We first met through Stephen King. I can't say I know how strange that must sound. All I can do is tell you that this is the honest truth. I knew about the writer before I ever became aware of the director. Even then, it all came about through sheer luck. What's even more remarkable to me is that it all happened when I was still at such a young and impressionable age. This is how it all came about. None of us ever met in person, to begin with. Instead, all that happened is my parents thought it would be a good idea to allow me to watch a movie. The exact details are a bit sketchy at this point, because it was so long ago. Either they sat down to watch this film with me, or else they just slipped their old VHS copy of Stand By Me into the cassette player and then just let me take the whole thing on my own. If I had to take a guess, then the second scenario is the most likeliest possibility. Even as a child I was prone to being solitary, and my parents, to their forever credit soon figured out that was just how I liked things. So, they left me in front of the Idiot Box with what had to have been one of the first home video copies of a book adaptation that has since gone on to become a priceless classic. It should go without saying that it's earned all the praise it gets. Rob Reiner's 1985 adaptation of a Stephen King novella with the unpromising title of "The Body" has to stand as one of the textbook examples of what happens when a page to screen translation somehow manages to please every single face in the aisles.
It doesn't hurt that the whole thing is anchored by a solid narrative throughline, one that is able to elevate the otherwise green performances of its young cast into something that has since rightly been regarded as iconic. It also happens to be very quotable at the same time. This seems to have been something of a running bonus with most of the director's efforts. Rob's work always tended to have this way with words. In almost every film he ever made, there would be these moments where the quality of the dialogue was able to carve out a permanent shelf space in the mind of the viewer. There are so many out there, and I'm sure whoever is reading this might have their favorites: "These go to eleven"; "I'll have what she's having"; "Inconceivable"!, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means"; "You can't handle the truth"; "I'm your number one fan"; "As you wish". And who can forget the perennial observation that "It's such a fine line between clever and stupid". I think it's possible to pinpoint an explanation for why the director was able to turn his films into the kind of meme factories that have more or less guaranteed their place for all time in the memories of generations.
There's also a bit of an irony involved with how Rob was able to do this, considering that it all relies on the kind of strategy that some might not expect. It's because Reiner seems to have operated on a clear-eyed understanding that even the best composed image is mute without a good word to lend it its voice. In other words, he seems to have had this intuitive understanding that all film relies just as much on the quality of the script (of the text, in other words) a whole lot more sometimes than even the pictures on the screen. It's one of those artistic realizations which should be self-evident, yet it seems to confuse a lot of viewers for some reason that I still can't fathom. We tend to create this artificial separation between words on the page, and images on the screen in a way that makes it difficult for a lot of us to to sift and weigh the value of either. Perhaps it also doesn't help that sometimes this disconnect can be warranted under the right perspective. My own take on this issue is that words take primacy over the image, and here's the reason why. A line of prose is a description of something, while any attempt to dramatize the letters in the story will always have to amount to an approximation, no matter how much quality and craft is placed into the set decoration, camera angle, or the lighting. To give a perfect idea of what I mean, ask yourselves how you would describe the secondary world of Florin, which is the main location for all of the narrative action in The Princess Bride? I think we'd surprise ourselves on that score.
It might come as a shock to others when we each realize that we all have our own pictorial ideas of what the home of Westley and Buttercup looks like, and that all other attempts to picture it pail in comparison. This is a rule that both readers and viewers seem to hold fast to as this unspoken form of ancient, and therefore binding writ. It's something that just seems to happen of its own accord, even if some of us know how the Fire Swamp was decked out with complete eidetic recall. Even with perfect memory onboard, there may come a moment when our own Imaginings take over. Then the simple plastic trees and artificial vines of Reiner's set give way to a tangled mass or almost sentient web of vegetation out of a storybook. The kind of enchanted glade that looks like it could either invite you in with open arms, or else swallow you whole. To my thinking, the best image of the Fire Swamp would have to be one that combines both of these sentiments. It just makes sense that the entire place is a combination of this lotus island spliced together with a Venus Flytrap and a Death Maze. That's because each of those words provide as elegant a summary as any of us will be able to give about the setting. It combines the best of both worlds, in a sense. The magic of Reiner's production melding into the enchantment of the original words penned by author William Goldman. All of which then get refracted back into the minds of the faces in the aisles to produce this ultimate, definitive storybook setting.
That to me is an example of fiction crafting at its very best, and both Reiner and Goldman's efforts on The Princess Bride are perhaps a textbook demonstration of how actual good storytelling functions. That's a crucial, yet often overlooked, reason for the success of a book or picture like this. It all comes down just as much to the audience participation as it does to the words on the page. In the end, all entertainment is a group effort, and I'd argue that even the efforts of someone as talented as Shakespeare, let alone Marty DiBergi, still would remain mute for the most part, if it wasn't for the willingness of their audience to join in on all the fun. That, to me, sums up Rob's main gift as an artist. He was one of those filmmakers whose instincts as a born storyteller allowed him to arrive at this unspoken realization that the image remains static and silent. Much like his friend and collaborator, Stephen King, Rob seemed to have figured out something that the author of Misery realized even when he was a kid. He was talking about another movie entirely, of course (it was Creature From the Black Lagoon, for the record), not that it matters. Because what unites the insights of The Stand author with that of the chronicler of Spinal Tap is the shared recognition that true Art is able to set the Imagination alight in a way that can transcend even the meagerest poverty row level production values.
In King's case, it was the old Universal Creature Feature that taught him this valuable lesson. "I knew, watching, that the Creature had become my Creature; I had bought it. Even to a seven-year-old, it was not a
terribly convincing Creature. I did not know then it was good
old Ricou Browning, the famed underwater stuntman, in a
molded latex suit, but I surely knew it was some guy in some kind of a monster suit.. .just as I knew that, later on that night,
he would visit me in the black lagoon of my dreams, looking
much more realistic. He might be waiting in the closet when
we got back; he might be standing slumped in the blackness
of the bathroom at the end of the hall, stinking of algae and
swamp rot, all ready for a post-midnight snack of small boy.
Seven isn’t old, but it is old enough to know that you get what
you pay for. You own it, you bought it, it’s yours. It is old
enough to feel the dowser suddenly come alive, grow heavy,
and roll over in your hands, pointing at hidden water (103-4)". If this bit of observation seems somehow disconnected to anything made by Reiner, then go back and consider the look and movements of the Rodents of Unusual Size, from the adventures of Westly and Buttercup.
For one thing, they have the same problem as Universal's Gillman. They're not just a bunch of guys in suits, you can also sort of tell right away, with just one look, that these count as very cheap costumes. It's clear to even a 10 year old that by the time this scene was scheduled for the day's shoot that most of the film's budget had dried up by then. And that's being generous, assuming Rob ever had the funds needed just to pull the whole Fire Swamp chapter off. Even the titular setting isn't that much to look at when you stop and think it over. It's an obvious set, for one thing. You can tell that there aren't that many wetlands out there that look quite so cheap. The whole thing looks like the backdrop of a Muppet Show skit, and the only major difference is that now the audience gets a chance to see what that would look like through the eyes of a professional 45 millimeter studio camera lens. The net result doesn't change all that much. It might have looked impressive as hell to someone like Shakespeare, however even by 80s standards, the sets for Ridley Scott's Legend come off as a lot more impressive in terms of the visual department. And yet the fact is that people still remember The Princess Bride more fondly than one of Tom Cruise's old missteps (and lets face it, you probably even forgot that Maverick was in the Tim Curry Fantasy film). It's a fascinating result that cries for explanation, even from die-hard fans.
How on Earth does a film with cheap looking sets that probably would give a tenured Medieval archaeologist a headache still somehow go on to become a treasured classic? I think King once more helps us to arrive at an answer to that problem, and the punchline seems to be that professionalism of imagery might be the least important aspect of what makes Rob's efforts still work so well. The first thing to note about the "Inconceivable" Fantasy is that it fulfills a very specific artistic stricture, which King describes as "perhaps the
perfect reaction, the one every writer of...fiction or director...hopes for when he or she
uncaps a pen or a lens: total emotional involvement (104)". That, I think, is the real gift that Rob was able to achieve, not just for himself as an artist. He was then able to pass that gift along to others because, like King, he realized that the true strength of a story resides in the words of the script, and on the Imaginative sympathies of a receptive audience to be able to realize where the true magic a story like The Princess Bride comes from. In that sense, it is possible to speak of Rob Reiner as a storyteller not just of the first rank, but also in the truest sense of the term. He knew that all good films amounted to stories told regardless of how much or how little you could show, in the last resort.
While all this might seem fascinating, there may be some who are now eager to remind us all of the baleful elephant looming over the whole proceedings. Rest assured, as much as I'd like to, as much as I wish I was writing words on a different topic in another timeline where Rob was still with us, I know that's not the case. If it's a reason why this should be the case, then I'm not the one you should be asking. I'm just here to try and see if I can provide some sort of compensation for a collective sense of shared grief. All of the bit of fun reminiscences held above had two purposes in mind. In the first place, the last time I checked, it was always considered proper custom to speak fondly of those who have gone on ahead of us. This might be something of a double obligation in the case of a talent like Rob's. Someone who was able to churn out such an incredible of amount of winning narratives for so long deserves to have others make sure that such gifts and efforts are never forgotten. In the second place, all of those snippets of two cents were meant to do one other thing. It felt necessary to try and give the reader a sense of what was normal and fun when it came to discussing Reiner and his life.
In my opinion, it is always going to be the films which will determine the legacy of the man, more than anything else. In a moment of shock such as this, when most of us are still just beginning to climb down from our initial reactions of horror, it seemed the proper thing to remind audiences of what made being a fan of the artist such a treat, while at the same time couching it in terms appropriate to a decent memorial, however meager. That's why I'd like to leave off this short tribute with a story. If this seems like a strange thing to do, then perhaps it might help to point out that the overarching theme of the tale seems to be the nature of grief; how it can shape and sometimes consume our lives; and also, strange as this may sound, how to fight back against it. What I'd like to leave off with here is a simple YouTube video. I think if taken in the right spirit, it can serve as some sort of balm, or tonic for the recent tragedy and scandal surrounding Rob's passing. In order for the proper frame of mind to be in place, however, a few final words of explanation are needed here to make everything clear. This includes the reasons why I chose this particular video, and why I think the content of a simple make-believe short story can work as good outlet for any needed catharsis on real life events. It all goes a bit like this.
The main conflict at the center of this story is the experience of grief, and how to move on from it. At the center of the story enclosed with this article is a widower struggling to move on from the loss of his wife. There may be some who will make an interesting argument on this particular plot point. They might say an outcome like this is normal compared to what happened to Rob and Michele. Even if it's true that the wife of the main character in this short story had a sudden death, it was still, in the last resort, a natural enough occurrence. What does the normal course of a grieving widower have to do with a tragedy like the one that befell the Reiner's. Besides, this is a work of pure fiction we're talking about. A make-believe situation featuring people who don't even exist, and never can. How on Earth can fiction such as this address the problems of real life? At least that will be the implicit assumption for some in the audience. To be fair, I'm not sure what I can say in response. Another implicit takeaway from such a viewpoint is that it maintains that if there's any compensation to be had when a tragedy like this strikes a family, then it can never come from the pages of a book. This is a viewpoint which holds that Art has no real power to address such issues when they happen in the real world. In that sense, my response won't be all that convincing to any who hold to this view. Still, I maintain that it is the truth.
Experience has taught me that people can have a very interesting, even symbiotic relationship to the stories we like to tell ourselves. To be clear, there have been plenty out there who maintain that stories serve no purpose other than entertainment. So long as I'm being fair, I'd even argue that this is what any halfway decent story should stick to. At the same time, it's like there's this weird dichotomy at work in how we relate to any decent work of fiction. We'll decry fiction as mere moonshine in one breath, and then spend hours online sharing and reminiscing with others about what we liked so much in our favorite books and films. In fact, the very existence of this blog and others like it is proof enough of how often this happens. It may not be enough to make some believe there is any importance to it. Yet it continues to happen, just the same. It's as if some natural phenomenon of sorts is taking place, and we still have difficulties figuring it out. Come to think of it, that might be the best explanation for why literary and film criticism even exists in the first place. All of which is to say that even if the majority opinion turns out to be that most of us don't believe in the value of storytelling, there still remains a number of interesting facts which are left begging for some sort of logical explanation. To start with, there was the revolution in modern sentiments and social mores sparked by the Romantic Movement.
Thanks to Lake Poets like Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake, we've come to view childhood and children not as mere resources to be exploited, by rather as genuine lives that deserve our protection, as best we can give it to them. Then there is the work, not just of authors like Mark Twain, but also forgotten names such as Phyllis Wheatley, who used the Imaginative medium of Poetry to pioneer the first voice of African-American Civil Rights in this Country. Then there is the further transformation of social life thanks to the efforts of a group of San Francisco poets and authors known as the Beats, and how they essentially gave voice to an attempt at living a more authentic life. Going back further down the timeline, we have Henry David Thoreau penning some of the key texts of environmentalism, the chief text of which is still considered to be Walden. No offense yet that comes off as a lot of positive impact for a bunch of people who were just sitting around spinning yarns to themselves. Each of these artists has made enough of a difference to the point where it sort of has no choice except to belie the statement that fiction has no value in human society. If that were the case, we wouldn't be busy rediscovering authors like Wheatley, and allowing her to once more have her voice both as an African-American, and as a woman. You don't do that without believing in some value for the written word.
It all gibes well with something Stephen King once observed in Misery. We're talking about the original book, now. The passage that follows sadly didn't make an appearance in Rob's film adaptation yet it's worth repeating here for the sake of proving the kind of value that others seem to believe fiction truly does hold. Somewhere in the middle of the misadventures of a hapless artist at the hands of a psychotic fangirl, King pauses to describe a curious phenomena that occurs when the writing is hot and the world within the words starts to leap off the page. He describes it as what happens when "the gotta set(s) in. Paul knew all the
symptoms. When she said she was dying to find out what happened next, she
wasn’t kidding.
Because you went on living to find out what happened next, isn’t that what you’re
really saying?
Crazy as it was—shameful, even, in its absurdity—he thought it was. The gotta.
"It was something he had been irritated to find he could generate in the
Misery books almost at will but in his mainstream fiction erratically or not at
all. You didn’t know exactly where to find the gotta, but you always knew when
you did. It made the needle of some internal Geiger counter swing all the way
over to the end of the dial. Even sitting in front of the typewriter slightly
hung-over, drinking cups of black coffee and crunching a Rolaid or two every
couple of hours (knowing he should give up the fucking cigarettes, at least in
the morning, but unable to bring himself to the sticking point), months from
f
finishing and light-years from publication, you knew the gotta when you got it.
Having it always made him feel slightly ashamed—manipulative. But it also made him feel vindicated in his labor. Christ, days went by and the hole in the
paper was small, the light was dim, the overheard conversations witless. You
pushed on because that was all you could do...And then one day the
hole widened to VistaVision width, and the light shone through like a sunray in
a Cecil B. De Mille epic and you knew you had the gotta, alive and kicking.
"The gotta, as in: “I think I’ll stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I
gotta see how this chapter comes out.” Even though the guy who says it spent
the day at work thinking about getting laid and knows the odds are good his
wife is going to be asleep when he finally gets up to the bedroom. The gotta, as in: “I know I should be starting supper now—he’ll be mad if
it’s TV dinners again—but I gotta see how this ends.” I gotta know will she live.
I gotta know will he catch the shitheel who killed his father.
I gotta know if she finds out her best friend’s screwing her husband.
The gotta. Nasty as a hand-job in a sleazy bar, fine as a fuck from the world’s
most talented call-girl. Oh boy it was bad and oh boy it was good and oh boy
in the end it didn’t matter how rude it was or how crude it was because in the
end it was just like the Jacksons said on that record—don’t stop til you get
enough (249-50)". King then backs up this basic premise with a few choice anecdotes about the effects that storytelling can sometimes have on its audience.
"It was crazy. It was funny. It was also real. Millions might scoff, but only
because they failed to realize how pervasive the influence of art—even of such a
degenerate sort as popular fiction—could become. Housewives arranged their
schedules around the afternoon soaps. If they went back into the workplace,
they made buying a VCR a top priority so they could watch those same soap operas at night. When Arthur Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes at
Reichenbach Falls, all of Victorian England rose as one and demanded him
back. The tone of their protests had been Annie’s exactly—not bereavement
but outrage. Doyle was berated by his own mother when he wrote and told her
of his intention to do away with Holmes. Her indignant reply had come by
return mail: “Kill that nice Mr. Holmes? Foolishness! Don’t you dare!”
"Or there was the case of his friend Gary Ruddman, who worked for the
Boulder Public Library. When Paul had dropped over to see him one day, he
had found Gary’s shades drawn and a black crepe fluff on the door. Concerned,
Paul had knocked hard until Gary answered. Go away, Gary had told him. I’m
feeling depressed today. Someone died. Someone important to me. When Paul asked
who, Gary had responded tiredly: Van der Valk. Paul had heard him walk away
from the door, and although he knocked again, Gary had not come back. Van
der Valk, it turned out, was a fictional detective created—and then uncreated
—by a writer named Nicolas Freeling.
"Paul had been convinced Gary’s reaction had been more than false; he
thought it had been pretentiously arty. In short, a pose. He continued to feel
this way until 1983, when he read iThe World According to Garp. He made the
mistake of reading the scene where Garp’s younger son dies, impaled on a
gearshift lever, shortly before bed. It was hours before he slept. The scene
would not leave his mind. The thought that grieving for a fictional character
was absurd did more than cross his mind during his tossings and turnings. For
grieving was exactly what he was doing, of course. The realization had not
helped, however, and this had caused him to wonder if perhaps Gary Ruddman
hadn’t been a lot more serious about Van der Valk than Paul had given him
credit for at the time. And this had caused another memory to resurface:
finishing William Golding’s Lord of the Flies at the age of twelve on a hot
summer day, going to the refrigerator for a cold glass of lemonade . . . and then suddenly changing direction and speeding up from an amble to an all-out bolt
which had ended in the bathroom. There he had leaned over the toilet and
vomited.
"Paul suddenly remembered other examples of this odd mania: the way
people had mobbed the Baltimore docks each month when the packet bearing
the new installment of Mr. Dickens’s Little Dorrit or Oliver Twist was due (some
had drowned, but this did not discourage the others); the old woman of a
hundred and five who had declared she would live until Mr. Galsworthy finished The Forsyte Saga—and who had died less than an hour after having the
final page of the final volume read to her; the young mountain climber
hospitalized with a supposedly fatal case of hypothermia whose friends had read
The Lord of the Rings to him nonstop, around the clock, until he came out of his
coma; hundreds of other such incidents (257-58)". There are other such examples out there than can be multiplied. A the constant running theme threading its way through all of it comes down to what happens when some kind of positive symbiotic relationship is forged between story and audience. However strange it may sound, it does appear to be explicable in clinical, analytic terms. It does seem as if the Imagination works as a kind of natural safe-guarding function. Part of the mind's ability to protect itself. It's what allowed a burned out poet like Coleridge to hold onto a sliver of sanity in the midst of a mental breakdown, and what allowed a girl like Phyllis Wheatley to try and write her way to freedom. All of it points to the occasional necessity of tapping into the Imagination for the purposes of mere survival.
The net result of such ongoing strangeness seems to be that we're surrounded by oddities, all the while being haunted by this indefinable sense of normalcy, that somewhere out there everything is "just so". In all honesty, I wish I knew if that were true or not. What I think I can say with any degree of clarity is that I think King is onto something. Nothing seems more possible to me than that well written books and films can be, not just a balm, but sometimes also even the cure for grief. It's the medium's capacity for consolation that I'd like to turn to now as a way of paying tribute to the life and work of Rob Reiner. If I had to give any other reasons for why I'm doing this, then they would go as follows. A major part of the initial idea for this memorial came from just listening to the words and realizing something interesting. Here's the thing, this is an article I never intended to write, and the video enclosed within isn't something I was expecting to have much in terms of worth commenting on. Then a terrible tragedy struck both Bob and his wife, Michele. So there I am in the wake of the whole thing, reeling from it all, just like the rest of us, and still trying to get my bearings. I went back to look at this video with not much of anything in mind, it's just that you'd be surprised how you're perspective of the Art you read or watch can do a 180 degree shift based just on what's happening in the real world.
The first time I caught a glimpse of an unremarked upon short story with the equally unpromising title of "Laurie", I didn't think it was any great shakes at first. Now, with the passing of a legend forever lodged in the memory banks, I went back to it, only to be confronted with a peculiar thought. It went a bit like, "You know something, if you were to cast someone like Tom Hanks in the lead role for a screen adaptation of this work, then you'd have a pitch perfect idea for the kind of film Rob Reiner used to make in his glory days". I don't know how morbid that sounds, yet I'd also be lying through my teeth if I tried to claim that this isn't the idea that crossed my mind there and then. It's a realization that I owe to the vlog proprietor of The Stephen King Book Club YouTube channel. His creativity with computer illustrations, combined with the regular artistry of King's words, all came together to remind me of just how good Reiner and the original author of Stand By Me used to work so well together. In fact, Rob's adaptations of the Maine scribe's writings seem to be one of those rare cases where the translation from page to screen has been met with near universal acclaim. It was my share of this bit of collective pop culture film knowledge that seems to have caused Rob to creep into my thought the more I watched.
I began to see how all the elements of this story went together to create this kind of accidental, yet genuine tapestry of all the best Humanistic tropes that Reiner was great at incorporating into his films. At the center of the story is a man who is still reeling from the loss of his wife. He starts out the story spinning his own wheels in a constant, never-ending loop of regrets, bitterness, and self-recrimination. All the time, he goes through a series of gestures and motions which tend to fall under the category of being a potentially self-destructive routine that can happen to those who take grief a step or two beyond the bounds of the normal. Sometimes, harsh as it may sound, the experience of loss can be enough to serve as the mental trigger necessary for further, larger psychological issues. The story's protagonist, Lloyd Sunderland, has never managed to get that far, to his enduring credit. Yet it's clear he's stuck in the same familiar rut. It takes an interesting sort of double surprise to first snap him out of his old routine, and then to get him to learn how to start caring again, not just for himself, but also for others. Now here's the part where I have to make one statement very clear. What I'm about to say next is meant to comfort, as best I can, anyway. Disrespect is the furthest thing from my mind. With that all said.
The thing is, as I was listening to the audio narrated version linked below, a funny thing happened. It's like I just began arrive at a slow, surprising, yet genuine enough understanding of how this could have made for a good film adaptation. Not just any page to screen job, either. It would also have been the type of Humanistic yarn that Rob was just plain great at churning out way back during the good old days. Indeed, there is even a sense in which "Laurie" can be spoken of as an interesting companion piece to a film like Stand By Me. At their core, both narratives revolve around the idea of the confrontation with mortality. Each features a protagonist who ends up venturing out into the wilderness to confront the shadow of the grim reaper. Whereas Stand By Me tackles the concept from the viewpoint of youth, "Laurie" explores the same terrain from that of an older, more adult perspective. It's one of those literary tropes or conceits that goes as far back in this Country to the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The idea of the Fateful Journey into the Woods has its origins in fairy tale and myth. Yet here in America, at least, the archetype seems to have found it's longest lasting legacy within the field of the Modern Gothic. This is what turns out to be the mainspring of King's short story. It's a key note that he has played to either exact or near perfection more than once in his career. The best novel-length example of the author playing this note to the hilt can be found in the pages of Pet Semetary. How well Lloyd fares on his own version of this same journey I'll let you discover.
The curious notion I can't seem to shake is the sense that the story's content somehow just manages to fit in well with the ideas and themes that undergird a lot Reiner's more serious works. There's this quiet, contemplative tone to the short work that allows us inside the head of the main character in such a way that makes him likeable to the point that you want to root for him and hope he turns out alright. There are even moments of genuine excitement and suspense, even if these are all handled in the typical Gothic fashion. What makes even these moments fit in with Rob's regular oeuvre, however, is the strange yet endearing note of authentic warmth that King is able to find in the midst of what is essentially an example of what's known as the Southern Gothic. It seems to have been this note of warmth, even of consolation that might have helped to place me in mind of Rob and his collaborations with King in the past. This seems to be because what we're dealing with here is a case of the author pulling off a remarkable, yet unremarked upon achievement, of sorts. King seems to have been able to tap into that same note of warm Humanism that animated Stand By Me, and then somehow transplant it intact into another with a totally different cast of characters, and plot situations. A lot of the reason for the author's success seems to be because both works share themes of death, and how to deal with loss.
It might have been the realization that "Laurie" shared these same plot elements with the Reiner film which made me think this could be the type of story that Rob might have been able to appreciate, even if we all got a lucky break, and nothing had ever happened. It's easy for me, at least, to imagine Rob leafing through the pages of "Laurie" in the collection You Like It Darker, and also being struck by the parallels between this relatively new work, and what he and Steve cooked up together in Oregon, way back when. Yes, it's true there's an obvious disconnect going on here between a work of fiction and a very sad facto of life. The thing is I came away from this story thinking that I'd found at least as close to a way for audiences to deal with it. "Laurie" seemed to offer something like an "Inigo Montoya Moment", for lack of a better word. Yeah it looks stupid, even on paper, yet it's the best I got here. It was as if King had tapped into that bit of Inspired oddity that allowed first William Goldman and then Mandy Patinkin to place one of the best examples of grief ever committed to page or celluloid. The fact that people still come up to Patinkin just to thank him for giving an outlet for dealing with the loss of their own loved ones has to be some kind of testament to the power that words have to allowing some form of healing to take place. If you're looking for an explanation for how that is, then the best I can offer is that it must be one of the functions of the Imagination to help sow up a lot psychic wounds.
It's one of those ideas that probably has no choice except to sound strange as hell, until you stop and recall that the main function of the Mind is the preservation of the human subject. When it comes to survival chances, nature doesn't seem to like leaving a matter of that importance up to a roll of the dice. So we have this Art making function in our heads that conjures up images and scenarios that possess the ability to tap into the best of our emotions in an effort to keep ourselves stable and healthy on more than just the physical level. Last I checked, scientists are still scratching their head over how a mental service like this could have come about. All we know is that it's there, and this is what it sometimes does. It's weird as hell, I admit. It can sometimes also save lives, so maybe there's something to be said for being born with these left-field curveballs inside our skulls. If it keeps me living longer and healthier I got no cause to complain. This goes double for all those times whenever the right yarn is lucky enough to snap a real, living soul out of a coma or a personal funk in the wake of tragedy. That's why I've chosen to celebrate Rob's life with a story. In addition to containing just enough of the right elements to act as a fitting tribute or memorial to a great artist, the work also tackles death head on.
There seems to be this implicit theme in the story which argues that it is possible to tackle not just grief, and the sense of loss that comes with it. There may also be a way of squaring off against our fears of death, and somehow managing to not let any of it conquer us in the last resort. This is the one part of the story where King seems to be tackling a more complex subject than I'm used to here. It looks very much like the writer had got hold of a genuine notion in the ultimate fate of Lloyd Sunderland, yet it's also the part where I appear to have difficulty finding the right words. Perhaps even that's fitting, in a way. It means that if even a story with such a simple narrative as this can achieve that kind of sublimity, then that's got a be some kind of a good sign. It can mean that the writer has managed to strike some of the right key chords that allow even a mere prose description to achieve some kind of poetic effect. The best way I can describe the key idea for this story goes back once again to the text of The Princess Bride, and the moment on the set of the movie where Patinkin admitted he used his own personal pain to carry a crucial scene through. It's a sentiment that this short story seems to share in spades: "I want my father back, you son of a bitch". It's crude and inelegant as hell. It's also perhaps the best any of us can do or say in a case like this If this is so, then is that such a bad thing? All I can do, therefore is repeat what I've said already. The final result left me with something of a surprise gift on my hands.
It's a story that functions as a tonic for bad times, one that the author himself perhaps never even intended. In a way though, that counts as yet another point in the story's favor. The best stories, in my opinion, are the ones where all the artistry remains unintentional on the part of the artist. I don't set much stock in the idea that you can make Art with a capital A just by choosing to do this. For whatever reason, the whole process just never seems to work out for the best that way. J.R.R. Tolkien never set out to create Middle Earth. Instead, all the happened was he ran across the title of his most famous secondary world as a line of prosody in an old Anglo-Saxon poem, then somehow this word generated another, "Hobbit", in the writer's mind, and from there all that happened is he got curious about what it all meant. In the same vein, King has often spoken of how a lot of his ideas just come to him out of the blue. It's a claim that's met with a lot of skepticism by even his most constant of readers, yet I've been a bookworm long enough to be able to state that this is what other authors as disparate as Edmund Spenser, Lewis Carroll and W.P. Kinsella, to Tobias Wolfe and Peter S. Beagle have confirmed as being their Standard Operating Procedure. I'm convinced that's how all the best works of fiction are made.
Any real story amounts to a Creative Idea waiting for the right artistic mind to discover it. Part of the reason some of them stick so well is that they can serve a function in helping us to cope with some of the worst aspects of real life. I'd argue that this is what Stephen King's "Laurie" is able to do when it comes to discussing the tragic event that took the life of one of the greatest directors in all of Hollywood history. It's the kind of story that has become an accidental yet fitting tribute to the Humanistic themes of living that both Rob and Steve were capable of exploring, whether separately in their own respective mediums and genres, or else together as collaborators with on another. It's for all these reasons that I not only recommend that you give "Laurie" a read. I also felt it right to include the story below. With that in mind, there's not much else to say, except the obvious. Here's to you Meathead, we miss you something fierce, man. Thanks for the memories. If you want us to smile again, then, "As you wish".
I've talked about him once before, yet more as a jumping off point, rather than as an artist in his own right. Not too far back, last year, I did an article on a book called The Bridge of San Luis Rey. I might have done at least some kind of decent enough job in covering the story and themes of that novel. However, if you go back and take a look at that article it becomes pretty clear real soon that all I did was use that novel as a means to an end. I used the The Bridge of San Luis more as a jumping off point to discuss one of the overarching themes in Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I blame the creator of the fictional realm known as Castle Rock, Maine, for that choice of focus entirely. As I also made clear in my Bridge review, it was King himself who set me on a trek through that book by his choosing to highlight that it was a keystone text when it came to the author's obsession with questions of Fate and Free Will, or Ka as he chooses to label it in the pages of his Mid-World saga. As a result, while I was able to give the this now obscure work of Modernist literature its due day in the spotlight, it's also a fact that my main focus in explicating its meaning was by and large in relation to King's fiction. I never even bothered to spend much time focusing on the author of The Bridge. Neither in terms of who he was, or whether he was the kind of talent that deserves to be remembered for anything, except as part of King's writer's toolbox. I'd like to see if I can remedy that, at least somewhat, with this review today.
The key challenge here will lie in seeing just how far Thornton Wilder stands on his own, as much as how he relates to King's work. The best place to start is with a formal introduction to the life of the artist, and for that I've been lucky enough to stumble upon a very helpful summary provided by Mildred Kuner. In the very first chapter of her study, Thornton Wilder: The Bright and the Dark, she has given as good a summarization of the facts of the writer's life as I am able to find or offer anywhere. So with that in mind, I'll let her make First Introductions. In describing her subject, Kuner, writes: "Regardless of what he writes, he generally celebrates the music of the spheres and, simultaneously, what he regards as its inevitable counterpoint - the rattle of the dishes. Thornton Niven Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 17, 1897. His father, Amos P. Wilder, son of a clergyman and a devout member of the Congregational Church, was a Yale graduate who had become a newspaperman and who eventually entered the diplomatic service during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt. His mother, Isabella Thornton Niven, was a woman equally dedicated to...intellectual pursuits.
His elder brother by two years, Amos Niven Wilder, became a professor of theology and the author of several books dealing with the influence of religion on contemporary poetry; a sister, Janet, became a zoologist; another sister, Isabel, became an author (she has written three novels and also has coauthored several articles in collaboration with her brother Thornton) and in later years has generally served as th buffer between him and the world whenever his engaged in one of his literary projects. Significantly, he dedicated his sixth novel, The Eighth Day, to her, for when he retired to the Arizona desert for twenty months, determined to communicate with no one until he finished his work, it was she who looked after his interests in his absence. In her he has found a spiritual twin to compensate for the loss of his actual twin who died at birth.
"In 1906 Amos P. Wilder took his family to Hong Kong, where he served as an American consul general until 1909. For a short period young Thornton attended school there - a strict, German-language school - so that at the age that at the age of nine he had already been exposed to both the world of the Orient and the culture of Europe, equally alien to all he had previously known. (One wonders how much this early experience contributed to his later artistic interest in exotic settings.) After six months his father sent the family back to the United States, not to Wisconsin, but to Berkeley, California, where Thornton attended the public school. By 1911, when Amos Wilder was serving in Shanghai, the family had returned to China, where Thornton was enrolled first in another German-language school, then at the English Mission School in Chefoo, until 1913. At that time the family came back permanently to California, where Thornton attended the Thacher School in Ojai, graduating from the high school in Berkeley in 1915. At the age of eighteen he had seen more of the world than many people do at forty-eight and he had learned early that a home is based not on a physical location but on human relationships. Not surprisingly, his books have no strong sense of property or of material things; everything he writes is permeated by a vivid feeling for family ties (1-3)" Kuner sort of walks right past the real crux of Wilder's fiction here, while at the same time catching a fleeting glimpse at its.
There'll be plenty more to say about how the author treats the subject of families when it comes to a proper discussion of the play at the center of this review. For the time being, it will be enough to note that trying to separate the themes of Wilder's fiction from that of Steve King is going to be perhaps harder than I expected. That's because there is one shared element between both artists that unites them on a certain fundamental level, and it impacts the ways in which each writer tackles the subject of familial and social ties. For the moment, lets continue on with getting to know a bit more about one of King's lesser known Inspirations.
"When it came time to enroll in college, Thornton chose his father's university, Yale, but Amos Wilder, finding his alma mater too worldly for his son, insisted on Oberlin, a small Ohio college known for its splendid music department and its religious character. At Oberlin young Wilder began writing seriously; in his two years there he contributed several pieces to the literary magazine. In addition, he was fortunate enough to study with Charles Wager, a teacher with a passion for literature who kindled the imagination of his students. Wager's interests, which, unlike those of some academic minds, were not narrowly confined to a minute area of specialization, struck a responsive chord in Wilder, for Wager's learning ranged over many countries and epochs. It was probably from him that Wilder developed his own intuitive appreciation for writings of the past, for tradition, for history, for legend. And Wilder's natural inclination in this direction was supported by precedent: both Shakespeare, who represented the end of an era, and George Bernard Shaw, who represented the beginning of one, deliberately selected for their material subject and characters that had already been exposed by artists before them. Perhaps what most impressed Wilder was the discover that genuine masterpieces are timeless: in the words of ager, "Every great work was written this morning," or, in the modern parlance, is relevant.
"At Oberlin, too, Wilder first came into contact with that school of criticism known as...humanism. A number of American critics...had grown contemptuous of that parochial kind of naturalism characteristic of American literature. Such writers, for example, as Theodore Dreiser, who appeared to scrutinize only the petty, sordid, materialistic details of everyday life, seemed to the humanists to be abandoning all that was best and intelligent in man, to be concentrating on the gutter instead of the stars. They felt that...the great classics provided the answer to literature and to life; books that stressed despair and deprivation could contribute nothing of lasting value. This was a view that the young Wilder found very easy to accept (3-5)", yet I think it's best to pause here and add a qualification born of hindsight right here. Everything I've learned about this guys leads me to believe that he qualifies as something of an American Renaissance Man. The fiction of Wilder displays a very careful understanding of the Classics that Kuner talks about. At the same time, a closer examination of the writer's output reveals a gap in her knowledge about his themes and meanings. For one thing, Wilder seemed to know that even the gutter has its place, and that sometimes it can even send up flares or messages that people like the academe of places like Oberlin would do wrong to take for granted. That's a mistake that Wilder never seems to have made. In fact, there are elements in the play to be reviewed in a moment that tell otherwise.
Rather than revealing himself to be the Ivory Tower snob that Kuner seems to mistake him for, Wilder once more proves how he could have served as the Inspiration for a working class author like King. The way he does this can be demonstrated if you go and take a look at an old 1943 film called Shadow of a Doubt. Wilder wrote the screenplay for that film, and it was directed by some guy called Alfred Hitchcock. The best way to describe that movie is this. To look at it, to place the whole picture under a microscope is to get a fair enough idea of where a lot of the themes and plot points in the cinema of David Lynch originally stemmed from. It's also the kind of film that might have left an impact on a young Steve King. Shadow of a Doubt is a film that shares a great deal of thematic overlap in common with a movie like Blue Velvet, or a novel such as Salem's Lot. Each vehicle takes a somewhat jaundiced view of small town Americana. It's an idea that Wilder shares in common with the creators of Twin Peaks and Castle Rock. There's the same sense of easy familiarity with the frailties, hypocrisy, cruelty, and sometimes even flat-out danger associated with living in a small town. In the case of the Hitchcock film, Wilder treats his audience to the story of what happens when a serial killer played by Joseph Cotton returns to his idyllic seeming small town in an attempt to hide from the police on his trail.
Even the basic nature of that plot summary, stripped down to its essence, is enough to telegraph to veteran Horror fans the kind of tale we've got on our hands. What it boils down to is that an outside evil descends upon the inhabitants of Anytown, USA, and in doing so proceeds to draw back the curtain on the dark side of American life. It's something that artists like King and Lynch have in common with Wilder, and it's a trait he shares in turn with artists like Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor, and above all, Mark Twain. I'll have to admit that last name signals an aspect of Wilder's fiction that I don't recall anyone ever bothering to take notice of. It's a bit concerning, because something tells me that if we could single out just what (if any) influence the author of Huck Finn had on the creator of Our Town, then we could go a long way toward figuring out what made Wilder tick. All of which is to say that this artist's exposure to the ethos of Liberal Humanism seems to have had a way different effect than the one Kuner believed it to be. Rather than making him into some disconnected, ivied academic, the writer turned out to share a certain kinship with the likes of Tom Sawyer. Like Mark Twain, he "knew the average all around". Unlike Sam Clemens, Wilder remained a lot more open-ended about human nature. Twain once held that "The average man is a coward". Wilder knew that cowardice is something any of us are capable of. He was also willing to place his bets on this not being the whole story, either.
Instead, just like the Renaissance Humanists who Kuner identifies as his main Inspiration, Wilder tended to see people as any number of possibilities (some good, others bad) waiting to be realized. His idea of the "average all around" encompassed the notion that people make or break themselves upon the wheel of life. You can scale all the way up to the very roof peak of the stars themselves, and you can just as easily fall to a level beneath the beasts that perish. That was always a question of mere human choice. The one thing that Wilder seemed to have the most impatience with were those human failures that tried to blame fate for their own self-imposed predicaments. Like I said, it's proving to be more difficult to separate the nature of Wilder's fiction from that of King. From here, Kuner continues:
"In 1917 Wilder transferred to Yale, a move that was not entirely to his father's satisfaction; about the same time, the latter resigned from the consular service and with his family took up permanent residence in New Haven. At Yale Wilder interrupted his education for eight months in order to serve with the First Coast Artillery at Fort Adams, Rhode Island; though he did not see overseas duty during World War I, he at least participated in his country's involvement with it, as he was again to do later, in World War II. Leaving the service as a corporal, he returned to Yale in 1919 and, the following year, earned his Bachelor of Arts degree (5)". In all, it's possible to list at least two major influential moments in the author's life. The first stemmed from the way both Wilder and his siblings were treated as a family by their father; more of which anon, as we get into the review proper. The second counts as the most unremarked upon aspect in the development of the artist's mind. However I'm convinced that, like King and Twain, the second major shaping factor in Wilder's talent was his growing awareness of how a lot of what was awry in his own household found its reflection in the troubles plaguing the larger microcosm of his original New England society. Both of these influences count as negative impacts.
It was the third one, however, which Kuner talks about next, which seems to have acted as an organizing principle, of sorts. Something that helped the writer give shape and form to a lot of what he witnessed, and that maybe helped him to gain some kind of perspective on it all. It seems to have chimed with the writer's introduction to the content and toolbox of Classical Humanism that he imbibed in college, and hence acted as something in the way of a kick off point for Wilder's artistry. "In 1920 Wilder went to Europe on a fellowship and studied at the American Academy in Rome. It was there, he tells us, that one of the most memorable experiences of his life came to him: as a member of an archaeological team he helped excavate an Etruscan street, buried centuries ago. And suddenly his awareness of this lost civilization, which had existed even before the Romans, had collided with his own moment in time clarified and confirmed all his previous thought processes: there was no past, present, or future to be considered separately; no geographical limitations could be taken seriously when an ancient culture could be laid bare by a modern American shovel. As he was later to explain it in The Eighth Day: "It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is a vast landscape, and it is the eye of the beholder that moves (5-6)". It's not much to go on, yet it might be enough to start out with, at first.
So to recap, here we've got this simple New England kid who grows up with something of an outsized Imagination, and he's lucky enough to be born into one of those households that tend to have a healthy enough dedication to artistic pursuits. This positive influence is offset by the fact that Wilder seems to have experienced his own version of the stifling and corrosive Puritanical atmosphere that Stephen King discovered for himself growing up on the streets of Durham, Maine. Mark Twain experienced his own version of the same social maladies coming of age in the American South. All of these negative impacts are once more off-set by a number of other factors. The first is that his stint as an exchange student in China left Wilder with an inescapable experience of the vastness of the world, and the differing cultures that we as humans have been able to construct for ourselves. It was this exposure to other societies (the Asian-Pacific, in his case) that allowed Wilder the chance to avoid the kind of limited provincialism that Mark Twain struggled with all his life, even when he knew he was just a small fish in a large ocean. This was a form of knowledge that was brought home to Wilder in a greater fashion as he made friends with those on the lowest wrung of Chinese society. It was this exposure to ways of living that were outside the box of his time that was then added onto by his exposure to Classical Literature in college. This broad-minded approach to things seems to have struck home when he dug up a piece of the past.
When you put all of that together, what you seem to get is the kind of literary career that has gone on to have one of the quietest, yet impactful legacies in the history of American Letters. It resulted in the kind of work that would later find echoes in the writings of J.D. Salinger as much as it could the Fantasies of Ray Bradbury. It's a combination of literary realism that wouldn't have been out of place in a play by someone like Arthur Miller or Reginald Rose. There are also moments where you have to wonder just how much this guy might have influence Magical Realists like Jorge Luis Borges, as well as Gothic Pastoralists like King. To give a sample offering of what showcases as the best introduction to this man's work, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at a one act play that Wilder composed during his journeyman years. It might not seem like much now. Yet something tells me this piece functioned as an important stepping stone in the history of the author's career. With that in mind, this is an examination of a work known simply as, Pullman Car Hiawatha.
If you grew up a child of the 80s, then odds are even Disney was a big part of it. Whether as an occasional presence that your parents popped into the pre-digital era VCR for you just every now and then, or else as the primary shaper of your Imagination growing up, it's fair to say that the Mouse House had a decent hand in molding how we remember our childhoods in some form or another. For me, it came from two places. Part of its was from the video cassettes my folks bought for me. The other was growing up with a version of the Disney Channel that was a like a version of Turner Classic Movies if it was geared for the Spielberg generation. You'd have early prototypes of the kind of shows you'd expect to find in a place like that, such as program blocks geared toward airing the classic cartoons featuring Mickey and the gang. You'd also have classic standbys such as Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers or Darkwing Duck. Then you'd turn right around and the next thing you know, your kids would get a chance to be introduced to Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, or John Wayne in films like The Searchers, or Stagecoach. Then things might shift over to an anthology program called Lunchbox, which showcased actual independent animation from around the world. After that, you might be introduced to a little known bit of childhood trauma fuel, such as Flight of the Navigator, or Dot and the Kangaroo. Coming up next, the scene would switch rails again, and you'd be treated to the sight of James Stewart playing Mr. Smith going to Washington. I'm not kidding, here, by the way, they had actual schedules of this stuff lined up all day.
You can even check out some of the classic Golden Age movies the channel used to showcase back in the day, followed by a heck of a lot more where that came from. What I'm getting at here is that growing up with the Mouse Kingdom back in the 80s was a hell of a different experience from what it is now. It was a lot more fun, for one thing. You got the sense that you were in the hands of entertainers who didn't just know what that word meant, you also got the impression they had some kind of understanding of how much more it could mean with a little effort and honest creativity. Growing up with the Disney Channel in my youth was similar in many ways to coming of age with the help of guys like Jim Henson. There was this implicit sense of understanding that you were having your Imagination expanded and encouraged by the TV folks that your parents allowed to babysit you. One of the programs that contributed to this sense of growing mental horizons also has to count as a product of the original Mouse channel. Yet it also had a physical media copy thrown into the bargain. It wasn't just any routine home video release, either. It was part of an actual line of promotional material that the Company was churning out at the time. The short film I'm here to talk about today saw its first home video release as part of the Walt Disney Mini-Classics line of VHS's. I supposed the best way to describe it is to call it all a specialty brand that saw it its heyday in the years 1988 to 1993 (web).
It was a back catalogue, of sorts, most which were no longer than perhaps 30 to 45 minutes of runtime, yet they seemed like features films in their own right, to a child of 7, at least. The content of each video consisted of one helping from a number of extended theatrical shorts that Walt and his team put into theaters back in World War II, in place of their usual feature-length animated masterpieces. This doesn't seem to have been anything that Disney was ever planning on. Instead, it was all down to a matter of economic necessity. With the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the nature of the reality around everyone began to shift into a new gear, and the same process held true for the Magic Kingdom. When America found itself catapulted headfirst into the then new conflict, it didn't take long for Hollywood to find itself a willing participant in the War effort against Hitler and what were then called the Axis nations, Italy and Japan. This resulted in Tinseltown grinding out an entire future movie vault's worth of propaganda in the forms of film and short featurettes. Walt's company was no exception to this rule. It was very much as historian Bowdoin Van Riper explains in his edited collection of studies, Learning From Mickey, Donald, and Walt: Essays on Disney's Edutainment Films.
"The outbreak of World War II broadened Disney’s involvement with reality-based films. The studio turned out a steady stream of instructional cartoon
shorts for the military—light-hearted in approach, but serious in intent—that
were designed to educate soldiers, defense workers, and civilians on subjects
ranging from recycling and personal hygiene to riveting techniques and the
proper use of anti-tank weapons.10 The studio’s second line of wartime shorts
was propagandistic rather than instructional. Not all the propaganda shorts
were realistic—Der Fuehrer’s Face plunged Donald Duck into a surreal, night
marish vision of life under the Third Reich—but all sought to present reality
as Walt Disney, and the country’s wartime leaders, saw it. Education for Death
purported to show how Nazi Germany indoctrinated its citizens, beginning in
early childhood. The most ambitious of these wartime propaganda films was
the 1943 featurette Victory Through Air Power. Mixing various forms of animation with stock footage and lectures by Major Alexander de Seversky, it made
the case for aerial bombing as a decisive factor in modern warfare. The demands
of wartime diplomacy—specifically the need to foster good relations with Central and South America—gave rise to Saludos Amigos! (1943) and The Three
Caballeros (1945). Mixing animation and live action as Victory did, they too
were designed to make a broad point: that Latin America and the United States
were natural allies, and their peoples similar in culture and outlook (5)".
The minor punchline involved here is that the main reason for all this innovation was the need to keep the Kingdom from financial ruin after Hitler and the Nazis pretty much busted the company's chance for overseas revenue from films like Snow White, Pinocchio, and Bambi. These are all cited as some the studio's best work for any number of reasons. The trick is none of that artistry seemed to have made much of a difference when you're dealing with a mind that's out to lunch. So, the War ate into company profits, and Walt was left having to scramble for ways to keep himself and his life's work afloat. One of the ways in which this was done was through the easy income of making wartime propaganda. The second, and most important way to do that was to create a series of short films. The trick is that if you were to create a number of these pictures (too long for a regular Mickey cartoon, but not long enough for a full-length feature) and paired them together, then however lopsided or dichotomous the final results, you'd still be able to keep the brand alive and remind people that the Disney name was still in the running and part of the overall landscape of Hollywood. It's the kind of strategy that's counter-intuitive in whatever remains of today's industry, yet there must have been some logic in their favor.
Because by combining two or more short films into one package, and placing them in cinema's, Walt somehow found a way to make it all pay off. As a result, this part of his career became known as the Package Era. Perhaps a better way to look at it is to say that Disney was the man responsible for the creation of the anthology feature film. Works like The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, or Fun and Fancy Free were the result, and later on the short works that made up those anthologies found themselves further repackaged later on down the line as part of the studio's line of Mini-Classic re-releases. The result was that kids like me got our first exposure to adaptations such as The Wind in the Willows, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, or Mickey and the Beanstalk from this now obscure video series line. Donald in Mathmagic Land was part of that same lineup for me. The first time I ever saw it was as a copy of VCR era physical media. It was the kind you could hold in your hands. When you unpacked it, there was a switch in the upper lefthand side of the cassette that would allow you to open up the lid covering the entire top half. Once you did that you could see the reels of film the entire picture had been printed on. Somehow our not so distant ancestors managed to pack an entire story onto such primitive tech, complete with a full orchestra and glorious technicolor. It's been a long time since I've stopped to consider some of the remarkable contents of this simple educational video that was designed with children's schools in mind. I'd like to take the time to unpack some of those contents.
This is the first day I can remember. It's not my first memory, by any means. Not by a long shot. There are other times, places, and faces that I can recall happening before this moment. The trick with all these other events is that they fall prey to the spotty, patchwork quilt quality of that brief yet crucial span of time when the human mind is still busy assembling itself into something like a fully fledged consciousness. Before the day I'm talking about, all I have to go on are all just snippets, or bits of fragmented pieces of things I saw. If I had to take a guess, then it might be that this is what the start of everyone's childhood is like. The funny thing about it in my case is that what I recall with anything like crystal clarity isn't the house I grew up in, or things of that nature. Instead, it's all scenes from various movies. The first fragment seems to have been more or less the entirety of Return of the Jedi. After that it's Christopher Lloyd doing his best Harold Lloyd impression on the hands of a giant clock tower, during the big finale scene of the original Back to the Future. After that I might have made the acquaintance of an explorer and British expeditionary soldier by the name of Lawrence of Arabia. Then, all of a sudden, I'm confronted by a musically inclined individual with funny looking hair, who goes by the even stranger, yet somehow fitting name of Amadeus. Not long after is when I got to meet the first of what I've come to think of as the 80s Uncles. It's a term I use for how I've come to regard all of the major blockbuster directors of that decade.
He's not the one I saw on that first full day in the life that I can recall, yet you can trust me when I say that Don Bluth's American Tail was one of those pictures that left a hell of an impact. You think that film's impressive through through adult eyes? Try watching the whole thing when you're barely more than five years old, sitting on the floor in front of your parents brand new (and long since discarded) bulky 80s Big Screen. I've just learned how to form full sentences, and just like that I'm being introduced to my first and most abiding sense of the Gothic, the Enchanted Sublime, and an idea of the Epic Scope that has remained with me all my life. All of this is an accurate enough description of what it felt like to watch that movie. Yet trust me when I say that I still haven't scratched the surface of the kind of emotional impact a film like that can leave on just the right type of receptive mind at the best possible time. Yeah, all the old cliches of 80s Trauma Fuel apply, yet that doesn't even scratch the surface either. For me, it was like discovering what it meant to be alive. Let's just say there's a whole trove of themes and ideas to a film like that which makes it all worth talking about. It's something I'll have to make my way toward, somewhere down the line.
My point for right now was that this was my first intro to the group of guys I call the 80s Uncles. These were the filmmakers who more or less went on to construct what the very idea of childhood was like for us 80s brats. In no particular order, I'd have to label them as Uncle George, Uncle Joe, Uncle Steve, and you've already met both Uncle Bob and Uncle Don. For now, however, I want to talk about the day I met Uncle Jim. It was the first complete day I can remember. This is how it started. I might still be just five years old. What matters is that this marks the first moment where I become aware of my surroundings. I'm dressed in my pajamas, and I'm making my way into the family living room from the dining area in my parents house. The big blocky outline of our early big screen idiot box is there waiting for me, and it's turned on. The first action I can ever remember doing is just sitting down once more in front of the screen and taking a look at what's there. The next thing I know, I'm a being introduced to what looks almost like a barnyard menagerie that's come to animated life, and has somehow gained the ability to talk and wear the same kind of toddler's clothes that I was still in back then. There's a green little frog on the TV, and he's sharing the spotlight with a pig in a pink dress.
Both of them appear to be at about the same age, though the girl might be just a smidge older than the tadpole she seems to want to dote on for some reason. Tagging along with the pig and the frog is a talking bear in yellow pjs, and a beany hat, followed closely by a strange looking creature with a long nose and big, goggling eyes the size of tennis balls. Close in tow is a piano playing dog, along with a brother and sister duo who are just as strange looking as the little blue weirdo (for that's what everyone calls him, and how he insists on being seen). The funny thing looking back on it now is that none of this seemed out of place, the way it might to the eyes of a disenchanted adult. Instead, the first thing that strikes me as interesting about my introduction to this setup is just how normal it all seemed. Without missing a beat, some part of my still developing mind took this all in and accepted it without missing a beat. It was as if we'd already known each other for years. I guess you could chalk that up to just how much these cartoon kids made me feel welcome as a viewer, if that makes sense. Whatever the case, what happened next was that I more or less followed these animated nursery inhabitants as they first browsed through a supermarket in a Plutonium power shopping cart, then ditched the idea to focus on growing muffins in a rural farming area that owed more to the world of Dr. Seuss than it did to anything related to the real work of soughing, ploughing, and harvesting. That's how it all got started.
It was the first time I ever met Jim Henson's Muppets. The fact that it was as a bunch of animated toddler forms of their usual adult selves really doesn't seem to have made all that much difference. It was just the gang, you know. No one except the characters themselves. It's like you could take the way they were portrayed on Muppet Babies, then go back and look at how they were in their primetime debut with Th Muppet Show, and the strength of characterization given to these imaginary figures is so seamless that it has to count as an underremarked upon creative accomplishment in terms of the artistry that's gone into the writing of Henson's main cast. In an age where there's the constant risk that showrunners have next to no clue as to how write with a sense of dramatic consistency to the characters in their charge, the level of cohesion that Jim and his friends were able to imbue the Muppets and their other creations with just comes off sounding like the unintentional yet genuine miracle it now is. The thing is, none of this ever came up overnight. The life of the Muppets is a story that will forever be entwined with that of their creator, and the trick with an artist like Jim Henson is he was a Man of Ideas in the truest Renaissance sense of the term. At the same time, all of this creativity didn't just spring up ready made in a day. Even if he was born with a nascent talent for tapping into the Imagination, the ability to both wield and then use this talent well was a long process of trial and error learning.
It's the kind of subject which by rights should be able to fill up several volumes of study. A good source for what I'm talking about is the personal journal Jim kept to chronicle the flow of his own ideas. Parts of this journal were published not long ago as Imagination Illustrated by Karen Folk. While it's by no means the entirety of that journal, the content that was available to the public contains enough information that entire works of history and criticism could be made just from the chronology of moments leading up to the time of Henson's first public success as a puppeteer in Washington DC's local television sector. Indeed, it even makes sense that a full-length book should be written about that time, as its one of the key periods in the artist's history where all of his talent was successfully channeled into a proper first showing. That's something worth examining in full. There's just so much worth learning about that time in Jim's first major step in his artistic development that I can even see some intrepid scholar with enough gifts not just penning a successful history of those early years, but of also having it turned into one of those recent string of biographical films that can either sink or swim on the skill the filmmaker has in knowing which parts of their subject's life deserves to have the camera
trained on it. In some ways, I'm staring to wonder if maybe that's what Ron Howard should have done.
