Living In Flames
ANCIENT HISTORY DEPT: Before I became a screenwriter, I was known in downtown New York circles as a monologuist. This was my signature piece.
LIVING IN FLAMES
I’m, I’m living in flames, I’m living in flames, that’s the only phrase that applies, that’s only phrase that fits, I’m burning up, I’m burning up, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not like a fever, a fever, a fever comes from the inside, and this comes from the outside. It’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s – I don’t know what it is, but I’m on fire all the time and I can’t stop it.
It’s this city, it’s this city, it’s too much for me, it all comes at me, I can’t take it, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t DO ONE THING AT A TIME. I have to do TWO things at one time. At least!
I wake up. I get dressed AND listen to music, I eat breakfast AND read the paper, I ride the subway AND read a book, I go to work AND work on a screenplay, I meet with friends AND try a new restaurant, I talk on the phone AND do a crossword puzzle.
I didn’t use to be like this! I used to live in a trailer! I come here, now there’s this constant catching up to do!
I buy clothes, they’re out of style. I want to get tickets to a show, they’re sold out. I want to get into a club, I can’t get in, it’s either too crowded or I’m dressed wrong. It’s like I have to be, like, two and a half TIMES ME, just to keep up!
And then I think things like “If I like this band, they must not be very good.” It’s this whole self hate thing, an inferiority complex.
But you see, here’s the other thing. I can’t stand to wait. If I make a date, and she’s five minutes late, she better not show up at all, because I’m just going to be pissed off for the rest of the night anyway. Keep me waiting? When I’m trying to catch up? I’ll go crazy, I’ll start breaking things.
Here’s how bad it gets. I need cash, I need to get to a cash machine. I get to a cash machine. If there’s a line, forget it. I won’t wait ten minutes on a line. I’ll walk ten minutes to get to another machine, but I won’t wait on that line.
My friends, they say I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m, I don’t know, I’m hyper or something, I’m obsessed, I don’t know, maybe I am, maybe I am obsessed, maybe I am obsessed, I can’t stop it so maybe I am obsessed. I guess I guess I guess I guess I guess –
Well.
But there’s this urge, there’s this drive, to be doing, to be doing something else, to be doing something as well, to be doing something in addition to.
Call waiting? Of course I have call waiting! The phone, that’s the biggest magnet, I should have a phone welded to the side of my head, I should have, I should have a tiny phone implanted in my skull, I should have a tiny phone implanted in my skull so that I don’t have to pick it up, I can just answer, keeps my hands free. The phone, I miss one phone call, that’s it, I’m a basket case, because I know that THAT WAS THE ONE. You know. It’s always THE ONE, there’s no use rationalizing it.
And if I get on the subway? I get on the express train? The express train stops between stations? I sit there and watch local trains go whipping past? You gotta see me. I hit myself in the head, I punch myself in the head, I tear my hair out, I want to break all the windows, I want to kill the brakeman, I want to go up to his little room and kick the door in and scream “MOVE THIS FUCKING TRAIN NOW!” and put his HEAD through the window!
It’s burning me up, I can’t take it, to back off, to relax, it would be admitting defeat, so I have to be in motion, I have to keep moving forward, if not I go crazy, so it’s either burning up or going crazy, I don’t really see that I have a choice!
I wonder sometimes.
I wonder what exactly it is that I am heading to. Why am I in such a hurry to get there? How will I know when I finally arrive? What will it look like? Is it all worth it? Typical questions, but I’M IN NO CONDITION TO ANSWER THEM! I’m burning up, I’m living in flames, that’s the only phrase that fits, I’m burning up, I’m living in flames!
Copyright © 1989 Todd Alcott
Venture Bros: Showdown at Cremation Creek, Part I
As this is the first half of a two-part episode, any attempts at analysis are bound to be premature. But what the hell.
The theme tonight seems to be “commitment.” In the A story, Dr. Girlfriend wants a commitment from The Monarch, while in the B story, Dr. Orpheus wants a commitment from The Alchemist. The Monarch submits to Dr. Girlfriend’s desire, The Alchemist isn’t so sure.
In the C story, Phantom Limb pledges commitment to The Sovereign, then immediately goes back on his word. This cannot end well. The Sovereign is a spooky distorted head in a TV set; one would do well not to cross him.
Both Henchman 24 (or is it 21?) and Brock wish to commit to tattoos. Both attempts are abortive. In the henchman’s case, the abortion is voluntary. This foreshadows the abortion of Dr. Girlfriend’s attempts to get through her wedding to The Monarch. Both the tatoos and the wedding are commitment ceremonies.
A note on The Monarch’s and Dr. Girlfriend’s relationship: if it continues along the lines it is, it’s doomed. It cannot end happily. These two have issues, and I’m not talking about dressing up in costumes and living in a flying cocoon. Dr. Girlfriend wants a commitment, but she wants The Monarch to change who he is in order to get it. This is a common and tragic mistake. Dr. Girlfriend wants The Monarch to give up arching Dr. Venture, but that is all The Monarch knows. He only defines himself in opposition, he has no positive identity. If he’s not arching someone, what is he going to do with himself? Dress up in the costume, fly around in the cocoon and — what, exactly? What kind of a way is that to live? And once his identity is taken away, how will he maintain his appeal to Dr. Girlfriend? What is her attraction to him after all? He’s a whining, petulant, fussbudget. She must be attracted to him for the command and drive that he possesses when arching Dr. Venture. Take away his hatred and his plans for destroying Dr. Venture and what will come to the fore? Where will he direct his energy? Dr. Girlfriend (Dr. Wife? Dr. Life-Partner?) makes the classic mistake of gutting her relationship when she thinks she’s solidifying it, a rare manipulative misstep for this otherwise canny woman.
(Incidentally, this may answer a question from last week. Why wasn’t The Monarch present during the raid on the Venture Compound? He apparenly had a hot date with Dr. Girlfriend in their seedy motel room.)
Dr. Orpheus is disappointed with the Order of the Triad. Jefferson Twilight seems okay with going along with arching Torrid, but The Alchemist is wavering in his commitment to costumed arching (his comment about being “disguised as a paunchy gay man” is a telling moment). The team cannot even perform the Man-Mound without the two lesser team members griping about it (and no wonder — The Alchemist, being the shortest member, should be at the top of the mound, not Dr. Orpheus — what are they thinking?). Dr. Orpheus wants to have a “practice session” (another kind of commitment ceremony), which The Alchemist derails by bringing a treat that Jefferson is susceptible to (thereby demolishing Jefferson’s commitment to sobriety).
While The Monarch is commiting to Dr. Girlfriend by promising to marry her, the henchmen are proving their commitment to The Monarch by capturing Dr. Venture and his family. (Strangely, the henchmen, while ever loyal, are beginning to show signs of independent thought — they gripe about hench-life out in the open now without apparent fear of repercussions — could this represent a more democratic atmosphere around the cocoon?)
Later, Hank and Dean are each becoming seduced by the henchman lifestyle. Hank is attracted by its juvenile, play-acting dress-up side while Dean is interested in the technical aspects. In fact, Dean shows more interest in the flying cocoon than he’s shown in his father’s projects in two seasons. Thematically, these storylines don’t exactly fit: one does not, after all, commit to being a child or a sibling, one is simply born that way. One does, however, commit to being a “Venture Brother,” and if they can be attracted to the hench-life, can the end of the Venture-brand line of adventures be far behind? (At the moment Hank puts on the “evil Hank” beard, he is distracted by the henchman’s alarm clock, a Rusty Venture clock of all things, with Jonas’s voice calling for Rusty to “wake up.” Is Hank experiencing an awakening of a sort by donning his henchman garb and his “evil Hank” beard?)
In the middle of all this, Dr. Venture has a revelation: Dr. Girlfriend is Charlene, the woman who turned him into a caterpillar (I know that everyone reading this knows that, I just enjoy typing phrases like “the woman who turned him into a caterpilar”). And so he does something rather alarming; after an adulthood filled with grumpily harumphing at the whole costumed-arching lifestyle, and at The Monarch in particular, he goes ahead and does something that cannot help but actually make him a genuine enemy of The Monarch. So while The Monarch has hated Dr. Venture all this time for no reason at all, Dr. Venture, on the day The Monarch has vowed to stop arching him, has given him something to really arch about.
The special surprise guest at the wedding is, of course, David Bowie. Which prompts the question, what does David Bowie represent in the Venture Bros cosmos? If the theme of tonight’s episode is commitment, then Bowie, chameleon without peer, would seem to represent the pinnacle of non-commitment. Bowie’s career (and by “career” I mean from 1969 to 1980; I can’t account for the ensuing 26 years of fitfully entertaining product, which puts Bowie more into the “squandered potential” theme of the show) was founded on what we might call “success through transformation.” So then we ask, well, who in The Venture Bros has succeeded through transformation? We could say that The Monarch has succeeded through transformation, if you can call what he does successful. The butterfly is the ultimate symbol of transformation, the ugly creeping worm that becomes the beautiful floating flower. And now he is contemplating another transformation, from arch-villain to, what, house-husband?
Well, at least it’s a step: Rusty and Brock have both refused to transform at all, they have both remained stuck in their adolescent mindsets for over twenty years now, Rusty with his frustration and curdled dreams and Brock with his devotion to Led Zeppelin, which even the butterfly-dressed Monarch puts down as juvenile.
Or maybe the Bowie reference is not to transformation but to masks: many of the characters in Venture Land wear masks, but Dr. Girlfriend has gone through more then most. Is she, like Bowie, a chameleon, or does she just not know who she is? First she’s Lady Au Pair, then she’s Etheria, now she’s Dr. Girlfriend: who is she “really?” Is there a symbolic weight to chameleon David Bowie “giving her away” at the wedding (and quoting “Modern Love” before the ceremony)? Does this represent Dr. Girlfriend’s farewell to masks, to false identities? Will we (and perhaps she) now find out who she “really is?”
(I see that David Bowie’s henchmen, at least for the road, are Iggy Pop and Klaus Nomi. A formidable team — but where are Fripp and Eno? Are they more of a “brain trust,” perhaps, that Bowie keeps in a vat of viscous liquid hooked up to electrodes, or does Eno outrank Bowie at this point?)
(A commenter on urbaniak‘s blog suggests that David Bowie is, in fact, The Sovereign. There is evidence to suggest that this is so. The Sovereign, after all, lets slip to Phantom Limb that he “has a wedding” to get to, and we see no distorted, floating head at the wedding. Unless The Sovereign is Sgt. Hatred, or Miss Littlefeet, both of which seem doubtful.)
UPDATE: Another aspect of Bowie’s work occurs to me, his deep and abiding belief in space aliens. In “Space Oddity,” space seems to be quite empty and lonely, but from Ziggy Stardust through Young Americans’ “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” he turns to the idea of invaders from space as Earth’s only salvation. (It’s not an accident that Ziggy’s band is called the Spiders From Mars.) His interest seems to have peaked with The Man Who Fell to Earth, but the appearance of genuine alien Klaus Nomi as a bodyguard suggests an exciting new avenue exploration in the Venture universe.
Tower Records, RIP
Tower Records has gone bankrupt, been sold, and will be liquidated.
I could write a bunch of stuff about what this indicates about recent shifts in the music business, how Tower’s “deep stocking” policy no longer makes sense in an era where musicphiles can get pretty much anything they want with a few mouseclicks, and worry about what this means for brick-and-mortar music stores in general.
But my initial response is a personal one.
Moving from southern Illinois to New York in 1983, I had, quite literally, never seen anything like Tower Records on Broadway and 4th St. A record store that took up an entire city block? Three stories of it? Unbelievable. Records I had only dreamed of owning were on sale here every day from 9am to midnight, 365 days a year. That’s right, Christmas and New Year’s included. If, on Christmas morning, I suddenly felt the need to own The Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime (maybe because I didn’t get it for Christmas) I could saunter right over and purchase it.
From the moment I saw that store, I vowed that this was the locus solus of the New York experience. My first home was in a far-flung corner of Park Slope, but each year I moved closer to my goal, until finally, in 1999, I was able to afford a loft on Broadway, a half-block away from Tower. An evening’s meditative walk for me would start at Tower Records, move on to Tower Video (and Tower Books, upstairs) when it was across the street on Lafayette, with perhaps a side-trip to Other Music if I was in the market for an Other Music kind of record, then on to St. Mark’s place where I would check to see if any of the new releases I was interested in could be found for used prices. If I was feeling expansive, up to Virgin on Union Square and then, if it wasn’t too late, the Strand. Then, often, I would end up circling back to Tower before heading home.
When I became interested in “downtown” music in the late 80s, your John Zorns and Elliott Sharps, before the Knitting Factory had their fancy digs and their own label, Tower was often the only place those records were available. And they were open late enough that you could see a band at a club (or a Philip Glass concert at BAM), dash right over and buy their record before the place closed (and the urge to purchase wore off).
When I began working in Los Angeles, I found myself overwhelmed, as many are, by the sprawling, anonymous quality of much of this kudzu-like metropolis. I would center myself and get my bearings by visiting the Sunset Blvd store. I used to say that if I ever became a fugitive from justice, the authorities would always be able to find me by staking out Tower Records on a Tuesday afternoon.
I have too many memories of joyous discoveries and artistic connections made in the aisles of Tower to list here, but here’s one that comes to mind as emblematic. On the morning of 9/11, like everyone else in New York, I stood transfixed in my living room watching the horrifying images unfolding on TV (even though they were happening a mere 1.5 miles away). The only thing that interrupted my morning was going downstairs to Tower — hey, it was new releases day, with not only the new Bob Dylan (“Love and Theft”) but also the new Leonard Cohen (Ten New Songs). It was 9:30 or so and neither building had collapsed yet. The aisles were filled with sobbing, wailing office workers, unable to watch the images being broadcast on the monitors lining the first floor, and unable to look away. The street outside was filled with a tide of humanity walking uptown, all the subways being shut down and no cabs available. In the coming days, when Manhattan was shut down south of 14th St, lower Broadway became an eerie, empty pedestrian mall, but Tower remained open.
So long, Tower.
Inscrutable nutjobs
For a project I’m working on, I’m trying to think of filmdom’s great inscrutable nutjobs.
The idea is a character who appears to be foreign, opaque and impenetrable at first, but as the movie goes on reveals unexpected insights and tenderness. Sort of a combination of the above folks, ie Roberto Benigni in Down By Law and Benicio del Toro in The Usual Suspects.
Your assistance in this matter is appreciated.
UPDATE: another good example: Brad Pitt in Snatch.
The Great Debates
ANNOUNCER.
Candidate number one, your opening statement.
C1.
Apples are better than oranges.
A.
Candidate number two, your opening statement.
C2.
Oranges are better than apples.
A.
Candidate number one, your rebuttal.
C1.
Apples are American. We put them in pies. And we call it Apple Pie. As in Mom and Apple Pie. We do not put oranges in pies. There is no such thing as Orange Pie. No one will ever say “Mom and Orange Pie”. Or even “Mom and Oranges”. No one will ever mention oranges in the context of America. No one will ever say “It’s as American as fresh squeezed orange juice.” Apples are better than oranges.
A.
Candidate number two, your rebuttal.
C2.
Apples, as candidate number one knows all too well, are covered with a red or green skin which can cut into the gums when one happens to bite into an apple. This hurts. It hurts me, and it hurts you, and it hurts America. Oranges come safely wrapped in an Orange Peel, which one removes easily and then one can eat the orange in individual sections. Or one could give half of the segments to charity. No one would ever give half an apple to charity. Only an orange. Only an orange represents the democratic ideal.
A.
Candidate number one?
C1.
I would like to ask candidate number two a question: have you ever peeled an orange when you have a hangnail? Hm? Hurts, don’t it. Hurts. Hurts like the Dickens. Why? Because, as candidate number two knows all too well, Oranges are Filled With Acid. It says so right on the label. And yet some Americans, I won’t name them, give them to their children. To eat at lunch. They feed their children GLASSES OF ACID for breakfast. This is not American. Nowhere in the constitution does it say “Oh yeah, and go ahead and feed ACID TO YOUR CHILDREN.
A.
Candidate number two?
C2.
I promised the American people that I would never stoop to negative campaigning. And yet candidate number one leaves me no choice. It is a known fact that apples cause cancer. It is also a known fact that apples have shady financial histories and ties to organized crime. It is also a known fact that apples were brought here by creatures from another planet for the purposes of enslaving the human race. I am not going to address these points. I am simply going to hold up this piece of paper. This piece of paper shows Candidate number one engaging in kiddie porn while eating an apple.
A.
Candidate number one?
C1.
Well. I am embarrassed. Yes I eat apples. Yes I have had sex with children on videotape for money while eating an apple. Does the American public care about that? I say that they don’t. And let me just say one thing: Apples come in two colors, “Apple Red” and “Apple Green”. Oranges come in only one color: orange. How’s that for simplemindedness? “What is it?” “An orange.” “What color is it?” “Orange.” My fellow Americans, God made the little green apples, just as he made the space creatures who brought them to us. God did not make oranges and candidate number two knows it.
A.
Candidate number two, your closing statement.
C2.
I believe in the United States of America. And you can call it hope, or faith, or blind devotion, or paranoid schizophrenia, but when my voices tell me to eat an orange, I do it. I do it. I don’t “doubt” them. I don’t “question” them. And you should not question me. You should merely vote for me and then do my bidding. And that is what America is to me.
A.
Candidate number one, your closing statement.
C1.
Let me just say this: I am so incredibly high right now.
A.
Thank you candidate number one and candidate number two. Please join us next time on “The Great Debates”.
Sweet and Lowdown
Emmett Ray and Rusty Venture compare notes. Pun intended.
If The Venture Bros were a musical biopic, it would be Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown.
Emmett Ray (Sean Penn) is a brilliant guitar player, but he lives in the shadow of greatness, namely Django Reinhart. Living in this shadow has apparently cast a pall over Emmett’s entire life. (
urbaniak fans know that Rusty Venture himself is in the movie, in a very Rusty kind of role, The Guy With Few Lines Sitting Next To The Star. So Emmett spends the movie in the shadow of Django, and “Harry” [urbaniak‘s character] spends the movie in the shadow of Emmett.)
Emmett’s problem, it seems, is that he keeps his feelings under tight control, and that has crippled his artistic muse.
(Robert Fripp tells a story where a critic takes him aside one day to inform him that he (Fripp) and Jimi Hendrix were the two greatest guitar players of their day, the difference between them being that Fripp had all the technique in the world but nothing to say, and Hendrix had no technique and everything in the world to say. Fripp, being who he is, and English besides, could only agree with the critic’s assessment.)
(And I own one CD by Hendrix and 85 by Fripp, which probably tells you everything you need to know about my aesthetic tastes.)
What does Emmett Ray want? Well, like Charles Foster Kane, he wants to be loved, but only on his own terms. A hugely talented artist with one of the most impoverished souls ever brought to the screen, he’s bought his own line; he routinely introduces himself as “Emmett Ray, the greatest guitar player in the world” (and occasionally adds, in shame, “except for this gypsy in France, Django Reinhart.”) Women, for Emmett, are an audience, so when he starts up (“falls in love with” is too generous a phrase) with mute Hattie (Samantha Morton) it seems like he’s found his perfect mate.
His life with Hattie brings his soul to the brink of awakening, and brings with it a certain amount of artistic and financial success. (Allen can’t quite bring himself to equate the two; instead, he brings success to Emmett Ray by having him, literally, fall into a pile of money.) Being the egotistical boor he is, Emmett assumes that he’s achieved the success all on his own and promptly leaves Hattie for Blanche (Uma Thurman), who is Hattie’s polar opposite. Hattie is poor, simple and mute, Blanche is society-born, pseudo-intellectual and won’t shut up.
Blanche is attracted to Emmett because he’s a lowlife and that makes him “real.” So it’s only a matter of time before she drops him for someone even more “real,” namely button-man Anthony LaPaglia. (The equation/comparison of artist and killer is explored more fully in the superior [and funnier] Bullets Over Broadway.)
What makes Emmett “real,” in spite of his shortcomings? He has three consuming passions in the movie: playing guitar, watching trains and shooting rats at the dump. Blanche tries to plumb the depths of these bizarre pastimes on an intellectual level, but neither Allen nor Emmett seem interested in them on that level. Emmett is simple enough to do what he does and not think about it, but he’s not simple enough (or generous enough) to entirely lose himself. He’s always got to show off, he’s always got to announce himself. He needs an audience or else nothing is worthwhile. The movie never shows him merely practicing, or doing anything by himself really. It seems he couldn’t imagine playing guitar for the sake of playing; it would have to be in front of people. There’s a climactic scene where a heartbroken Emmett (see below) tries to conjure up some choice licks to seduce Gretchen Mol, a dimwitted dance-hall girl, in a train yard; when he realizes she’s not listening, he disintegrates emotionally and destroys his guitar.
The tone of the movie occasionally veers from warm, detailed, straightforward behavioralism into broad silliness, which strikes me as odd and unnecessary. It seems as though Allen doesn’t trust his material enough to write Emmett’s story entirely seriously, or doesn’t trust his audience’s willingness to consider a subject as ethereal and complex as the artistic muse.
Another way of addressing this problem is to ask, Why is Emmett the way he is? The script doesn’t really say — it suggests that maybe Emmett had a bad childhood, grew up poor and without proper parenting, but that’s true of hundreds of artists more generous of spirit than Emmett — why is Emmett so stunted and unavailable? The movie leaves the question unanswered. He is the way he is. (Allen has never been shy of making plentiful use of the lazy screenwriter’s friend, narration, and uses it to connect the dots and fill in the blanks here as well, both in the witty “real life” narrators like Nat Hentoff and Allen himself and in Uma Thurman’s Blanche, all of whom attempt to allow the audience under Emmett’s skin, to no avail.)
The acting in general is very good, but Sean Penn is extraordinary here. There are a number of scenes where he is called upon to be a genuine human being and we can see the war in his eyes between his desire to feel and his inability to do so. He’s not just a jerk, he’s a jerk who has salvation easily within his reach at every turn and yet chooses to shun it.
There’s a scene toward the end where Emmett goes back home to find Hattie and ask her forgiveness. In the movie’s best moment in both the acting and screenwriting departments, Sean Penn grudgingly asks Hattie if she wants to come back to him and she, unable to speak, hands him a note. He reads it, and after a pause, asks “…Happily?”
Strangely, given the subject matter (an artist unwilling to engage with his feelings, and thus failing), this was Woody Allen’s last really good movie for a long, long time.
Take the Marvel challenge!
My son Sam (5) has quite suddenly made a dramatic shift from DC to Marvel. Interest in Batman and Superman has dropped precipitously, interest in Iron Man and Hulk has increased exponentially. More to the point from a marketing point of view, he has immediately and instinctively assessed Marvel’s presence as a “brand,” and refers to Marvel characters not as “superheroes,” but “Marvel superheroes.” As in, he goes up to other kids at school and asks if they want to “play Marvel superheroes.”
One result is that he has gone from drawing pictures of the Justice League to drawing pictures of, well, everyone in the Marvel universe. All in the same drawing, as though trying to catch up after years of neglect.
Below is one of his latests efforts. Test your Marvel knowledge! How many of these characters can you name?
click on images to enlarge
THE ANSWERS:
Robolizard has done a heroic job with some tough material. The ones he missed are all pretty much the ones I missed too. Luckily I had the artist available to interpret for me.
Here is the complete set:
1. Mr. Fantastic
2. Silver Surfer
3. Spider-Man
4. Ant-Man
5. Nightcrawler
6. Daredevil (complete with endearing backwards 5-year-old double-D)
7. The Hulk
8. Black Panther
9. Iron Man (would be easier to identify if Sam had had access to the correct shade of red)
10. Lightspeed (who is Lightspeed? She is a member of Power Pack, of course, why do you ask? She is identifiable by her rainbow trail that she leaves whenever she zips from place to place.)
11. Rogue (probably the toughest one here. Sam had trouble getting across the idea of the white streak in her hair.)
12. Wolverine
13. Human Torch (Johnny Storm, that is — everyone knows the original Human Torch has no face.)
14. The Thing
15. The Wasp
16. Elektra (I know, I know, she’s topless — how advanced my son is! — but he got her little strappy things right.)
17. She-Hulk.
Congratulations to all our — well, our player!
Venture Bros: Viva los Muertos!
I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that “Viva los Muertos!” is the reason that television was invented.
No joke: just the other day I was asking myself if there is an upper limit to the themes and issues that an episode of Venture Bros could address.
Question answered.
The themes this week are among the grandest imaginable: war, authoritarian control, the one-ness of existence, the border of life and death and the nature of humanity.
We start in the middle of a war film. The Monarch is sending his henchmen into battle. We are behind the orange-tinted goggles of one of them. The Monarch, unlike last episode, is not there for the invasion; no, this battle he’s sitting out, content for now to send his men to their deaths, as any good general does in any war.
It’s present day, but the language of the henchmen comes from older war films. The trench recalls World War I and the reference to “taking this hill” recalls Paths of Glory, Kubrick’s study of military cruelty, where primping generals sip tea in chateaus while sending their men to die for no reason at all. It makes me wonder what the Monarch’s goal for this incursion was, why he’s not participating today, what he has to do that’s more important.
As in Paths, the incursion is a failure and our POV henchman is quickly dispatched by Brock, only to be brought back to life by Dr. Venture, in the manner of Frankenstein’s Creature, just in time for that landmark film’s 75th anniversary. “The Holy Grail of super-science,” Rusty crows, life from death. Death, science wishes to show, is not the undiscovered country, the land from which no traveler returns, but just another tool for maximizing profit. The fact that Venturestein can hardly be called human atthis point seems to be beside the point — Dr. Venture has re-animated dead flesh and stands to profit greatly from it.
Like Frankenstein’s Creature, “Venturestein” identifies Dr. Venture as his father, a notion Dr. Venture quickly quashes. “I get enough of that noise from these two,” he says, gesturing to Hank and Dean. This brings up an important and vital aspect of Dr. Venture’s parental instincts: why does he keep bringing Hank and Dean back to life, since he has no interest in being a father? “Dean, as of right now Hank is better than you,” he snaps at his children, as good an example of bad parenting as we are likely to see on television this season. And yet we will see later in the episode that parenting isn’t always just a nurturing instinct born of love, it can also spring from a desire to mold and warp, to control and shape an unformed mind. Dr. Venture puts Venturestein in Hank’s bed to teach him, what else, the relative value of a life of legalized slavery (which explains his afro head and the beat about Hank and Dean trying to find “Africa-America” on the globe), or, as Venturestein succinctly puts it, “Prostitution!”
Now then: The Groovy Gang.
The average writer says “Hey, let’s have the Mystery Gang meet up with the Venture Bros. It’s a natural. And they can be middle-aged and failed, driving around in a beat-up van solving mysteries.” But it takes the genius of the creators of Venture Bros to take the mystery gang and invert them from optimistic, youthful children of the 60s (don’t forget, Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby were, literally, on their way to the Woodstock festival when they were waylaid by their first mystery) to a pack of the darkest, most repugnant criminals of ’68-’78, namely Ted Bundy, Patty Hearst, Valerie Solanas and David Berkowitz (and his talking dog Harvey). And so “Ted,” the leader, becomes a vicious, controlling thug, good looking and charming on the outside but murderous and brutal on the turn of a dime, threatening to put Patty “back in her box” and regularly threatening “Sonny’s” life. (It’s hard to see why Val, whose real-life counterpart felt that her life was controlled by men in general and Andy Warhol in particular, would be part of this gang, except that she seems to see herself as some sort of protector/predator of victimized Patty.)
Ted pulls the van up to the Venture compound in a thunderous rainstorm (a rare use of “atmosphere” in the Venture world). “I smell a mystery!” he says, apropos of nothing. Or is it? Ted can’t know about Venturestein running amok inside the compound. What mystery is he referring to? And then we realize: Ted Bundy, and all intelligent, cold-blooded killers, fascinate us precisely for their investigations into the same mystery that Dr. Venture is “prostituting” inside the compound: the border between life and death. In a sense, Ted is always pursuing not just “a mystery” but the mystery — what happens to us when we die?
The serial killer cannot keep himself from his quest in the same way that Dr. Venture can’t keep himself from his own. One kills from insanity and the other brings men back to life from a different kind of insanity. The killer answers to a higher power (a point driven home by Sonny’s dog, growling at him about “The master’s orders”) while the scientist pretends to be that higher power to reverse the process. And so unholy Creator and equally unholy Destroyer are set on a collision course on the Venture compound on a dark and stormy day.
(There’s more than a little of George W. Bush in Ted as well. When asked for reasons for invading the Venture Compound, Ted invokes both God and the lack of gasoline as reasons enough. When Sonny questions further, he’s met with accusations of disloyalty and the barrel of a gun.)
Because Venture Bros episodes consistently teem with twinning and reflections, our B-story this week concerns a more serious version of Creator and Destroyer. Brock feels bad about killing Venturestein (twice) and crashes Dr. Orpheus’s shaman party (or “Dracula factory!” as Ted puts it, completing the “Universal Monster Movie 75th Anniversary reference” beat [and also bringing up vampirism, the other most-potent “life from death” myth of the 20th century]) . The shamans all drink wine made from the ego-destroying “Death Vine” (which reminds Brock a little too much of “a Jonestown thing,” yet another reminder of authortarian control, a bad father, run amok) and when Brock tells his story of killing the henchman, the oldest, most respected shaman tells a seemingly unrelated story of having sex with a dolphin.
Or is it unrelated? Sex, after all, is the opposite of murder, and the dolphin could be seen a purer, more instinctual level of existence. The dolpin, which science has shown is the intellectual equal (if not superior) of humanity, manages to live a free, toil-free life in spite of its intelligence. It sees no need to organize into complex societies, print money, go to war or enslave children (to name only the most radical of the offenses listed this week). The shaman’s story of the dolphin, in spite of its absurdity, is truly the opposite of Brock’s story of senseless, state-sanctioned murder.
Dr. Venture is a bad father, and so is Ted, and so is the unseen government constantly lurking in the background of the Venture world. Dr. Venture has finally achieved success; the army wants 144 of his Venturesteins to use as walking bombs; Rusty has no trouble taking the order, and assumes that Brock, the born killer, will simply “make some dead bodies” for him.
But Brock is changing; he’s questioning the limits and certitude of his powers, his “license to kill.” And so he “drinks the Kool-Aid,” as it were, with the shamans (who lose their lunches, as well as their egos, as they drink from the Death Vine) and has his hallucination involving that same dolphin spoken of earlier. The dolphin explains the importance of empathy and the oneness of existence to Brock (just as its darker twin, Groovy, commands Sonny to murder on the behalf of the mysterious “Master”). The hallucinatory dolphin is then, of course, murdered by a hallucinatory Hunter Gatherer, Brock’s own authority (and father-) figure. Hunter sets Brock straight on his nature and purpose in the world. We are here to kill, he insists, on the behalf of our masters, invoking another Kubrick war film, Full Metal Jacket. It’s enough to snap Brock out of his confusion and set him back on his path of righteous destruction.
Meanwhile, in another part of the compound, Sonny sees Hank and Dean and freaks out. They’re supposed to be dead. He knows because he killed them some time earlier. And again, it’s funny but it’s also not. The serial killer, the one who sees it as his brief to send souls off to the undiscoverd country, confronted with two of those souls returning? The Destroyer confronted with two souls undestroyed? It’s as serious and confounding idea as the scientist bringing the dead back to life.
And so there’s a showdown in the cloning lab, where Hank and Dean are confronted with their own confounding image, rows and rows of themselves (providing the show with its best line, “I think they’re in a ‘saw their own clones’ coma”). Ted and Sonny are ready to kill Hank and Dean, but we see that, as murderous as they are, they are, after all, mere amateurs. Brock is a highly trained, skilled professional, acting on behalf of a government (and the family he loves).
Dr. Venture comes in just in time to snap Hank and Dean out of their stupor, pulling, what else, a great, paternal lie out of his back pocket, a parental fib, prompting Hank and Dean to exclaim that Rusty is “the best dad ever!” bringing the episode full circle. The ultimate bad father has, magically, become the ultimate good father, at least in the eyes of his cruelly manipulated children, and that’s a lesson that needs to be learned, especially with an election five weeks away.
UPDATE: mcbrennan, typically, has spurred a few more thoughts, mainly about Dr. Venture and his back-up plan to, essentially, send his own children off to die as brainless zombies in an unnamed war. I was reminded of two Leonard Cohen songs. He was writing, of course, about Vietnam, but they will serve here:
“Story of Isaac” contains this verse:
You who build these altars now
to sacrifice these children,
you must not do it anymore.
A scheme is not a vision
and you never have been tempted
by a demon or a god.
And “The Butcher” begins:
I came upon a butcher,
he was slaughtering a lamb,
I accused him there
with his tortured lamb.
He said, “Listen to me, child,
I am what I am and you, you are my only son.”