Venture Bros: Home is Where the Hate Is
The Venture Bros continues to mine the deep vein of the theme of Identity in ever-more subtle and intriguing ways. “Home is Where the Hate Is” is much lighter in tone than many VB episodes (adult swim.com put “Viva Los Muertos!” on right afterward, a real shock to the system), but as skillfully crafted as any.
In this case, the identity in question is the Monarch’s (the Monarch is quickly becoming the protagonist of this show). The Monarch has given up arching Dr. Venture and gotten married to Dr. Girlfriend; this should have been a positive change for his sense of identity, abandoning his old grudges in order to become a loving, integrated costumed supervillain. But here we see that he’s having second thoughts about his decision.
Sgt Hatred, on the other hand, seems perfectly comfortable with his life as a company man. Perhaps a little too comfortable. His notion of arching, involving questionaires, welcoming parties and baskets of home-grown okra, doesn’t sound like arching at all — it is, plot-twists aside, a development of “business.” Supervillainy in the VB universe is always, in some form or another, a kind of cosplay, and what good is cosplay if it’s “just business”? (“You put the ‘pro’ in ‘protagonist,’ says Hatred to Rusty, and he means it as a compliment.) Hatred blithely goes about his shows of villainy while feeling no ill will toward Rusty or anything in particular, while the Monarch seethes and rages against the slightest slight.
“Home is Where the Hate Is” takes a closer look at the business of arching than we’ve gotten as of yet. What is this institution of arching and how has it come to be this way? In the cosmology of The Venture Bros, it seems that super-science is like God and supervillainy is like Satan: the latter exists so that we may better recognize and understand the former. Supervillains, it seems, are a natural outgrowth of super-science — create wonderful works of technology and, voila, a costumed freak will emerge to arch you. The fact that Rusty (grudgingly) accepts this indicates that the institutions of super-science understand and condone The Guild and its bureaucracy — it is, somehow, a necessary part of doing business.
The Guild has reduced arching to a business, but The Monarch understands that arching is driven by hatred (if not Hatred). Or perhaps “victimhood.” Victimization plays a strong role in the VB universe and may be what best ties Rusty and the Monarch together. Rusty feels like a victim for being born in his father’s shadow, he feels like a victim for having a more-successful brother, he feels like a victim for being saddled with Hank and Dean (whom he calls “the buzz-kill boys” in this episode). He has made his victimhood his identity, which may be what really keeps him from developing as a human being. He uses his victimization as a crutch or a fall-back position: “The General doesn’t want to buy any of my inventions because I was born in my father’s shadow.”
(At the start of the party game, Sgt. Hatred announces: “Everyone has the name of a famous person pinned to their backs.” That isn’t just the groundwork for a game, that is the essence of the entire show, boiled down to one sentence. Everyone on the show feels like they have someone else’s name pinned to their backs like a “Kick Me” sign, whether it is the name of a parent or an arch-enemy or a better-known member of their community or their younger selves. Everyone in the VB universe lives a reduced life in some way, no one is capable of reaching their full potential, because of that name pinned to their backs. In a way, one can admire Sgt Hatred for seeing this commonality for what it is and embracing it — so what if he can’t really live up to the name tattooed down his front? There are other things in life, like a loving wife, a thriving vegetable garden and an interest in lawn care. He has found a way to live outside his chosen identity — could The Monarch ever do likewise?)
The Monarch, on the other hand, seems, perversely, to be most comfortable when victimized. He grouses as he looks through the Guild’s Facebook and bickers with Dr. Girlfriend about her past, but only comes into full bloom when able to shout defiance, whether he’s feeling aggrieved about a life-long grudge or cheating at a party game. Like Rusty, he’s most comfortable as a victim because it keeps him from facing his “adult” duties of marriage and career: “I can’t be a loving husband because Sgt Hatred cheats at Charades.”
Both Rusty and The Monarch resent the responsibilities that come with their identities. Rusty resents his sons, The Monarch resents, well, pretty much everything. With identity comes responsibility, and in the case of “Home is Where the Hate Is” the themes of Identity and Responsibility are put into comic relief with the b-story of Hank and Dean’s hijinx with 21 and 24. 21 has a responsibility toward 24, his friend, but is given the responsibility of watching after Hank and Dean, which he resents: his identity as a friend comes into conflict with his identity as a henchman.
21’s problems are multiplied by an internecine conflict with The Moppets. Essentially a case of sibling rivalry — Mom’s kids don’t get along with dad’s kids — The Moppets are resenting their pending identity shift from Dr. Girlfriend’s henchmen to The Monarch’s henchmen. And while Kevin and Tim-Tom don’t make very good victims (pushy, knife-wielding dwarfs seldom do), they do hold their identities dear and harbor a grudge against their opposite — which is, of course, really a grudge against The Monarch, the man who took their “mother” away from them.
The plots of both the A and B stories of “Home is Where the Hate Is” come together, as all good comedy plots should, with everyone taking off their clothes. When Sgt Hatred invites The Monarch to strip down for a soak in the hot tub, he’s being more than just a bourgeois suburbanite, he’s asking The Monarch to shed his identity, assuring him that he will be happier and more comfortable for it. Of course, neither he nor The Monarch can fully shed their identities: The Monarch keeps on his cowl, and Hatred cannot shed his tattoo, which literally spells out his identity. Maybe that’s why The Monarch and Sgt Hatred can’t fully relax in the hot tub while Rusty seems quite at home: Rusty has no costume to shed, only clothing.
Meanwhile, off in the hedge-maze, 21 and 24’s lives are saved by shedding their costumes, losing their identities, as The Moppets, in their infantile sibling rage, literally mistake the clothes for the men. 21 asks Hank why he and Dean also took off their clothes, and Hank seems genuinely baffled as to his reasons. We know the reason, of course: thematic unity. Hank and Dean, of all the characters in the VB universe, carry the heaviest burden of identity troubles, even though they don’t seem bright enough to ever articulate their anxieties in any meaningful way (as Dean amply demonstrates in his conversation with 24, a conversation about — what else? — identity).
Dean advises 24 to “follow your dream”, but in the closing moments of the show we are given the dark side of that advice: Sgt Hatred, so comfortable in his identity, is shown pursuing an agenda of child molestation. There are, the episode reminds us, some dreams better left unfollowed.
Mantis update
I happened to catch Snacks as he shed his second skin — his second in a week! In the first image, he’s just emerging from his old skin. (The photo is not upside-down, Snacks is — most mantises prefer hanging upside-down, as it gives them a better view of their hunting grounds.) In the second, you see Snacks’s roomie Booie swooping in for a quick, er, snack. The size difference, as you can see, is dramatic, and will be until Booie sheds his skin again.
Spielberg: Jurassic Park part 3
Okay, where were we? Jurassic Park is an hour old at this point and is about to take a sudden genre-shift from “drama of ideas” to adventure-suspense masterwork. And it occurs to me that Spielberg is here almost pulling a Hitchcock with his mid-movie genre-switch. Almost, but not quite. Psycho switches genres mid-way through, but the effect is a shock and a surprise, whereas Jurassic Park tells you right up front that it’s a thriller, then forestalls the thrills for a solid hour, until the tension becomes almost unbearable.
And so, let’s continue!
The set piece is, of course, deeply thematic in its plot-points. The T-Rex escapes from its high-tech paddock because the power is off, the lawyer flees one piece of technology (the car) and scampers across the jungle to another piece of technology (the rest room), neither of which succeed in saving him. (Life, in this case a twenty-foot lizard, “finds a way” to devour him.) In the lawyer’s pursuit of survival, he abandons Hammond’s grandchildren, which forces Alan into the position of reluctant caregiver. The children are trapped inside their piece of technology, forcing Alan to abandon his, Ian uses yet another piece of technology (a flare) to lure the T-Rex away from Alan and the kids. The T-Rex, shoving the car around on the roadway, forces Alan and the kids over the retaining wall — the humans are now in the zoo, the beast is now free.
This set-piece is followed immediately by another, Dennis’s death at the hands of the dilophasaurus. Again, we’ve got a man (life), who’s got a bunch of embryos (life) smuggled in a high-tech can of shaving cream (technology) using technology (a jeep) to get through the jungle (life) during a storm (nature), his glasses (technology) fogging (due to the heat coming off his body in his excited state), causing him to crash, which leads to him using his winch (technology) wrapped around a tree (life) to try to get him out of his situation, all of which is interrupted by the dilophasaurus (life), who spits in Dennis’s eyes, which is his vulnerable spot due to him losing his glasses (technology failing again), which paralyzes him, allowing the dilophasaurus to eat Dennis inside his car. Dennis’s escape craft becomes his tomb, and his can of shaving cream tumbles into the mud, swallowed up, seemingly, by nature.
As if to make up for lost time, we then have a third wonderful action-suspense set-piece, involving a car (technology) in a tree (life), endangering the life of a boy who Alan promised to not abandon. These scenes are, obviously, where Spielberg lives, and they serve the plot (escape the dinosaurs!), the theme (life finds a way) and the character (Alan must protect the children) all at once.
Had enough? The movie isn’t ready to slow down yet. After the car in the tree, there is a fourth masterful action-suspense scene as Ellie and Muldoon show up at the T-Rex paddock looking for their friends and find only Ian and the remains of the lawyer, then are forced to high-tail it out of there with a T-Rex chasing them.
Finally, after 21 minutes of non-stop thrills, the movie is ready to slow down a little, as Alan gets the kids safely up into another tree. A sense of wonder returns as the A-team beholds a herd of brachiosaurs, and yet Alan is clearly through with his dinosaur obsession. When the kids cling to him for comfort, he feels, literally, a pain in his ass, which turns out to be the raptor claw he previously used to ruin a child’s day. Trading childcare for obsession, he tosses the claw out of the tree.
At 1:24:00, we have the end-of-Act-III-low-point, as Ellie sits down with Hammond in the designed-to-look-like-nature restaurant at HQ. Hammond has — horrors — a “death of my kitten” speech, wherein he tells a story about his early days as a young charlatan. Ellie picks up his story and, presto, turns it around to suggest that, for all Hammond’s new sophistication, he’s still a charlatan for thinking he could control nature. The act, and the narrative, is then honed to a point when it is announced that getting the children back safely is “the only thing that matters now.” Because “ideas” about science and technology and nature and morality are all well and good, but movies thrive on plot and motion. You can’t really make a movie about an idea — you can write a novel about an idea, and you can even have a play about an idea, but a movie needs a plot with a physically obtainable goal. And “get the children back home safe” is about as basic and compelling as that sort of thing gets.
Act IV begins with a quiet beat as the sun comes up and Alan and the kids are visited by a brachiosaur. Alan, still, cannot help but be in awe of these magnificent creatures, even though they are, literally, sick of this island.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the plot for the first half of the act is announced: “let’s shut down the system,” so that we might then re-start it and save the children. This applies to the immediate physical situation and, I suppose, to the larger metaphor at work, ie: “the system” the establishment has at present is flawed, and we must “shut it down” and re-start it, in an uncorrupted state, in order to preserve the future.
America’s greatest actor Samuel L. Jackson then steps forward for his time in the limelight of Jurassic Park, to deliver what has to be the most opaquely expository speech in a movie full of opaque expository speeches, as he explains: THE LYSINE CONTINGENCY (so sad that Robert Ludlam did not think to use that for a title). Jackson delivers the speech beautifully, but I, for the life of me, cannot figure out what THE LYSINE CONTINGENCY has to do with the plot of the movie, ie “getting the children back home safe.” Dramatically, it highlights Hammond’s affection for the dinosaurs, which he considers his “children” almost as much as his biological grandchildren, but Jackson, unless I am mistaken, is talking about a plan that would kill off the dinosaurs eventually, not right now, so I’m still mystified as to why it’s in the movie, much less why it’s shot and acted with such skill.
Out in the field, Alan and the kids encounter a T-Rex again, but this time the T-Rex has other things on its mind. This time, Alan and the kids are merely witnesses to the glory and terror of nature, as they realize that, if anyone, they are the ones who don’t belong here. All this works to emphasize that the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are not monsters or even villains, they are animals with their own agendas, unpredictable but not unknowable.
There then follows a masterful suspense sequence as Hammond and Ian guide Ellie and Muldoon through the steps of re-booting the power as Alan and the kids negotiate atall electrified fence. Spielberg, again, keeps almost every aspect of this sequence soaking in theme as he wrings every conceivable drop of suspense from the situation, adding typically Spielbergian touches of grim humor to punctuate the tension.
The power comes back on, Muldoon gets eaten, and the second half of Act IV begins. Now everybody is back at home base and the only objective is “let’s get out of here.” Alan and Ellie go off to figure out how to do that while the kids get attacked by velociraptors in the kitchen, the sixth masterful sequence in the movie.
At 1:53:00 everyone meets up in the control room as the velociraptors attack. The movie’s only real eye-rolling moment comes as Hammond’s pre-teen granddaughter easily decodes Nedry’s so-fiendishly-complex-system-that-only-he-can-understand-it system while dinosaurs attack, not six feet away. This moment, thankfully, gives way to a pulse-pounding out-and-out chase scene, through the building’s ceiling space and out into the lobby. The chase leads to the climax, where Alan, Ellie and the kids are cornered by — oh no! Two velociraptors! How are we ever going to survive? We’re cornered by two velociraptors! Thankfully, unseen by anyone, the twenty-foot T-Rex sneaks into the lobby and saves the day, on tiptoe I’m guessing, although how he fit through the lobby door is another mystery.
The movie’s exclamation point, pictured above, where the “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth!” banner comes fluttering down as the T-Rex gives a triumphal roar, still makes me laugh and cheer. The image perfectly sums up the movie’s argument and stance — the dinosaurs time has come and gone, yet here, at this moment, someone apparently forgot to tell the dinosaurs. The image acknowledges that, in spite of all the warnings in the narrative, the idea of dinosaurs returning is still an insanely powerful one, which can be proven by the fact that you’ve just watched this movie.
In the movie’s closing moments, Alan comes to the conclusion that his obsession isn’t so cool after all, that there is life beyond obsession. His “purpose” in life has shifted, he’s more interested in life and less interested in the study of long-dead creatures. As he flees Jurassic Park with Ellie, Ian, Hammond and the kids, he sees a flock of pelicans skimming the surface of the water, reminding him that dinosaurs, of course, are actually still here. “Life found a way,” the way life generally does — it evolved, as Alan senses he must now evolve as well, and that, for all of science’s inquiry into the possible, “the way things are” is probably the best of all possible worlds.
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?)
Spielberg: Jurassic Park part 2
It sounds kind of dumb to say it, but it occurs to me upon reflection that Jurassic Park is a movie of ideas. It sounds kind of dumb because it doesn’t seem like a movie that involves chases, crashes and giant stomping lizards could be considered about “ideas.”
And yet, look at our protagonist. Alan Grant is, if not passive exactly, then reactive throughout the narrative. In Act I he gets rooked into coming to the island by a manipulative John Hammond, in Act II he sighs and kvells as he gets squired about the park, in Act III he flees from dinosaurs, and in Act IV he guides the children back to the camp. He’s not even there for the penultimate set-piece where the kids are terrorized by the velociraptors in the kitchen.
That’s not a very strong through-line for a protagonist of a movie that one expects to make a billion dollars, but what are the alternatives?
We could, perhaps, say that the movie has multiple protagonists, but really all of their through-lines are weak and Alan’s is definitely presented as the “a-story.” And yet his “arc” — his gradual acceptance of children — has little or nothing to do with the “big ideas” of the movie (cloning, the limits of technology to control nature, the inevitable evil of capitalism, etc).
And yet, the movie is hugely effective, for which one must gives props to Spielberg. He took a script with a reactive protagonist with no clear through-line and turned it into a terrific thriller and one of the biggest box-office smashes of all time. The “ideas” of Jurassic Park were ones the audience were, apparently, ready to receive, and they are given center stage through the whole first half of the movie.
(This is also why Theme is so prominent in the movie. In fact, we could say that Theme is, in fact, the “star” of Jurassic Park.)
So where were we? Paleontologist Alan Grant has been lured by super-science capitalist John Hammond to Jurassic Park. Hammond has exploited Alan’s life-long fascination of dinosaurs to ensure his park’s success in the face of possible lawsuits and, while Alan has some doubts about the project, he cannot stop swooning like a little kid when faced with the prospect of a live dinosaur.
Moving forward into Act II:
24:00: Hammond shows the team a video presentation that explains the science behind the park. This is a scene of dense exposition, exposition without which we would not understand the action. Spielberg makes it tolerable (on a first viewing, anyway) by presenting it as a pitch-perfect send-up of grade-school science movies like Frank Capra’s Wonders of Life series. He also makes the scene thematically relevant by having the video’s audience break out of their mechanical restraints to get at the reality behind the image.
27:50: Alan gets to hold a baby velociraptor in his hands (although its egg is snatched away by a robot hand) and chaotician Ian Malcolm delivers a stern warning about the dangers of Hammond’s enterprise.
32:50: The velociraptors are presented but not shown, in order to keep their mystery and terror at a maximum. Muldoon, the big-game hunter who’s in charge of keeping the velociraptors in line, is here charged with delivering another long expository scene about the nature of velociraptors.
34:28: The principles dine while strangely old-fashioned slide shows play on the walls of the restaurant. In another remarkably long expository scene, they argue about the morality of Hammond’s enterprise.
38:00 The kids arrive, and Alan does his best to avoid them — and fails. They look at him as a rock star as he grows visibly uncomfortable.
We learn that not only is Dennis Nedry involved in a nefarious plot to steal dinosaur embryos, he is the only IT guy employed by Ingen. Yes, at a theme park designed to cater to tens of thousands of visitors a year, with a museum and a restaurant and a motorized tour and a sophisticated audio-visual setup and dozens of laboratories staffed by scores of Ph-D-level scientists, with a heliport and pilots and boats and a dock and drivers and office staff and cooks and caterers and waitstaff and god knows what else, there is one IT guy, without whom Jurassic Park would founder.
The tour gets underway, and Ian delivers yet another long expository speech, this one about chaos theory. Now, I read the novel Jurassic Park and I’ve seen the movie many times and I’ve read The Lost World and seen its movie many times as well, and it’s still unclear to me why Ian Malcolm needs to be on these trips. First, it’s unclear to me why Hammond’s board demands that, of the three experts brought to the island for the tour, one is a paleontologist , one is a paleobotanist and the third is a chaotician. What board member suggested that? What Ingen board member stood his ground and said “unless we get the approval of an expert in chaos theory, this park will not open!”? What does chaos theory really have to do with what happens in Jurassic Park? I don’t mean in terms of “ideas” that the author wishes to discuss, I mean in narrative terms. There is, as far as I can see, nothing that happens in the narrative that requires the application of chaos theory. There’s a T-Rex chasing your jeep, your understanding of chaos isn’t really going to change anything. Ian’s actions in Jurassic Park, as I see them, are: he complains about what Hammond has done here, he makes a pass at Ellie, he delivers a speech that has nothing to do with anything, he gets attacked by a dinosaur, and he helps Ellie negotiate the power shed. Strangely, he is the only one asked back for the sequel, which calls for his expertise even less.
We meet a sick triceratops, and Ellie gets her moment to shine, if by “shining” you mean handling a detective scene about what’s bugging the triceratops. Significant screen-time is devoted to Ellie’s expertise in botany and animal diseases, and yet the mystery of the sick triceratops is left unsolved and unmentioned again. I understand that, at the root of the narrative, there is an argument being made about capitalist-driven science pressing ahead into areas it doesn’t understand, and how a simple decision at the inception of a project leads to all sorts of unintended consequences down the road (which is what Ian is doing there), but as the narrative of Jurassic Park develops, the sick dinosaurs (which turn up later as well) and the discussion of chaos theory become window dressing that add little to the narrative, except as fuel to feed the tensions between the scientists and Hammond. But let’s face it: a movie that involves people being chased by dinosaurs doesn’t also need lessons in mathematics to help “sell” the drama of science-vs-capital or technology-vs-nature.
52:00 — A storm is coming in, and everyone leaves the island. What? Come again? There is a storm coming, severe enough to force the entire park staff to leave the island, yet Hammond is still going to let his crucial, all-important park tour continue?
54:00 — Ellie splits off from the group to go look for triceratops clues, while Ian chats with Alan about family. Ian, it seems, has many families, many ex-wives and children, and seems perfectly comfortable with that reality. Alan, on the other hand, still can’t quite stomach the notion of children at all. His life is his work — or, more properly, his obsession.
It’s worth noting that, while the movie supposes that technology fails in the face of the power of nature, it is, in fact, not “technology” that fails at Jurassic Park — it’s Dennis Nedry. For all the narratives high-minded notions of chaos theory and the complexities of ecosystems, the failure of the park comes down to a fat guy shutting down the system so that he can swipe some embryos.
(There is, pointedly, a photo of Oppenheimer stuck to Dennis’s monitor. I noticed it and understood its implication from the first time I saw the movie, but it wasn’t until this time around that I noticed the post-it attached to the photo, a note that reads “Beginning of the Baby Boom.” That is, the birth of the atomic bomb, to the unnamed post-it author, was a sort of biological Big Bang, a technological explosion that led, somehow, to a biological explosion. Which also ties in to Ian’s theories, but still does not explain his narrative purpose.)
And now let me pause here, half-way through the movie, to address the latest episode of Venture Bros, and pick this up later.
Spielberg: Jurassic Park part 1
WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? Like many Spielberg protagonists, Alan Grant has an obsession. In his case, dinosaurs. Nothing could possibly fulfill his dreams of a lifetime more than an island full of living dinosaurs. Over a wild 24 hours of adventure and terror, he comes to realize the price of his obsession, and the futility of it.
As I have mentioned before, Jurassic Park is the most theme-heavy of movies from Spielberg, the most theme-heavy of directors. The theme here is “life finds a way,” specifically that life finds a way around the technology that tries to control and define it. Every scene in Jurassic Park, literally almost every shot, finds a way to express this theme in one way or another, sometimes subtly, sometimes with characters explicitly stating it in long complicated speeches.
Jurassic Park, like many of Spielberg’s movies, has four clearly-defined acts and goes like this:
ACT II (24:00-1:00:00) Grant, his girlfriend Ellie, chaotician Ian, the oily lawyer and two of Hammond’s grandchildren are led on a tour through the park. Nothing goes right and great emphasis is placed on the limits of technology. There are several long, expository scenes, some of them necessary to understanding the plot, some, mysteriously, not. Alan, although still clearly fascinated by the prospect of live dinosaurs, admits to having some qualms about the scientific value of bringing ancient life into the modern world. Dennis’s plot to smuggle embryos is set into motion. We learn that his plot involves shutting down the power for the entire island, a decision that leaves Alan, Ian, the lawyer and the kids stranded next to the T. Rex paddock, at night, in a rainstorm.
ACT III (1:00:00-1:28:00) Act III begins at the one-hour mark, on the dot, with one of the all-time greatest action-suspense scenes ever created, ten minutes of superbly-orchestrated brilliance, and we’re off to the races. From here on out, the concerns of Jurassic Park become largely mechanical and situational — and substantially more entertaining. After the attack of the T-Rex, we cut to another part of the island for Dennis’s death at the hands of a Dilophasaurus, then come back to Alan, who is stuck on the wrong side of civilization with the children, whom he will guide and guard for the remainder of the movie. At 1:14:00 we have another wonderful action-suspense scene involving an SUV in a tree, at 1:18:00 we have Ellie and Ian chased by a T-Rex. There is a respite as Alan finds a place to rest with the kids, and an end-of-third-act low point where Ellie and Hammond have a little heart-to-heart, complete with a death-of-my-kitten speech from Hammond.
ACT IV (1:28:00-2:00:00) The sun comes up and Alan and the kids are still alive in their resting place. Alan’s fascination with dinosaurs remains, in spite of everything. Meanwhile, Team B tries to figure out how to get reboot the island’s power supply. There’s another superb suspense scene where we crosscut between Alan trying to get the kids over an electric fence as Team B restarts the island’s generator. The velociraptors attack the park headquarters as Alan and the kids arrive safely. As Alan and Ellie see about getting off the island, the kids are attacked by velociraptors in the movie’s fourth or fifth virtuoso action-suspense scene. Alan and Ellie come back for the kids and are all attacked by the velociraptors again. The T-Rex becomes a sudden, unlikely ally in a moment of crisis and the group flees the island. Alan, we see, has had his obsession for dinosaurs dulled by his experience of the past 24 hours, and as he contemplates Hammond’s grandchildren he reflects that it’s probably just as well that his dream remains a dream.
SOME THOUGHTS:
0:00 – 3:28: The theme is stated visually in the very first scene. A bunch of workers (in their snappy Jurassic Park-brand hardhats) hold guns and peer nervously off into the distance at something scary coming through the bushes.What is it coming through the bushes? Is it a dinosaur? No, it’s just a forklift. A forklift carrying a dinosaur in a crate, but a forklift nonetheless. Dinosaurs, this scene says, are not the problem — the problem is the technology intruding into nature. Here, not only is the forklift shown knocking over trees to get through the jungle, but we see that it’s carrying that velociraptor in that box — and what do you know, the velociraptor finds a way to, if not get out of the box, at least exact some revenge on the men who put it there. Technology (men with guns, with corporate logo) in nature, face off not with nature but with another piece of technology (the forklift and box), which contains Life (the cranky velociraptor), which Finds A Way to get around the technology trying to control it.
5:30: Alan digs for velociraptor bones in the Badlands — with the help of the latest dinosaur-hunting technology. Which he doesn’t understand, and which seems to fail due to his merest touch. Alan, we see, is mistrustful of technology — he’s told that soon, due to technological advances, paleontologists won’t even have to dig for bones, to which he replies “Where’s the fun in that?” Alan sees that if technology advances far enough, life won’t have a chance — and yet he’s devoted his life to getting close to these creatures that obsess him.
9:08: The movie’s first expository scene, where Alan explains to a child why a velociraptor is scary, as though we might have a hard time believing it, given the evidence. The scene also serves to express Alan’s dislike of children — he pointedly terrorizes the kid as Ellie rolls her eyes. In the following scene he goes to absurd lengths to list the reasons he doesn’t want children, which Ellie, apparently, does.
I’ll admit I have a hard time connecting Alan’s growing affection for children to the theme of the movie. At the end of Act III, Alan pointedly gives up his dinosaur obsession in favor of protecting his unsolicited charges, but that speaks more to Alan’s Spielbergian obsession and less to the subject at hand. It’s almost as though the protagonist’s desire in Jurassic Park is more of a sub-plot, the “A-plot” being the technical explanation of how the dinosaurs came to be and why these folks are on the island.
10:30: Hammond appears, the jolly capitalist. He’s got lots of money and he’s going to make a lot more of it. Hammond is interesting to me as the kind of capitalist who thinks he’s really hit on something that isn’t evil, that somehow he’s managed to circumvent the age-old rule of capitalism, that business must be based on plunder and rape. He really thinks his park is a positive good and that he’s thought of every possible contingency. “Spared no expense” is his motto, catchphrase and sacred vow: he’s not just out to make a quick buck, he sees himself as a kind of Medici, bringing great works to a benighted world.
13:45: We meet Dennis Nedry and hear a little about his plan to abscond with the embryos. Wayne Knight’s performance is so broad and bizarre that it seems like it belongs in a different movie. I’ve seen Jurassic Park many times and I still have trouble assimilating it into the whole. I wonder if Spielberg saw some kind of problem with the role and felt that it had to be played this way in order for the movie to maintain the specific tone he was looking for, that perhaps if Dennis Nedry’s scheme was played straight the narrative might become too ponderous. Recently Spielberg has mentioned his affection for Dennis Weaver’s gonzo performance in Touch of Evil; I wonder if perhaps he was hoping to create his own Weaver-esque performance with Knight. Or maybe Knight just amused Spielberg with his delivery and Spielberg, on the set, simply pushed him to be bigger.
17:11: The “Jurassic Park” logo is on everything — helmets and jeeps and gates and signs and doors. This is a brilliant touch, because thevillain of the piece isn’t really technology but capitalism. Capitalism wishes to turn everything into a product, and the point of the narrative is that Hammond has attempted to put a logo on life itself. He’s much worse than Dr. Frankenstein: he doesn’t just want to create life, he also wants to market it as well, with all the trappings. Hammond knows that the world is fascinated by dinosaurs and he’s going to cater to that fascination, even though it’s clearly the wrong thing to do. Not coincidentally, the movie also knows that the world is fascinated by dinosaurs and plans to cater to that same fascination, and tell us it’s wrong, and reveal the disaster awaiting, and make tons of money off it anyway, partly through ticket sales and partly through, yes, slapping a “Jurassic Park” logo on everything conceivable.
20:24: Alan and Ellie see the Brachiosaurus. I love this scene. Sam Neill and Laura Dern play it perfectly. It’s not just that they are paleontologists being presented with the object of their fascination, its that Hammond has, somehow, managed to reach deep down inside their cerebral cortices and give them nothing less than their childhood dreams come true. And it, quite rightfully, staggers them. I certainly know how I feel when I see the scene — the gentle brachiosaur lumbering up the hill in the afternoon sun is exactly what I have imagined a living dinosaur would look like ever since I was a child, but far more poetic. The scene is crucial in setting up the protagonist’s dilemma, such as it is: we really want to see this, as much as the protagonist does. Good lord, who would not? When we see the brachiosaur, we, like Alan, are ready to do whatever it takes to see more. Spielberg is well aware of this, which is why he stages the scene with maximum beauty and emotional punch, then withholds the dinosaurs, for the most part, for the next 38 minutes of exposition and argument. He has our attention and he’s going to tease us until we can barely take it any more, and then he’s going to give us what we want in a way we absolutely don’t want it.
Which brings us to the end of Act I. More later.