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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.

A look at The Civil Dead and Jethica An idea most frequently associated with Roger Ebert is the description of films as empathy machines. In 2005 he gave a speech outside the Chicago Theater, when a plaque was being dedicated to him, where he said: “We are all born with a certain package. We are who we are. Where we were born, who we were born as, and how we were raised. We are kind of stuck inside that package, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people, and find out what makes them tick, and what they care about. For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” Now I would push Roger a little on that last line, but only in the sense that it’s not films that make us empathic - we already are unavoidably so by nature - but a film can do an effective job of enlivening our empathy or guiding it in new directions. Exactly how empathy functions is a contentious issue, but there are features of empathy that have been well-established for a long while now. Notably, our empathy is most readily activated by that which resembles ourselves in some way, and this impulse is surprisingly broad in its application. If you’ve ever put a pair of googly eyes on something, then you know firsthand how readily we can anthropomorphize basically anything in the world. It’s this same principle that does a lot of the heavy lifting in most animated films. One wouldn’t think, for example, that you would be able to tell a compelling narrative story about abstractions like our emotions, yet Pixar’s Inside Out was able to sufficiently humanize concepts like Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness, to tell an enthralling tale. More impressively, that story also was able to say something worthwhile about the young human girl, Riley, that was experiencing those emotions, and by extension, was able to say something about the human experience in general. Almost anything can trigger our empathy, and it reveals something about us when it happens. I say all of this as a preamble to discussing the unexpected role that I see empathy playing in two smaller films from earlier this year: The Civil Dead and Jethica. Both of these films are ghost stories of a kind, though neither is, strictly speaking, a horror film. In both cases, they are stories about people who are haunted by ghosts but are using a literal haunting to say something about being figuratively haunted. They are also both stories that take some pains to get us to sympathize with both the haunter and the haunted. To explain what I think is most interesting about this approach, forgive me for a brief digression into the history of empathy. One of the earliest robust discussions of the mechanism of empathy occurs in Adam Smith’s 1759 book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This discussion occurs so early in the historical discourse on empathy that it precedes ‘empathy’ being coined as a term by 150 years. At the time he was writing, Smith and his contemporaries used the term ‘sympathy’ to refer to what we now call empathy. I mention all of this here because the culmination of Smith’s first introduction of what he takes sympathy to be, is his pointing out what he takes to be the furthest extreme of our natural impulse to sympathize: our inclination to sympathize with the dead. What’s so noteworthy about our impulse to sympathize with the dead is that we’re experiencing some kind of fellow feeling with someone we know to no longer be feeling anything at all anymore and that asymmetry highlights how our empathy always says far more about us than it can ever say about whomever we are empathizing with. We can never actually know how someone else really feels, but only how we imagine we would feel in what we take their circumstances to be. Smith says this of our sympathy with the dead: “We sympathize even with the dead, and overlooking what is the real importance of their situation, that awful futurity which awaits them, we are chiefly affected by those circumstances which strike our senses, but can have no influence upon their happiness. It is miserable, we think, to be deprived of the light of the sun; to be shut out from life and conversation; to be laid in the cold grave, a prey to corruption and the reptiles of the earth; to be no more thought of in this world, but to be obliterated in a little time, from the affections, and almost from the memory, of their dearest friends and relations.” For Smith, all of our sympathy for the dead, even our understanding of the dead, only comes to us through a prism of our being alive, and it’s very much that idea that’s at work in these two films I want to discuss. It won’t be possible to fully explore what I want to say about The Civil Dead and Jethica without spoiling those films, particularly their endings. However, since I think not many people have seen them, I’ll begin with a rough sketch of what they’re each about, and let you know where to jump off if they sound like something you would want to check out without being spoiled. The Civil Dead is about a young photographer, Clay (Clay Tatum), who lives in an apartment in LA with his girlfriend. One day, while his girlfriend is away on a trip, Clay goes out to take pictures and runs into someone he used to be friendly with back in his hometown, Whit (Whitmer Thomas). Whit talks Clay into hanging out the rest of that day, and on through the night. Whit finally reveals to a hungover Clay the next morning that Whit has actually been dead this whole time, and is a ghost that only Clay can see and hear. The rest of the film is the two of them navigating that dynamic. Jethica is about two women, Elena (Callie Hernandez) and Jessica (Ashley Denise Robinson), who are each being haunted by the ghosts of men who forced themselves into their lives. Elena is living way out in the middle of nowhere in a trailer in the desert that belongs to her grandmother, trying to figure some things out with her life. One day she runs into an old friend of hers, Jessica, at a gas station. Elena learns that Jessica is driving cross country, seemingly on the run from something, so Elena invites Jessica to come to stay with her at the trailer as long as she needs. Jessica agrees, and once at the trailer, she confides in Elena that the reason she had left home was because of a situation with a stalker that got out of control. A guy named Kevin (Will Madden) had been following her, leaving her unhinged messages, demanding she sees him, and threatening her if she didn’t. Elena hears Jessica out, even listening to some of the messages, and tells Jessica that she’s safe now and can go take a shower and relax. While Jessica is in the shower, though, Kevin shows up outside the trailer, ranting and pacing outside, yelling for Jessica to come out. This is a little bewildering, not least of which because the trailer is truly in the middle of nowhere, nothing but flat desert to the horizon in every direction, and there’s no sign of another car out there. Kevin eventually disappears again, and Jessica brings Elena outside to show her Kevin’s body in the trunk of her car. Jessica tells Elena how Kevin had shown up at her house threatening her, and she had stabbed him in self-defense. She had fled with his body in her car, but his ghost had been haunting her ever since, continuing to stalk her even in death. I’ll pause here because I haven’t yet relayed anything important that isn’t already in the trailers for these two films. If either of them sounds intriguing, please check them out before reading on if the element of surprise is important to you, because each film takes these initial premises in some interesting directions. That warning given, I proceed. What The Civil Dead is interested in, in a loose sense, is what we owe others. The film is told from Clay’s point of view, but there is an interpretation of what happens that would straightforwardly paint him as the villain of this story. When we meet Clay, his girlfriend has just left town, so Clay starts running a scam out of their apartment. Posing as a realtor showing his apartment as available to rent, he holds an open house, collecting application fees from people excited to find such a large apartment available so inexpensively. When we first meet Whit, we learn that he first moved to LA to become an actor, and had reached out to Clay to try to connect with him early on, but Clay kept blowing him off. Even aware of how Clay had been ducking him, Whit is thrilled to now have someone who can see and hear him. At this point, Whit doesn’t know how long he’s been dead, but it’s been a crushingly lonely experience, being invisible, and unable to sleep, or eat, or touch anything. Just stuck existing emptily. Clay and Whit do find a brief camaraderie with one another, in large part because Whit can help Clay with his money problems. Clay wheedles his way into a high-stakes poker game run by a producer he knows, where Whit can tell Clay what cards everyone is holding during the game. At this point, the way the rest of this film could play out is a string of adventures that Clay and his ghost buddy could have, but Clay doesn’t really want that. Clay finds Whit to be too clingy. So, under the guise of arranging for them to be able to spend some quality time together away from Clay’s girlfriend, who still doesn’t know anything about their situation, Clay takes some of his poker winnings to rent a cabin in the woods for him and Whit to go hang out. They go and do even have a fun first night together, but on the second day, Clay lures Whit up into the attic of the cabin, shutting him in up there, knowing that Whit has no way to let himself back out. And the film ends with Whit yelling to Clay for help as Clay packs his car up and drives back home, the cabin slowly receding in the car’s rearview mirror. The way our empathy is manipulated here is impressive. We can step back and look at the way that Clay probably tells this story to himself after the fact and the way this film could have been framed; Clay found himself being haunted, stalked even, by a creepy ghost he never asked for. But, he was ultimately able to outsmart the ghost, trapping it somewhere it couldn’t bother him anymore. What makes the film play out differently than that for us is that we like Whit, feeling bad for what happened to him, both in his life and death; and we kind of think Clay is a douchebag. All of our empathy is with the ghost in this case, because our understanding of what he is going through is all familiar to us as experiences from our own lives: feelings of invisibility, isolation, loneliness, and embarrassment. But even all that said, Clay never consented to being haunted, and doesn’t owe Whit companionship. Clay may be a pretty garbage person otherwise, but it gets really complicated to say what he did was wrong. The way that Jethica plays out is almost the inverse of what happens with Clay and Whit. What we discover that Elena and Jessica have in common is that they are both haunted by men that they killed. In Elena’s case, she was driving down the road, got distracted, and hit a guy walking down the side of the road named Benny. (Andy Faulkner). After he is killed, Benny’s ghost mostly just keeps walking up and down the stretch of highway where he died, and we see Elena sometimes pick him up and talk to him, as a way to make peace with what she did. It’s only towards the end of the film that we learn it wasn’t an accident that Elena hit Benny. She happened to be distracted, and maybe she could have avoided him if she hadn’t been, but he deliberately jumped in front of her car. He was ready to end it all, and she just happened to be the one passing by. The shared theme between Elena and Jessica ends up being women whose lives were derailed by sad and selfish men, but what’s so surprising about where the film decides to go with that is how much empathy it still chooses to have for those two men. Kevin and Benny are undoubtedly the villains of the story, but after Benny absentmindedly reveals to Elena what he did, and Jessica gets Kevin to realize that what he has been doing, in both life and death, has been hurting her, the resolution to the story of the two ghosts is that they stop haunting these women, but also find a friend in one another before finally disappearing. The film doesn’t need to do that, and neither Benny nor Kevin is really owed such grace, but the empathy extended to them is still moving because we can’t help but hope that, even at our worst, such kindness might be extended to us. Neither film does, or really even could, tell us anything definitive about death, but both stories do contextualize something important for us about how we should treat others while we’re alive. How Clay treats Whit isn’t unambiguously wrong, but we still judge him harshly for how little empathy he has for Whit, also seeing it as an extension of the general selfishness with which we already saw him treat others. Clay may not have owed Whit companionship, but it was a choice to be such a dick about it. Conversely, the care that Elena and Jessica showed Kevin and Benny was probably excessive. No one owes kindness to an abuser, but, in general, anyone willing to extend empathy to others tends to receive ours. Such is the esteem with which we hold empathy that we always prefer the one who shows too much to the one that shows too little. And that’s part of why we love films, not because they are empathy machines, but because we are, and a good film reflects that back to us. 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.

Shortly after the final episode of Ted Lasso aired, Brendan Hunt, who played Coach Beard, hosted a Reddit AMA to answer fan questions about the show, the finale, and the rumored plans for the future of AFC Richmond’s coaching staff. One of the questions he was asked concerned something I had noticed and long wondered about myself: The musical theater references throughout the run of Ted were plentiful, and frequently significant parts of the story. Notably, in the finale, the team says goodbye to Ted and Coach Beard after their last team practice, by breaking into a fully choreographed rendition of “So Long, Farewell” from the Sound of Music. This itself is a call back to an early practice where Ted and the coaching staff were drilling a slightly more incredulous team through the dance steps of NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye,” to say goodbye to the departing Dr. Sharon, the team’s sports psychologist. The performance of “So Long, Farewell” is mostly filmed as a direct address to the camera, so it perfectly doubles as both a story point and as the show itself singing farewell to its audience. That said, as fun and fitting as this rendition of “So Long, Farewell” may be, I think what may actually be the real capstone musical reference for the show comes one episode earlier, in the penultimate episode of the series, in a scene between Coach Beard and Nate that I think is the culmination of one of the most important themes the show was trying to develop. Part of the arc of the show’s last season, a point that audience and critic response seemed to struggle with, was the gradual reclamation of Nate after his heel turn to end season two. Nate began the series as the team’s equipment manager - their kit man - before being elevated by Ted to become part of the coaching staff, but Nate’s jealousy and insecurity got the better of him, and he finished the second season by taking the head coach job with a rival team. The dynamics of Nate’s story were always a little odd in the context of the show to that point. We were introduced to one clear-seeming villain in the pilot of the show - philandering billionaire Rupert Mannion, whose high-profile divorce led to his wife taking control of his beloved team, AFC Richmond. Rupert was presented as an unambiguous bad guy, and he largely stays the same bad guy throughout the run of the show. In terms of storytelling, a major benefit of Nate joining up with Rupert’s rival team is that it allows one of the show’s core characters to be able to interact with Rupert on a regular basis. In the lead-up to the end of the series, this gives the writers a way to spend more time getting to know Rupert, ahead of the inevitable comeuppance he’s to receive in the series finale. This development for Nate always felt odd, though, because it was a bit out of step with almost all of Ted’s other relationships with people during the early run of the show. The first season of the series is all about people who seem like rivals or antagonists to Ted, gradually being won over by his earnest open-heartedness. In the first season, he wins over the new head of AFC Richmond, Rebecca Welton, even though she had only hired Ted with the hope that he would make a laughingstock of her ex-husband’s favorite team. By the series' end, Ted and Rebecca will have grown so close that she questions whether or not she would even want to own the team without Ted as its coach. Ted works this same magic with journalist Trent Crimm of The Independent, who initially wants to take down Ted as a foreign interloper, but by the series end, Trent has become a member of Ted and the team's inner circle, writing a book about the team’s culture. Again and again, Ted does the same with skeptical players, fans, and broadcasters; and even with his therapist. Ted approaches antagonism with openness and curiosity, so it feels discordant to see Nate’s heel turn in the face of Ted’s kindness. Why would a show so rooted in winning people over, have such a prominent character go in the other direction, despite Ted’s obvious continued affection and approval? What becomes clear though, having seen how the rest of the series played out, Nate was never really meant to be a villain. And for that matter, it’s not entirely clear that Rupert is even a villain in the show’s eyes either. Ted Lasso, both the show and the person, are not interested in carving the world up into heroes and villains. Ted says repeatedly about coaching that it’s not about wins and losses for him, and that bears out in the series with the team winning their last match, while still falling short of the league title. Winning would be nice, but Ted always saw his job as making the players on his teams the best people they can be. And the finale of the series lands as well as it does, despite the team falling short of the league title, because the players, along with everyone involved with the team, wind up as better versions of themselves thanks to Ted’s influence; and this seems especially so with Nate. Nate’s character arc also becomes especially important in the series once you realize that Ted doesn’t really have one. It ends up being fairly core to what the show is trying to say, that, aside from having made some new friends and collected new experiences, Ted ends the series largely the same person he began it. We see him struggle with panic attacks, become better about examining his own feelings and make some peace with the divorce that prompted him to take a job so far from home, to begin with, but Ted is basically the same person in the finale that he was in the pilot. For the show, Ted, as a character, represents something larger about the possibility of just being a good and open-hearted person, regardless of what life throws your way. The characters around him in the show go through major life changes, guided for the better by Ted’s influence, while Ted just stays a steadfastly good person. Continued goodness and strength of character are hard to dramatize, though, which finally brings us to the scene between Nate and Coach Beard that I wanted to discuss. At this point in the final season, we’ve seen Nate gradually coming to terms with his having been wrong to leave Ted and the team in the way that he did; prompted in part by Ted’s public goodwill towards him whenever he was asked a question about Nate during a press conference, and in part by seeing how much different being in the world of Rupert Mannion is from being in the world of Ted Lasso. Nate is ready to reconcile with Ted and ask forgiveness, but the resolution to that with Ted wouldn’t be that dramatically satisfying, because we never get the sense that Ted ever felt betrayed by Nate, to begin with. Ted seems at times confused, or disappointed, by Nate's behavior, but never really betrayed. Ted saw something in Nate when he promoted him, and Ted’s continued faith in Nate makes their eventual reconciliation feel inevitable. In Coach Beard, we get someone who does actually feel betrayed by Nate, both personally and on behalf of his best friend, Ted. And, throughout the final season, we see Beard struggling to accept that Ted is not more angry with Nate for what he did. This (along with Coach Beard’s generally more volatile seeming nature) creates a great deal of tension when he unexpectedly shows up on Nate’s doorstep to confront him right before the series finale. The scene we get between Nate and Coach Beard plays out like this: Nate: Are you here to kill me? Beard: Ted and I met playing college football. He was the backup punter and I was the backup kicker. We never got into a game, but we spent a lot of time together jogging; doing box jumps. After school, we went our separate ways. He was dating Michelle and got into coaching, and I got into prison. When I got paroled, I had no money. Family didn’t want me. I had nowhere to go. I looked up Ted. He took me in. Fed me. Let me crash on his couch. And in return, I stole his car. Now I didn’t get far, and I would have gone straight back to prison, if Ted didn’t come down there and convince those cops that he gave me the car. Nate: Just like in Les Miz. Beard: Our story is very similar to Les Miz, yes. Nate: You went to prison? Beard: Yes, for stealing a loaf of meth. And then I stole from my friend. Who forgave me. And gave me a job. And a life. So, to honor that, I forgive you. I offer you a job. Nate: Thank you. You sure you don’t want to head-butt me? I think it might make us feel better. Beard: (Turns his hat around, but rather than head butting him, he just touches his head to Nate’s head.) Monday. 9 AM. (Beard hugs Nate). If you don’t know the story of Les Misérables, the musical that Nate and Coach Beard are referencing, or the original novel by Victor Hugo, it’s an expansive story: mostly centered on an ex-convict named Jean Valjean. Valjean’s story is very much like what Coach Beard described for himself; Valjean was arrested for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving children. And, thanks to his numerous attempts to escape, he ended up serving 19 years in prison before finally being paroled. Parole brings its own disappointments for Valjean, though, because the identification papers he was required to carry with him at all times identify him as an ex-convict, and Valjean discovers that nobody wants an ex-convict in their inn, tavern, or home. Exhausted and starving after days of walking, someone does take enough pity on Valjean to tell him to try the house of the local clergyman, Bishop Bienvenu. Valjean is tired and angry when he knocks on the Bishop’s door, but he is readily taken in and offered dinner along with a bed for the night. The bishop treats Valjean like an honored guest, having the table set with the one luxury the Bishop still permits himself, his silver cutlery and candlesticks. And, that night, after the house had gone to bed, Valjean steals the silverware and attempts a getaway. Like with Coach Beard, Valjean didn’t get far before being apprehended. And, like with Ted, the Bishop not only convinces the police that he gave Valjean the silverware, but he also gives Valjean his silver candlesticks, too; instructing him, once the police leave, to use them to start a new life. A point that the book takes more time than the musical to make clear is that the Bishop is an unusually saintly figure and a model for how everyone really ought to live in the world. Jean Valjean spends the rest of his life trying to live up to that example, and we see Coach Beard trying to live up to Ted’s saintly example in this scene with Nate. It’s harder for him to get there, but Coach Beard’s acceptance and forgiveness of Nate are unconditional because that’s what Ted would do. Coach Beard doesn’t tell Nate that he’s on probation, or has to earn his forgiveness, because, in the eyes of the show, that’s not what forgiveness is, or should be. For Ted Lasso, forgiveness is what we extend to anyone who sincerely wants to be better; and we do so both for the benefit of others, as well as for our own. This is about more than just forgiveness but about the show’s general thesis about how we help one another be better. In a scene in the locker room during the finale, we see Ted’s inner circle discussing the idea of whether or not people can change. To which Leslie Higgins offers, “Human beings are never going to be perfect... The best we can do is keep asking for help and accepting it when we can. And if you keep on doing that, you’ll always be moving towards better.” These ideas are all tied together. This is what coaching, and life, are about for Ted Lasso; Not the wins and losses, but helping people along who are trying to be better, aware that perfection isn’t on the table for anyone. Part of that means accepting people when they’re not better yet and forgiving them for their shortcomings as long as they’re trying. Ted, or the saintly Bishop Bienvenu, might be an impossible standard for anyone to actually live up to, but, like Jean Valjean, or Coach Beard with Nate, we can always try to be better, and do what we can to help others be the best versions of themselves, too. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

This headline doesn’t make sense to me: “Paul Reubens, best known as Pee-wee Herman, dead at the age of 70, after a private 6-year battle with cancer.” Paul Reubens, 70? Impossible. How can that eternal man-child have grown so old when I wasn’t looking? How can he still feel like my peer, while almost being the same age as my father? A private 6-year battle with cancer? How could someone so important to so many people be sick for that long and not get the victory lap he deserves while he was still with us? And Pee-wee Herman dead? Paul Reubens, maybe, but Pee-wee? Incomprehensible. I have been thrilled and surprised by the scale of affection people have been sharing for Reubens and his work. He has always been important to me and the people I knew, but, 7 years removed from the last direct-to-streaming Pee-wee movie, I was unprepared for how culturally relevant he remains. What I share with more people than I realized is that I can chart the most formative years of my life by Paul Reubens’ career. I was born the same year as that first HBO special that broke Pee-wee into the mainstream. The Pee-wee Herman Show was a filmed stage performance of the show that Paul developed at the Groundlings Theater & School after he was passed over for the 6th season of Saturday Night Live. I remember seeing the special in reruns as a very young kid, presumably in between episodes of Fraggle Rock, and it stuck with me. I surely didn’t understand most of what I was seeing and hearing; but, because the show was riffing on the structure of a kids' show, there was enough to hold my young attention, and I still remember the lo-fi ending where Pee-wee gets his wish to fly and says he’s the luckiest boy in the world. For as rude and oddly adult as the character was at that point, that moment still landed for little kid me. Chronologically, Paul was able to move from the success of his stage show and TV special toward getting a deal with Warner Brothers Studios to make a Pee-wee movie, but that isn’t what I saw next. Long before I saw Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, I was a fan of his children’s show, the adaptation of his stage show: Pee-wee’s Playhouse. As great as that first Pee-wee movie is, Playhouse is how I best remember the character. Similar to what Jim Henson did with The Muppet Show, Paul and his team found a way to preserve much of the anarchic energy from the stage show that appealed to adults, while creating a show that was more inclusive for a children’s audience. Though overtly much more of a kids' show than The Muppet Show ever was, or wanted to be, Pee-wee’s Playhouse held just as much appeal for audiences of all ages. Looking back, you can particularly see how much both the stage show and children’s show would go on to become major influences for children’s cartoons for decades to come. Right from their opening credits, you can see how much a show like SpongeBob SquarePants aggressively borrowed from Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure didn’t have quite the same influence on me that it had on others, because it’s what I came to last with the character, but, it was kind of the perfect capstone for me, radically expanding what the character of Pee-wee could be by taking him out into the world. To invoke Jim Henson and The Muppets again, this isn’t that dissimilar from what happened with the jump from The Muppet Show to The Muppet Movie. The trajectories of The Muppets and Pee-wee were different, but they touched a lot of the same bases along the way. We mentioned above how Pee-wee was born from Paul being passed over for Saturday Night Live. A critical step towards the development of The Muppet Show was Jim Henson and his creation, The Land of Gorch, flaming out on the first season of SNL because the writers didn’t know what to do with characters that were meant to be for adults while looking like they were for kids. A place where Paul and Jim’s trajectories differed is that Jim began in children’s television and spent most of his career trying to get out of that box so he could pursue more avant-garde interests. Paul Reubens started out working in sketch comedy, performing in front of hip adult audiences, before making Big Adventure, one of the more “out there” mainstream films of the 80s, but ultimately, settled into a long run in children’s television. Both Paul and Jim were also notably much more than just their most famous creations. Jim eventually got to branch out from The Muppets to make films like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth before his passing in 1990. Also in 1990, after Pee-wee’s Playhouse went off the air, Reubens reinvented himself in the 90s and 2000s as a character actor and in-demand voice artist. Despite some very high-profile speed bumps to his career, Reubens was a major part of projects like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Mystery Men, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and more. Now, I don’t really want to go too far comparing Jim Henson and Paul Reubens because the mountain of differences between the two of them surely outpaces their similarities, but these coincidental resemblances do help underscore for me a comparison that I do want to dig in on; that, as creations, The Muppets and Pee-wee Herman are of comparable importance and resonance. When I said at the beginning that the idea of Pee-wee Herman being dead was something incomprehensible to me, this is what I had in mind. Despite Paul Reubens’ obviously inseparable relationship with the character, Pee-wee feels like an inviolable part of the fabric of pop culture. The death of Pee-wee Herman feels as impossible to me as the death of Kermit the Frog did after Jim Henson passed. That thought has led me to realize that I would love nothing more than to see further stories with Pee-wee even if Paul can’t be with us to see them. He left behind a number of unmade Pee-wee scripts before finally getting 2016’s Pee-wee’s Big Holiday made. He even approached Johnny Depp around 2009 about the possibility of playing Pee-wee in a film Paul was trying to convince Tim Burton to direct. The idea of someone else playing Pee-wee doesn’t seem that absurd to me considering that the ending of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is Pee-wee giddily watching someone else play him in the movie of the story we had just finished watching. I suspect nothing like this will ever happen, though. It’s a shame because of how much I love Pee-wee as a character and the kind of stories you could tell with him. From all the various iterations over the years, we can see that he can be quite childlike and quite dark; he can be quite sweet and quite rude; he can be bold, imaginative, and entirely his own person. Pee-wee just exudes an infectious enthusiasm, delight, and a childish joy that doesn’t let up. Something indomitable. Like with The Muppets, Pee-wee can both be identifiably himself and yet, plugged into almost any story. I would happily watch a “Pee-wee’s Christmas Carol,” or “Pee-wee Treasure Island.” For all these reasons, I would love nothing more than to see creatives come up with fun things to do with a character like Pee-wee Herman, but at the same time, looking at the rather lackluster results of what has been attempted since Jim Henson’s passing, also maybe I don’t. I think I want these things, but maybe they would all just be a proxy for the thing I really want; to get to experience a performer like Paul Reubens imbue a character like Pee-wee with all of those qualities again. And that might also be impossible. Paul was something special, both on screen and in life, and, however much I don’t want to believe it, it’s probable that we’ll never see his like again. 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.

This is going to be one of those film articles where I jump straight into talking about the ending, so consider yourself warned if you haven’t gotten around to seeing Searching for Bobby Fischer at some point in the last 30 years. I’ve long thought of this as my favorite sports movie, even if it is debatable whether chess should actually be classified as a sport. Either way, Searching for Bobby Fischer is unambiguously formatted like a sports movie. We get all the hallmarks of the genre: montages, mentors, winning streaks, losing streaks, rivalries, a crisis of confidence going into the final act, an inspirational pep talk, and finally, a climactic contest between two well-matched opponents. This film, however, because it is specifically about youth chess, has an unexpected relationship towards winning and losing that I find fascinating for the genre. The film walks a fine line between wanting to provide a typical sports movie catharsis displaying some kind of final victory, and trying not to push an agenda on the kids depicted in the film that winning should ever be thought of as the only measure of success. Most of the early portion of the film is working towards establishing two points: first, that our young protagonist, Josh Waitkin (Max Pomeranc), has a preternatural intuition for the game of chess, and second, that he will have to push himself incredibly hard if he wants to develop that aptitude into something on par with the very best players his age. Towards the end of the film we get increasing emphasis on the idea that chess is a game and, particularly for kids, is supposed to be fun. There’s a clear tension here, and how well the film works for you, particularly its ending, may strongly depend on how well you think it navigates these opposing ideas. The film’s story builds towards the final match of the 1986 National Primary Championship, where Josh Waitzkin faces off against a kid who has been set up to be something of a nemesis for him: Jonathan Poe. The character of Jonathan is interesting in that he’s younger than Josh and he’s presented like a pint-sized Ivan Drago. He’s been trained to be a very serious-minded chess machine, pulled out of grade school by his father so that he could focus on chess full-time. This sounds like a Hollywood invention, but it isn’t. Jonathan is actually based on Josh’s real-life opponent for this tournament, Jeff Sarwar, who would go on to win the under-10 World Championship that same year. A very important context here though is that, not too long after the events depicted in this film, and in part due to the notoriety that Jeff’s success brought him and his unconventional family, he and his sister would be taken into protective custody by the Children’s Aid Society of Ontario, because of their father’s abusive behavior towards them. There’s an untold cautionary tale here about what it can look like when a parent’s only interest in their child is vicarious glory. Both Jonathan Poe and Jeff Sarwar are meant to offer a contrast to where Josh is at by the end of the film. While Josh isn’t depicted as being pushed in quite the same way that Jonathan and Jeff are, he does feel pressure from his sportswriter father, Fred (Joe Mantegna), who doesn’t do much to hide that he is happiest with Josh when he wins. From his chess teacher, Bruce Pandolfini (Ben Kingsley), Josh feels a constant pressure to always be learning the neverending minutia of the game, so he can one day fulfill his highest potential. Part of the crisis that Josh ends up experiencing heading towards the final tournament is because all of this pushing does actually work. Through his hard work and training, Josh has continued to improve as a player, but he’s now gotten to the point where he’s so highly rated that he’s the runaway favorite to win any match he plays against the kids in his age group. There’s no joy in winning for him anymore because it’s what’s expected of him. All that’s left for him is a fear of losing and letting down his dad and Bruce. And, for a time, that fear turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Part of how Josh breaks out of his funk comes when his mother (Joan Allen) starts pushing back against what his father and Bruce have been asking of him. She starts pushing them to let Josh go back to playing speed games of chess for fun against the men in the park, like Vinny (Lawrence Fishburn), even if it might mean risking picking up some bad chess habits. And, maybe most importantly for Josh’s well-being, the family decides to go on a chess-free vacation right before the tournament to give Josh a chance to relax and just be a kid for a while. This works, too. Taking this kind of step back is just what Josh needs, and he does ultimately win the tournament. That’s not the film’s ending, though. The story continues after Josh’s win, watching him comforting a friend who was also playing in the tournament but lost a key match earlier on. The film never loses sight of it still being a children’s chess tournament, and that for Josh to have his happy ending, every other kid competing has to have their heart broken. It is heartwarming to see Josh be able to empathize with his friend, but, the more you look at it, the clearer it becomes that this isn’t the kind of unambiguous happy ending you expect to get from most sports films. Part of what woke me up to the more bittersweet notes of this ending was learning more about the rest of the lives of the people in this story. The film, and the book it was based on, is called Searching for Bobby Fischer for at least two reasons. First, and most obviously, because of how chess parents and chess teachers obsess over whether their kids might follow in Fischer’s footsteps to become the next great American chess player. But, second, it also refers to people quite literally searching for the reclusive Fisher. As we learn in the opening narration from Josh, Bobby Fischer went into seclusion after winning the 1972 World Chess Championship against Boris Spassky. Josh describes how erratic Fischer’s behavior was leading up to the tournament. Fischer complained about just about every single arrangement related to the match. He insulted what he saw as the backwardness of Iceland, where the tournament was taking place. And he frequently spoke unkindly about the people of Iceland. Most dramatically, Bobby was also constantly threatening to blow off the match altogether. When Fred Waitzkin wrote the book this film is based on, Fischer had been living in seclusion for well over a decade. In what must have seemed like a bit of happy synergy for the film, in 1992, around the time the film was in production, Fischer emerged from hiding to play Spassky in a 20th-anniversary rematch of their 1972 contest. The match caused a bit of a sensation only for Fischer to mostly disappear from view again after handily winning the rematch. Perhaps a less happy revelation for the legacy of the film, though, is learning about Fischer’s pathological paranoia and virulent antisemitism. While Fischer had once seemed to just be the colorful enfant terrible of the chess world, the more we learn about him, the more unstable he appears to have been. Shortly before he died in Iceland in 2008, he was recognizable out in the street by his rotten teeth, after having had all of his fillings removed to avoid radio signals being sent to his brain by the Russians and Americans. He ultimately died of kidney failure caused by a bladder infection he didn’t trust any doctor to treat. The film is called Searching for Bobby Fischer, but aside from Bobby’s chess prowess, he wasn’t remotely someone any parent should want their child to emulate. In fact, looking beyond Bobby to all of the other characters involved, it’s not entirely clear that any parent should really want their child to pursue something like competitive chess. What’s more clear in the book is that Fred Waitzkin pursued competitive chess when he was younger, having caught chess fever along with the rest of America around the time of that Fischer-Spassky World Championship. Fred bought chess books and memorized openings, only to discover how far behind his nascent ability was compared to people who had already been playing their entire lives. He abandoned playing himself, but he’s honest in the book that part of him pushing Josh was to see his own dream fulfilled by his son. Something hinted at in the movie is Bruce Pandolfini’s aversion to tournament play, but what’s made much more clear in the book is that the reason he doesn’t play in competitions anymore is because of what he feared publicly losing might cost his reputation professionally as a chess teacher, writer, and commentator. His fear was very much the same one that Josh would have to overcome heading into the finals. Vinny, who is based on a real person, but also stands in for all the men who played with and mentored Josh in Washington Square Park, is still an active competitive player when we meet him, but what’s abundantly clear in the book is that his isn’t meant to be any kind of life for Josh to want to mimic. It’s never said straight out whether or not Vinny is homeless, but it is strongly implied, which is true for a lot of the players in the park. In the book, we meet master-level players that have been ruined for anything else in life by their obsession with chess, and now spend their nights sleeping in the park under their chess tables all year round. Funnily enough, you know who else doesn’t play competitive chess anymore? Josh Waitzkin. At the time this film was made, the real Josh was about 16 years old. You can see him playing chess at the table next to the film’s Josh toward the end of the movie when he returns to play speed chess with Vinny. By this point, real-life Josh was an international chess master who had won the National Junior High Championship, the High School Championship, and the U.S. Junior Championship. At the point when we see him in his blink-and-you-’ll-miss-it cameo, Josh Waitzkin was someone for whom you could make a credible argument that he was well along the path to becoming the next Fischer. However, just a few years later, he completely gave up playing chess competitively, shortly after he started college. Josh just couldn’t maintain his affection for the game, or for what the game asks of people for them to keep developing as a player. This is the thing I’ve now come to find to be the most fascinating about Searching for Bobby Fischer. At the end of the film, we got the sports movie happy ending of Josh winning the final match, but the impact of that win, his agreeing not to push himself so hard, and his decision to be more ok with just being a kid, looks like the seed of him eventually leaving the game altogether. The film celebrates Josh’s win, but in the final shot of him comforting his friend that lost, we also get something of the idea that maybe we shouldn’t be doing this to kids. So, I’ve come to learn that this is my hot take about Searching for Bobby Fischer: It is a great youth sports movie, but one that also manages to suggest that maybe we would be better off just letting kids be kids. For Josh Waitzkin, his happy ending doesn’t really come from winning that final match, but rather, from when he starts to let go of the idea that he has to win all of the time, and when he stops trying to be the next Bobby Fischer. 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.

I think of E.T. first and foremost as a film about what it’s like being a kid, especially a kid in a particular time and place; But what’s interesting to me about that is how that feeling persists despite how fantastical the actual story of the film is. In E.T., a boy discovers an alien in his backyard, and spends the final act of the film with his friends, evading government agents, trying to help that alien get back to his home planet; but what I remember most from the film is the smaller character moments: Elliott faking being sick so he can stay home and play with the alien he just met, Elliott spending the morning enthusiastically introducing that alien to all of his action figures, and explaining things like what soda is and how a Pez dispenser works. All the action and adventure elements make the story more thrilling, and many of those moments like the bicycles taking flight are iconic, but what a lot of the later E.T. knockoffs got wrong is that what earns all of those thrilling moments is having first said something real about the characters and their lives. The elevator pitch for Jules (2023) might have been something like E.T. for the senior set, and it does play with a number of the same story beats, but the film is using those elements to do something more, telling what ends up being a fascinating story about aging. In Jules, Ben Kingsley plays Milton, a 78-year-old widower, who lives by himself in the house he raised his family in. He’s a bit of a crank, known for showing up to every town board meeting to make the same two proposals: that a crosswalk is needed in the part of town where he keeps getting tickets for jaywalking, and that the town needs to change their slogan to something less grammatically ambiguous. He has a strained relationship with his children, and his daughter, Denise (Zoë Winter), has started to worry about how forgetful he’s been of late. She becomes especially concerned when she learns that Milton has started telling people about an alien spacecraft that crash-landed in his backyard and is crushing his azaleas. She’s right to be worried about his forgetfulness, it’s a real problem and seems to be getting worse, but Milton’s right about the alien; there is a spacecraft in his backyard, and it is crushing his azaleas. When we meet Milton at the start of the film, he hasn’t accepted yet that his memory is failing. He’s worried enough about the possibility that, when he initially sees the spaceship in his backyard, he knows he could be imagining it. When it’s still there the next morning, though, he accepts that it’s real and is a problem in need of a solution. A problem that becomes all the more pressing a couple of days later when he looks outside and sees that an alien has now emerged from the ship and is sprawled out on the ground by his backdoor. There’s a not-too-subtle metaphor at work here. At a time when Milton is starting to feel like the sky is falling, the sky literally starts falling; at a time when Milton is finding the world more difficult to navigate and comprehend, something shows up to upend his whole understanding of the universe. The comparative virtue of the problem of having a spacecraft and alien land in his backyard, though, is that this ends up being something that feels less scary and more manageable to Milton than his own cognitive decline. Milton’s initial impulse to solve his problem is to treat it like the problems of the crosswalk and town slogan; he decides to just bring it up at the next town hall meeting. So, he goes to the next meeting, waits his turn to speak, and tells the town board about his visitor. They of course don’t believe him, but how they do that is a little heartbreaking. They don’t argue with him or mock him. They don’t say anything at all. They see an old man with declining faculties and are embarrassed on his behalf. They let Milton take his seat again, not knowing what to say, and not wanting whatever it is he needs at the moment to become their problem. Milton isn’t completely ignored by everyone in that room, though. Two older acquaintances of his who also come to these meetings to make their own recommendations to the board, are concerned about him and approach him afterwards. One is Joyce, played brilliantly by Jane Curtain, who initially chastises Milton because of his saying something kooky like that makes them all look bad. She will soften, though, when she eventually learns firsthand that he was telling the truth. The other is Sandy (Harriet Harris), who is more sympathetic from the start because she has lived through the cognitive decline of her late husband. She accompanies Milton back to his house to make sure that he’s ok, but winds up getting quite the surprise when she gets there. The three of them, Milton, Sandy, and Joyce, are each contending with their own challenges that come with aging, but for a time at least, they will have some company to face those things with, all while taking part in a grand adventure. Some of the trappings of this story may make it seem like it’s some dour affair, but it’s not. It’s occasionally poignant, but more than anything it’s a light and funny ride. How the film actually plays out is worth seeing for yourself. If you have seen E.T., then you can imagine some of the shape of the story for yourself, but Jules isn’t trying to be a ripoff. It doesn’t regurgitate anything from E.T. but it deliberately echoes that movie at times to be upfront about what it’s trying to say. As E.T. is an adventure story that is principally about what it’s like being a kid, Jules is an adventure story that’s principally built around the kids we all still are even when we’re growing old. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

The Case for Remaking Breakfast at Tiffany’s For a while now, I’ve had an ongoing text thread with friends of mine where we play the daily internet movie games, like Framed and Movie Grid. Framed in particular ends up being a fun game to play with others because, even when none of us can guess what the day’s movie is, it’s rarely ever anything so obscure that it doesn’t spark some kind of conversation for the group. An especially interesting one to me from a little while ago was Blake Edwards’ 1961 film, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s a film with a peculiar kind of stature. It features one of the more iconic performances ever put on film in Audrey Hepburn’s turn as Holly Golightly, while also being a film that hardly ever seems to get screened or discussed anymore because it also includes one of the most egregious instances of yellow face you’ll ever see, with Mickey Rooney’s performance as Mr. Yunioshi. Though the film’s seemingly growing obscurity may be deserved, it is a shame because of how much I think the worthwhile parts of the film and its story still have to offer audiences. One of the more enduring images of the 60’s film is a 31-year-old Hepburn from this film: her hair up, wearing the definitive little black dress, bejeweled, and wielding her foot-long cigarette holder. I saw more than a few people dressed as her just this past Halloween. And yet, I don’t know what fraction of people who know that image could tell you anything about the film's plot. This iconic image is much better known as representing Audrey Hepburn than it is for her character, Holly Golightly. And yet, it’s hard to recommend to such people that they go back and watch this film, because Rooney’s performance isn’t just racist through a modern lens, it ought to have been seen as out of bounds even for the time. The performance also isn’t something that pops up just once that you can fast forward through but rather is a “running gag” that shows up repeatedly throughout the film. I’ve talked to people on both sides of the issue. Some folks have never made it past Rooney’s first appearance, and some folks have been watching the film for so long that they have gotten used to living with Rooney’s scenes as the cost of getting to enjoy the rest of one of their favorite films. I can see how Breakfast at Tiffany’s could be someone’s favorite film, too. Beyond Hepburn’s performance, she has spectacular chemistry with her co-star, George Peppard, as Paul Varjak, the aspiring novelist who has just moved in upstairs from Holly and reminds her of her brother Fred. Blake Edwards' direction sparkles at times, particularly in the party scenes in Holly’s apartment and during Holly and Paul’s day of new adventures in the city. Henry Mancini’s score is also an endless pleasure, deservedly winning Oscars for Best Score and Best Original Song, “Moon River.” All that said, because of Rooney’s performance, it’s still a film I can never really feel comfortable recommending; So, I’ve concluded that it’s time to remake Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Remakes are a dicey proposition, especially with films that are regarded as classics. It’s generally going to be ill-advised to try to remake some beloved favorite with an enduring legacy, like Singing in the Rain or It’s a Wonderful Life. But, as we recently saw with Spielberg and Kushner’s update of West Side Story, even an accepted classic can be reinvigorated in the right hands. I’m especially keen on the idea of a remake of Breakfast at Tiffany’s because I’ve always been more fond of Truman Capote’s original novella than the film it was based on anyway, and the story is one that, if told faithfully, may have even more salience now than when the film was made. The film and the novel manage to largely depict the same events while also telling fundamentally different stories. The film, with its happy ending, is something of a romantic comedy. With this framing, it makes sense that it was one of the touchstones when Nathan Rabin was first outlining the idea of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Set in the mid-20th century, a young writer, notably unnamed in the novella, moves into a building in New York City, where he comes into contact with his vivacious and charismatic upstairs neighbor, Holly Golightly. The nature of Holly’s life is ambiguous in both the film and novella, but she supports herself on the gifts and money she gets from socializing with men, and from money she is paid to make weekly visits to a former crime boss in Sing Sing. While much of Holly’s life is shaped by men pursuing her, she is the one who interjects herself into her neighbor’s life one night when she comes down the fire escape to get away from a bothersome man she had brought home to her apartment that night. She’s somewhat taken with her neighbor because of how much he reminds her of her beloved brother Fred, and she even takes to calling him ‘Fred’ for most of the rest of the story. The handling of this connection between Holly’s neighbor and her brother marks what might be the biggest point of departure between the film and the novella. In both, it’s this connection that allows Holly to be more vulnerable with her neighbor than she is with others, particularly other men. But, while in the film, this connection is the seed of the romantic tension between them, in the novella, this is what allows Holly to give her neighbor access to her life in a way she wouldn’t for all the men that are sexually interested in her. In the novella, she calls her neighbor by her brother's name and singles him out as what she hopes is a safe harbor, something she is greatly in need of as she’s trying to make a way for herself in the world. The other most significant change between the novella and the film is never made explicit, but there is a very apparent difference in Holly’s age. Audrey Hepburn was 31 when she played Holly Golightly, while the character is only 19 in the novella. That difference has always underlined for me the degree to which men’s relationship towards the young Holly of the novella was more overtly predatory. We learn the same backstory for Holly in both the film and the novella. Her real name is Lulamae Barnes. She and her brother Fred were orphans who had run away from cruel foster parents. They end up surviving in part because when they are caught stealing from the farm of a local veterinarian, named Doc Golightly, he takes pity on them and brings them into his home. At the time, Lulamae was only 13. She would be 14 when Doc married her, making her the mother to his 4 children. Later, when talking about this with Fred, after Doc finds her in New York and tries to talk her into coming back home, she doesn’t look back with any regret about her time as a child bride but recognizes it wasn’t a real marriage. She did love Doc, and in the novella even sleeps with him again before being sent back to Texas. But she ran away because it wasn’t the life she wanted. This pattern would repeat in LA where she would be taken in by another older man, O.J. Berman, a talent agent who wanted to turn her into a movie star. It’s in running away from that life that she finds herself in NY. Holly Golightly who is only 19 wears these experiences differently than the 31-year-old Audrey Hepburn. Hepburn’s Holly is chic, sophisticated, and self-assured. This Holly is the one that fits the mold of Rabin’s original idea of the manic pixie dream girl. She confidently lets herself in through the window of her sensitive writer neighbor, she assuredly presents him with a different worldview than the one he’s known, and she coaxes him into new adventurous experiences, before ultimately settling down with him for a happily ever after. In the novella, not only do they not wind up together, but much of the point of the story is that, despite her numerous messy shortcomings, Holly remains fiercely, maybe pathologically, independent, despite the many efforts of the men in her life to put her into particular boxes or social cages. The very framing device of the novella is that Holly’s story is explicitly told through the male gaze. The character that Mickey Rooney plays in the film is actually important to the novella, because Holly’s upstairs neighbor, I.Y. Yunioshi, is a photographer who regularly travels internationally on assignment, and it’s a photograph that he takes that sparks the narrator to tell the story. Yunioshi, while traveling in Africa, is shown a small carved idol of a woman’s head that looks so much like his former neighbor, Miss Golightly, that he takes a picture of it, and sends it back to a barkeep in NY that shows it to our narrator. So, at this point, everything in the story we’re about to read has already happened, and Holly is long gone. In the novella, this isn’t the love story the film makes it out to be, but rather a story about a barkeep and unnamed writer hung up on the literal graven image of a woman they loved, who left them behind on her way to bigger and better things. For all the strengths of the original film, it’s themes and ideas like these that I would love to see a new film explore. 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.