The final scene takes place at a toy store, presumably FAO Schwarz, or similar. This setting is another departure from the book, where Bill’s confession and this next scene are all one piece. Something about what happens next Kubrick specifically wanted to set not just in a Christmas setting, but in the most nakedly commercial facet of the holiday. This echoes a bit the way he’s used Christmas throughout the film. never the traditional themes of the holiday, but the trappings. Trees and lights and presents and parties, but just these surface appearances. Walking among the toy store aisles, Bill asks Alice what they should do. To which Alice says, “What do I think we should do? I think we should be grateful that we’ve managed to survive through all of our adventures, whether they were real, or only a dream.” Bill asks her if she’s sure, and she adds, “Am I sure? Only as sure as I am that the reality of one night, let alone that of a whole lifetime, can ever be the whole truth.” Alice is clearly struggling some to make peace with what her husband confessed to her, but she is choosing to make peace with it. Whether or not that’s the right choice is up to her to decide. She is choosing to accept what happened and try to repair their bond. She tells Bill that she loves him, but that there is something that they need to do as soon as possible. Bill dutifully asks what that is. And Alice answers with the somewhat infamous last word of Stanley Kubrick’s filmography, “Fuck.” So, is Eyes Wide Shut a Christmas movie? I don’t know, probably not. It being set at Christmas plays no role in the plot. The Ziegler's Christmas party could have been anytime, and they could have been doing any kind of shopping in the final scene. But, that said, is there something Kubrick is trying to say by setting it at Christmas? Probably so, but maybe not Christmas in the sense we usually think. In some ways, Christmas is a holiday of appearances, which something that traditionally Christmas movies can feed into. Carefully orchestrated Christmas cards pictures taken between fights. Cheery lights on the house that might not reflect the lives of the people inside. When we first meet the Zieglers it’s one picture perfect happy couple meeting another as the Zieglers welcome Bill and Alice to the party, only for us to meet Victor again upstairs just a little while later, standing above a naked unconscious woman that isn’t his wife. The course of the film reveals all the ways that Bill and Alice aren’t so picture perfect, too. But there’s something Alice says in that last scene that sticks with me. When Bill asks her what they should do she says “we should be grateful that we’ve managed to survive through all of our adventures.” There is something a little Christmasy about the idea of counting your blessings and being grateful for what you have and have overcome. This is my take away, at least. Eyes Wide Shut is a film about marriage and fidelity, that looks at the differences between how things appear and what they are actually like, and examines the tension between the things we want and our appreciation of what we have. Each of those themes makes sense to interrogate through a lens of Christmas. Where we leave Bill and Alice is in a toy store at Christmastime, a place more than any other in the world that screams out from every shelf, “Look at all the things that could be yours!” But they have everything that they need at the moment. They have each other, and a better understanding of one another. They’ve been through a lot together, but their eyes are open now. It’s a Christmas miracle! Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning , one of the memories that Viktor Frankl relates from his time in a concentration camp is of a particularly memorable sunset. He describes the scene of him and his fellow prisoners being exhausted after another endless string of grueling workdays. They were laying together on the floor of their hut, when another prisoner came in, telling them that they needed to come outside to see something wonderful. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner says to another, ‘How beautiful the world could be!’ Frankl’s book is, among other things, an exploration of how people find and create meaning in their lives, and how through such meaning, people can sustain themselves during even the very worst of circumstances. In this anecdote of Frankl’s, the sunset in no way erased anything of the seemingly hopeless circumstances that he and his fellow prisoners were just barely living through, but, just the same, a moment of shared beauty was still something that, if only for a moment, made them feel a little more alive and lightened their load. Reading this story recently, I thought of a pivotal scene in Hal Ashby’s 1971 film, Harold and Maude . The titular Harold and Maude have just spent the day together. Harold, never stated, but about twenty or so; Maude, on the very cusp of turning 80. They are sitting side by side in a marshy and rusted-out trainyard, with a very busy highway in the background behind them. Harold is beginning to realize that he’s falling in love with Maude. Holding her hand, he looks down and notices, for the first time, the concentration camp number on her arm. At that same moment, with a joyful gasp, Maude points to a flock of birds taking flight in front of them. The camera cuts to a view from behind them that shows what they’ve been looking at all along is a beautiful magic hour sunset, with waves gently crashing right in front of them. The contrast is drawn between their surroundings and what they’re choosing to look at instead is plain. We cut back to the view of them from the front, and again see the ugly, industrial debris all around them. Maude makes a passing allusion to the glorious birds that Dreyfus saw on Devil’s Island, without mentioning to Harold, or the audience for that matter, that Devil’s Island was a French penal colony, or that Alfred Dreyfus was a French military officer falsely accused of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment there due to the rampant antisemitism in the French military at that time. Maude knows the story, but her interest in the moment is only the glorious birds that Dreyfus had marveled at. We cut again to a view from behind and watch the two lovebirds snuggling further into one another, savoring the beautiful moment, though surrounded by ugliness. Looked at from one angle. Harold and Maude is a carpe diem story, similar in spirit to the later Dead Poets Society. Harold overlaps in a number of ways with the unformed schoolboys of that story, and Maude overlaps more than a bit with the manic pixie English teacher that taught them all to seize the day. The key difference though is that having taught Harold his much-needed lesson - shaking him from his aversion to life and fixation on death - Maude actually goes on to take her own life. It would have more straightforwardly underlined her message to Harold if Maude merely died, but it dramatically complicates that lesson when she chooses to end her own life. There’s a climactic suicide in Dead Poets Society as well, but it’s noteworthy how the two films differ on this. In Dead Poets Society , it’s a young boy who takes his own life out of feelings of hopelessness. The closer parallel for Harold and Maude would be if it were Harold who had taken his own life rather than Maude. In the case of Maude, she is anything but hopeless. She’s satiated. She’s lived a rich and full life, and she sincerely wishes the same for everyone else, but she’s had her fill and is ready to be done. In the first scene where Harold & Maude speak to one another, they’re both recreationally attending the funeral of a gentleman that neither of them knows. Maude comes up to Harold to ask if he knew the deceased. When Harold says, “No,” she mentions to him that the man died at 80, which to her is a good time to pass on: I heard he’s 80 years old. I’ll be 80 next week. Good time to move on, don’t you think? …Well, I mean 75 is too early, but at 85 you’re just marking time. You may as well go over the horizon. It’s this idea that I struggle with most in this story. As I’m writing this, the legendary star of stage and screen, Rita Moreno, has just turned 90 and is being talked about as a strong possibility to receive an academy award nomination for her role in Stephen Spielberg’s recently released adaptation of West Side Story. She has 14 acting credits since turning 80, including 46 episodes as a regular on a TV series. Rita Moreno has certainly not just been “marking time.” My own parents are rapidly approaching their 80s, and I hope that they also have a great many fulfilling years ahead of them, and will have something to look forward to in every day they have left. But, that said, I’m probably not being honest with myself if I don’t concede that there is something to what Maude is saying, and all I’m doing is quibbling with which age she picked for her departure. In every life, if it lasts long enough, the inevitability of its ending can’t help but eventually become an ever-present and all-consuming concern, and not wanting to live to see that day seems to make some sense. Not wanting to live long enough to outlive all of your friends, or the usefulness of your own mind and body, makes sense. However, how we square acknowledging that with Maude’s life lessons to Harold, has everything to do with her being 80, and his only being 20 or so. Maude is interesting in that, as far as the film goes, she doesn’t have a character arc. From the first words we hear her speak, she is already on a course she has chosen for how her story will end. Her interactions with Harold don’t divert her from that course at all. Her character arc has already happened during the long and rich life she lived before the film even starts. Harold, as the cliche goes, still has his whole life ahead of him. While it’s at least coherent that Maude may want to choose to end her life before she is no longer able to enjoy it, she awakens Harold to the idea that a similar fatalism makes no sense for him when he seemingly has so much wonderful life available to him. When Harold tearfully confides in Maude what first prompted him to start faking his suicide - the reaction he saw from his otherwise unfeeling mother after she had thought he had been killed in an accident at school - and how he came to think he’d enjoy being dead, Maude makes her full-throated endorsement of life: I understand. A lot of people enjoy being dead. But, they’re not dead, really. They’re just backing away from life. Reach out. Take a chance. Get hurt even. Play as well as you can. Go team, Go! Gimme an ‘L’. Gimme an ‘I’. Gimme a ‘V’. Gimme an ‘E’. L-I-V-E Live! Otherwise, you’ve got nothing to talk about in the locker room. This isn’t just a thing that Maude is saying for Harold’s benefit, while secretly having given up on her own life. She is living her life fully and is collecting stories for the locker room right up until the end. She’s leading police on high-speed chases. She’s liberating trees from city streets to replant in the woods. She’s posing nude for an ice sculptor. She’s living all the days she’s chosen to have left. Even as she’s riding with Harold to the hospital in the ambulance he has called, she is more bemused by the whole thing than anything. Harold implores her not to die, and tells her that he loves her. She’s thrilled by this. Not so much that he loves her, but that he’s loving at all. “Oh, Harold,” she says. ”That’s Wonderful. Go and love some more.” I think it’s this last line that captures the enduring legacy of this film. At that moment, Harold says, “No. Never.” But, we leave him on a slightly more hopeful note as the credits roll. He’s somewhat at peace with what has happened, and what’s in store for all of us eventually, softly dancing towards the horizon and playing the banjo that Maude gave him, having absorbed the lessons she had to give. He has lived and loved, and thankfully, he will go on to do so again and again. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

It makes sense that Lin-Manuel Miranda would see something in Jonathan Larson’s tick, tick…BOOM! that suited his own strengths and sensibilities for his directorial debut. It doesn’t hurt that he knows the show first-hand, having starred in a 2014 revival. It’s a New York City story, like his own In the Heights , albeit through a different neighborhood and cultural prism. It’s about a protagonist explicitly writing like they’re running out of time and turning out to be right, like with Hamilton . It’s about the minutiae of someone trying to get a musical off the ground, which Miranda knows firsthand, and it’s a look at a wunderkind in the time before the acclaim, which Miranda should know something about as well. Jonathan Larson is best known for writing the music, lyrics, and book to the musical, Rent . Rent, as we hear at the very beginning of the film, was a phenomenon, running for 12 years on Broadway, winning both the Drama Desk and Tony award for Best Musical, as well as a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Unfortunately, the tragedy of Larson’s story is that he didn’t live to see any of that success. Larson died of an aortic aneurysm, the result of a misdiagnosis, just before Rent’s first off-Broadway preview performance at the New York Theater Workshop. He was 35 years old. tick, tick…BOOM! isn’t about Rent , or explicitly about Larson’s death, though both can’t help but be in the background here if you are already familiar with Larson’s story, and both feature in the closing moments of the film. tick, tick…BOOM! is Larson’s own autobiographical musical account of his struggles to establish himself in NY’s theater scene. Miranda’s adaptation of that project widens the aperture a bit to tell a fuller version of that story. The framing device he uses is that we’re watching Larson stage a performance of tick, tick…BOOM! recounting his failed efforts to get his previous musical, SUPERBIA , off the ground. Miranda cuts between Larson's performance and him going through those experiences, but with that reality punctuated occasionally by additional, full, world-bending musical numbers. I didn’t exactly know how this story was going to play out while I was watching it, except for realizing that neither tick, tick…BOOM!, nor SUPERBIA , were the thing that Larson was best known for, so it seemed unlikely that we were going to get the story of his big break. The film begins with the stage performance of tick, tick…BOOM! , with Jonathan lamenting his anxiety about his lack of success and his impending 30th birthday - with a literal ticking clock underlining the message. As the audience to that performance, we are with Jonathan in the future, looking back on the story that he’s telling. No matter how the story he’s telling goes, there must be some hope to it, because we are getting to watch him on a stage tell it to us. At the same time, we are also another 30 years in the future from that audience, also aware of the greater successes he would go on to have, but not live to see. There is an interesting parallel here to another musical, of sorts, released this year: Bo Burnham’s Inside . The surrounding context is different for Burnham, in that everything he is singing is being further heightened by suffocating pandemic quarantine, but the underlying idea is the same: that the idea of turning 30 feels like a turning point in life where youth is officially behind you, and there is a growing compulsion to assess what you’ve accomplished with your life up to that point. There is also tidy symmetry in that Larson is singing about turning 30 in 1990, which is the year that Burnham sings about being born. What both films capture is that universal feeling of hitting a point in your life where it suddenly feels like the idea of time changes from something in great abundance to a dwindling scarcity. The pressures and passage of time feature in different ways throughout tick, tick...BOOM! . Jonathan not only feels like he’s running out of time in his own life to make his mark, but he also finds himself endlessly short of time in his day-to-day life to do all of the things he wants, and needs, to do. He’s days away from the critical workshop performance of his show, SUPERBIA , but he’s still missing the song that everyone that matters agrees the show is missing. He doesn’t have time to work on the song because he needs to work to make money to pay for the musicians for the workshop. He doesn’t have time to talk to his girlfriend about their future because he needs to prepare for his workshop and somehow finish that song. The conclusion of Larson’s journey in his production of tick, tick…BOOM! is that, although he may be turning 30, and although the musical he spent the majority of his adult life working on isn’t going to get produced, he’s still living the only life he could imagine for himself. So what if SUPERBIA didn’t succeed the way he wanted? He still made it. People liked it. He’s still proud of it. On to the next one. There’s still time. Happy Birthday! And yet, there’s only still time until there isn’t. Larson has made peace with the relentless ticking, but it never stops for anyone. The feat of both Larson, and Miranda, is being able to honor that idea that we are all running out of time in our own ways, while still being sincerely joyful and celebratory about the things we can choose to do with the time we do have. It’s great that Larson went on to create Rent, but he doesn’t actually know that yet at the conclusion of his production in Boom! . Whatever is next for him, the ending to the story he is telling is already a happy one for him, because he has made peace with the person he was meant to be, whatever may come next, whatever time he might have left. The film, despite the very great many things already working in its favor, hinges entirely on Andrew Garfield’s performance as Jonathan, and he more than delivers. After seeing the film, I was dumbfounded to discover that he doesn’t come from any extensive musical theater background, but prepared for the film with just a year of vocal training. Additionally, when not singing, he carries himself throughout the film with such an impossibly easy charm that he feels like the tailor-made first choice for the kinds of roles Tom Hanks made his career on. Garfield is going to get Oscar consideration for this performance and it’s going to be richly deserved. Miranda should also be applauded for his handling of this adaptation. I had to remind myself throughout that it was this, and not In the Heights, that was his first time directing. Working with a smaller ensemble, and occasionally limited in scope because of COVID protocols during production, Miranda has produced an incredibly complex narrative, working in both different times, but also in different senses of reality, often within the same scene, yet yielding a finished product that goes down as clean and easy as can be. He’s proven himself to be a more than capable director, and, in the spirit of this film, I bet the next one will be even better. I had already submitted this review when the news broke of Stephen Sonheim’s passing at the age of 91. Sondheim was the very definition of a giant in the world of musical theater. He was an important mentor in Jonathan Larson’s life and appears as an encouraging presence throughout tick, tick...BOOM! in a role played by Bradley Whitford. A story making the rounds in the days since his passing is that Sondheim was also an encouraging presence in the making of this adaptation of tick, tick...BOOM! , offering to rewrite the final voicemail his character leaves for Jonathan to more closely match what he would have actually said at the time. Then, when Whitford was unavailable to record the rewrite (perhaps conveniently unavailable), it’s actually Sondheim’s voice we hear in the film. Even before his passing, it was something wonderful to hear because of his relationship with Jonathan, but even more so now. It’s heartwarming to hear about such a vibrant and creative force using every last bit of the time available to him to its fullest. May we all be so lucky. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

A look at Guillermo de Toro's Pinocchio 2022 has unexpectedly been the year of Pinocchios, with three different filmed adaptations being released of Carlo Collodi’s 1880s children’s book, The Adventures of Pinocchio. There was a Russian animated version released in English with Pauly Shore voicing the titular Pinocchio, and SpongeBob Squarepants’ Tom Kenny as the voice of Geppetto; there was a potentially even more misguided version by Robert Zemeckis that combined a live-action Geppetto played by Tom Hanks acting against a computer-animated version of the 1940s Disney iteration of Pinocchio; and lastly, and most successfully in my view, Guillermo del Toro’s darker stop-motion animation take on the story, set in Mussolini’s fascist Italy. Funnily enough, Tom Kenny provides the voice of Mussolini here, and funnier still, if IMDB is to be believed, he’ll also be voicing Pinocchio in yet another version of the story set to be released next year. It’s just so many Pinocchios! The Tom Kenny of it all aside, it is curious, to say the least, to see the same story adapted four times in two years, but that barely scratches the surface of how many adaptations of this story exist. Honestly, however many adaptations you think there have been, the true number is probably quite a bit more than that, and all spread out over more than a hundred years. The seemingly definitive version of the story for my whole life has been Disney’s 1940s version, only the second feature-length film released by the studio, and the follow-up to 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs . Pinocchio. It is so tied to the history of The Walt Disney Company that the film’s opening song, “When You Wish Upon a Star,” has long been something of a theme song and guiding ethos for the company. Long before the Disney film, though, there was a silent-era, live-action version from 1911 that is a fascinating artifact of film history, being one of Italy's first feature-length films. I’ve had no luck finding a definitive list of every adaptation of the story there has been over the years, seemingly due in part to how disparate the adaptations have been. There’s a 2015 Czech version, numerous TV movies including a 2008 version with Bob Hoskins as Geppetto, a 1967 version from Germany that mixed live-action with real puppetry, a Japanese animated series from 1976, and dozens more besides. There have also been countless films that have overtly riffed on elements of the Pinocchio story, like 2021’s Finch , 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron , and 2001’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, to name a few. The unifying feature across almost all of the adaptations of the Pinocchio story is that there is a craftsman that makes a child, which then comes to life, and over the course of the story, that fabricated child develops a longing to become more real. In some ways, this is itself something of a riff on the same ideas of the Frankenstein story, and many other folk tales besides, but there has been something unique to the dynamics of the Pinocchio story in particular that has seemingly encouraged so many creators to attempt their own adaptation. It’s a story that lends itself to examinations of parents and children, what it is to be human, what it is to be good, the nature of lying, what it is to be real, and so much more besides. Looking at del Toro’s version, it’s interesting to see which bits of the story he chooses to tweak and highlight, what things he invents himself, and where he is drawing inspiration from the book versus paying some kind of homage to the original Disney film. I’m particularly interested in how overtly religious his treatment of the story is. When we meet him, Gepetto is not just a woodworker but is engaged in a long project of carving a crucifix for his local church, and it’s the accidental bombing of this church through which he will lose his son, Carlo; Gepetto is carving the world’s most famous dead son right before he loses his own. Gepetto will go on to plant the pinecone that Carlo was holding before he died, and from the tree that pinecone grows into, he will drunkenly carve another son, the wooden puppet that will become Pinocchio - a kind of resurrection of its own. It’s also something of a miracle that seemingly the only two things in the church that survived the bombing unscathed were Carlo’s pinecone and Geppetto’s crucifix. When it happens, Carlo’s death is especially painful because he doesn’t even know what’s coming when the building starts to shake. Excited, he asks, “What’s that sound, papa? Is it a plane?” Geppetto knows, though. And we’ve already been warned by this point of Carlo’s fate from the opening narration, so we suspect what’s about to happen, too. Carlo does briefly make it out of the church, but he runs back in to grab his perfect pinecone, having become attached to the idea that he could plant his own tree to one day make things from it just like his father. When the bomb hits, Carlo is holding his pinecone, staring up wonderingly into the eyes of Christ on the cross. Carlo’s perfect pinecone survives the blast, bouncing out the front door and down to the place in the ground where Gepetto had been knocked to by the blast. There is a random senselessness to Carlo’s death that is deeply unsettling. We learn that the town and church weren’t even the intended target of the bombing. There was no target at all. The planes were just dumping their bombs to make their planes lighter for the flight home. Our narrator for this early part of the story is Sebastian J Cricket, the stand-in for Jiminy Cricket from the Disney film, and the unnamed talking cricket of Collodi’s book. As in the other versions of the story, Sebastian will often function as something of a conscience for Pinocchio, accompanying him on some of his adventures, having taken up residence in a hollowed-out portion of the pine tree that became Pinocchio’s body. These themes of death and grieving play a big role in del Toro’s approach to the story. Both in big ways like the cruel death of Carlo, but also in smaller ways, like Gepetto’s first explanation of the significance of the pinecone to Carlo. Gepetto and Carlo have just cut down a pine tree for wood, to which Geppetto says, “When one life is lost, another must grow.” Life and death are an endless and inevitable cycle, but here Geppetto is placing the emphasis on the happier side of that cycle. Yes, everything ends, but from every end comes the beginning of something new. Almost unspoken is that when we meet Carlo and Geppetto, they’ve already experienced a significant loss. Mom is out of the picture, but the only reference we get to her is Carlo asking Geppetto to sing Mama’s song so that he can sleep. It’s tragically losing his son that shatters Geppetto, but the ground for that tragedy is seeded by the earlier loss of his wife, Carlo’s mother. The grief of that ending is also the beginning of something else, though. It’s this grief that leads Geppetto to plant Carlo’s pinecone, which is what grows into the tree that Geppetto cuts down to make Pinocchio, which is how he comes to have the second son who is with him most of the rest of his life. Where one life was lost, another grew. Pinocchio and Geppetto, as depicted by del Toro, are an interesting study in contrasts. In del Toro’s version of the story, Geppetto is far more complicated than the versions in the 1940s Disney film, or Collodi’s book. In the original Disney version of the story, Geppetto is simply a woodworker living on his own, who happens to carve a little boy puppet, and idly muses to himself how nice it would be if it were alive. He’s surprised when he wakes up to discover that Pinocchio is alive, but this Geppetto loves and accepts him immediately. The tension of the story is never really between the two of them. In the book, it’s a bit more complicated, as Collodi is trying to tell a story about the importance of obeying your parents, so, though Gepetto does love Pinocchio, much of the early drama of the story comes from what happens when Pinocchio doesn’t listen to Geppetto or do what he’s supposed to do. For del Toro, his Geppetto struggles mightily to accept Pinocchio. He is a grieving father and he is bewildered by his puppet coming to life, and he is appalled and offended that it calls itself his son. Geppetto is angry at the chaos Pinocchio causes in his life, and it’s in a moment of frustration that he calls Pinocchio a burden, which is the impetus for Pinocchio to leave home. Despite all that, it also says something of Geppetto’s character that he does take on the responsibility of parenting this child in need of raising, and that, despite the difficulties, he also comes to love Pinocchio as a son. His feelings for Pinocchio resonate more for the audience both because they are harder earned, and because they reflect a bit more accurately the messiness of the emotions that come with being a parent. Pinocchio is something else altogether. Despite some echoes here and there, he is decidedly not Carlo. Just as siblings can be wildly different, where Carlo was obedient, Pinocchio is willful; whereas Carlo was mild, Pinocchio is rambunctious. As we learn, Pinocchio may be alive due to a soul borrowed from Carlo, but he is wholly his own person. In every version of Pinocchio , there is a naïveté to him that is an engine for much of what happens in the story. In del Toro’s version of the character, that manifests as something of a Zen beginner’s mind. His Pinocchio is naive, but he runs towards everything with an openness and eagerness and a complete lack of preconceptions. Where Geppetto was a grieving old man grinding out the last of his days, Pinocchio came into his life as Life and Joy personified. Even, early on, when Pinocchio gets too close to the fireplace and his feet catch on fire, he squeals with joy, “Look at me! I’m on fire!” And when Geppetto extinguishes him, Pinocchio says “Papa, you’ve ruined the nice light on my feet.” When his feet are burned off, he accepts it without hesitation and moves on; and when Geppetto builds his new legs, he accepts that too, and is overjoyed. Over time, Pinocchio does grow more sophisticated about the world, better-understanding people and Geppetto, but largely maintains this joyful beginner's mind throughout. Throughout the film, Pinocchio has many adventures after leaving home. He joins the traveling carnival to send money back home to Geppetto, so as not to be the burden that Gepetto called him out of frustration. Because Pinocchio can’t exactly die, he gets briefly pulled into the Italian war effort, and as with many versions of the story, he ultimately winds up reuniting with Geppetto and Sebastian while trapped inside the belly of an enormous sea beast. From here we get an incredibly rich ending from del Toro that ties all of the themes of the film together, elevating it to something truly special. We get the action set piece of the finale as Geppetto, Pinocchio, and Sebastian escape from the belly of the sea beast. We also get the emotional rollercoaster of Pinocchio sacrificing himself to save Geppetto, Geppetto grieving the loss of another son, and Sebastian making a sacrifice of his own to bring Pinocchio back from the dead. We get a brief happy ending of the three of them together, having survived these adventures, but del Toro gives us a further coda to the story. Circling back to the idea that everything ends, del Toro also gives us the inevitable passing of Geppetto, after his well-lived life, and we also get a similar ending for Sebastian. Our final shot is of Pinocchio, leaving flowers on Geppetto’s grave, walking off into the distance, leaving the ending of the life he has known, to enter the beginning of another. There have been many Pinocchios, and many reconfigurations of the story, but this one may be the best. Guillermo del Toro owes a debt to Collodi’s book for providing the bones of this story, and he owes a debt to the original Disney film for how it synthesized and streamlines all the best ideas from Collodi’s book, but it would be hard to overstate just how much greater depth and pathos and humor he brings to this story. That itself helps underline the themes of endings and new beginnings he’s working with. We pass stories like Pinocchio down, each generation adding to it and reshaping it to the needs of that time. Maybe eventually someone will tell a version of this story that will carry it even further than del Toro has, but for now, we have this one, and I will treasure it. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon , 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.