Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart, Wyatt Cenac, and John Oliver became Muppets for a segment. They were discussing Mitt Romney’s surprise announcement that he would talk about one way in which he would cut the federal budget: defund PBS. (It’s funny how concerned conservatives get about the smallest budget items when they just happen to be things they want to kill anyway.)
It was very funny. However, there was a problem.
Go ahead; I want to know if you see it:
Pretty obvious, right?
Okay, it’s not! I’m a pedant and a puppeteer. And the one thing that drives me crazy is getting my puppets to speak like regular people. And the critical element to this is moving the puppet’s jaw down rather than its head up. Give it a try with your own head: try to talk by moving your head back rather than moving your jaw down. It doesn’t work, does it?
Once you notice this, watching bad puppetry will drive you crazy! Well, maybe not. But go back and look at the video. Two of those puppets are not like the other. Can you spot it? It’s John Oliver.
Why is this? It probably isn’t that Stewart and Cenac are gifted puppeteers. More likely, it is that the John Oliver puppet isn’t well made. This is one of the most annoying aspects of being an amateur puppeteer: I can’t afford good puppets and I can’t make any puppets. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love George, who is pictured above.
The last time I watched The Magnificent Ambersons was about 17 years ago. If you don’t know what to expect, it can be a very upsetting film. But when I watched it today, it was mostly a delight.
When I first watched it, the film was going along swimmingly. And then the last scene — The last shot! — slapped me in the face. There should have been a warning card, “This film finished by an entirely different crew with no budget.” It is a terrible thing.
On this viewing, I noticed much more that bothered me. Yet the experience was far better. The third act itself is somewhat jarring. Whereas the first two acts are tightly scripted and produced, the third is episodic. The grand thematic arc that guided the earlier parts of the film breaks down. It seems as though the rest of the film was edited so as to rush to the denouement.
But those first two acts are well worth the time. In fact, they are probably the best thing Welles ever did. What’s most striking — although we see this in most other Welles films — is the perfect combination of staging, choreography, and camera work to tell a complex story with ease.
One scene is especially thrilling. Eugene has come to see the dying Isabel. George says he can’t see her. He pushes past George on his way to the stairs. Just then Fanny comes down the stairs telling him that George isn’t just being a jerk, it would be a bad time. Eugene begins to think better of the visit. Then we see Uncle Jack upstairs tell him to come back later. This is all done in 40 seconds with a single shot.
One thing that is really interesting about The Magnificent Ambersons is how it shows what a varied set of tools that Welles used. I tend to think of him as an aggressive editor. But this isn’t really the case. I think he depended upon a lot more editing in his later films because of the way he had to make them. Here we have scenes that are highly cut and others with fluid camera work, and still others with a static shot. Whatever works.
Welles is also great at not boring the audience. For example, there is no deathbed scene. Instead, we get Fanny walking up to George and hugging him. “George!” she says. “She loved you. She loved you.” Nuff said? Absolutely.
The Magnificent Ambersons stands as the ultimate indictment of our culture where commerce always trumps art. Even worse, it speaks to our basest nature where group politics gleefully destroy creative work in the name of sticking it to “them.” Nonetheless, all the great artists who worked on this film cannot be denied. The Magnificent Ambersons is still a priceless gem — if badly damaged.
I was at the movies yesterday watching The Expendables 2, and I thought, “All these guys are rich and famous and they use the power they have to make pernicious, evil myths like this.” It is impossible for me to relate just how much I hated this movie. It was bad on every level. Watching all these aging action stars smirk and mug for the camera was hard. The repeated attempts at humor were pathetic. Arnold Schwarzenegger says “I’ll be back” a few times during the film. The “payoff” comes when Bruce Willis is talking to Schwarzenegger. Arnold says, “I’ll be back.” Willis responds, “You’re always back. This time, I’ll be back.” Willis leaves and Schwarzenegger says, “Yippee-ki-yay.” It is painful.
The movie starts with scenes designed to show that the newest member of the team is some kind of badass. And so we know that either he will turn out to be a villain or he will die. When he tells Stallone that he’s going to quit after this next job, we know that it is the latter. But here’s the thing: this character—Billy—used to be in the army. And so, much is made of this in the way that much is done to support the troops by putting a yellow ribbon on the back of your SUV. It’s a concession to those who might say, “Shouldn’t securing nuclear materials be the responsibility of the military rather than a group of misfit vigilantes?”
Indeed, after Jean Vilain (Oh, that’s so clever!) steals the map to where weapons grade Plutonium are stored and kills Billy, Stallone seems far more concerned about avenging Billy’s death than stopping five tons of Plutonium going on the market. (Ridiculously, Vilain claims they will get $4 million per kg. I’m not up on the market in illegal Plutonium, but I tend to think it would be more expensive than that.) This sets up the stupidest climax I have ever witnessed. Vilain is out of bullets, so instead of just killing him, Stallone puts down his guns so they can beat the shit out of each other before the bad guy is killed. (Spoiler! You thought there was a good chance Stallone would die, right?)
In the first five minutes of this film, our heroes kill 100s if not 1000s of people who made the mistake of being in the employ of the bad guys. It is an evil sensibility that modern action movies take for granted. I have made my peace with racism in otherwise great action movies from the past like Gunga Din. At least in those films, stereotyped characters actually are trying to kill our heroes. Today, the assumption seems to be that they are better off dead. Given what we know about modern conscripts, I cannot see them as anything but victims. When the audience cheers their annihilation, I am sickened.
One of my long standing complaints about movie villains is that they treat their henchmen poorly. If you treat your friends as bad as you treat your enemies, you will soon have no friends. We get a similar dynamic in this movie. Vilain is conscripting men from the villages to dig down to where the Plutonium is stored. But instead of just paying them and letting them go home, the villains kill one man who is exhausted and then bury alive all the men after they get the Plutonium. There is no reason to do this unless you happen to think that villains don’t have reasons for doing things.
These workers greatly out number the villains. But they do nothing. They just watch themselves die and continue working. They don’t act the way real human beings do. They don’t rise up. They don’t even demur. What they are doing is unclear. It seems the writer thought they intrinsically knew that our heroes were on the way to save them.
Action movies almost always elevate men to the status of Gods. But in The Expendables 2 they do it largely by reducing regular men to nothing more than props. And this is what these stars are doing: using their power to tell the workers of the world that they are nothing more than garbage and shouldn’t we all be thankful we have them to save us from the futility of our lives.
Afterword
There was one scene that was funny. Stallone is talking face to face with Willis. And they are the same height! Don’t believe what they say on IMDB. Stallone is about 5’6″. Willis is about 6′. Stallone must have been standing on a box. I bring this up only to show that these men are well aware of the mythic nature of their work. So when they create evil myths like The Expendables 2, they know what they are doing. And that makes them evil.
Update (21 November 2015 10:48 pm)
It turns out that the going price for legal Plutonium is about $4 million per kilogram. The price on the black market, would of course, be vastly more.
There are a lot of really creepy lines from films that people like to quote, apparently not realizing quite what they mean.
I was thinking about the line “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” from Apocalypse Now. Most people only think of that line, and so the line indicates a bizarre insanity. But I always remember the line as this: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning; it smells like victory.” That means something rather different and more disturbing. Here is the scene:
As you can see, I remember the scene incorrectly. Here is the whole speech:
I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn’t find one of ’em, not one stinking dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smells like victory. Someday this war’s gonna end…
The final line — “Someday this war’s gonna end” — makes it even more disturbing. This is not only an insane man; he equates torturing people to death with his own success; and this is not out of necessity — he is concerned it will no longer be possible to experience “victory.”
I’m the Only One Here
A similar thing goes on with Taxi Driver. Everyone remembers the line, “Are you talking to me?” I’ve never really understood why that line is so popular. I guess people like the badass aspect of it. But when I saw Taxi Driver in the theater, that was not how I experienced the scene, and I don’t think that is how the film was meant to be experienced. To me it all about isolation and a mind driven crazy by it:
“Well I’m the only one here.”
The scene is creepy, to say the least — the creepiest scene in a very creepy movie. What is most creepy of all, is that a lot of people look at Travis Bickle as a hero. In their way, I think they too are the only ones there. But by focusing on the first line, they fool themselves into thinking that Bickle — and by extension themselves — is doing something.
Similarly, I have known more than a few people who idealize Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore. By remembering only part of what he says, they can think he’s cool, because a little crazy is cool. They can suppress the full understanding that this is a man who will be a serial killer as soon as he doesn’t have a war to occupy him.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe all these people understand Bickle and Kilgore all too well. For every James Eagan Holmes, there are probably thousands — maybe even millions — who simply dream. And maybe it is best they have their Bickles and Kilgores to occupy them.
As for me, I will continue to be creeped out by these creepy speeches from creepy characters in all their especially creepy completeness.
I just finished reading two translations of the first part of Don Quixote and I’ve begun to see it in a whole new way, at least in terms of theatrical production. Cervantes does something that was greatly improved upon by later writers: he brings a number of subplots together with the main plot. It isn’t clear that he knows that he’s doing this, because he doesn’t make good use of it.
Probably the most surprising thing he does is to reintroduce of the 15 year old lad from Chapter 4. When we first see him, his master is whipping him. Don Quixote, that righter of wrongs, makes the lad’s situation even worse. And Don Quixote, lost in his dream world, rides off thinking he has done a great deed.
Here the boy comes back and explains all that happened. Don Quixote wants to right this further wrong, the boy stops him. He explains that Don Quixote only makes bad situations even worse and that the best thing is to stay the hell out of other people’s business. This is the only time in the whole novel that Don Quixote seriously considers that he is not right.
These last chapters also set right the story of Cardenio, Lucinda, and Ferdinand. This involves Ferdinand’s first love, Dorothea, who he abandoned. They leave as two couples: Cardenio with Lucinda and Ferdinand with Dorothea. The evil Ferdinand gets no punishment for his actions, probably because he is of noble birth who are not only above the law but beyond moral expectations.
There is also yet another couple of young lovers who get together, but why they are thrown in the book is not clear. Gines de Pasamonte shows up long enough to return Sancho’s sometimes stolen sometimes not donkey. The barber whose basin Don Quixote stole is bought off. And the innkeepers are paid for Don Quixote’s lodgings and all the destruction he has caused.
The most important tying up is done with Don Quixote’s friends the priest and barber—but not the barber who lost his basin (this is very confusing when they are together in the story). They bring him home where he is cared for by his niece and housekeeper. The plot is left there, but Cervantes writes that he has heard of further adventures, but hasn’t been able to get his hands on them. So the book ends with as shameful a lead in to a sequel as the new Spider-Man film.
The main thing about all of this is that if plotted correctly, all of these story threads could come together to great comedic effect. The story does not have to be a sequence of adventures—it can have real dramatic momentum.
If you’re like me (And who isn’t?) you really liked the phrase “a pair of pliers and a blowtorch” in Pulp Fiction. It isn’t that I’m into torture; it is just that it’s a great phrase, “I’m gonna call up a couple hard pipe-hitting niggas to go to work on the homes here with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch.” This video is queued to the exact right place so go ahead and click play; I’ll rejoin you in about 15 seconds.
After Reservoir Dogs was all the rage, many people pointed out that Quentin Tarantino had lifted many ideas from other films. I suppose that he thought he was creating an homage to his predecessors, and I’m inclined to agree. But it is still a little bothersome when the things you most like in his movies are all lifted verbatim from others.
Charley Varrick
And that brings us back to, “A pair of pliers and a blowtorch.” About a year after seeing Pulp Fiction, I was watching TV late one night and Charley Varrick came on. It is about a bank robbery that goes wrong for unusual reasons and the consequences. And it stars Walter Matthau in an unusual kind of star role. Two-thirds into the film, we get this very short scene:
That’s John Vernon delivering the line, “You know what kind of people they are. They’re gonna strip you naked and go to work on you with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch.” Truthfully, I don’t know if the line is original to this movie; it may have been a common turn of phrase. The one thing I do know is that Tarantino got it from this film. Just watch the film; it is his kind of movie.
If you haven’t see Charley Varrick, I recommend it. It is very good.
I spent yesterday with my brother, and as usual, we went to see a movie I would never watch if I were by my self. Although I hate films like The Amazing Spider-Man, it is good to keep up on what Hollywood is capable of doing. And what they are capable of doing is striking another blow against the art of storytelling.
James Vanderbilt—with the help of Alvin Sargent, who has fallen mightily over the years—has the dubious distinction of creating a script that has no emotional core. The story arc is given by the material: nerd gets super powers, fights crime until super villain appears, destroys super villain. Clearly, you can weave just about any story in there. The biggest cliche is to have a love interest who is threatened in the third act by the super villain. Check! The second biggest cliche is to have the super villain somehow involved in the back story death of a hero’s loved one. Check! The third biggest cliche is the by-the-book cop who doesn’t understand our vigilante hero, but who eventually sees the light. But these are not necessarily bad things. The problem is that in The Amazing Spider-Man these elements are thrown on the story spine carelessly, as though the writers felt they had to but didn’t want to.
The girlfriend (smart young scientists dressed in fuck-me boots) is in peril and then the peril disappears without any help from the hero. The super villain is implicated in the death of Peter Parker’s parents, but only vaguely and it doesn’t matter to the plot of this movie. The only reason the by-the-book cop interacts with the hero is that he happens to be the father of the girlfriend.
The film meanders from action sequence to talk sequence. It is like Laurie Anderson’s song Big Science, but worse, “I think we should put some mountains here. Otherwise, what are the characters going to fall off of?” Here it is, “I think we should put Boots Girl here. Otherwise, what is the hero going to kiss?” But even in this endeavor, the film disappoints. For example, Parker starts up a relationship with the Boots Girl. Then Parker searches for the man who killed his uncle, and the action scenes go on and on until we forget all about the girl. But that’s all right! Just throw Boots Girl back in the plot. She is like a wave equation: when she’s on the screen, Parker is in love; when she’s not, she doesn’t even exist.
The Amazing Spider-Man also features an interminable epilogue, as if two hours of random shit wasn’t long enough. The best advice I’ve ever read about screenwriting (but it applies to all narratives) comes from William Goldman. He suggests the best way to resolve your plot is to do it as quickly as possible. This is advice that is seldom used in modern movie making. The reason is simple: there is no tension that needs to be resolved. This is film making by the numbers, and the third act is about creating 30 minutes of action, not about resolving anything because there is nothing to resolve. There is the Good Guy and there is the Bad Guy. The Good Guy will win because that is the genre. There are no motivations for the hero other than being good.
Too bad screenwriters don’t have this motivation.
Afterword
There is far more to like Spider-Man than in many comic book heroes. In particular, I like Peter Parker’s aunt and uncle. His aunt even has a union job! Imagine that. Of course, the writers find it necessary to place Parker and Boot Girl in a high tech lab. And Boot Girl’s cop father has an apartment that looks like it would cost upwards of $10,000 per month. But mostly the film itself is grounded in the very middle class home of Peter Parker. Much the same thing can be said of Daredevil, which has a working class core to it, even if Matt Murdock’s home is a bit too high tech.
My biggest philosophical problem with the superhero genre is its romanticism. (It is funny that Ayn Rand novels like Atlas Shrugged are fundamentally the same, but somehow people think of them as serious.) The undercurrent of all these stories is that the government is impotent and we need a superhero to save us. If this smacks of more than a little fascism, it should. But the absurdity outs itself. It is never satisfying to have the heroes take on criminals as we find them; super villains must be manufactured. It is back to the Laurie Anderson quote. But in the end, these kinds of costume clad superheroes are not nearly the threat to social cohesion as plain clothes heroes like Dirty Harry.
Before getting to the burning question of whether Bugs Bunny is a rabbit or a hare, let’s take a step back and take a look at this colorful character.
A Brief History of Bugs Bunny
On 30 April, all the way back in 1938, Bugs’ Bunny was born. Well, sorta.
Note that I used an apostrophe after what has become his first name. It is in reference to the director of the first cartoon to feature the character, Ben Hardaway, whose nickname was Bugs. Thus, animators started referring to the nameless character as “Bugs’ bunny” (and later “Bugs’s bunny”) — not a name, a description. But the name stuck, even if the apostrophe didn’t.
The cartoon in question is Porky’s Hare Hunt. But the bunny in that film is not much like the Bugs Bunny we have grown to love.
For one thing, he sounds like Woody Woodpecker — literally. In 1940, Mel Blanc moved the voice from the one character to the other.
Also, this early character doesn’t have the intellectual sophistication that he will eventually develop. (Although he’s still way smarter than Porky Pig and most humans I know.) He’s mostly just a spaz, like Daffy Duck in his early versions. (He was first introduced in the similarly titled, Porky’s Duck Hunt.)
In addition to this, Bugs doesn’t look the same. He’s quite short — again, like the early Daffy Duck. And he is all one color. But there is a continuity. It’s kind of like the ship of Theseus: if all parts of a ship are gradually replaced, is it still the same ship? There isn’t one answer to that; it is just a way of thinking about what is is.
But in the case of Bugs Bunny, I think we can say that this little Woody Woodpecker laughing bunny is indeed a form of the iconic character.
This is not the consensus view, however.
Porky’s Hare Hunt was from the Looney Tunes series, and Bugs Bunny really is a Merrie Melodies character. Thus, most people consider the first appearance to be in the 27 July 1940 film A Wild Hare:
And he evolved from there. Frankly, I believe at some point he crossed a line and became uninteresting. It’s hard to set a precise moment, because there is no such moment. But it was when Warner Bros Cartoons went postmodern. That’s when there was Bugs Bunny the actor and Bugs Bunny the part he played.
Not that good postmodern cartoons weren’t made. Duck Amuck is one of the best things Warner Bros Cartoons ever did.
It’s more that Bugs Bunny became so sophisticated and so in control that he lost his zany. But there’s a lot more great Bugs Bunny than meh.
Is This a Question Worth Asking?
As far as I know, I was the first person on the internet to ask and fully answer the question, “Is Bugs Bunny a rabbit or a hare”? People go their whole lives without asking the really important questions.
It was a question that had burned in my mind since I was a child. Rabbits and hares look similar, but they are very different animals.
But I was surprised that almost to a person, my friends found the “rabbit or hare” question absurd — just Frank being Frank. However, since I published this article back in 2012, it has been one of the most popular pages on this site of 8,000 pages.
Clearly: a lot of people had the same question.
And several years after this article was first published, a number of other people published similar articles. There’s even a video that deals with the issue, although in a roundabout way.
Bugs Bunny: Rabbit or Hare?
So let’s get to the question: is Warner Bros Cartoons’ most famous character a rabbit or a hare? The question must be answered!
Is a Bunny a Rabbit?
I know what you’re thinking: his name is Bugs Bunny, so he must be a rabbit. And yet, most of the cartoons have titles like Hare Brush and Fallin’ Hare and Bill of Hare.
What’s more, just look at the titles of the two films that people argue about being the first to feature Bugs Bunny: Porky’s Hare Hunt and A Wild Hare (both embedded above).
An Ill-Defined Term
And the truth is that “bunny” is an ill-defined term. But not because it isn’t defined as (generally a young) rabbit. Rather, because most people lump rabbits and hares together.
So the situation is far from clear.
A Little Biology: Rabbit vs Hare
Before we get into this, I should tell you a little bit about rabbits and hares.
Despite the fact that they look quite similar, they are, in fact, not just different species, but different Genera.
In fact, rabbits (and I always kind of knew this because you just can’t trust rabbits) are in 8 different Genera.
This depends on the exact kind of rabbit. Most Americans will know the rabbits in the Sylvilagus Genus, which includes the cottontail rabbit.
Hares are all in one genus: Lepus.
Rabbits have 44 chromosomes, while hares have 48. So they really are fundamentally different.
So rabbits and hares are only in the same family: Leporidae. So they are as related as humans are to gorillas — very related, but far from being the same.
Two cottontails (rabbit)
What’s In a Name?
Part of the problem is that five of the 32 types of hare are called jackrabbits. (Five different kinds of rabbits are called hares.)
This reminds me of all the confusion about the dormouse. The dormouse is not a mouse. In fact, they aren’t even the same Family; you have to go up to the Order (Rodentia), which they share.
When I was younger, I wondered why the jackrabbits I see everywhere here in Northern California seemed so different than domesticated rabbits. It is because they are only distantly related. And personally, I find hares much more interesting, even if I’m personally more like a rabbit.
Black-tailed Jackrabbit (hare)
What Does This All Have to Do With Bugs Bunny?
Perhaps the most obvious difference between hares and rabbits is how they are born. Hares are born with hair (Ha!) and are fairly independent. Rabbits are born blind and hairless.
Unfortunately, his does us no good in our search for the truth about Bugs Bunny, because no film survives from his early days. But all hope is not lost.
Because of the fragility of young rabbits, they are forced to live underground in burrows. And Bugs Bunny lives in a hole. This almost seems like a smoking gun. See this Pete Puma cartoon:
We have seen that Bugs lives in a hole in many other episodes. This does suggest that Bugs is a rabbit. It is about the only thing that does, however. And The Flintstones live in houses, not caves. The hole seems clearly designed to give Bugs Bunny a sense of place, and in later episodes a sense of his being human-like (note that neither hares nor rabbits easily outwit humans).
Bugs is gray, and hares tend to be grayish. Bugs has long ears, and hares have longer ears. Bugs is fast, and hares are very fast (jackrabbits can run up to 40 miles per hour). Bugs is quick witted, and so are hares — they have to be given they live out in the open. But by far, the most compelling evidence that Bugs Bunny is a hare is that hares do not live in groups — they are loners.
The argument for Shorty is perhaps better. For one thing, he looks like a rabbit. And he doesn’t speak English like hares normally do.
Conclusion: Is Bugs Bunny a Hare or a Rabbit?
In the end, I suppose we shouldn’t depend upon cartoons for our biology education. Bugs seems to be both a rabbit and a hare. But the evidence points more toward him being a hare.
What is clear is that the crew at Merrie Melodies saw hares and rabbits as interchangeable. Given that Warner Bros Cartoons was based in Los Angeles, California, the main experience of the people working there was likely the jackrabbit — a hare that is called a rabbit.
And obviously, given that Bugs Bunny was first paired with Elmer Fudd, and Elmer Fudd was first paired with the proto-Bugs Bunny (Elmer’s Candid Camera), of course they would use “rabbit” to make fun of Fudd’s speech impediment (it was 1940).
I think Bugs Bunny looks and acts more like a hare than a rabbit. But what he really looks and acts like is a cartoon character. One of the very best.
Now all I have to do is get the scoop on that Trix “rabbit.”
Image of Bugs Bunny taken from Wikipedia and licensed under Fair Use. The wildlife images are both in the public domain via pxhere and PIXNIO.
I just read Jerzy Kosinski’s novella Being There. Its studied deepness is strangely compelling.
The book is very short: 140 pages with loads of white space. I’m a slow reader, but I think it took me less time to read it than it had taken to watch the filmed version.
The film is very true to the novella. At least it is in terms of plot. The film hits the satire harder than the book. And the book is, of course, much more clear because the reader is inside Chance’s head.
The only important plot difference is that the ending in the book makes much more sense. The movie ends like this:
In a conversation with karl, I had said that I liked vague endings (which is true) and I gave Being There as an example (it isn’t). The ending of the film now strikes me as tacked on as though the producers were trying to tie down the ending: see, he’s Jesus. Or some other hero who will save us all. Chance is anything but.
The book ends much more satisfyingly. Chance is at a high toned party:
He crossed the hall. Chilled air streamed in through an open window. Chance pushed the heavy glass door open and stepped out into the garden. Taut branches laden with fresh shoots, slender stems with tiny sprouting buds shot upward. The garden lay calm, still sunk in repose. Wisps of clouds floated by and left the moon polished. Now and then, boughs rustled and gently shook off their drops of water. A breeze fell upon the foliage and nestled under the cover of its moist leaves. Not a thought lifted itself from Chance’s brain. Peace filled his chest.
It wasn’t until I read this paragraph that I understood what the title Being There meant—maybe because I’m slow. Chance is the only one in the novella who is operating always in the present tense. Most of the book is spent with him problem solving: doing what must be done to keep the meals, lodging, and TV going. Unlike in the movie, he has no interest in being a gardener; that was just what he used to do for a living. Now, people are asking him questions about any number of complex issues and he answers as best he can with the only knowledge he has: gardening and TV watching.
There is one scene that is in the movie, but isn’t particularly important. A publisher asks Chance to write a book. Chance tells him that he can’t write. He goes further and tells him that he can’t even read. The publisher, like everyone else in the film, hears metaphor in everything Chance says. That’s good satire, but it has much greater meaning in the book. Chance specifically does not admit to being illiterate to his benefactors, the Rands, because he remembers that illiterate people on TV are looked down upon. He has no problem offering this information to the publisher because the publisher has no effect on securing his living.
Another problem with the film is the role of Dr. Robert Allenby. He is a very minor character in the book. In the film, he is the only person who figures out that Chance is just a gardener. In the book, no one figures it out. In fact, no one can figure it out. Chance is like a cube that sneaks into flatland. Everyone is too busy making sense of a chaotic world; they can’t even see this chaotic world now, if they ever could.
When I first watched the film as a kid, I wondered if Chance would really go on to be president. And I wondered about the fact that he has no documentation and what this would do to his chances. No such thoughts occur when reading the book. It is clear very early on that unless he is kicked out of the Rand house, he will continue to eat his meals and watch TV. And that’s it. He did go on TV once, but that seems to be because he wanted to see what happened to his body and if he would split into two people: the normal person and the TV person. After that, many people want him on TV but he says no to them all.
There are other aspects of the novella, of course. There is our lionization of TV celebrities. There is our tendency to talk around each other. There is our admiration of the unknown. But mostly, the book works because it distills our shared desires. At heart, we are all Chance, but in practice, we are everybody else.
I tried to upload a video from Arrested Development to You Tube. It was 22.8 seconds long and it was bookmarked between a screen that read, “Sometimes satire just makes things worse.” And “Now millions of ‘hip’ Americans think Parliament has 3 houses. Maybe it’s because Congress has three houses.”
The scene I took was from the episode “The Ocean Walker.” In it, Michael asks Rita, who is mentally challenged, how many houses are in the British Parliament. She replies, “Seven!” And Michael says, “That does sound about right.” Meanwhile, the narrator claims that the number is three. When I first saw this episode, I didn’t get the joke. Instead, I thought, “Wow, I’m stupid! I thought there were only two.” So I looked it up, and sure enough, I am stupid—not because I was wrong but because I’m so gullible; I’ll believe anything Ron Howard says.
It occurs to me that many people watching the show went away thinking that the British Parliament has three houses. Not only did the narrator say it twice, George Michael, the most earnest character ever created, says it as well.
But that 22.8 seconds of Arrested Development violated Fox’s copyright claim and the video was blocked instantly. (Ever notice how when uploading videos to YouTube, most of the time is spent “analyzing”? I believe that is just checking the video against such claims.) I am certain that what I’ve created falls under fair use. It is an outrage that such a tiny section of video is automatically discounted without thought by YouTube. What’s more, such a policy is bad for Arrested Development itself. Little snippets like this are nothing if not commercials.
So until I get a letter from Fox, the video is provided here. If I can figure out how to embed it directly here I will.
Update
I’ve filed a dispute claiming fair use. Our society is screwed up when the onus of fair use is on the user, but so be it. Temporarily, the video is on YouTube. I am not hopeful for my claim—not because it is invalid but because the copyright law is now so skewed that it is hopeless. I’m looking forward to copyright being expanded another 15 years for the sake of Disney.
For the time:
Update (7 June 2014 11:00 pm)
I should have done this update a long time ago. Fox agreed with my claim and it is up for good, I guess. You could help me a little. The video currently has 7 thumbs up and 6 thumbs down. All of those 6 thumbs down came at the beginning. I think this is because they thought I was criticizing the show, which I’m not. I think this is one of the most brilliant jokes ever. So you could give the video a thumbs up.
In my usual way of obsessing about things, I’ve been on a Charlie Kaufman jag. I just want to say a couple of quick things about Adaptation. It is a fun film, but I tend to think not great. But we’ll see.
Duality of the Artistic Personality
There seems to be some belief that Kaufman created the twin brother Donald Kaufman character so that he could express his concern about Hollywood at the same time he was lampooning it. This may come from a statement by Kaufman himself. As I always say, few people understand a piece of art as little as its author.
The characters are the two sides of the artistic personality. On the one side, you want to use your creativity to create something new and wonderful and meaningful. On the other, you want to use it to create cool genre crap. In other words, we all want to be Graham Greene.
In Adaptation, Kaufman uses these two sides of his personality to create two halves of a film: the first is artistic and insightful; the second is cool genre crap. And no one gets to blame him for slumming, because he didn’t do it; it was Donald—who, incidentally, he gave screenwriting credit to.
Not What Loves You
I thought this was just too wonderful:
Charlie: There was this time in high school. I was watching you out the library window. You were talking to Sarah Marsh.
Donald: Oh, God. I was so in love with her.
Charlie: I know. And you were flirting with her. And she was being really sweet to you.
Donald: I remember that.
Charlie: Then, when you walked away, she started making fun of you with Kim Canetti. And it was like they were laughing at me. You didn’t know at all? You seemed so happy.
Donald: I knew. I heard them.
Charlie: Well, how come you were so happy?
Donald: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn’t have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.
Charlie: But she thought you were pathetic.
Donald: That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That’s what I decided a long time ago.
I just watched The Sanctuary Sparrow, the second episode of the TV series based upon The Cadfael Chronicles, the Edith Pargeter novels about an unusual 12th century monk, Brother Cadfael, who solves murders and generally delights us by being more enlightened than his comrades.
I won’t go into the details of the plot, but if you are interested, Wikipedia provides a thorough description. What’s most interesting to me is the character named Iestyn—kind of the Welsh version of Justin. He is in love with Susana, the complex and sympathetic antagonist. In the end, she is killed (a fact the Wikipedia synopsis strangely neglects to mention). Iestyn cries over her body and says, “And I would have taken her barefoot in her shift.”[1] He is referring to the fact that she insisted upon having money before they married; he required no such thing.
Iestyn is in no way a bad man. In fact, his devotion to the wronged but angrily pro-active Susana strikes me as heroic. Of course, 12th century English mores do not allow anyone to publicly admit this. Iestyn is bad because he took Susana’s side, while Susana’s soulless father who cares only for gold is good. At the end of the episode, we don’t find out exactly what happens to him. Sheriff Hugh Beringar tells a young married couple, “He’ll not hang if my voice is heard.” And then Cadfael and he speculate about Iestyn’s future life:
Beringar: Does Iestyn really have a life before him—one worth living?
Cadfael: It will be a minor devotion. But yes, he’ll marry and breed yet.
Beringar: And forget her?
Cadfael: Have I said so? Time will ease his pain, but he’ll carry the wound of her love to his grave.
[1] In this context, a shift is probably an old dress.
[2] I recommend watching the Cadfael series. For those who will always regret the terrible film adaptation of Umberto Eco’s wonderful novel The Name of the Rose, Cadfael is a welcome salve.
Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart, Wyatt Cenac, and John Oliver became Muppets for a segment. They were discussing Mitt Romney’s surprise announcement that he would talk about one way in which he would cut the federal budget: defund PBS. (It’s funny how concerned conservatives get about the smallest budget items when they just happen to be things they want to kill anyway.)
I was at the movies yesterday watching The Expendables 2, and I thought, “All these guys are rich and famous and they use the power they have to make pernicious, evil myths like this.” It is impossible for me to relate just how much I hated this movie. It was bad on every level. Watching all these aging action stars smirk and mug for the camera was hard. The repeated attempts at humor were pathetic. Arnold Schwarzenegger says “I’ll be back” a few times during the film. The “payoff” comes when Bruce Willis is talking to Schwarzenegger. Arnold says, “I’ll be back.” Willis responds, “You’re always back. This time, I’ll be back.” Willis leaves and Schwarzenegger says, “Yippee-ki-yay.” It is painful.
I just finished reading two translations of the first part of Don Quixote and I’ve begun to see it in a whole new way, at least in terms of theatrical production. Cervantes does something that was greatly improved upon by later writers: he brings a number of subplots together with the main plot. It isn’t clear that he knows that he’s doing this, because he doesn’t make good use of it.
I spent yesterday with my brother, and as usual, we went to see a movie I would never watch if I were by my self. Although I hate films like The Amazing Spider-Man, it is good to keep up on what Hollywood is capable of doing. And what they are capable of doing is striking another blow against the art of storytelling.
Before getting to the burning question of whether Bugs Bunny is a rabbit or a hare, let’s take a step back and take a look at this colorful character.
