Stan Winston
I am greatly saddened to hear of the passing of Stan Winston. I don’t think it’s too much to say that his creature designs changed and extended the realm of the possible in movies, and provided the hook, the fuel and the content of, literally, millions of dreams and nightmares.
I once came close to working with him on a project and his designs were, without exception, creative, inspiring, efficient and excellent. They were easily ten times more cool than the script that I had written and they made me wish I could start over again to better serve his work.
Untouchable Obama
Before I forget, let me just mention that it did not escape my notice that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama quoted Alcott-fave-author David Mamet the other day in a speech somewhere to someone.
I don’t know if the Untouchables reference was lifted with Mamet’s knowledge or permission (not that it would be required), nor do I know if Obama, an Illinois senator, was intentionally co-opting the line understanding that it was written by our nation’s pre-eminent “Chicago author” (although, in the movie itself, the line, spoken by Irish Cop Jimmy Malone, is in support of what the character Malone refers to as “The Chicago Way”). Nor do I know if the quote is meant to be a dig at Mamet’s recent conversion to conservatism (although I can’t imagine what the point of such a dig would be). I do know that Mamet once wrote a speech for Dukakis back in the day that went unused — could he be moonlighting for Obama now?
What is clear is that Obama, by taking on the rhetoric of Jimmy Malone, positions himself as a moral man taking on a cabal of amoral gangsters who hate families, law and fair play, against absurd odds, and in that regard I totally get it. And I hereby vow that one day, as God is my witness, a presidential candidate will one day quote a line from Antz in his or her pursuit of power.
Mantis update
The two dozen or so mantises that we kept from the last batch have, er, “sorted things out” between them and we are now left with three robust, healthy specimens: Ceiling, so-called because of his habit for living on the ceiling of his container, Booie, named after a friend’s dog, and Snacks, who, well, I don’t know where his name came from. The one pictured above is Ceiling. Each has had his or her first “skin shedding” and is turning from brown to green. As you can see, they are still less than an inch long after a couple of weeks of devouring fruit flies as quickly as they can catch them.
Venture Bros: The Invisible Hand of Fate
Part-way through my third viewing of “The Invisible Hand of Fate” it occurred to me that The Venture Bros is a show so wide-ranging in its conception and subject-matter, so ambitious in its scope, that there is, for all intents and purposes, no “typical episode” of the show. A show like Scooby-Doo, or VB‘s inspiration Jonny Quest, were, of necessity, the same show over and over again, but while The Venture Bros. repeats and strengthens themes and motifs and plot devices, it also repeatedly upends audience expectations to the point where you can tune in and be confident that your concept, whatever it is, will be blasted.
So Billy injures himself in the bathroom of the trailer he shares with White, and suddenly remembers his past, which seems to take place at the intersection of Magnolia Street and Quiz Show Boulevard. Billy is, apparently, a brighter-than-average prodigy whose life-plan involves attending MIT and becoming a super-scientist like his boyhood idol Rusty Venture. He is, of course, thinking of the Rusty Venture of TV, not the balding, pony-tailed lout currently drinking himself to the floor of an empty bar. Billy, like many in the VB universe, is a decent-enough freak with big ambitions, heading for disappointment, disillusion and failure.
Billy’s brilliant career as a quiz-show prodigy is undone in a moment by one “Todd,” the quizzee to his left. As a life-long watcher of televisual “Todds”, I have often noted that any character named “Todd” is either presented as a lazy-eyed, buck-toothed moron or an over-educated, uptight Poindexter. I congratulate The Venture Bros for somehow managing to combine both of these archetypes in one Todd — a buck-tooth, lazy-eyed, over-educated uptight Poindexter.
White tries to console Billy with a line about how the “invisible hand of fate” has brought him to this point, but of course nothing could be further from the truth. Billy might have had the wrong answer in the quiz show final, but it was White who turned him into a cheater for the sake of ratings, ruining both their lives and leaving them inextricably linked for the rest of their lives. On the other hand, it appears that White cheated for Billy out of a sense of camaraderie — “we freaks have to stick together” — so his actions could be seen as rooted in affection.
(Which leads me to wonder — are White and Billy lovers? Do I even want to know?)
Billy and White flee the quiz-show world and the episode takes a left-turn so abrupt that it looks like an out-of-order reel-change. The sudden G.I.Joe parody O.S.I., with the strike team that dresses like the Village People and the hyper-violent shenanigans with Sphinx, the Cobra-like evil organization they fight, is so bizarre, so astounding, such a strange confluence of references and influences that it resists easy interpretation — for me, anyway — and probably deserves an entry all of its own.
The already-complicated Venture Bros world gets more complicated when we learn that the Guild were the bad guys on “the old Rusty Venture TV show.” So, wait — in the world of The Venture Bros, Rusty Venture is a “real person,” and was also the star of a TV show, which either was or was not a dramatization of his “real life”? That is, did Rusty Venture really have adventures with his father and also star on a TV show about his own life, which was only tangentially related? And was the Rusty Venture TV show a cartoon show? That is, would the animated Rusty Venture in The Venture Bros. look different from the “Rusty Venture” character in the Rusty Venture TV show? And does that mean that when we see Rusty in boyhood flashbacks, we’re seeing scenes from his “real life,” or scenes from his TV show?
To make things even weirder, we see Jonny Quest’s bodyguard Race Bannon at O.S.I. HQ torturing someone who, I’d guess, was a minor character on Jonny Quest but my computer monitor could not bring into sharp enough focus to identify. Also at O.S.I. HQ we meet two young men, a blond and redhead, who bear suspicious resemblance to Hank and Dean Venture, albeit with personalities reversed — the blond is a squeaky-voiced nerd while the redhead is a broad-shouldered meathead. The significance of this I await to be eventually revealed.
Billy and White arrive at an “underground quizzing match” (nice thing about a Venture Bros plot, “underground quizzing match” is one of the least unusual story point) that seems to be hosted by, of all people, Andy Kaufman stand-in Tony Clifton.
We see that Billy is, in fact, a natural in the quiz arena — he rattles off the answer “the Magna Carta” with nothing but a date to guide him. (I’m guessing that the episode was written well before the recent Supreme Court ruling that was a blow to Bush’s attempts to repeal the Magna Carta, but resonance is resonance.)
“The Invisible Hand of Fate” also takes time to fit in what appear to be two non-sequitur, stand-alone comedy scenes: Brock and Hunter Gathers playing the cow game on the road, and the whole “nozzle” scene. This development seems new to me, but I’m sure more alert viewers will correct me.
Billy and White arrive at the Venture compound just in time to see Rusty’s “bodyguard” Myra being tased by security forces. I puzzled over this odd piece of brutalization against a woman until I realized that the scene is probably there simply to explain why Rusty is in need of a new bodyguard. In any case, Rusty spurns Billy and White and another of Billy’s childhood dreams is crushed — he finds out that his role model is “a total dick.”
Billy’s next quiz meet turns out to be a dogfight, which Billy loses. I like how he’s disqualified because White enters the ring, not because he isn’t actually a dog. His relationship with White at an impasse, Billy gets off the back of (his own) moped, coincidentally at the exact spot where he and White will one day share their trailer.
(Oh wait, I just realized, it’s not coincidentally at all — Billy leaves White at this spot, which is why White places his trailer there — all out of love for Billy.)
Billy is picked up by Brock and Hunter, who press him into service spying on Professor Fantomas, who is doomed, of course, to one day become Phantom Limb. (“Fantomas” being, of course, a reference to this guy.) Billy is nervous about becoming a spy, but finds that he is welcomed as a freak in Fantomas’s class, even as he is overwhelmed by studies.
Billy’s roommate commits suicide (or does he) and Billy goes to see Fantomas in his office. He’s let in by one of my favorite characters of all time, the Guy Scraping The Name Of The Office’s Previous Occupant Off The Door. This character shows up in two of my favorite ’90s movies, Seven and The Hudsucker Proxy, although I can find no direct reference to either of those movies in “The Invisible Hand of Fate”. In the office when Billy walks in is the episode’s only other female character, Dr. Girlfriend, who is at this point calling herself “Sheena” and apparently trying to win favors from Fantomas. Sheena, it will not surprise the reader, is a punk rocker. (UPDATE: Apparently the name is “Sheila”, not Sheena. Mea Culpa.)
Fantomas, we learn, was quite impressed with a paper Billy has written, which we later learn was actually written by Stephen Hawking. So Billy has, again, advanced in his cause through unintentionally cheating. He is always a pawn in someone’s game, a victim of good intentions — White’s love and Hunter’s rabid patriotism.
Hunter believes that Fantomas is a member of the elusive Guild, and as the episode develops it seems that, indeed, he is. The question I have at this point is, does Fantomas know that he has been bankrolled by the Guild, or he is he, too, a pawn? Has the Guild orchestrated this entire bizarre, convoluted plot in order to turn Fantomas into Phantom Limb and bring him into the Guild? Is the Guild the “Invisible hand” of the title? Or is the episode asking for a less ironic interpretation, is this wild, complicated plot actually a heartfelt, earnest exploration of the strange, twisted byways that sometimes shape our lives and, more importantly, our narratives?
(Brock says that he and Hunter “think” Fantomas killed Billy’s roommate because he was “getting too close,” which leaves enough room for me to guess that they are, perhaps, wrong.)
Brock and Hunter browbeat Billy for his naivete (honestly, how could he not see that his professor with the withered limbs is a threat to national security and a member of an international criminal organization? Wake up, Billy!) but Billy fights back and escapes, runs to Fantomas to make a clean breast of it.
He shows up just in time for the experiment that will change Fantomas’s life. What he does not know is that he, in his ignorance and foolishness, will inadvertently create a supervillain. This is, in fact, Billy’s only real act in the episode — to clumsily give Fantomas the power he needs to become Phantom Limb.
Billy, traumatized, is trundled off by O.S.I. to a memory-wipe program, Hunter is sent to Guam and Brock is booted from the O.S.I. to be assigned to bodyguard Rusty (as he recently got rid of Myra, his old bodyguard). The beefy Dean double makes a pointed Don Quixote reference I’m still puzzling over, then reveals himself to be a member of the Guild (or so it seems). Which seems to indicate that the Guild has, indeed, quietly orchestrated this entire improbable scenario.
Last week I noted that the iPod billboard with Jonas on it in silhouette next to the line of itinerant Mexicans reminded me of this famous photo. Almost immediately, I regretted making the comparison, certain that I was reaching, seeing things that weren’t there. Then, this shot turns up in this week’s episode, reminding me that it is, apparently, impossible to look too deeply into an episode of The Venture Bros.
In a bookend scene, Billy awakens from his unconsciousness to find White, Brock and Rusty gazing down at him with what looks like real affection. But is he among friends? These people, in one way or another, ruined his life.
(Emphasis is placed on Billy’s twitching mechanical hand, a hand that matches Fantomas’s own artificial limbs in design. Is Billy also, one day, going to develop an evil hand?)