EPISODE 320: THE GOOD PLACE?
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Most of TV has gone into hibernation, but Queer Eye is back and Dietland looks pretty darn interesting. Chris Pine is somehow alive in Wonder Woman 2 despite being killed in Wonder Woman 1, but now wears a track suit in 1980s Hollywood so all is forgiven.
14 year old Stranger Things actress Millie Bobby Brown and Last Jedi star Kelly Marie Tran have both left social media after trolls would not stopping be awful to them, and I'm pretty sure Justin Trudeau wishes he could do the same; Drake apparently now lives at center court of the Air Canada Center, the US is housing thousands of immigrant children separated from their parents in an old Walmart, the West Coast province of the Jesuits did their ordinations last week at a small diocesan parish on the border (and it was pretty great), and I'm writing all this rather than checking my email because I'm afraid to see whether the guy I want to write a biopic about has written back to tell me yes or no.
As The Baker's Wife sings during Into the Woods, "This is ridiculous, what am I doing here, I'm in the wrong story."
I feel you, sister.
++
You know those great Vulture or Vanity Fair pop culture stories where they take some movie from long ago that no one liked and convince you that it was actually amazing and incredibly relevant and how did you miss it?
The other day my iTunes shuffled stumbled across “He Needs Me” from the 1980 movie Popeye – Robin Williams’ first movie, Shelley Duvall’s follow up to The Shining. And I thought hey, what a perfect contender. Wonder how that holds up.
Turns out, really not so good. It’s one of the only movies I can think of where the action sequences actually slow the movie down. There’s a song called “Everything is Food” that is impossible to get out of your head and also makes no sense. Seriously, I don't care how omni your vore is, not everything is food.
And the film’s big finish involves an undersea fight with what is clearly a rubber squid. You might think, hey, it’s 1980, go easy Spielberg; but Jaws came out five years earlier, had tons of mechanical shark problems and yet was still way more effective. And The Empire Strikes Back came out the same year as Popeye and cost $2 million less.
Popeye, Lord Vader Finds Your Lack of Proper Special Effects Disturbing.
The island set of Sweethaven (constructed on the shores of Malta) took seven months to build, and then the cast and crew were stuck there nine months, mostly getting high and enduring near-constant rain – a real problem when your film has only one moment in the entire script where it's supposed to be raining.
There’s a great online oral history of the film which reads like life with a traveling circus, with the twist that everyone is slowly going crazy. Think the animated version of the set of Apocalypse Now.
More than anything, though, it seems like director Robert Altman (who had already directed classic films M*A*S*H* and Nashville and would later do the great The Player, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park) just didn’t really know what movie he was trying to make. It's not entirely his fault, either: whereas a movie like The Flintstones went for straight-up buffoonery – you can almost hear the producer reading a draft of the script and shouting “It’s a cartoon, not Shakespeare!” – Popeye has at its center not the expected spinach-dosing hijinks but the story of a shy man with a speech impediment who is all alone and searching for the father than abandoned him.
Seriously, I know it sounds crazy, but Popeye is a really poignant story, and Williams absolutely embodies vulnerable, broken heart. (It's a film worth watching just to see Williams so totally abandon his raunchy, transgressive patter. It really is one of his best performances.)
I know, there's nothing in this or any image from the movie that backs up my claim.
(Seriously, that hair...) But really, he's great.
Everything good in the movie, really -- starting with the gorgeous, tender songs from composer Harry Nilsson; I dare you to listen to this lullaby-letter that Popeye sing-writes to Sweetpea and not feel things – points towards forgetting the cartoon entirely and just make the film about this lonely guy finally finding a home and family.
But instead that’s just the first half, and what follows is live-action cartoon gobbledygook. The movie ends with Popeye dancing on the water singing “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man”, everything human and fragile about him now completely erased in favor of Hollywood schlock that makes you wonder if you're dead and being punished.
The movie actually made money; in fact it was the 12th highest grossing movie of 1980. But the studio hated it and told everyone it was a failure and it was hung around Altman’s neck for years. Williams used to kid that if you played the movie backwards it had a happy ending. (The movie begins with Popeye rowing into town, so...)
But he also said he loved it, and you can see it on every frame. It really is one of his best and most disciplined performances.
++
There is a part of me that thinks for all its flaws the movie has some relevance. Check out the opening number, in which the town of Sweethaven comes to life and sings their national anthem while Popeye rows in.
Here’s that first verse:
Sweet, Sweethaven./God must love us.
We, the people/of Sweethaven.
Hoo-ray, hoo-ray, Sweethaven.
Flags are waving.
Swept people from the sea/Safe from democracy.
Sweeter than a melon tree/Put here for you and me.
Sweethaven.
It’s a beautiful song, the instrumentation driving, militaryesque, definitely anthemic. The voices sing confidently as they depict their home as a God-chosen land of plenty.
But then, as Popeye comes into town, we discover that even though no one here came by choice -- “God must have landed here/Why else would he strand us here” -- these people have nothing but fines and closed doors to offer strangers. It's weird, actually; they're all so very likable, and yet they treat Popeye like wet garbage.
Meanwhile they allow themselves to live under the thumb of a hairy, glowering bully who speaks almost entirely in growls and grunts, literally rips apart the Oyl family home after Olive jilts him, and oversees measures that keep the people in almost total poverty.
Once Sweetpea is abducted/taken-from-his-immigrant-parent/guardian-by-the-government-bully, yeah-this-movie-may-have-something-to-say-to-today, the movie completely loses track of its social commentary in favor of Hey, Fighting! And with Musc-les!
But for that first hour, as Popeye is ignored, mocked for his speech patterns, attacked and then shunned again by a community who keeps singing how God loves them under the banner of a flag a lot like our own, it's pretty hard not to squirm in your chair.
Seems like kind of a good thing.
++
The Incredibles 2 came out this week, and Vulture did a great interview with director Brad Bird about the insanity of the film's making – it had to be finished an entire year faster than planned after Toy Story 4 got delayed; what it’s like to deal with studio execs: “What the studio [executives] can be if they’re not careful is the person next to you going, “AHHHH! AHHHH! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? TURN LEFT! NO, THE OTHER LEFT!” And it doesn’t help. It’s never gonna help us get there.”
And he had this great reflection on Hollywood’s general valuation of sadness over optimism:
The unhipness of optimism! You know, I always noticed that in art school, that grief was considered more profound than happiness. But why? Break it down into something like acting: Comedy is super hard to do well, and yet every year, it’s dismissed by the Oscars. A great comedy like The Big Lebowski will never win Best Picture, you know? If it happens, it’s a fluke, once in a billion years … but if you’re playing an alcoholic with a harelip and a limp and financial problems, have we got an award for you! I just reject that notion that grief is more profound than joy.
Once again:
++
Saw Pope Francis: A Man of His Words this week. I have this feeling as much as people love the Pope probably almost no one has gone to see this movie. Because documentary. And no sex or violence.
But if you get a chance, you should check it out. The director Wim Wenders had this really great idea to have Francis speak directly into the camera at times. Which doesn't sound like that big a deal, but actually it has a huge impact. You feel like you're seeing so much more of who he is, like you got a backstage pass after the show and you're in his dressing room and you're kind of worried, geez, never meet your heroes and all that, and instead he's actually somehow even more interesting with his skull cap off and his collar unbuttoned.
It's still playing in some theaters. You can preorder it on Amazon, too.
(He says at one point, the smile "is the flower of the soul."
Also, the artist is "an apostle of beauty who helps other people live."
This guy... you know?)
++
You know, what if Popeye is actually a story about a bunch of people in Purgatory?
Oh, sorry, have we moved on? It's just, how is it they all could have been stranded on that island? Were they all on the same ship? But then how is it they've been here so long they consider themselves a nation?
And where did Popeye even come from? At the start of the film he's rowing to shore in the midst of a storm in this little rowboat, the kind of thing you would use to come ashore from a bigger ship you feared would run aground. But there is no bigger ship.
And a lot of people in this town seems to be caught in a sort of Purgatory-like pattern. Wimpy has a hunger for hamburgers that never gets quenched (which is actually kind of terrifying). Olive is incapable of saying and pursuing what she actually wants. ("He Needs Me" is a really interesting song to watch; I remembered it as her singing of her love to Popeye, but in fact as she's singing she's kind of doing this seductive dance trying to get him to notice and express his love for her. Like she thinks her words, her feelings would not be enough. She needs him to be the one who acts.)
There's a background guy who always seems to need to hide when someone looks his way, and another who cannot pick up his hat. No matter what he tries, he keeps kicking it. Olive's dad is always demanding an apology. And again, they're all living in fear of a monster person and a weird, unexplained tax collector who demands payment for everything from arriving in town to eating.
These are all classic Purgatory images -- people caught in cycles they need to break, with devil-figures who are keeping a good part of the awful going. It's interesting, too, often the Purgatory story move is that we can't save ourselves, that's who got us into trouble in the first place. We need one another. (Think: Lost, or The Great Divorce.)
But Popeye instead has the insight that society is just as flawed as we are, that in fact it can serve to nourish our isolation and hatefulness.
So rather than We're Each Saved Only When We're All Saved, here the work is actually the result of a Savior. Every person is freed on account of the one person who refuses to be worn down by others' callousness or his own experience of abandonment. Life gets better not because we get better but because this one guy is good.
Whoa. I feel like I'm really close to arguing that Spinach is Eucharist. I should stop.
(Popeye, available on Amazon for just $6.)
++
Lots of pots bubbling on the writing front (and maybe one going cold -- really dragging my feet on checking that email...). I had the chance to write about those ordinations the West Coast Jesuits did at the border. It was a really wonderful experience; the parish was really lovely about having all these strange loud Jesuits come clobbering through, and the young Jesuits who were getting ordained had some very thoughtful things to say about how they imagined the ceremony there.
Also spent an afternoon in Tijuana for America, where I got ripped off by a taxi driver, had a border patrol agent explain how the current administration's plans for expanding border forces is a total disaster, because all the young people they hire quit as soon as they discover what a difficult and stressful job it is; and I met a great priest who runs a shelter for migrants and the deported.
(Crazy but true: some of the Mexican deportees he's dealing with have been in the U.S. for so long, they actually need Spanish classes. But not to worry, everything totally makes sense and is just fine.)
++ LINKS ++
Haven't had a lot of time to catch up on reading this week, so consider these links aspirational.
Stephanie Rosenbloom in the New York Times writes on the joys of Eating Alone in Paris.
Daniel Duane in California Sunday Magazine on Tijuana, City of Exiles. (I asked a bunch of people in Tijuana what they thought about having all these migrants coming from the south and deportees from the north, was it getting residents upset. Every single one of them gave me the same puzzled stare and explained, Tijuana is not like that. This is a city of migrants.)
Josef Adalian gives an inside-look at Netflix, which you might have read is buying all the show runners and wants to make even more shows than it is now, even though that is too many and please stop.
And lastly, have you found yourself wishing your computer could randomly assign the ingredients to your nachos? This is the day you have longed for.
(Actually, found one more thing. Did you ever see Punch Drunk Love? It was Adam Sandler's first serious role, and it's this little gem about a guy with some serious emotional issues who falls in love. (What's not to like?)
Near the end of the movie, Sandler's character goes to Hawaii to see the girl he's in love with, and it's kind of stalker-y and crazy and it doesn't seem like it'll end well. But then he finds her, and there's this moment...Hollywood at its absolute best.
Randomly, the whole sequence is set to Olive Oyl singing "He Needs Me".)
Amy Poehler was one of forty funny people asked by The Hollywood Reporter to fill out a "Hey, life is crazy but at least we can laugh" type survey. Here's what she had to say:
My most memorable heckler... "Who cares? The whole world is on fire."
Dream product endorsement "A giant whale just died in Thailand after eating 80 plastic bags."
Guilty pleasure "Let's not forget over 4,600 people have died in Puerto Rico."
I'm funny because... "I don't even know anymore."
If I didn't work in comedy... "I would never leave my house."
College comedy audiences are… "Kids that are afraid they will be shot in their own schools. What has happened to us?"
Sitcom you'd reboot? "Mr. Rogers. I miss him. We need him."
The funniest thing about the Trump administration is… "Are you kidding me?"
America 2018, you are not any of the good things you said you wanted to be. Stand up and take your crazy someplace else.
More life in front of us. Take the time you need, feed your soul, and let's look out for one another.
Here we go.