The Pnictogen Wing

in search of embarrassing memories, taking advantage of Dailymotion to watch the old 1963 Jerry Lewis Nutty Professor, at least as much as we can stand. chemistry representation!...sort of. at any rate it's a movie I remember liking from childhood TV, because if there's any one quality I've never possessed, it's good taste in entertainment. ~Chara

oh dear, this is really quite bad. I feel like I need to watch a Jacques Tati film immediately afterward to cleanse myself ~Chara

you know, I've never seen Les Vacances de M. Hulot but, curiously, I've read the book, some time in elementary school. I remember this cover, at least ~Chara

"...but we have learned, through chemistry—a ha ha ha—man can grow further with the aid of additional elements."

welp time to get out the adamantium, I suppose ~Chara

you modern-day chemists with all your HPLCs and GC/MSes and your electron spectroscopy and everything—can you compete with a test tube rack full of food colorings??

at some point, however, there was a transition—I'm guessing around the 1990s—when the stereotypical image of a scientist's laboratory no longer meant colored liquids and O-chem glassware but, like, someone in a white coat and latex gloves tapping on a computer, or maybe pipetting something with a dial-a-pipette ~Chara

so, there's this clever-ish subjective shot in Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor where (immediately after a horrific and inconclusive transformation sequence) he's evidently just got done getting himself a new suit and now he's on the way to a nightclub where the college kids all hang out, "The Purple Pit", and everyone he passes just stares wide-eyed at him, and because it's a subjective shot we can't see what they see, but then finally there's a dramatic reveal of Prof. Kelp's new look and it's...Jerry Lewis in trans colors, and a gallon of Brilliantine in his hair. meet "Buddy Love", who is suspiciously reminiscent of Dean Martin. ~Chara

(EDIT: Edith Head did the wardrobe for this movie, no wonder it's so striking)

in search of embarrassing memories, taking advantage of Dailymotion to watch the old 1963 Jerry Lewis Nutty Professor, at least as much as we can stand. chemistry representation!...sort of. at any rate it's a movie I remember liking from childhood TV, because if there's any one quality I've never possessed, it's good taste in entertainment. ~Chara

oh dear, this is really quite bad. I feel like I need to watch a Jacques Tati film immediately afterward to cleanse myself ~Chara

you know, I've never seen Les Vacances de M. Hulot but, curiously, I've read the book, some time in elementary school. I remember this cover, at least ~Chara

"...but we have learned, through chemistry—a ha ha ha—man can grow further with the aid of additional elements."

welp time to get out the adamantium, I suppose ~Chara

In The Sixth Sense, a movie I haven't seen since the time I saw it upon release. (I watched a LOT of movies in 1999, as it turns out.) It's slightly odd: I've gone back to Unbreakable a couple times, The Village quite a few times, and I've even seen Lady in the Water more than once, but I haven't revisited Sixth Sense. ~Chara

The Truman Show is on a short list of films that we can remember seeing together—my older sibling and I together, that is, in long-ago adolescent years. I should maybe try to make a list of all of them; it includes some movies I haven't been able to make myself re-watch yet, like The Usual Suspects.

Waterworld, which Frisk and I saw at some dingy second-run theater in the greater Los Angeles area (do they even have those any more? second-run movie theaters?), I managed to re-watch like twenty minutes of. It's a gross and skeevy movie and I'm asking myself why that sort of thing works so much better when George Miller does it, but that's a bit like asking why S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is so compelling and moody in comparison to a Fallout game: there's a kind of smirky self-awareness that creeps into American dystopian media, a sense that the author(s) are trying to let you know that they don't really think this sort of thing can actually happen in "real life".

But back to Truman Show, which I find has held up very well as entertainment even once you're totally "spoiled" about what's really going on, because if you strip away the more outlandish elements of Truman Show you're still left with something uncomfortably real and creepy: a snotty, insular, whıte-flight neighborhood, a "gated community" where homeless people ("the trash", according to Truman's sweet old mother) are hauled instantly out of sight by plainclothes detectives. Seahaven's pretty close to the ideal community of American settler culture, a paradise that nowhere else on Earth can live up to, and yet it doesn't work unless Truman's always afraid: afraid for his job, afraid that his marriage is a sham, afraid of leaving the safety of land.

I remember, when this movie was new, a lot of Discourse™ (it would have been Usenet Discourse™ at that time) about whether the premise was plausible. "Nobody could really make a TV show like this, and anyway who would possibly want to watch something like 'The Truman Show'? Who'd want to watch a boring guy do routine things?" And so forth. I was skeptical at the time, the same way that I was later skeptical that "Survivor" would work as a TV show, but I was dead wrong about that! Beyond doubt, "The Truman Show" would have found a big audience. The mere fact that Truman himself was hoodwinked and oblivious would be a powerful draw: you could feel sorry for Truman's captivity, or laugh at his stupidity. "Haha, he really thinks nobody's watching lol!" And the falsity of all Truman's relationships—e.g. the festering resentments bubbling under the surface of Truman's compulsory marriage to Meryl—would be pure entertainment for audiences hooked on cringe comedy.

A while ago I got curious enough about The Truman Show to look for older drafts of the movie script, and thus I learned that they had some ideas about giving Truman a much more comprehensive glimpse of the machinery that was built round him. In at least one draft, Truman comes across evidence that Christof was trying to figure out how to fly Truman to "Fiji": he stumbles across a tropical-island set, and an airplane mounted on gimbals, and other such things. There were more scenes exploring Truman's phobias and how they were reinforced through scripted episodes of retraumatization.

And! there was some idea of giving the movie an epilogue, i.e. trying to give Truman something to do after he decides to leave. I don't know if such a scene would ever have felt satisfying. Oh you could imagine some sort of big cathartic confrontation, some sort of come-uppance for Christof and his gang, and I think any such scene would have seemed facile and inadequate. It's possible to guess that Truman's life outside the dome would not have been easy or pleasant, so perhaps it's best that The Truman Show ends as it does, with Truman's future a mystery.

~Chara