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Harvey is a curious movie. Synopsized in a bleak literal way: it’s the story of an alcoholic middle-aged man, suffering from hallucinations, whose sister and niece are trying to have him forcibly institutionalized so they can take his house. Looked at in another way: it’s the story of a lovable eccentric and his magical sidekick, breaking the people they encounter out of their cynical ruts, through attentive loving kindness. What one is meant to feel while watching this film is this lightness of the story, but the darker currents do bubble up throughout, highlighting a moral to the film that I think deliberate: engaging the world with patience and open-heartedness can have a genuinely transformative effect on your world, the people you meet in it, and your own story. Adapted from Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize winning play of the same name, Harvey takes its title from the purported hallucination at the center of the film: a 6’ 3.5” rabbit that, seemingly, can only be seen by our protagonist: Jimmy Stewart’s Elwood P. Dowd. Identified throughout the film as Pooka - a benign, but mischievous fairy spirit from Celtic mythology - the film is coy about whether or not Harvey is real, or whether he can be seen by others. Even at the end of the film, when we see the motion of a swing and an opening gate, effects that we are inclined to attribute to Harvey, Elwood is the only other character present, calling into question whether we are merely now starting to see his hallucinations, too. Harvey is as real as you or I, to Elwood. To understand this movie, particularly if you haven’t seen it, it’s worth lingering on this point for a moment. The film lives and dies on how concrete and natural Jimmy Stewart is able to make Harvey, and their relationship. Stewart manages something quite special in what would ultimately be an Oscar nominated performance. Stewart never winks. Stewart doesn’t play Elwood as a man hallucinating, but commits entirely to Harvey’s reality. In a time before ubiquitous green screen acting, he makes an unseen Harvey believable in a way that lets our imagination color him into the scenes. Stewart’s performance also carries the tone of the film. Harvey has been revived a number of times over the last 70+ years. I saw it on Broadway with Jim Parsons and Carol Kane. There was a TV movie adaptation made in 1998 starring Harry Anderson. Jimmy Stewart even returned to the role in a 1972 TV movie. The latter of these two can be found on YouTube if you’re so inclined. Each of these performances, including Stewart’s own return to the role, fail to capture everything that Stewart brought to the original filmed version. There is a bit of a tightrope walk required by the role mainly because the story doesn’t shy away from Elwood being a heavy drinker, (and purportedly delusional) but the story would fall apart if he came off as too pitiable or strange for the audience to root for and identify with. By the end of the film, you need to believe that when Elwood’s sister opts not to have him institutionalized, or have his delusion chemically treated, everybody is better off with Elwood in their lives just as it is. Stewart, in my view, accomplishes this in a way that other productions haven’t, by portraying Dowd as almost a bit of a saint, or a mystic, instead of a loveable weirdo. You look past Elwood’s drinking, and the implications of Harvey, because of the charisma and light coming from Elwood when you see him interacting with others. Elwood, as Stewart first performed him, comes off like Fred Rogers or Bob Ross: patient, kind, soft-spoken, happy, and in love with life and everyone he meets. When we first meet Dowd, he’s listening to a mailman, making small talk about the day, to which Dowd says, “Oh, every day's a beautiful day,” and you believe he means it. The line reading works, not coming off at all cloying, because Dowd seems to believe it in his bones as a simple fact, not something he’s trying to project or convince others of. As I alluded to at the beginning, the story of Harvey revolves around Elwood Dowd, who has inherited his deceased mother’s home, and seemingly not inconsiderable resources. His sister, Veta, and her daughter, Myrtle Mae, have recently come to live with him, but are embarrassed to discover that Harvey lives with Elwood as well. The precipitating incident for the film is a social gathering that Veta attempts to throw at the house while Elwood is supposed to be out for the day. The party is meant to be a sort of coming out party for young Myrtle Mae, to introduce her to the community, so that she might attract suitors, or even a husband, without the baggage of her peculiar uncle. Through happenstance, Elwood does hear about the party. He and Harvey hurry home intending to offer support to his sister and niece in their endeavors. Elwood arrives and introduces everyone at the party to Harvey, quickly clearing out all of the partygoers. For Veta, this is the final embarrassing straw, and she calls a local judge to begin the process of having her brother committed. The small scene in which Elwood hears about the party is as important for how I see the movie as most anything that comes after. Elwood has arrived at his favorite bar, “Charlie’s,” where it seems he plans to spend the day. He and Harvey take their usual seats at the bar, where they are both recognized and warmly welcomed. Elwood leaves Harvey at the bar for a moment to go say ‘hello’ to a man he recognizes at one of the tables. We’re introduced to the somewhat indigent looking Mr. Meegles, who we learn has recently been released from jail. In this encounter we first see Elwood’s boundless love, trust, and acceptance of others. Dowd is genuinely interested in how Meegles is doing, pays no mind at all to the little time he’s done, and invites him to come over to the house for dinner the next night. Mr. Meegles also helps advance the plot, because it’s him that points out to Elwood the notice in the society page of the newspaper about the party Veta is throwing that day. There is a thread of loneliness and longed for connection in Harvey that we see through a few different guises. Veta’s frustration at feeling like she can’t have people over to the house anymore; she becomes distraught when her efforts at the top of the film go awry. Myrtle Mae is also frustrated: feeling that she can’t have gentleman callers over. Mr. Meegles worries that he won’t be welcome at Elwood’s house, or anywhere, because of the time he did. These threads, and their happy resolution, feature prominently during the second half of the film as our attention focuses on the sanitarium, “Chumley’s Rest.” The action of the last half of the film turns on the farcical story point of Veta being committed to the sanitarium instead of Elwood. It’s Veta who seems distraught and talks of Harvey as if he were real, while Elwood’s enviably happy equanimity seems the very picture of sanity. There are four important characters we are introduced to at Chumley’s Rest: Dr. Chumley, Dr. Sanderson, Ms. Kelly, and Mr. Wilson. Each character has an arc that turns based on their benefiting from having met and been disarmed by the charm and kindness of Elwood Dowd. Dr. Sanderson and Ms. Kelly are the doctor and nurse on duty when Elwood is brought to Chumley’s Rest. We meet them bickering and with an unspoken past, but Elwood acts as matchmaker for them throughout the second act. Mr. Wilson is an orderly at the sanitarium, whose behavior hints at the way institutionalized patients are often manhandled to get them to behave. He softens over the course of the final act as Dowd encourages the growing relationship between him and Myrtle Mae. Dr. Chumley is the most interesting case. We meet his kind wife briefly as Elwood is leaving the sanitarium, but Dr. Chumley seems unhappy with his life. We hear Elwood recount how when Dr. Chumley later found him and Harvey at Charlie’s, they spoke over a few drinks, and Dr. Chumley became inebriated enough that he wandered off to try and hit on someone else’s date. Later, when talking with Elwood about Harvey, Chumley says if Harvey could take him anywhere, he would like to disappear for two weeks with some pretty girl, who would stroke his head and tell him what a poor little thing he was. When we last see Dr. Chumley, he’s walking back into the sanitarium, (possibly still drunk) talking in a hopeful tone to a “Harvey” of his own about this dream. Whether Dr. Chumley is actually left better off at the end of the film is hard to say, but he is certainly happier. Everyone else comes away happier for having come into contact with Elwood as well. This idea is stated fairly plainly in the most famous monologue from the play and film: Harvey and I sit in the bars... have a drink or two... play the jukebox. And soon the faces of all the other people, they turn toward mine and they smile. And they're saying, "We don't know your name, mister, but you're a very nice fella." Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments. We've entered as strangers - soon we have friends. And they come over... and they sit with us... and they drink with us... and they talk to us. They tell about the big terrible things they've done and the big wonderful things they'll do. Their hopes, and their regrets, and their loves, and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar. And then I introduce them to Harvey... and he's bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed. The same people seldom come back; but that's envy, my dear. There's a little bit of envy in the best of us. Between the lines, we can infer the account of these interactions is surely colored by how Elwood sees the world, but by this point we’ve already seen his disarming way with people. Surely there are times when the people he and Harvey met were not as kindly as they are painted here, but I expect Elwood is more right than wrong. The connections he made were largely warm ones, and the ones that weren’t, were warm for him all the same. In this vein, Elwood says at one point: “Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be’ - she always called me Elwood - ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.” There’s hints throughout the film that Elwood may have had a dramatic break with reality at some point after his mother died. That may have also been when his drinking started, as well. While talking to Dr. Sanderson Elwood even says, “Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it.” At some level you see a recognition in Elwood of a dramatic change having taken place, but all evidence points to it being one for the better. He is happier, the people he meets are happier, and when given the chance to have him chemically treated to return him back to whom he was before meeting Harvey, Veta realizes that she would be doing him far more harm than good. Harvey functions as a curious meditation on mental illness and happiness. What Veta has to weigh when offered the option of having her brother chemically treated is whether it’s more important to her that he be normal, or happy; does she want him to be just like everyone else, or let him stay kind and open-hearted? What is the virtue of being normal for normalcy’s sake alone? What Jimmy Stewart is able to achieve in his performance is something quite remarkable. Just looking at the facts of Dowd’s case from a detached distance, some sort of treatment seems both warranted and overdue. But, Stewart’s Dowd is clearly living his best life, and you see the believably transformative effect the kindness of his Dowd has on all of the story’s other characters. Dowd, as Stewart plays him, is more than a loveable eccentric, but a genuinely admirable role model. Dowd says to Dr. Chumley at one point: “I always have a wonderful time - wherever I am, whomever I'm with. I'm having a fine time, right here.” I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t benefit from having a bit more of that peace in their life. 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.

Whoopi Goldberg turns 65 years old this month and is about to celebrate with a starring role in the upcoming CBS All Access adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand. She’ll be playing a 108 year-old woman named Mother Abagail Freemantle, who, in a world decimated by plague, leads the good people who have survived, to the place where they will make their final stand against the forces of darkness. Timely. These days, Whoopi is most widely recognized for her role as one of the hosts of The View - ABC’s daytime talk show that she has helped moderate since 2007. In some ways, The View is the ideal vehicle for her uninhibited approach to the world, but perhaps a bit lost to those who know her best from this phase of her career, is how much of an iconic figure she already was before taking this job. Whoopi is an EGOT, one of a small handful of people that has been awarded an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. With that Oscar, she became only the second African American woman to win one, and the first to ever be nominated in both the Best Lead Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories. In addition to her Oscar nominations, she was the first African American woman to host the awards show, doing so four times between 1994 and 2002. Also, she was the first African American woman, and only the fourth person overall, to receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. It was as a host that I first became aware of Whoopi, but it was in her role co-hosting Comic Relief with Billy Crystal and Robin Williams. Watching and rewatching each year’s Comic Relief was a big part of my life. For those who may not recall, Comic Relief was a fundraising event that aired on HBO at irregular intervals between the years of 1986-2006 to raise money for homelessness. Each event was structured around a deep lineup of the day’s best comics, with Whoopi, Billy, and Robin, both hosting the event and performing throughout. A number of the broadcasts are still up in full on YouTube, and although there is certainly material that hasn’t aged well, the programs are worth revisiting. There was a special alchemy to the trio of Whoopi, Robin, and Billy in their nine turns as hosts of the event. Robin and Billy were both world-class stand-up comics, but Whoopi was something more. While Billy and Robin would trade rapid fire bits, often recycling material that was already a part of their routines, Whoopi would react and improvise around them in a way that tied the three of them together, grounding what they were doing in the moment. Whoopi had come up through comedy clubs, like Billy and Robin had, working in improv troupes and doing stand-up, but her background was primarily as an actor. The 1985 one-woman show titled, "The Spook Show," that brought her to prominence was genuinely funny, but the greatest praise she received for her work was for the depth and heart she brought to the different characters she had created. An important New York Times review of an early version of the show, likened what she was doing to marrying the character work of Lily Tomlin to the realism of Richard Pryor, merging scripted and improvised content in a way that created something very special. The nature of Whoopi’s initial success helps highlight the breadth of her abilities. She created her one woman show out of necessity. An undeniable talent, she was struggling to get cast in leading roles as a Black woman. If she was going to succeed, she knew she was going to have to take an active role in creating her own opportunities. That initial show, “The Spook Show,” would be the catalyst for everything that came afterwards for her. Mitzi Shore loved what Whoopi was doing enough to give her a regular spot in The Belly Room at The Comedy Store to do her show. Mike Nichols saw her show and helped her turn it into its eponymous Broadway version. It was her show that brought her to the attention of Alice Walker, and got Whoopi in the room with Steven Spielberg to audition for The Color Purple - for which she would receive a Best Lead Actress Oscar nomination. It was for the album recording of her show that she would win her Grammy. All of this success and these accolades stem from an indefatigable drive not to be limited by how people saw her. By the time of the first Comic Relief in 1986, Whoopi was already established as a special talent. A gifted writer, a hilarious stand-up comic and improviser, as well as a lauded dramatic actor of stage and screen. Her star shined as bright then as anyone’s can, but the time since then has been a bit of a roller coaster in terms of output as Hollywood has often struggled to put her talents to work. There have been some impressive highs. She won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as Oda Mae Brown in Ghost, and saw great commercial success in her role as Sister Mary Clarence in Sister Act 1 and 2 - her appearance in the second of these films would briefly make her the highest paid actress in Hollywood. Each of those roles came about more by chance than design, though. She was only cast in Ghost at the insistence of the film’s star, Patrick Swayze. Sister Act, was originally developed as a project for Bette Midler, before she passed on it. Then, when Whoopi was hired, she took an active part in remaking the role for herself by hiring Carrie Fisher to rewrite all of her dialogue. Those highs have been fairly infrequent in terms of her film work. She has gotten a chance to do good work in some of her supporting roles, but most of the lead roles she has been offered have been underwhelming. Her legacy comes largely built as a live performer. In addition to her hosting jobs on The View, Comic Relief , and the Oscars, she has returned to Broadway numerous times: most notably in a 20th anniversary run of her original stage show, and a well-reviewed turn, taking over for Nathan Lane, in the lead of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. She’s also been a welcome presence on TV in frequent guest spots, and recurring roles on shows like Glee , and Star Trek: The Next Generation . Her role as Guinan, on Star Trek: The Next Generation , is another example of Whoopi creating her own opportunity. She was friends with cast member, Levar Burton, and she told him to see if he could let the show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, know that she would love to be involved in the show in any way. She kept after Levar about this for a time, until he was able to convince the show runners that, despite her level of fame, her interest in the show was genuine. She finally got a meeting with Gene Roddenberry, where she was able to explain how important seeing the original Star Trek series had been to her as a child because, as she said it, it was the only time she ever “saw Black people in the future.” Nichelle Nichols’s role as Lt. Uhura, a smart and capable black woman, serving an integral role in the function of the Starship Enterprise, inspired her to believe in herself. Whoopi wanted to appear in Star Trek: The Next Generation so that she could play that same role in inspiring other young black children. In addition to her upcoming appearance in The Stand , we may be getting an opportunity to see Whoopi revisit her role as Guinan. In one of the few happy stories this year from before TV production shut down, during an interview on The View about his return to the Star Trek universe on the show Picard, Patrick Stewart invited Whoopi to return to the show as Guinan. It was a moving moment on a number of levels: a happy surprise moment between close friends, an opportunity to return to both a role and a show that means a great deal to her, and an opportunity for her to do work worth doing. As shows begin to head back into production, here’s hoping that this is something that we’ll be able to look forward to. As glad as I am that we will see new work from Whoopi, and as happy I am for the success she continues to have, I do think it would be worthwhile for people to take another look at the many past accomplishments of her career, rather than waiting for her “in memoriam.” Whoopi Goldberg was and remains a significant figure in American stage and screen, one that created her own opportunities, and eased the way for others that followed along the trail she blazed. She ought not be forgotten. 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.

Aaron Sorkin is enjoying a bit of a moment. Sorkin gets to witness the Netflix wide-release of his second directed film, The Trial of the Chicago 7 , only a day after the HBO Max release of The West Wing quasi-reunion special (the staged theatrical production of the election themed episode ‘Hartsfield Landing,’) as a benefit for the Michelle Obama led voting rights group: When We All Vote. West Wing fans have been clamoring for a reunion almost since the show went off the air, and Sorkin’s new film is already garnering a significant amount of award buzz. Sorkin can be a bit polarizing as an auteur, trafficking in a Capra-esque idealism that is a bit out of step with the more pervasive cynicism of our times. A modern audience will accept fairytale-like stories about smart and good-hearted people where everything turns out alright in the end, but they usually need to involve lightsabers, superheroes, or singing cartoons. There is something of a shared spirit between these kinds of stories and Aaron Sorkin’s work, although he tends to set his stories in courtrooms and offices where important work is being done. Both of these recent projects share that they are stories of another time that find renewed relevance today. Sorkin specifically chose the ‘Hartsfield Landing’ episode of The West Wing, because it is a love letter to voting and the peaceful transition of power. The Trial of the Chicago 7, is a love letter of a different kind, existing somewhere on the opposite end of that spectrum. It celebrates the myriad of ways that people work to oppose and remedy government dysfunction. The centerpiece of ‘Hartsfield Landing,’ is a lightly fictionalized version of the small New Hampshire towns, like Dixville Notch, that are able to open their polls at midnight on Election Day. These towns report their results as soon as everyone has finished voting, making them one of the very first places in the nation to report results. Parallel to this story is an unfolding international crisis that hinges on voting rights in Taiwan. Throughout the episode - in a typically Sorkin extra-on-the-nose detail - President Bartlett is playing multiple literal games of chess with his staff, while waiting for the metaphorical chess moves from the Chinese government. Simultaneously, a member of his staff spends the day lobbying a couple from Hartsfield Landing to vote for Bartlett, hammering in the idea that not only does every vote matter, but it matters that every voter be heard, and be allowed to make up their own mind. Aaron Sorkin doesn’t really do subtlety or ambiguity. There is a moral to this story: voting and democracy are sacred human inventions that need to be revered and protected. Sorkin is going to find a few different entertaining ways to tell you the lesson, which will tie together at the end in an unexpected way, but you will not be left in the dark about what the lesson is and where he stands. In The Trial of the Chicago 7, Sorkin is telling a story that could function as a prequel to a West Wing episode. Here is what happens when government and democracy become dysfunctional, and here is what has to happen in order to set things right again. Where The Trial of the Chicago 7 suffers, is that since Sorkin is working with actual events, he sometimes has to stretch things a bit to achieve the moral lesson and narrative arc he’s going for. There are any number of reviews and articles that can outline the ways in which this movie departs from the actual events, and importantly, there is nothing in this film remotely as egregious as the invented relationship that Sorkin used as a narrative frame for The Social Network . I’m not going to get into those differences here, as having that knowledge so fresh in mind going into watching this film detracted from my experience in a way that went away entirely upon rewatch. I would recommend going into Chicago 7 fresh, and if you are so inclined to investigate further after watching the film, there is a wonderful audiobook dramatization of the trial transcript: The Trial of the Chicago 7: The Complete Transcript . Staring, among others, Jeff Daniels and J.K. Simmons, it offers a fuller and more faithful portrait of the events of the trial. Regarding the politics of this film, Sorkin lets you clearly know who the good guys are, and allows whatever tension there is on that front to rest on whose methods and strategy are best. Our story is the protesting of the 1968 Democratic Convention, and the conspiracy trial of the organizers of those protests. Sorkin lets us know that the Vietnam War was a great wrong in need of remedy, that the protests were righteous, and that whatever faults our protagonists may have, responsibility for the violence that occurred, rests at the feet of police and government officials standing in the way of progress. Within those dynamics, Sorkin’s sympathies are least with the revolutionaries, most often siding with those characters who are doing their best to work within the system, but still willing to endorse the measures good people feel are sometimes needed in order to address injustice. Sorkin takes great pains to make sure that there are likable characters within the government, police, and the prosecution, seemingly to make clear that his problem is not with the system, per se, but the bad actors within that system. Aiding in telling this story is a truly wonderful cast, that gives Sorkin an opportunity to flash his other great skill: managing an ensemble in a way that gives everyone a chance to shine. Each of the defendants on trial is actualized in a way that lets each of the characters be unique and memorable, while everyone still feels part of the same world. Frank Langella does heroic work, making the actually clownish Judge Hoffman into a grounded and believable character. Micheal Keaton completely owns the screen for his critical few minutes in the story. Joseph Gordon-Levitt makes the most out of the largely thankless role as the lead prosecutor. When award season rolls around, the biggest challenge may be separating out who are the lead actors and who are the supporting actors. I would expect, at least, that Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman, and Mark Rylance as William Kuntsler, will get nominations. Jeremy Strong as Jerry Rubin is deserving and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Bobby Seale is a wonder. As a film, it’s well directed and edited. The opening montage is a masterclass in setup. We get character building introductions to most of the key players, we get an overview of where the war and the draft stand, we get introduced to the different factions that are organizing the protest, and all this without feeling like an info dump. Throughout the film, the same key events are seamlessly intercut from multiple perspectives and timeframes, as well as being intercut with actual 1968 footage. As a director, Sorkin has acquired himself quite capably. In terms of legacy, I expect this movie to have an interesting one. Aaron Sorkin has faithfully told an important story of protest and revolutionary figures, but one so mild-mannered that it can be used to eat up three days of a high school social studies class at the end of the semester - perhaps skipping the scene where Jerry Rubin gives a detailed lesson on how to make a Molotov cocktail. There is language and bloodshed, that you wouldn’t find in a West Wing episode, but in terms of the kinds of stories they are and how they are told, they’re two sides of the same coin. That may not be for everyone, but it happens to be exactly what I want most these days. 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.

[Immediate Spoilers for The Cabin in the Woods ] During the Q&A after an early screening of The Cabin in the Woods , someone asked the director, Drew Goddard, if there were any plans for a sequel. Goddard, surprised, reportedly asked if the questioner had actually watched the movie. The ending of The Cabin in the Woods isn’t meant to be ambiguous. We are to understand that not only are we seeing the end for all of our protagonists and antagonists, but the end of all human life on earth, seemingly forever. That ending on its own is something unusual; that this ending comes at the choosing of our protagonists is something stranger still; and that this ending is meant to be something of a victory is strangest of all. Yes, the end of all mankind comes at the gargantuan hand of the old gods, but only because our protagonists cannot abide the price that would have had to be paid to avert it. There are two ethical thought experiments that have been talked and written to death in recent years which apply here. The first, and more ubiquitous, is Philippa Foot’s trolley problem. Imagine a runaway trolley/train heading down a set of tracks, hurtling towards five men working on the tracks, completely unaware of the train and certain to be hit and killed. From your position, you can do nothing to stop this train, but you can switch the trolley to a different track, one where only one person would be certain of death. While not certain, robust empirical research of this thought experiment indicates that the majority of people who hear about this dilemma believe they would be inclined to flip the switch, sacrificing one life to save five, or they would be inclined to think that someone who flipped the switch was doing the right thing. The flip-side of this thought experiment involves knowing of the certain and imminent death of five individuals, and then choosing a bystander to sacrifice in order to save the five. In one version, this involves harvesting the organs of one healthy person to save the lives of five terminally ill patients. In another, there is no switch to be pulled, and the only way to save the five is to push one person in front of the trolly before it reaches the five. In these sorts of thought experiments, the math of the cost in human lives is the same, but the overwhelming majority of respondents in those more active scenarios are opposed to taking action. It’s hard to pinpoint the nature of the difference between these two categories of thought experiments, but in the first we can tell ourselves we are choosing to save five lives, and a downstream byproduct of that choice is that the trolley will still kill someone. In the other examples, we are actively choosing a person to kill, and the byproduct of that will be to save five lives. Our protagonists and antagonists in The Cabin in the Woods are on opposite sides of this divide. Sitterson (Richard Jenkins), Hadley (Bradley Whitford), and the rest of the team in the control room have made the calculation that actively sacrificing four to five human beings to save the lives of 7 billion people is the moral thing to do. The team in the control room is often presented as comic and unserious, but at the loss of the first life they solemnly intone the words required by the ritual: “This we offer in humility and fear, for the blessed peace of your eternal slumber. As it ever was.” Despite surface appearances, they take their work, the ritual, and the stakes of their failure seriously, and are clear that what they are doing is a moral necessity in circumstances they are trying to make the best of. Conversely, Dana (Kristen Connolly), the last of the sacrificial victims and archetypal horror movie final girl that the ritual requires, eventually makes the decision that there is nothing in this world that would make her kill her friend, Marty (Fran Kranz), who had repeatedly saved her life; it would not be worth the life of everyone else on earth, nor would it be worth either her or Marty’s lives as their immediate demise is also assured as a consequence of her choice. While she briefly struggles to get to this choice, and does entertain the idea of killing Marty, she is confident when she does decide, that what she is doing is a moral necessity in circumstances she is trying to make the best of. The film makes clear what the fallout of Dana’s decision will be, and that the film is on Dana’s side. At the same time, neither the team in the control room, nor the legion of horrific monsters are exactly cast as villains either. The monsters do what monsters do, and the team in the control room is doing what they feel they must in service of a righteous cause. A fairly nihilistic position is defended earlier in the film by Marty. “Society is binding. It’s filling in the cracks with concrete. Everything is filed or recorded. Blogged, right? Chips in our kids’ heads so they won’t get lost. Society needs to crumble. We’re all just too chickenshit to let it.” Part of this ironically juxtaposes with the literal manipulation and surveillance the kids are going to be under by Sitterson, Hadley, and their team; but taken literally, Marty has already broached the idea that the world and humanity are neither saveable nor worth saving. In the final moments of the film, the moral crux of the story is made plain in the confrontation between Dana, Marty, and The Director (Sigourney Weaver). The Director says: “It’s our task to placate the ancient ones, as it’s yours to be offered up to them. Forgive us, and let us get it over with.” To which Marty replies, “Maybe that’s the way it should be if you’ve got to kill all my friends to survive. Maybe it’s time for a change.” One could see how what seems required might look differently looked at from each vantage point. To the director, this seems as straightforward as the trolley problem - sacrifice this one stranger’s life to save the lives of 7 billion people. For Dana, the math is the same, but it’s not some stranger she needs to sacrifice. Rather, it’s a good friend who had saved her from an attacking werewolf mere moments before. Whether they should or not is an open question, but our moral concern does shift when it comes to our loved ones. For Marty, the question hits closest to home as he is being asked to sacrifice himself for the greater good. The Director says as much to him, “We’re talking about the agonizing death of every human soul on the planet. Including you. You can die with them. Or you can die for them.” We admire those who sacrifice themselves for others, (think the death of Spock in Wrath of Khan ) but we admire it because it’s supererogatory: going above and beyond what is morally required. We generally don’t demand of anyone that they must sacrifice themselves for others. Marty doesn’t sacrifice himself for the world, Dana ultimately cannot bring herself to kill him, and the Director is killed by her own monster before she can kill Marty herself. In the last moments, Dana and Marty apologize to one another for their circumstances: “I’m sorry I almost shot you,” Dana says, and “I’m sorry I let you get attacked by a werewolf and then ended the world,” Marty replies. There is still time at this point for them to change their minds, but they’re not going to. Passing a joint between them, Dana says, “You were right. Humanity. Time to give someone else a chance.” This is the choice they’ve made. Humanity let what they’ve been through, and so much more, happen to them, therefore humanity is not worth saving. This is the greater good they believe in and the film is on their side. Taking apart the ending like this makes me more sympathetic to that questioner on the Q & A asking about a sequel. I understand Dana and Marty’s decision. The ending is honest and true to the characters. The Old God’s hand erupting out of the ground, blacking out the screen, followed by the fierce Nine Inch Nails musical cue is a deeply satisfying ending in the moment. Yet, the message underneath that ending makes me want something more. I do love The Cabin in the Woods , and structurally I’m hard pressed to find a thing I would change about it. Part of me wants a continuation of the story where humanity is redeemed, but what we get and what we want are often at odds. I regret the nihilism at its core, but I love The Cabin in the Woods for the film that it is. Even if given the opportunity to sacrifice this film, perhaps to save the world from extinction at the hands of the old gods, I’m not sure I would do it. Sorry folks; sometimes them’s the breaks. 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.

There are numerous ways that a classic movie can echo through time. We can see the ripple effects of innovations in technique or storytelling show up in later films; we can watch compelling stories that are told over and over again; we can see moments that are so iconic that they are copied and parodied relentlessly, while still other movies can be both so distinct, yet familiar, that they bubble to mind in similar moments in other films while you’re watching them. There’s a sense in which the story you may be watching can’t help but get entangled in your mind with your own experiences, or with all of the other stories you’ve ever heard. It’s something like this last idea I experienced recently while watching Billy Wilder’s film, Sunset Boulevard for its 70th Anniversary. I have seen the film a few times, and enough of it is always simmering in the background of pop culture that it has never faded from my memory entirely, but one scene unlocked the film for me in a peculiar way on my most recent viewing. Our protagonist in Sunset Boulevard is Joe Gillis (William Holden), a down-on-his-luck screenwriter trying to evade creditors from repossessing his car. Eventually, quite literally evading the would-be repo men in a high speed chase, Gillis manages to escape them for a time by hiding out in the driveway, and then the garage of a seemingly abandoned mansion after a tire on his car blows out. While watching this scene develop - Gillis becomes aware of the mansion attached to the driveway he pulled into, and begins to explore the grounds of the property - I unexpectedly thought of a similar scene at the beginning of The Rocky Horror Picture Show . The context is different, but our protagonists there, Janet Weiss and Brad Majors, seek help at a dark looking mansion after the tire of their car blows out. The thought is fleeting, and might have gone right out of my head had the next few scenes not prompted similar connections. Right away, Gillis meets the enigmatic majordomo of the house, Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim), in a manner not entirely dissimilar from when Brad and Janet meet Riff Raff - at least that’s how I saw it once primed to see things that way. Once I began actively looking for parallels, they came pretty easily. One of the more overtly odd elements of Sunset Boulevard is that when Gillis arrives, he is initially only let in because Max thinks that he is there to handle the arrangements of burying a dead pet chimpanzee. Later that evening, after Gillis is given a room for the night, he watches a somber procession as that chimp is carried in a white child’s coffin to be buried in the backyard garden. This was especially noteworthy to me at this point because coffins feature prominently twice in Rocky Horror : First, also right as Brad and Janet are arriving at the house, a skeleton falls out of a coffin to start the song The Time Warp ; and second, in the dinner sequence where everyone eating discovers that the table they have been eating at was actually a coffin containing the remains of Eddie - who was also something of a dead pet. Where the parallels grow the strongest for me are where they might perhaps be least expected. I don’t know if I’m the first person to argue that Norma Desmond and Dr. Frank N. Furter are characters cut from the same cloth, but now that I have seen these similarities, they are so clear to me that I don’t imagine I could ever unsee them. Both Norma and Frank are commanding, self-possessed divas that draw people into their orbit like a cult leader. Both are fixated on films and figures of a bygone era - heroines like Fay Wray and classic sci-fi movies for Frank; silent movies and their stars like herself, Rudolph Valentino, and Douglas Fairbanks for Norma. Both have assiduously crafted an image of themselves they want to protect and project, but one that we watch unravel by the end of each film. We meet both characters in the act of creation - Norma having written the screenplay for her comeback film, Salome ; and Frank, with the man he brings to life, Rocky. As Frank literally makes a man out of Rocky, Norma remakes Gillis into the image of what she thinks a man should be: outfitting him in fine clothes and jewelry, training him to be responsive to her needs. As Frank traps Brad and Janet, preventing them from ever making the phone call to get their car repaired, Norma allows the repo men to take Gillis’ car so that he can’t leave. Both Norma and Frank begin to fall apart over jealousy: Norma when Gillis seems to fall for Nancy - the woman he’s been secretly writing a screenplay with - and he tries to move out, and Frank when he catches Janet and Rocky together in the lab. Both stories are bookended by a narrator telling the story of a tragedy, and both stories end with a gun and swimming pool - Frank and Rocky being shot with a ray gun by Riff Raff and falling into the swimming pool, while Norma shoots Gillis as he’s trying to leave, causing him to stumble into the swimming pool that we see him being fished out of at the top of the film. What we’re talking about is something different from mere allusion. Another film having an anniversary this month is John Waters’ 2000 film Cecil B. Demented . That film explicitly recreates the famous closing line from Sunset Boulevard in its own finale, but just as reference for reference’s sake. The connection between those two films goes no further than this one allusion. Rocky Horror is itself a movie deeply steeped in reference and allusion, but very specifically working with a toolbox of classic sci-fi and horror films. To extend beyond that universe to deliberately reference a film like Sunset Boulevard would seem to be muddying and undermining to its project to a degree, so no deliberate reference seems intended. It’s in this sense that I think the connection between Sunset Boulevard and The Rocky Horror Picture Show is better understood in terms of the echoes of folklore and storytelling that can arise spontaneously from shared human experience, or the incidental ways that past culture can unconsciously seep into present culture in ways we aren’t aware of. I have no reason to believe, and I have found no evidence so far, that Richard O’Brien had Sunset Boulevard at all in mind when writing Rocky Horror , but having grown up in a world in which it existed, and deliberately referencing material that was made around the same time, the cross-pollination that we see between these two radically different films begins to make some sense. For example, Gillis shares a similar story arc to Brad and Janet, in that they each find themselves walking willingly into their situation. They begin to feel themselves trapped once they are there (which they are), they start to become more open and receptive to the positive parts of what’s happening to them, and then they almost immediately come to deeply regret everything about the experience as someone they care about is drawn into the situation trying to save them - Dr. Scott in the case of Brad and Janet, and Nancy in the case of Gillis. How much we read into the parallels here is interesting, because now we are dipping into what are considered more universal tropes of storytelling. Countless stories follow an identical arc to this one. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell discusses the shared symbolic grammar that all stories share. It’s in this sense that I think the connection between Sunset Boulevard and Rocky Horror are most salient. Like two pieces from different puzzles that happen to fit together, it doesn’t make much sense that these stories share as much in common as they do. They are two radically different works in terms of tone, content, and intention. Neither is striving to convey some great shared moral or truth. What they have in common is being stories, that, however heightened they may be, are rooted in human emotion and experience, and happen to be created from many of the same ingredients. It’s a happy accident that they can be connected in the way that they’ve become for me, and it’s a small bonus that these connections have genuinely changed how I see these characters and their stories. The part of this that I find most interesting is not the forward-looking sense in which my having seen Sunset Boulevard informs my experience of the later Rocky Horror, but rather the backward looking way in which a film released 25 years later has irreversibly changed my experience of watching the film that came before it, and makes me look forward to the potential further evolutions to my experience of this film that are yet to come. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in New Windsor, 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 .

Released 30 years ago, Joe Versus the Volcano is the first of the three romantic comedies that Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan made together. Their next two films: Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, would both be Nora Ephron-helmed romantic comedies that are now widely regarded as classics. Writer/Director John Patrick Shanley’s Joe Versus the Volcano is something quite different. Shanley, a NYC playwright and screenwriter, directs his first film here off the success of his Best Original Screenplay Academy Award for the 1987 film, Moonstruck . For a romantic comedy, what Shanley has made is a fascinating meditation on the relationship between life, meaning, and death. Masked in absurdity and overt silliness, it is subtle just how thorough a taxonomy of this interrelation we are given by the film. At the outset, we meet our lead, Joe Banks (Tom Hanks), who has seemingly given up on life from a fear of death; we go on to see him liberated when the uncertainty around his death is removed, and he is told just how little time he has left. We see Joe afraid, confronted with imminent demise in the middle of a treacherous storm; we see him resigned, but grateful, taking care of someone else while hopelessly adrift at sea; we see him walk bravely to his death at the mouth of the volcano; and we see him again at the end of the film, adrift at sea, but now with equanimity for whatever may come next, and ready to share the journey with someone else. At every moment in the film, Joe’s death is always looming in the background, though the details around it may shift as the story unfolds. What changes is a profound difference in Joe’s relationship to his death, that allows him to live the life he has remaining. Quite a trick for a film about a guy who volunteers to jump into a volcano. In an impressive opening sequence, Shanley paints a hellish portrait of dead-end office life and the workaday world. There is a shot in the first few minutes of the film that is almost the inverse of the iconic scene from The Shawshank Redemption : Tim Robbins standing in the rain, arms outstretched towards the sky, completely free. Here, it is Joe, trudging into work, shoulder to shoulder with his fellow damned, along a grim and gray industrial landscape, having stepped in an ankle deep puddle for the second time, throwing his arms in much the same pose, but demonstrating abject hopelessness and helplessness in the face of his dismal circumstances. The capstone to this scene is a shot of a single flower poking through a crack in the pavement, surrounded by the stepping feet falling all around it, until it is finally crushed under someone’s shoe. Joe works for a medical supply company, American Panascope. We don’t know everything they make, but the two products that we are shown are rectal probes and petroleum jelly. Joe works in a windowless office, under flickering fluorescent lights. His job is to mail out promotional catalogues to potential customers, but since his boss doesn’t trust him to restock those catalogs himself, he currently has almost nothing left to send. We are only introduced to two of Joe’s coworkers at the office. There is his boss, Mr. Waturi, played by Dan Hedaya, who we hear as Joe makes his way to his desk to start his day. Mr. Waturi is at a desk in the middle of the office, loudly talking on the phone, having an interminable conversation that consists only in angrily asking different versions of the same question over and over again. Joe’s other coworker we meet is DeDe, the first of the three characters played by Meg Ryan. DeDe is a little sickly like Joe, but generally seems content and accepting of her lot in life. She enjoys her job for what it is and cares enough to check on Joe after he sits down. Since Joe is always sick, though, she doesn’t have much of a baseline to compare him to. Joe’s brief escape for the day is a trip to the doctor’s office. We hard cut from him rubbing his eyes at his desk, to him rubbing his eyes again in a dismal fluorescent lit waiting room, where he is waiting for Dr. Ellison. When the doctor is ready, the change is a bit like Dorthy walking from her black & white house into technicolor Oz. Dr. Ellison’s office is all rich mahogany, with tidy book-lined shelves and sunlight filtering in through the window. Dr. Ellison himself, played by Robert Stack, is the first healthy looking person we’ve seen in the film. Dr. Ellison tells Joe some good news and some bad news. Having run an exhaustive battery of tests, they’ve found that all of the many symptoms Joe has been complaining of were psychosomatic. It appears that Joe is a hypochondriac. Insinuated is that Joe felt better in his previous life as a firefighter, but the symptoms that made him leave that job were his body’s response to the dangers of fighting fires. It turns out that he is in almost perfect health. The bad news is that through all of the exhaustive testing, they uncovered something else. Joe has a rare neurological condition called a brain cloud. A brain cloud is a terminal, but otherwise symptom free condition. Joe will experience no ill effects except that one day, within the next few months, his brain will suddenly shut down and he will die. Joe leaves Dr. Ellison’s office in a bit of a haze. Outside on the street, though, he encounters someone walking their dog and Joe starts to come alive. He heads back to work, full of life. On the way in he comes across that flower from the opening that was stepped on and he coaxes it back to standing again. He loudly quits his job, unloading on Mr. Waturi everything he’s thought of him all along, and on his way out the door for the last time, he asks DeDe out for dinner that night. Yes, Joe is dying, but he has decided to live in the meantime. Dinner with DeDe goes great, she’s enamored with the newly full of life Joe, but she freaks out and leaves once he tells her that he only has a few months left to live. She likes him, but his situation is more than she’s willing to sign up for at the moment. She returns to her life, the one that Joe just left, and he is left to think about how he will spend the days he has left. An answer arrives at his house the next morning in the form of Samuel Graynamore, a businessman played with just the right amount of impish whimsy by Lloyd Bridges. Graynamore has learned about Joe’s circumstances. He knows that Joe is dying, that he used to be a heroic firefighter, and that he is now faced with figuring out what to do with his final days. Graynamore has a proposal for him. Graynamore’s superconductor business depends upon him working out a deal with the Waponi, the natives indiginous to the island Waponi Woo, which happens to be rich in Bubaru, the mineral that Graynamore needs for his superconductors. There is only one thing that the Waponi want, and Graynamore would like Joe to help him help them. All he needs Joe to do is jump into a volcano. The Waponi people believe that the volcano on their island needs to be appeased with a voluntary human sacrifice every one hundred years. Understandably, none of the Waponi people want to jump into the volcano themselves. If Graynamore can find a volunteer, the Waponi will grant him the mineral rights to the island. If Joe will be the volunteer he needs, Graynamore will help him live out his last days like a king - providing a lavishly equipped cruise to the island where the Waponi people will greet him as a savior. For lack of anything better to do, Joe agrees. If nothing else, it should be an adventure. Armed with Graynamore’s credit cards, Joe equips himself in New York City for his trip. He hires a limousine and chauffeur, Marshall (Ossie Davis), who helps him get what he needs. Marshall takes the idea seriously that “clothes make the man,” and Joe is slowly transformed over the course of the day. Now armed with fine clothes, a fresh haircut, and four high-end waterproof steamer trunks, Joe boards a plane to Los Angeles. Upon arrival, he is picked up by Graynamore’s daughter, Angelica, the second of the three roles played by Meg Ryan. In their short time together, Joe and Angelica bond, but it’s clear that Angelica is troubled. An inverse to DeDe, Angelica has every opportunity available to her, living comfortably off of her father’s money, but she is sadly discontent with her lot. Here, it is Joe that opts not to pursue her, not wanting to take advantage of someone so obviously lost. Angelica drops Joe off at the docks where he will board Graynamore’s ship, the Tweedledee. For the journey, the ship will be captained by Graynamore’s other daughter, Patricia, the third character played by Meg Ryan. Patricia is meant to be wholly herself, in contrast to both DeDe and Angelica. Assertive, confident, brave, and only begrudgingly doing her father the favor of leading this trip in exchange for ownership of the Tweedledee when the ordeal is over. The trip doesn’t go well. The ship is hit by a terrible storm, getting struck by lightning, and sinks, with everyone but Joe and Patrica still onboard. Joe rescues Patricia and manages to improvise a raft by roping his steamer trunks together, but she is unconscious and remains that way for days. He nurses her, keeping her shaded from the sun with an umbrella, gives her capfuls of water from his canteen as his own health deteriorates. After days at sea, delirious from dehydration and sunstroke, he thanks the moon for his life, and passes out. He wakes up, revived by a now conscious Patricia who has been nursing him. Shortly after, they are spotted and rescued by the natives of Waponi Woo. Before getting into the next part of the plot, there is something worth addressing. The depiction of the Waponi people firmly places this film as a product of a different time. The Waponi are a broad caricature of Pacific Island peoples, played for laughs by white actors - most notably Abe Vigoda and Nathan Lane. The mismatch is deliberate, and seemingly without intended malice, but it would go too far to say that it was, or even could be, self-aware enough to be exculpatory. The depiction is clearly intended to be akin to a Looney Tunes cartoon, but I wouldn’t argue with anyone who said it was racist and crossed a line. Patricia and Joe are brought ashore. Again, somewhat reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy et al first arrive in Oz, they are both taken to be primped and pampered ahead of the feast that night. When the time comes, Joe is ready to jump into the volcano, but Patricia wants to talk him out of it. They’ve bonded, they love each other, but as Joe says, the timing stinks. Patricia talks him into letting the chief marry them before he leaps, and then, once married, she takes his hand and they leap into the volcano together. A blast of hot air and smoke erupts out of the volcano, carrying them both up and out of the volcano, entirely clear of the island, dumping them both in the ocean. They watch in disbelief as the island begins to sink. Their circumstances dawn on them both in different ways. Each is thrilled to be alive, but Joe is focused on their treading water in the middle of the ocean, while Patricia is confident that things will ultimately work out. On cue, Joe’s trunks emerge from the ocean and we quickly cut to them both back on their tied together trunk raft. The problem remains that Joe still has his “brain cloud.” While discussing it, though, Joe mentions Dr. Ellison, to which Patricia realizes that Joe has been set up. Dr. Ellison works for her father. He doesn’t have any other patients. He was clearly tasked with the job of finding a sucker to jump into a volcano for her father, and he succeeded. For a moment, while realizing he’s been duped, Joe starts to lapse back into his hypochondriac ways, but Patricia pulls him back, reminding him how great he has felt up until now, and that they now have a life to look forward to together. This is what they are musing on as their raft sails towards the horizon. To some degree, the relationship at the center of this film is a bit besides the point, or at least not what it seems at first glance. While Meg Ryan is in the whole film, it is noteworthy that we don't meet Patricia until halfway through the story, and that she spends a significant portion of the later half of the movie unconscious. The trappings of this film are that it's a romantic comedy, but the heart of the film is Joe's evolving relationship with death, death concretized in the form of the volcano. At the end, it is Patricia's hand he's holding, but each of her characters along the way, as well as Marshall, are part of what got him to this point, where he is able to stand at the volcano's edge and take his leap. Even more importantly, they are all part of what gets him to the place where he can float off into the horizon with tranquil acceptance for whatever might come next. Death comes for all of us in the end, and it will ultimately come for everyone in our lives. That everything ends is part of what imparts shape and meaning to the things that do happen, and the lives that people lead. Having a healthy perspective on that blunt truth is essential to being able to live any kind of a good life. At the same time, the fear that Joe has of death as a firefighter wasn't wrong. We can't help but accept that there is an unavoidable tension in the idea that death is simultaneously necessary, inevitable, and also bad. Joe's fear of death was appropriate, just carried too far, so far that he found himself living a life not worth living. His response to his terminal diagnosis improves the quality of his life, but here he carries things too far as well. The fact that he has grown so accepting of death that he is able to happily and bravely jump into a volcano isn't a great outcome for him either, considering he isn't actually sick at all. It's dumb luck that he and Patricia are saved. It's only once the two of them are dumped into the ocean that Joe exhibits his healthiest attitude towards death. He is appropriately concerned about their dire circumstances, but they have each other, and they will face whatever is to come with equanimity, neither rushing towards nor from death, taking what pleasure they can in whatever time they have left. Joe Versus the Volcano is a useful film to me at the moment - less as a romantic comedy than as a fairy tale, with a clear moral about how we ought to live. The film opens with: "Once upon a time.." and closes with: "They lived happily ever after..." The happily ever after is an odd touch because we leave Joe and Patricia lost at sea, but there is something to the idea that we can live happily until whenever our “ever after” might come. That idea is some comfort to me in uncertain times like these. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in New Windsor, 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 the comforting elements of romantic comedies is that they tend to telegraph what they’re about early on. I can't think of an instance where, after some last minute plot twist, I suddenly discovered I had been watching a rom-com all along. The audience is meant to be looped in on what kind of story we are watching from the beginning. We are meant to pick up early which two characters we are going to watch end up together. They're the ones in the poster. They're the two lovelorn characters we’re introduced to early in the first act; they’re the cute ones. Maintaining some kind of tension in a rom-com is challenging when the audience already knows the broad strokes of how the story is going to end. Some adversity to the couple’s pairing needs to be introduced, but the obstacles can’t be anything that would tarnish the characters for us. Egregious moral failings or sincere betrayal by one of the characters would invariably sully the ending for us. Shakespeare leaned heavily on misunderstanding to achieve tension in his comedies. In Much Ado About Nothing , Claudio is made to think that his betrothed, Hero, has been unfaithful to him on the eve of their wedding, but the truth comes out in the nick of time and all is well. The misunderstanding aside, Hero and Claudio are largely unchanged over the course of the play. They meet, they fall in love quickly, and ultimately wind up together. Neither of them have much of an arc, as such. The more interesting tension in that play is between Beatrice and Benedick: two characters who misunderstand both themselves and one another. Each is deeply cynical about the other, and about love in general. So, when they begin to come together, you actually experience some surprise and see some character growth on their parts. Their cynicism is the primary obstacle to be overcome, but we don’t hold it against them. While cynicism is never admirable, it is always understandable. Cynicism - in the colloquial sense of the word - can play a useful role in the structure of romantic comedies. Cynicism about love, about marriage, about fidelity, about the world, is always believable because there is plenty in this world we could be cynical about. We also, as the knowing audience for a romantic comedy, are primed to accept love conquering that cynicism in a way we might be more skeptical of in our day to day lives. I mention all of this because I think cynicism serves a fascinating role in Billy Wilder's 1960 film, The Apartment . Wilder has chosen to tell a love story, but he does so from a perspective that quietly comes off deeply cynical about love, marriage, and fidelity. In truth, the film may have some of the darkest subtext of any romantic comedy I’ve ever seen. None of this is overt, mind you. In terms of tone, the film does feel lighthearted, (as a romantic comedy should) but it doesn’t take that much scrutiny for the themes I have in mind to become apparent. That Wilder tells this kind of story in the way that he does, lends force to how we feel when our romantic leads ultimately transcend the cynical world he has fashioned in order to wind up together. The film begins with a voice-over from C.C. Baxter, one of the 8,042,783 people living in NYC, and one of the 31,259 employees of Consolidated Life of NY. Baxter works: "On the 18th floor. Ordinary policy department. Premium Accounting division. Section W. Desk 861." Baxter is a small cog in a company so large that the start and end times for the workday are staggered by floor to avoid overwhelming the elevators. The hook to the film is that Baxter is a bachelor living alone in an apartment near New York's Central Park, who, through circumstances he is a bit mystified by himself, has found himself allowing his apartment to be used by a number of the men working above him at Consolidated Life as a place for them to meet their mistresses. We learn that Baxter had initially believed these men, when they said they were only looking for a place to change, or such, after work. But, by the time we meet him in the story, Baxter is fully aware of what the men are doing, and even facilitates their trysts while feeling helpless to say 'no' to superiors that control his future with the company. Our window into Baxter’s life and orbit begins as he is standing on the street outside his apartment, waiting for Mr. Kirkeby and his date to be finished for the evening. As Mr. Kirkeby and his date are heading out we hear the following exchange: Mr. Kirkeby: “Where do you live?” Sylvia: “I told you, with my mother.” Mr. Kirkeby: “Well, where does she live?” Sylvia: “179th Street in the Bronx.” Mr. Kirkeby: “Alright, I’ll take you to the subway.” Sylvia: “Like hell you will; you’ll buy me a cab.” Mr. Kirkeby: “Why do all you dames have to live in the Bronx?” Sylvia: “You mean you bring other girls up here?” Mr. Kirkeby: “Certainly not. I’m a happily married man.” This exchange is fairly representative of the men that Baxter is enabling: married men, secretly dating numerous women, while feigning devotion to the woman they happen to be with at the time, and doing everything in their power to protect their respectability in public. The film is coy about what the men are doing with their dates while they are in Baxter’s apartment, but we can presume something more than hand-holding. Once Mr. Kirkeby and his date move along, we proceed inside where Baxter sets about cleaning up the remnants of Mr. Kirkeby’s evening and making himself a comparatively drab frozen dinner to eat in front of the TV. That same evening, shortly after getting into bed, Baxter is roused by a phone call from Mr. Dobisch, who got lucky at a nearby bar, (with a woman that is clearly intended to be a fairly mean-spirited caricature of Marilyn Monroe) and needs Baxter to clear out of his apartment for a while. What little fight Baxter puts up wilts as Mr. Dobisch makes clear that he won’t be speaking so glowingly about Baxter to Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) in Personnel if Baxter doesn’t continue to play along. Baxter caves and ends up spending most of the evening on a park bench waiting to go home. Jack Lemmon threads the needle on C.C. Baxter as a character that gets regularly pushed around by the men using his apartment, but without portraying him as so meek or charmless that he stops being believable as a romantic lead. The scenario Baxter finds himself in is interesting, though, because of how deeply it bakes ubiquitous infidelity into the world of the film, and how at ease Baxter is with his role in that infidelity. Baxter exhibits no moral qualms about what he is enabling. He is beleaguered by the logistics involved, and managing his neighbors’ misperceptions of him as a lothario - having a different girl up to his apartment every night - but he seems not to struggle at all with the moral implications of what he’s helping these men do to their wives. Dominos rapidly fall for Baxter at work after his night sleeping in the park. In the morning, as Baxter is arriving at the office, we’re introduced to elevator girl Fran Kubelik, (Shirley MacClaine) who Baxter and many of the men in the office are infatuated with. As written, Fran could be taken as a fairly straightforward “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” but Shirley MacLaine manages to wring quite a bit more depth out of the role than that. She is undoubtedly defined for us in the film through her relationships to Baxter and Mr. Sheldrake, and her brother-in-law, and the other men in the office who lust after her, but we do get glimpses of a genuine inner life to the character. Shirley MacLaine would get an Oscar nomination for her performance, in part because of how genuine and rich she was able to make Ms. Kubelik beyond what was written on the page. Fran is presented to us through a male prism, but her love and pain are real in a way that transcends merely servicing the male characters’ story arcs. Once at his desk, Baxter is summoned to see Mr. Sheldrake in Personnel. He takes a triumphant ride up to Sheldrake’s office in Ms. Kubelik elevator, certain of his imminent promotion. His rude awakening is a joy, as no one plays rising comic panic like Jack Lemmon. In Mr. Sheldrake's office, Baxter is put through the wringer. He sits down, certain that the positive reviews he has received from the men using his apartment has secured him a promotion. He is briefly pleased to discover that Sheldrake did receive all of the glowing praise, but is crestfallen to discover that Sheldrake had seen through it immediately. For a tortured moment, Sheldrake lets Baxter think that he is about to call the vice squad on Baxter and these other men. At the height of Baxter's panic, Sheldrake reveals that what he actually wants is to use Baxter's apartment for himself. Baxter is relieved. What's one more bad apple? It seems he is still in line for a promotion. He even gains the confidence to ask Ms. Kubelik out for a date that night, to which she agrees. This puts all of the pieces of the story into place. Of course, we discover, it is Fran that Sheldrake wants to bring to Baxter's apartment. In an emotional scene in the back corner of a Chinese restaurant, we learn that they had just had a fling over the summer, while Sheldrake's wife and family were away in the country. Despite all of the assurances from him that he would leave his wife, their relationship ended right when his family came back to the city. Fran meets Sheldrake ahead of her date with Baxter, but just to tell him that she doesn't want to see him. Sheldrake replies that he wanted to see her to tell her he has spoken to his lawyer about drawing up the paperwork for his divorce. It will take some time, but he has begun the process of leaving his wife. Fran initially begs off. She doesn't believe him; she didn't ask him to leave his wife, she still has another date that night. But, she loves him, and leaves with him. Sheldrake gets Fran; Baxter gets a promotion and his own office. He was hurt getting stood up by Ms. Kubelik, but tells her he understands. This is how things stand for a time, but the story takes an oddly dark turn on Christmas Eve. At the office Christmas party, Ms. Kubelik finds out from Sheldrake’s drunken secretary that she is just one in a long line of Mr. Sheldrake's mistresses. Baxter finds Ms. Kubelik as she’s recovering from this bad news, and he surreptitiously discovers in speaking with her that she is who Mr. Sheldrake has been taking to his apartment. That evening, Ms. Kubelik tells Sheldrake what she's learned, and he makes a cursory effort to patch things up before giving her $100 as a Christmas gift and running to catch his train home to his family. Baxter spends the evening out at a bar - drinking and killing time while waiting until Mr. Sheldrake and Ms. Kubelik are finished with his apartment for the evening. Baxter gets picked up by a married woman, Mrs. MacDougall, who’s looking for company on Christmas while her husband is in jail. Baxter decides that he might as well take her back to his apartment like everybody else does. When he gets there, he sobers up real quick, discovering that Ms. Kubelik has taken all of the sleeping pills in his cabinet in an attempt to end her life. These are not your typical rom-com plot twists, to say the least. Baxter and the doctor next door, Dr. Dreyfus, are able to rouse Ms. Kubelik, and Baxter is charged by the doctor with the task of keeping an eye on Ms. Kubelik for a couple of days to insure she recovers and doesn't make another attempt. There is a brief scare when returning from the grocery store where Baxter is alerted to a smell of gas coming from his apartment, but he finds that Ms. Kubelik had turned on his stove without lighting the burner. This setup is what gives Baxter and Ms. Kubelik a chance to bond. They play cards, they eat together, and they talk. To commiserate with her, he shares that he had planned to shoot himself over a girl once, but was thankfully saved at the last minute by happenstance, and eventually got over the girl. We do see them start to grow closer, but their time together is cut short by the arrival of Ms. Kubelik’s brother-in-law, looking to bring his missing sister-in-law home. This next plot point is not made at all plain: before Fran tells her brother-in-law why she needed a doctor and had to have her stomach pumped, (because she took too many sleeping pills) he seems to be briefly under the impression that she may have gotten an abortion. He doesn’t like the truth much better and punches Baxter out before leaving with Fran. Baxter returns to work sporting a sizable black eye, now working as an assistant to Mr. Sheldrake, but he quits when Sheldrake asks him once again for the key to his apartment. That night, at the same Chinese restaurant for New Year’s Eve, Sheldrake tells Fran what Baxter did. She realizes she’s with the wrong person and runs to Baxter’s apartment to find him. As she’s about to knock on the door, we hear a shot ring out. For a brief moment, while Fran pounds on the door, we’re allowed to consider the possibility that Baxter took his own life, but he opens the door with a freshly foaming bottle of champagne in his hand. Relief. Baxter and Ms. Kubelik wind up together, making plans for their future, dealing out a hand of cards as the credits roll. We leave the film believing that Baxter and Ms. Kubelik will be fine, and our cynical world has been conquered for a time. This is the comfort of romantic comedy, abandoning cynicism for a love-conquers-all happy ending. A cynical audience would note that aside from Dr. Dreyfus and his wife, every relationship we’ve seen in the film has been an unfaithful one. Every man was fooling around behind his wife’s back, and every woman was, or had been, knowingly seeing a married man. Ms. Kubelik was willing to break up M.r Sheldrake’s marriage, and Baxter was all set to go home with Mrs. MacDougall. There is every reason to be skeptical of what the future holds for Baxter and Ms. Kubelik, and The Apartment is aware of that, having just shown us that world. But, it also welcomes us in setting cynicism and skepticism aside to share in the happiness of the new couple. As we mentioned at the beginning, cynicism can help serve as a point of tension in a romantic comedy, but conversely, what a rom-com can also offer us as an audience is an opportunity to reject cynicism. Not to blindly and naively pretend that people and the world are better than they are, but to take a good look at the world as The Apartment shows it to us, and choose to trust that, despite it all, Baxter and Kubelik will be fine. Engaging honestly with the cynical view of things can offer us a chance to recognize that while there are Mr. Sheldrakes, Mr. Kirkebys, and Mr. Dobischs in the world, not everyone is like them, and sometimes, for the right two people, things really can turn out alright. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in New Windsor, 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 1985 film, Brewster’s Millions, begins with an opening scrawl that reads: “This is the story of Montgomery Brewster, a relief pitcher in the minor leagues of life, who got handed the American Dream...on a very hot plate.” This movie was an old favorite during my childhood. It does hold up in many ways, but having just recently rewatched it for the first time in twenty years, what I was most struck by was this framing of the story as a tale of the “American Dream.” There is a fantastical element to the story of someone being plucked from obscurity for a grand adventure, but it says something that this depiction of the American Dream consists solely in the joy of winning and spending a great deal of money. Simply having money is the dream here, rather than building a fortune through work, or using a fortune to further some other noble end, or even using financial security to achieve other more fulfilling life goals. What was a little dispiriting to realize is that for many - both in the era the film was made and now - this film captures the American Dream exactly. Richard Pryor plays Montgomery Brewster, an aging minor league ballplayer who learns that a previously unknown great uncle has left him a convoluted inheritance. Not unlike a game show, Brewster is made an offer by the executors of his great uncle’s estate. He has the option of pocketing a million dollars with no strings attached, or taking a chance to receive $300 million. The catch is that in order for Brewster to receive the $300 million, he will first have to squander $30 million in 30 days. There are restrictions on how Brewster can spend the money to insure that he wastes it, along with a requirement that he tells no one why he’s doing what he’s doing. By midnight of the last day of the month, Brewster needs to be completely penniless in order to win his full inheritance. As a story, this is an old one. Based on the 1902 novel of the same name, this is the seventh American film adaptation of this story. There have also been 3 additional Indian film adaptations. From version to version, many of the details of the plot change, but the core of the story is always our protagonist having to fritter away a small fortune in order to win a much larger one, without being able to tell anyone why they are doing it. To have been adapted so many times, suggests there must be something deeply resonant to this premise, which is part of what I was troubled by on this rewatch. Our Brewster accepts the challenge to win the $300 million quickly and easily - so easily that it makes one wonder at including a choice in the narrative at all. Ostensibly, the lesson Brewster is supposed to take from this experience, - stated explicitly by his great uncle in his video will - is to learn to value money through becoming sick of spending it. How seriously the film takes this lesson is hard to tell, as Brewster is never established as having any sort of pre-existing issue being irresponsible with money. The lesson is presented as a rationale for why the great uncle is issuing the challenge, but it’s never brought home in the course of the film as a lesson for Brewster or the audience to learn. In one sense, Brewster’s real antagonist in the film is the clock: can he spend the money in the time allotted? The token opposition to him in that goal are the two lawyers at the law firm managing his great uncle’s estate. They want to see Brewster fail so they can retain control of the estate’s assets. In this effort they will enlist one of the junior lawyers at their firm, Warren Cox, to withhold some of Brewster’s money in order to surprise him at the last minute. At the outset, Warren is briefly portrayed as an upstanding figure, engaged to be married to the equally upstanding accountant assigned to help Brewster manage his financial records, Angela Drake. Warren’s character may be the one in the film that has a true arc, in that he transitions from being a moral figure to becoming a willing criminal, though a goodly part of that transition happens before he’s even finished with his first scene - as he immediately compromises a stated principle against drinking alcohol when he is offered a five-inch thick stack of cash as a charitable donation from Brewster. Warren shows us something of the corrupting power of money, but it happens so quickly you might miss it. Angela Drake’s job is to track Brewster’s expenses. Unbeknownst to her, the purpose of this is to verify that Brewster is complying with the stipulations of the will. Her role in the story is to be the virtuous figure, cajoling Brewster for not doing more good with his money, yet falling for him anyway despite his never actually doing anything especially good with his money. Brewster is aided in his task by his personal catcher and only friend, Spike Nolan, played wonderfully by John Candy. As soon as Brewster comes out of the meeting where he learns of his inheritance, Brewster hires Spike at a massive salary to help him with his investments. The small character development that Spike has in the film is a move from enthusiastically supporting his friend’s spending, to trying to intervene before his friend fritters his inheritance away. Angela Davis, also slowly comes to help Brewster over the course of the film, proving to be instrumental in foiling Warren’s plot against Brewster at the last minute. The central joke of the story is that Brewster takes great pains to squander his money, but keeps getting foiled by unexpected success. When he gambles, he hits on all his long shot bets and his seemingly terrible investments all happen to turn an immediate profit. He does manage to sink a bunch of money putting on a vanity exhibition game between his old minor league team and the NY Yankees. This digression is one of the actual moments of character development for Brewster, as he discovers and briefly has to contend with not being quite as good a pitcher as he believed himself to be. The winning strategy Brewster finally hits on to most effectively waste his money is the most cynical part of the movie. Brewster decides to run for office, but as the office itself would count as an asset, he runs to lose with a nihilistic campaign to get ‘None of the Above’ elected mayor of NYC. The premise of Brewster’s mayoral campaign is that both candidates are corrupt, so the voters should opt for ‘None of the Above’. But the film isn’t interested in whether either of the candidates actually are corrupt. It's just taken as a given that politicians are inherently corrupt and Brewster proceeds from that assumption. Our happy ending on this plot line is that Brewster successfully nullifies the election. It doesn’t take much imagination to draw the throughline from this kind of cynical thinking to many of the gravest problems of the modern world. The conclusion of the movie comes quickly. Brewster learns that he was betrayed by Warren. He punches Warren, who threatens to sue Brewster for everything he’s about to not have. This gives Brewster the opening to use the remaining money Warren has surprised him with to retain Angela as his lawyer in any legal case Warren might bring, getting a receipt for legal services from her right as the clock strikes midnight. Brewster wins his full inheritance. He gets the girl - though it’s unclear why that happens; he punches out his rival, and then walks off screen with no indication that he’s grown or learned anything from the experience at all. Behold the American Dream! Despite the tone of everything above, I find I still enjoy the film, but I feel a little bad about that. Director Walter Hill, recently coming off of his success on 48 Hours , keeps the story moving at a brisk and interesting pace. This is the only pure comedy that Hill ever directed, in an otherwise long career as an action film director, and fittingly for this film in particular, he readily admits he only did Brewster’s Millions for the money. The casting of the movie is great. John Candy brightens every scene that he’s in. Stephen Collins brings more emotional range to Warren Cox than seems present on the page. And Richard Pryor is a true joy throughout the film. It is a genuine pleasure to see Pryor’s Montgomery Brewster succeed, with the shame of it being how hollow that success is upon examination. Brewster’s Millions is worth revisiting. It’s well made and enjoyable throughout as a story. In terms of message, it is an interesting time capsule of American values in the 1980’s, as well as providing a reference point to the degree to which those same values of shallow consumerism still loom large in American culture today. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in New Windsor, 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 a pleasant surprise earlier this year, 74 year old David Lynch released a 17 minute short film on Netflix called What Did Jack Do? The brief description accompanying the film reads: “A detective interrogates a monkey who is suspected of murder.” I remember laughing at that description when I first read it. How silly and strange it seems at first blush, right? The description also happens to be quite literally accurate. Almost the whole of the film is David Lynch, playing a detective, interrogating a capuchin monkey, named Jack Cruz, about the murder of Max, a possible rival of Jack’s for the affections of a chicken named, Toototabon. I did laugh a bit when I first saw the monkey talk, and there is a weird, jarring quality to the deliberately cliched dialogue throughout, but I also became fully engrossed by the brief tale. I was tense throughout; I was genuinely moved by Jack’s tortured affection for Toototabon. And there was a brief musical interlude we got from Jack that felt magical when it happened. Despite the bizarre setting and content, all the emotional moments resonated as I imagine they were intended to. What Did Jack Do? is a little silly and weird, but not just for the sake of being weird, and the difference seems to rest with how fully Lynch commits to the worlds and characters he creates. Lynch’s most well known work, Twin Peaks, turns 30 this year. It has long been parodied as an example of weird and aimless pretentiousness. There’s no shortage of YouTube clips of different comic takes set in the show’s iconic red curtained room with zigzag floor. However, Twin Peaks - when it worked - and What Did Jack Do? are both bolstered by Lynch’s commitment to following an idea wherever it might take him, and his characters, in service of the story he’s telling, however silly or weird it might seem at first blush. That said, it would go a bit too far to say that Twin Peaks was wholly undeserving of that reputation for aimless and strange pretension. Somewhat infamously to the fans of the show, Lynch, and his co-creator Mark Frost, largely stepped away from Twin Peaks for most of the second season over demands about content being made by executives at ABC, the network running the show. Lynch directed the seventh episode of the second season, but then didn’t direct again until the season finale. The 14 episode interregnum where Lynch’s influence and input waned, where the writers room was left to do their best impression of David Lynch, is unambiguously aimless, often trafficking in weirdness for its own sake. In the beginning, the basic narrative idea of the pilot for Twin Peaks was straightforward: FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) came to the small Northwestern town of Twin Peaks, WA to try to help local law enforcement solve the murder of widely beloved high school prom queen, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). As a description of the pilot, this is fairly accurate. As a description meant to capture how the story of Twin Peaks has evolved through its various incarnations over the past thirty years, it is comically spare. While the murder of Laura Palmer always remains the central touchstone of the story, the story of Twin Peaks evolved into a cosmic story of good versus evil with a complex mythology all its own. That mythology wanders pretty far afield from the way the world seems in the show’s pilot, but it gets there organically. Through a famous accident, Lynch inadvertently caught set dresser Frank Silva in a reflection in a scene he was shooting, which inspired Lynch to work him into the show as what would because a malevolent spirit named Bob that haunted Laura as a manifestation of the sexual assault she suffered throughout her childhood. Another actor, Al Strobel, appeared in the show initially as a one-armed man, serving as little more than an allusion to the classic TV show, The Fugitive . That brief appearance as a red herring evolved into his character being another spirit, named Mike, that served as a counterpoint to Bob, that played an increasingly important role in the show all the way through the 2017 season three revival. Michael J. Anderson’s iconic role as The Man from Another Place, the small red-suited man in the red curtained room with the zigzag floor, first appears in a dream that Agent Cooper has. The device of having him perform his dialogue backwards so that it could be understood while the film is played in reverse happened because speaking backwards was something that Anderson happened to be able to do. The theme throughout here is Lynch getting an idea from something small and then following that idea wherever it happened to lead him. The writers room for Twin Peaks can be forgiven a bit for losing the plot in season two because of just how bad a hand they were dealt by circumstances. Season one of Twin Peaks was a phenomenon. Over the course of a tight eight episode season, the creative team made the question “Who killed Laura Palmer?” one of international importance. There is a well trod story of Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev asking U.S. President George H.W. Bush to find out from Lynch who the murderer was. Lynch and Frost understood that the mystery surrounding Laura Palmer’s death was the engine for the show. Lynch referred to the mystery as the golden goose. They had a firm idea in their mind from the beginning who Laura’s killer was, independent of where the mythology of the show eventually went, but they had no timeline for revealing that information. Lynch would have been fine if the killer was never revealed. From the beginning of the show, though, they were both under pressure from the network to resolve Laura’s murder and move on to other stories. In the seventh episode of the second season they relented, and that proved to be the beginning of the end of the show. With the central mystery solved, Lynch’s interest in the show waned, leaving Frost and the remaining writers to figure out what the show was about now. Further complicating matters, one of the central romances of the show, the one between Kyle MacLachlan’s Agent Cooper and Sherilyn Fenn’s Audrey Horne, fell apart due to behind the scenes tension between Fenn and MacLachlan’s then girlfriend, Lara Flynn Boyle, who played Donna Hayward. Having lost Lynch, as well as the central premise of the show, and their main character’s love interests, all at the same time, it shouldn’t be that surprising that the show lost its way. In the 13 episode gap until Lynch returns for the finale, we get a mishmash of tire-spinning subplots, where David Duchovny plays a transgendered DEA Agent friend of Cooper who also happens to be investigating him; Audrey’s father, Ben Horne (Richard Beymer), has a multi-episode storyline where he thinks he’s a civil war general, Kenneth Welsh is introduced as Cooper’s crazed former FBI partner, Windom Earle, out for revenge on Cooper for an uncharacteristic affair that Cooper had with Earle’s wife; Heather Graham and Billy Zane are awkwardly introduced as love interests for Agent Cooper and Audrey Horne to replace the relationship between them that had been torpedoed; there was the misguided Miss Twin Peaks pageant that the writers managed to shoehorn many of our leading women into without much rhyme or reason; and Windom Earle’s interminable game of human chess he plays with Cooper where real people die when pieces are taken. There is a lot I’m skipping because of how involved it would be to try to explain, but the theme here is: throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks as a way to find out what the show about Laura Palmer’s murder is about, once you’ve solve the murder of Laura Palmer. When Lynch returned for the finale, he threw out as many of the subplots that had emerged since his last episode as he could. He started from a simple point - that Windham Earle had taken Heather Graham’s character, Annie, through a portal in the woods into the red room - now called The Black Lodge - and it was up to Cooper to follow them to rescue her. Everything that follows Cooper entering the Black Lodge is entirely new and strange, but again, in service of the story. Cooper manages to rescue Annie, but we discover in the episode’s final moments that it came at the price of him having to stay in the Black Lodge, while a doppelgänger of him takes his place in the real world. This is how the season ends, and for a time, how the show ended . The final episode of the show was something special, a complete return to form, but it was too late. ABC canceled the show. Fairly shortly after the cancellation, Lynch was able to get support for a Twin Peaks movie, 1992’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, telling the story of Laura Palmer’s final days and her murder. However, he encountered a number of hurdles in getting the movie made. Lara Flynn Boyle declined to return. Sherilyn Fenn wasn’t available. Kyle MacLachlan reluctantly returned, but only for a small role in the film. With those restrictions, Lynch and one of the writers from the show, Robert Engels, were able to put together a movie that was something special. It would go on to be nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Sheryl Lee’s performance is genuinely something special that might have gotten some mainstream award attention, had it not come in the context of a spin-off movie to a canceled cult TV show. The movie wasn’t what audiences wanted, though. The reception was unfortunately such that Lynch had to abandon a three movie series he had envisioned to complete the story. Again, for a time, this is where things stood. But thanks to a cryptic line in the series finale, a window was opened to revisit the world. While in the Black Lodge, Laura says to Agent Cooper, “I’ll see you again in 25 years.” As we approached 25 years from the finale, Frost and Lynch saw an opportunity, and inspiration, for revisiting the world. Fortunately, they were able to persuade Showtime to fund an 18 episode continuation of the series, giving us 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return. There’s no shortage of recent articles on Twin Peaks: The Return , but in line with what we’ve been discussing, it was a special season of storytelling that radically expanded the world and mythology of Twin Peaks , often in bizarre and hilarious ways, but always in service of telling the story of Agent Cooper’s return from the Black Lodge, his return to Laura Palmer’s murder, and an attempt to return the world to how it was before things went wrong. Twin Peaks: The Return is inarguably strange. Huge chunks of the initial episodes are almost silent as Agent Cooper works his way through a largely unexplained cosmic landscape as he tries to make his way back to our world. When he returns, he takes the place of one of his doppelgängers, spending the majority of the season nearly mute and without agency, floating through his doppelgänger’s life by happenstance, like a more surreal version of Being There , while his family and coworkers are bizarrely accepting of the change. What makes it all work is that Lynch never winks at the audience. Yes, his premises are bizarre, but he always treats what follows from those premises as genuine, rooting the action in the humanity of his characters, whatever their circumstances might be. It’s this sensibility that explains what makes something like What Did Jack Do? work, while season two of Twin Peaks fell apart as soon as Lynch’s attention was elsewhere. Looking back at these past 30 years of Twin Peaks , you can see the show’s DNA all over the recent Golden Age of television, particularly in obvious descendants like Lost , Mr. Robot , and The Leftovers . Lynch’s mere presence on TV was also significant in itself, though. Lynch began work on Twin Peaks very much in the prime of his film career. In 1990, Lynch had already made his iconic art house film, Eraserhead , had helmed The Elephant Man to eight Oscar Nominations including Best Director, had received his second Best Director nomination for Blue Velvet, and would go on to win that year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes for his film Wild at Heart. Lynch played a role in opening up television as a medium for serious filmmakers, which we are reaping the benefits of now. And, importantly, with an achievement like Twin Peaks: The Return as a capstone to his career , I’m excited to see the influence I expect him to have on young directors for years to come, pushing the boundaries of what film and television can be. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in New Windsor, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Barry 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.

For the past four seasons, The Good Place has been a unique delight in the world of network television. Leveraging the good will he received from a long track record writing successful, well-regarded programs, Mike Schur created a show that defies many of the conventions in form and content of modern mainstream tv comedy. Structured like a prestige drama, the show tells a complete story in 52 chapters, one that continuously builds its own complex mythology, and fundamentally reinvents the world in which the show takes place at the start of each new season, all while still delivering the goods as a funny, 22-minute comedy. The Good Place follows its cast - four humans, a demon, and a quasi-omnipotent being - as they navigate the afterlife and innumerable after-lifetimes, as they try to answer the question of whether or not people can overcome their nature to become morally better, and how we find meaning in the face of both mortality and immortality. You know, your standard everyday sitcom fare. Other shows have endeavored to tackle what happens after we die; other shows have tackled questions of morality and what it takes to be a good person, but none with nearly as much humor, imagination, and playfulness. There are a number of angles one could take on describing The Good Place : its exceptional casting, its imaginative world design, how little the writers spoon-feed or talk down to their audience. However, what I find most interesting about the show is, not that the cast and writers were able to make a topic like moral philosophy funny, but that the show actually makes and explains substantive arguments for how people could become “better” and what would constitute a “well-lived life.” The initial premise of The Good Place is: an admittedly not-great person (Kristen Bell’s Eleanor Shellstrop) finds that she has died and gone to “The Good Place” due to some kind of clerical error, and the question is: can she become a sufficiently good person for real, before anyone finds out and sends her to “The Bad Place” where she belongs. The Good Place as a show, outgrows the narrowness of this premise fairly quickly and in spectacular fashion, with one of TV’s all-time great plot twists, but the core idea persists throughout the entire run of the show: can people become better, and if so, how? Ultimately, the show argues that people can become better. So can demons. And so can quasi-omnipotent beings. For Eleanor, there is a confederate in “The Good Place” to help her: a recently deceased professor of moral philosophy (William Jackson Harper’s Chidi Anagonye). Out of pure self-interest, Eleanor begins to study moral philosophy with Chidi, but in time, she starts to absorb his lessons in a sincere way. This isn’t just a useful plot device, but part of the thesis of the show, demonstrating a fair amount of influence from Aristotle. Eleanor is motivated to develop and cultivate a more virtuous character out of self-interest, but through practice, like with any skill, those traits become ever more habitual, creating a genuine foundation of good character from which to create ever more sophisticated virtues. What the show consistently argues is that with good intentions, through trial and error, and with the right support system, people can become more virtuous. At the end of the show, when our cast is given an opportunity to redesign the afterlife, they create a system where people get to have their character tested over and over again, until they finally can pass every test and move onto “The Good Place.” No longer is anyone considered irredeemable or deserving of eternal torture. Nobody goes to “The Bad Place” at all anymore, and eventually everyone gets to “The Good Place.” There is a deeply humanist theme to the show that highlights the value of individuals, alongside the idea that no one is equipped to become a better person on their own. Eleanor needs Chidi in order to overcome her shortcomings, and Chidi needs Eleanor in the same way. There is an idea in the African Philosophy of Ubuntu, which can be interpreted widely, but is generally taken to be that the thing that makes us most fully human is the other people in our lives. A common way of stating this idea is that: a person is a person through other persons. Looked at in one way, this is a recognition for the need we have for teaching, and for feedback from others in order to better ourselves, but what’s also entailed by this is that we owe it to others to be that source of education and feedback. A good person is not best understood in isolation, but rather as part of a family or community working together to become better. As a complement to the persistent theme of moral improvement running throughout the entire run of the show, we also discover in the final episodes of The Good Place that the show is an extended argument against the possibility of any kind of “Good Place” in the way that it is traditionally understood. There are any number of ways to imagine an afterlife, but one of the most common features shared by those different views is that the afterlife is eternal. The idea of an eternal afterlife is meant to offer comfort to those who have just lost a loved one, or are themselves troubled by their own mortality, but the writers of The Good Place make plain the trouble with the idea of forever: it can’t help but get boring. If humans persist after death, but fundamentally as just eternal humans, we run into the problem of hedonic adaptation. The degree to which humans are able to enjoy things is context dependent. We enjoy things relative to our other experiences. Cake and ice cream on special occasions are a treat. Cake and ice cream for every meal would become a chore. In the afterlife described by the writers of The Good Place , everyone can get any experience they can imagine, whenever they want, as often as they want, without limit. And, when our cast encounters those people that have made it to “The Good Place,” they discover them to have largely devolved into apathetic zombies. When finally given a chance to overhaul how “The Good Place” operates, our cast introduces the option for people to end their afterlife when they feel ready and complete. Yes, those people who have led good lives, or gone through the new system to become sufficiently virtuous to enter “The Good Place” are still offered an eternity of pleasure as a reward for their good behavior, but now they are also offered the option to stop when they’re full. The idea being, that we need endings in order to give shape and meaning to the things we do. It’s the fact that our lives and experiences end that gives them any kind of shape. This isn’t meant in a way to glorify endings themselves, but to highlight the role of endings as the necessary punctuation that concludes our experiences, for both good and ill. This idea also translates over to Mike Schur’s decision to end the show when he did. Four seasons is a comparatively brief run for a show as popular as The Good Place , but Schur and company reached the ending they wanted, the one that best fulfilled the message of the show. To go on any further would be to risk becoming bored by their own creation, or stifling it in some way, just so that it could keep on going. Expressed sentiment by the cast and crew of The Good Place has been fairly universal that this was the best and most fulfilling job they’ve ever had, a job that no one wanted to see end, but everyone also agreed that they would rather see it end well than just peter out. I feel like they timed it perfectly. I draw this connection between the real world and the world of the show because that’s a connection that Mike Schur would like to see drawn. The show is about the afterlife, but all of the themes it discusses are ones that can be applied in our day to day lives. As a mission, the show takes seriously the idea that their little tv program might actually contribute to making the lives of people better, and the world a slightly better place. For most of the duration of the show, there was an episode-by-episode podcast organized by Mike Schur and hosted by cast member Mark Evan Jackson. The podcast did the regular work of breaking down the episodes, and securing interviews with cast and crew about the show, but the podcast also ended each week by asking the open ended question, “What’s Good?” The question gave people an opportunity to highlight charities and organizations that could use support, to spotlight individuals that were making useful contributions to the world, or to just take a moment to talk about some of life’s small pleasures. The point though, is that throughout the show’s conception, even extending to the podcast about the show, the idea was always being pushed that despite what contrary evidence we might see in the world around us, people are good, and if we work together we can make the world into a better place. The Good Place was, and is, a very special show. Setting out to create a comedy that also asks questions about ethics and the meaning of life, seems like it ought to be a noble, but doomed undertaking. In my case, as well as the case of many others I am led to believe, it was a meaningful show, and I am a better person for having experienced it. Damian Masterson Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in New Windsor, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be They Might Be Giants, Barry 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.

Reefer Madness Through the Years The original Reefer Madness has a convoluted history. The film began its life as an anti-drug education film called Tell Your Children , purportedly funded by a church group of the same name. The film was meant to convey the “dangers” of marijuana through the fairly hyperbolic story of three high school students whose lives are ruined by coming in contact with the drug. This original intent for the film was probably sincere, if misguided, but that’s not why it has survived to our present day. A quirk of the time period when it was made was that one way to get away with exhibiting more salacious and exploitative films was to present them as if they were moral education films; So, a producer, Dwain Esper, bought the original film of Tell Your Children and added additional footage to make a more sensationalized version of the same story. Esper then released that film around the country under a number of titles, including Reefer Madness. Part of what helped turn the film into the cult object of fascination that it is was this strange tension between the two vastly different motives at work in the film. Reefer Madness took on a new life when it was rediscovered by advocates for marijuana legalization in the 70s, who found in its ridiculous and over-the-top morality tale, a perfect parody of the anti-drug movement of the time. They started showing the film around the country again, but now with an altogether new motive. In a generation, or so, Reefer Madness evolved from being anti-drug propaganda to being an ostensibly anti-drug exploitation film, before finally being reclaimed as an accidental pro-marijuana satire. And that’s not all, as another generation more, this story would be rediscovered yet again, now undergoing an evolution into the form I’m most interested in: a musical. Reefer Madness: The Musical (2005) is part of a lineage of satirical and off-kilter horror musicals , and shares more than a few things in common with one of the most well-known examples of the sub-genre: Little Shop of Horrors (1986) Both films began as small stage adaptations of cult films, made possible because the source material happened to be in the public domain. Both productions also developed such an unusually rabid following that they garnered themselves otherwise highly improbable film adaptations. Reefer Madness: The Musical was created by TV writers Dan Studney (Music) and Kevin Murphy (Lyrics & Book, also co-writer of the pretty great Heathers: The Musical ), and manages to follow many of the core story beats of the original film, while also producing something much more unambiguously silly. In the original Reefer Madness , the three teens at the heart of the story are Bill Harper, his high school sweetheart, Mary Lane, and her older brother Jimmy. The musical streamlines this by combining the two boy’s characters into one: Jimmy Harper. The story beats of the musical basically match those of the original film. Jimmy Harper (Christian Campbell) and Mary Lane (Kristen Bell) are newly minted high school sweethearts, but things fall apart for them when Jimmy falls in with the wrong crowd. He meets Jack (Steven Weber), a reefer pusher who hangs around the local Five and Dime to pick up new customers. Jack manages to ensnare Jimmy, talking him into coming back to Jack’s place for a ‘real party’. There, Jimmy meets Mae (Ana Gasteyer), who runs the house for Jack, even though she’s conflicted about the younger clientele Jack’s been bringing in lately. Jimmy also meets Ralph (John Kassir) and Sally (Amy Spanger), a college dropout and a single mother respectively, who hang around the house full-time doing what Jack needs in exchange for reefer. Once at the house, this group peer pressures Jimmy into trying their special kind of cigarette for the first time, and after just one puff, he is completely lost. The rest of the film chronicles Jimmy’s out-of-control marijuana addiction, along with its deadly consequences. What Studney and Murphy add to that story is how absurd and cartoonishly they color in everything in between these story beats - in one sequence literally turning the film into a cartoon. I don’t want to spoil things for anyone coming to this film for the first time, but while the original film is a small-town drama, the musical adds sequences that take place in Heaven and Hell; There’s a zombie attack; Jesus gets his own solo song; there are additional musical appearances by Uncle Sam, George Washington, The Statue of Liberty, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Greek god Pan, an animated pot brownie, as well as a plate of pasta and clams; And, one of the high points of the film is a Busby Berkeley dance number orgy that takes place in a soundstage marijuana jungle. It’s a pretty wild time. The film works as much as it does thanks to how perfectly cast it is, most especially an unreal performance by Christian Campbell as Jimmy Harper. Campbell’s dimples, build, and boyish good looks help him believably pass for a high school senior. And similar to someone like Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Campbell is playing a role he had already fully internalized, having been the one to originate it on stage. There are small takes and choices, and inflections throughout that show the benefit of someone that got to feel out their performance in front of a crowd countless times before the cameras rolled. For a role that asks a lot physically and vocally, he makes it look effortless. Campbell’s other half in the film is Kristen Bell as Mary Lane. Bell also had the benefit of having previously played this role in the 2001 off-Broadway run of the show (an unfortunately timed run that never quite found an audience, opening the week after 9/11). By the time this film came out, Bell had started her run on Veronica Mars, but she’s already undeniable here. Her chemistry with Campbell is through the roof, her sense of physical comedy and timing is already as honed here as it would be on The Good Place, and hearing her sing I can’t help but regret that the only other major musical role that we’ve gotten from her has been Anna from Frozen . Christian’s and Kristen’s best scene together is their first one. The musical takes a heavy-handed scene from the original Reefer Madness, where the teen sweetheart's tragic end is foreshadowed by them flirting with one another over a copy of Romeo and Juliet, and runs with that idea. In Jimmy and Mary’s first duet, they sing to each as Romeo and Juliet, while clearly demonstrating that neither of them has finished reading the play or has any idea how it ends. The song even mixes in a brief dream sequence with the two of them imagining themselves in period attire, being married by Shakespeare, while he’s also trying to waive them off each time they sing something hopeful that clashes with how the play turns out. This is probably Kevin Murphy’s smartest lyric in the show, giving you everything you need to know about these characters and their relationship with each other, while both drawing out their naivety and still scoring with smart theater kid jokes that shouldn’t work as well as they do. As great as Campbell and Bell are, the not-so-secret weapon of the film is Alan Cumming as The Lecturer. The musical is structured like the original film, where the framing device is that everything we are initially watching is being presented by a lecturer to a classroom full of parents, as an educational film depicting the tragic events that we’ve been discussing. Cumming is part The Music Man , going from town to town, riling up the locals about the dangers of marijuana, but he also has a bit of menace to him as well, akin to his turn as the emcee in Cabaret . Part con man, part fanatic, he’s almost the true villain of the film. He appears both in the framing sequences and throughout the film in the guise of different characters from around town, narrating the story as it moves along. Cumming is the embodiment of the propagandist impulse in the original film, framing for the audience, and the parents in the classroom, how they are “supposed” to feel about what they are seeing, and underlining how unpatriotic they are if they see it any other way. The rest of the core cast is wonderful as well. John Kassir is perfectly manic as the burnt-out college student, Ralph, who acts as Jimmy’s partner in crime before suffering his own psychotic break. Stephen Weber is having a ball, hamming it up as the reefer-dealing Jack, playing him like Jimmy Cagney - which is honestly a fair take on what the actor in the original film did with the same role. Amy Spanger doubles as the sexy femme fatale that plays the largest role in luring Jimmy to take his first puff of marijuana, while also getting some of the biggest physical comedy beats in the film as the most burnt-out of all the characters. Spanger also really gets to show off her vocal chops in the finale as Lady Liberty. And Ana Gasteyer wrings more comedy than one would think possible from a character that is trapped in a bad situation by addiction and domestic violence, who also has to function as a key part of the moral center of the film. It’s a role that asks a lot, and Gasteyer kills it as effectively as she ultimately kills Jack. Looking back at both films, they’re each strange time capsules in their own ways. Comedy generally ages poorly, and there are some gags in Reefer Madness: The Musical that does peg it to a different time, but I do think it mostly holds up. What’s most interesting though, is that fear over marijuana has largely dropped out of public discourse as states around the country have been legalizing it. You’ve been able to buy CBD products for a few years now, and can even get low-dosage THC products pretty easily, too. This debate is basically over. So, in one sense both of these films are artifacts of a bygone time. That said, there is still something timely about Tell Your Children, which is heightened by Reefer Madness , and is made explicit in the finale to Reefer Madness: The Musical - the constant to all three films is that something that never seems to go out of style is fear-mongering about perceived dangers to children as a way of exercising social control; and what makes it especially insidious is that there undeniably will always be actual dangers to children that ought to be controlled, if not eliminated. As long as there are children, there will be those that cast the things that they are personally afraid of as being some threat to the children; As long as there are children, there will be people like Dwain Esper trying to monetize parents’ fears about something happening to them. Here’s hoping though, that we’ll also always have films like Reefer Madness: The Musical to call out and ridicule that kind of corrosive nonsense when it appears. 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.

Jim Gaffigan Goes ‘Above and Beyond’ in Linoleum Linoleum is a challenging film to talk about fully without spoiling what it’s really saying. It is a film with a twist, but it’s not really about that; The film is not trying to be coy that there is something more to the story than what’s on the surface. And it’s not trying to be a puzzle for the audience to solve, either; The film’s not looking to give the audience all the pieces it needs to work out what the bigger picture is ahead of it being revealed. The best I might be able to say to describe Linoleum is that it’s something like a dream that only comes into focus right before you wake up. The heart of the story is a fairly grounded family drama, overlapping with a coming-of-age story, along with a story of personal crisis; but, ultimately, the film has even greater ambitions than all of that. Written and directed by Colin West, Linoleum is ostensibly the story of Cameron Edwin (Jim Gaffigan), the middle-aged host of a little-watched children’s science program, Above, and Beyond . He is currently married to his wife Erin (Rhea Seehorn), the former cohost and co-creator of the show. Frustrated with the show’s struggles to find an audience, she left Above and Beyond for a job at a local air and space museum, and we learn at the top of the story that, though they’re still living together, Erin is in the midst of serving Cameron with divorce papers. They have two children, Nora (Katelyn Nacon), who is in high school, and her younger brother Sam. We’re meeting Cameron, Erin, and Nora at a tumultuous time in their lives, particularly for Cameron. He is feeling unsettled in his life. His show is struggling and about to be taken away from him; his wife is leaving him; he’s feeling regret over never having fulfilled his dream of working for NASA, and coping with it being too late for that now. Also, Cameron is starting to watch his father fade away as he struggles with worsening dementia. Erin still loves her husband, but she sees how lost he is, and is letting go of him now so she can move on to the next stage of her life. She has her own dreams of working as an aerospace technician and is entertaining taking another museum job two hours away that will get her closer to that goal. Nora’s struggling with all there is that comes with being young and in high school, but compounded by confusion about her sexuality. Nora is a model of how most anyone should wish they were in high school, though. She’s mixed up, but only because she’s still working out who she will be. Otherwise, she is happy and confident being who she thinks she is so far. It’s Cameron that is the most lost, though. Part of what is amplifying his discontent is that the person who has been chosen to replace him as the host of Above & Beyond is the person he wishes he had become, a former Astronaut named Kent Armstrong (also played by Gaffigan), who has also just moved in across the street with his son Marc (Gabriel Rush). Marc is also trying to find his way in the world, as an always-on-the-move military kid trying to live up to the expectations of an incredibly demanding father. Marc is the new kid, starting the school year late, but he ends up being placed in the same class as Nora. They take to one another quickly and form an undefined relationship of sorts, but one that will be forcefully resisted by Marc’s father, who doesn’t want his son hanging out with someone like Nora. The inciting event for the story is that, while all of these issues are bubbling away, a literal manifestation of Cameron’s dream crash lands in his backyard, in the form of an old capsule from the space program that had been abandoned in orbit during a previous mission. No organization is entirely clear about whose responsibility the capsule is, so the Edwin family is ordered out of their home while the matter is investigated. Erin’s sister agrees to take them in, but she clearly doesn’t approve of Cameron and seems to be the biggest cheerleader for Erin and Cameron getting divorced. Feeling unwelcome in his sister-in-law’s home, Cameron moves back into their condemned house; And, with no job to occupy his days, he pulls the capsule out of the crater in his backyard, and decides to start building a rocket of his own in his garage. Jim Gaffigan is truly wonderful in this film, and not at all what I expected. He has no trouble holding the screen in two different roles. His performance as Kent Armstrong is so distinct from his Cameron character that it wasn’t until someone else in the story mentioned their resemblance that I realized Gaffigan was playing both. Gaffigan’s Cameron is believable as a kid’s science host in the spirit of Bill Nye and a dad any kid would want; And, maybe more impressive, behind his ever-present business suit, and slick backed hair, and precisely clipped mustache, Gaffigan’s Kent is genuinely threatening as an ex-military former astronaut, who expects the world, including his young son, to conform to his high expectations. To say more about the plot would begin to spoil things more than I would like, but I will say that at this point in the story, we’re in a very strange place. There is something just a little bit off about everything we’re seeing. We are told enough to make it credible that Cameron could have the degrees and know-how to refurbish the capsule, but if it crash-landed it’s still odd that it survived well enough to be refurbished in the first place; Also, it’s perhaps odder still that no one ever comes to take the capsule out of his backyard. The film mostly feels grounded, but at the same time there are these strange elements that keep popping up, like Cameron having always wanted to be an astronaut, only to lose his job to a former astronaut named Armstrong, who just happens to move in across the street from him, and just happens to be his doppelgänger. Without talking any more about the details of the story, I do want to talk a bit about how deeply the story connected to me. Besides Cameron, I could see something of myself in all the characters of the film, like it was all a bit like watching the story of my life behind me and the life still ahead of me. To more concretely tie this to the central metaphor of the film, it's like all the characters were the components of one multistage rocket lifting off. In Nora and Marc, I could see all the bad and good in being young and lost, and how much it helps at that time to find somebody to go through it with. In Sam, who becomes more crucial and meaningful to me each time I rewatch the film, I can see all the unexpected things that shape our lives in all the ways we can never plan for. In Cameron and Erin, I can see the recognition of finding yourself in a life that wasn’t what you planned and the rush of deciding that there is still time to do something different. And, in Cameron’s dad, I can see the reminder that even if all stories have to have an end, there can still be a good story along the way. Taken as a piece, they all tie together like the pieces of a single life. It’s a wonderful film that truly rewards each rewatch, and I couldn’t recommend it more highly. 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.