My Grandad was a fake blacksmith you know.
He worked in a forgery!
Tag: fun
January 24, 2012
January 23, 2012
Really funny jokes-Squeeze a lemon
The local bar was so sure that its bartender was the strongest man around that they offered a standing $1000 bet. The bartender would squeeze a lemon until all the juice ran into a glass, and hand the lemon to a patron. Anyone who could squeeze one more drop of juice out would win the money. Many people had tried over time (weight-lifters, longshoremen, etc.) but nobody could do it.
One day this scrawny little man came into the bar, wearing thick glasses and a polyester suit, and said in a tiny squeaky voice “I’d like to try the bet”
After the laughter had died down, the bartender said OK, grabbed a lemon, and squeezed away. Then he handed the wrinkled remains of the rind to the little man. But the crowd’s laughter turned to total silence as the man clenched his fist around the lemon and six drops fell into the glass!! As the crowd cheered, the bartender paid the $1000, and asked the little man “what do you do for a living? Are you a lumberjack, a weight-lifter, or what?”
The scrawny little man replied “I work for the IRS.”
January 22, 2012
Really funny jokes-Carnival truck
A carnival truck and a revival preacher’s truck collide head-on, and everyone is killed. The next thing anyone knows, Saint Peter is interrogating the revival preacher very thoroughly. Suddenly, the carnival crew arrives at the Pearly Gates reeking of beer and reefer, and Saint Peter continues waves them all through as he continues questioning the preacher. The Reverend splutters indignantly and asks, “How can you let those filthy, unrighteous hooligans into heaven while you give me the third degree?”
“Take it easy,” Saint Peter says. “They’re only going to be here a week.”
January 21, 2012
Spoil Everything Now
How many times has this happened to you? It’s the day after a big episode of television show X. You’re standing around at the copy machine or water cooler with some co-workers. “Did you see what happened on television show X last night?” you say to the group, knowing that most everyone in this circle watches and enjoys television show X. “Yes!” exclaims a co-worker, “I couldn’t believe it when….”
“STOP!” yells another in the circle, seemingly in a state of panic. “It’s on the DVR but I haven’t watched it yet.”
The conversation grinds to a halt. Everyone sighs and stares listlessly into the swirling galaxy of creamer in their coffees, or mechanically shuffles papers in silence to put in the copier. “Nice weather we’re having,” someone offers.
How did this state of affairs come to exist? How is it that those of us who simply watch television as television ended up deferring so quickly and definitively to the TV-tardy generation? As TiVO and then more generic forms of DVR technology spread through the marketplace, why did the broadcast generation so eagerly accommodate those who prefer to watch their programs in weekend marathons of digitized fast-forwarding? Why is it impolite to “spoil” a show by revealing plot information, and yet not impolite to force a larger group of people to clam up during a spontaneous discussion of said plot?
These are perplexing questions, to be sure. At first this deference was perhaps simply techno-intimidation. In its earliest days, TiVO marketing (and TiVO owners) enjoyed making the non-time-shifted feel as though they were slaves to the manipulative agenda of network puppeteers. To watch broadcast television when it was actually broadcast was to admit you had nothing better to do, that you let television rule over your life rather than taking charge of the technology itself.
As the years have passed, however, we can now see that this was an utterly ridiculous proposition. Who is more enslaved by television: the person who tries to make it home in time for Modern Family, but if he misses it just does something else with his time; or the person who loads up a brace of Modern Family’s that have to be “cleared” from the DVR, maybe over Thanksgiving or after the spring finale? For me, there is no sadder sight than an otherwise young and healthy individual hunched over a laptop watching something like The Jersey Shore, trying to “catch up” with a program that God intended us to watch by accident while channel-surfing from the comfort of the couch.
I suppose this impulse can be defended in those who watch serial narratives, an audience that would be devastated to miss even a second of the complete storyline (unlike viewers of old who, if they missed an episode, caught up in the first five minutes of the next installment and simply carried on). Like so much of what has gone wrong with contemporary television, we can blame much of this on Twin Peaks, the series that probably did more than any other to ensure that the college educated would feel an obligation to view every moment of every single program and somehow still think they were smarter than the cathode tractor-beam that had just transfixed them for upscale target practice.
Many are happy that television is now often afforded the status of “art” in the same way as the cinema. But I’m not so sure this has been a good development inasmuch as it has destroyed the pleasures of quotidian disposability that were so long a part of the medium (like being able to engage in casual day-after conversation about an episode without someone freaking out that you’re about to read Molly Bloom’s soliloquy aloud before they’ve had a chance to buy their copy of Ulysses). 
The “artification” of television has gone hand-in-hand, of course, with the industry’s amazing success in convincing otherwise intelligent people that they should buy multi-disc DVD/Blu-Ray copies of a television series in its totality. Sure, Captain DVR has disrupted the imperious power of the network schedule—only to then get ensnared through appeals to art, quality, and archival depth so as to drop a few twenties on a deluxe boxed-set. All the old NBC wanted was my time and eyeballs—but the new Comcast/NBC/Universal wants me to think I have a responsibility to own the complete run of Heroes, neatly filed away alongside hours and hours of other forgettable shows that in an ideal world would remain elusive and ephemeral. Why anyone (other than a media teacher, of course) would go to the trouble of brushing off a box set of The Simpsons in order to watch a specific episode rather than simply allow Homer, et al. to pop up as a welcome surprise during unfocused leisure time is a true mystery. It’s rather like keeping bottles of tap water in fancy bottles even though the faucet remains completely functional.
Some might argue the box set is a good way to catch up with an important series one has missed—but even here, I would suggest it is enough to know that Series X will undoubtedly return, like a comet, and that arriving at that welcome rendez-vous in an unspecified future will make the eventual viewing of the series much more pleasurable than burning through it in an obligatory 22 hour marathon. I can’t think of anything currently on TV, or indeed that has ever been on TV, that I would absolutely HAVE to see RIGHT NOW.
This stockpiling of episodes—either on DVD or on the DVR– is especially nonsensical and even a bit depressing when it involves programs that were designed to be wholly disposable in the first place, shows like Storage Wars, Kendra, Hoarders, and House Hunters that work best as random encounters with sporadic time-killing. Indeed, if you like a particular show in one of these formats, wouldn’t it be better to keep a few in the quiver? That is, rather than systematically make sure that each and every episode has been accounted for in the DVR queue, wouldn’t it be more rewarding to allow for a few strays to escape as breeding stock so that they might unexpectedly return sometime in the future? Incredibly, I actually encountered an episode of Seinfeld the other day that I had somehow never seen before. It was a profound, moving, and even magical experience, akin to necromancy or time-travel, and a pleasure that the DVR’s mandatory efficiency in consumption makes increasingly rare.
Many have bemoaned how cable (along with an armada of other technologies) has led to a balkanization of public culture and the centripetal hardening of “egocasting” as the new media sensibility. This fragmentation is inevitable, no doubt, and I am certainly not nostalgic for the days of 3-Network pseudo-consensus broadcasting. But, in a world where increasingly you only share film, television, and music choices with a very narrow cross-section of your demographic, how frustrating is it when one slothful DVR-owner can singlehandedly bring a discussion to a halt?
Here’s a good rule of thumb in television: if you can’t be bothered to make the time to watch a show on the day it actually airs, if the idea of watching a particular show isn’t something you actually look forward to enough to plan your precious leisure time around it, then it probably isn’t all that important to you in the first place. Television is so relentlessly of the present and moving ever onward into the future, why would anyone go back in time to resurrect an experience so demonstrably unimportant?
That’s why I think those who still have affection for the flows and rhythms of broadcasting as broadcasting should quit being so deferent and polite in this conflict. I’m tired of feeling like a public masturbator simply because I bothered to sit down and watch Revenge on the night it was actually airing. If you feel the same, then take the vow to discuss whatever you want, whenever you want, and let the TV-tardy assume the responsibility of shunning human company until they feel “caught up” enough to contribute to the basic social cement of televisual “small talk.” After all, we never had a vote on which way this social convention was supposed to go.
January 21, 2012
Diabolical Codyism
REGRESSION crisis currently bedeviling the western democracies, a mass and now multi-generational stagnation in adolescence largely engineered and sustained by a culture industry that needs all of us to remain fixated on the products and fantasies we consumed when we were fourteen. The promo art for Young Adult announces this crisis as its central theme: “Everyone grows old. Not everyone grows up.”
Before unpacking Young Adult, however, we must first revisit Juno. Below, the semiotic square illustrates how the four main characters embody positions derived from the film’s structuring opposition of ADULT – CHILD.
JUNO (2007)
Before proceeding with the individual characters, it should be noted that the “semiotic square” typically does not have a baby at its center. I have added one, however, because it is the precious, precious baby that provides the bedrock of the Codyverse. Indeed, one could argue that both Juno and Young Adult are primarily concerned with arriving at the appropriate answer for Question 3 above: “Who shall and shall not be granted proximity to the precious baby?”
Juno herself, of course, assumes the “contrary” position at the top of the square, a wise-cracking teen who, though she seems mature beyond her years, must learn important lessons on the path to true adulthood. As the only fully functional “adult” in the story, Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) will assume the Adult/Non-child position. I will assign Paulie (Micheal Cerra) the “neutral” term at the bottom of the square as he is caught in a limbo between adulthood and childhood and is thus neither (as opposed to Juno’s more forceful transition from Child to Adult). But the crucial term here is on the right side of the square: Mark (Jason Bateman) in the position of Child–Not Adult. While Juno is about “Juno,” obviously, its main ideological task is to punish Mark for his transgressive regression so that he might be expelled from the text and kept as far away as possible from the precious baby.
Mark’s transgressions are these: 1). he still enjoys “punk rock” and “horror movies;” 2). he shares his expertise in these forms with a teenage girl; 3). he verbalizes his attraction to this same teenage girl, probably because she also likes punk rock and horror movies; 4). he bitches about how marriage forced him to renounce his ambitions to be a “rock star”; 5). he expresses a desire to live in a loft downtown; 6). he expresses some degree of hesitation over coming into proximity with the precious Juno-baby. It’s very straightforward, really. Mark is the regressed male who, unlike Steve Carrell in The 40 Year Old Virgin, does not have a hip and patient Catherine Keener to save him from wallowing in perpetual adolescence. Juno ends “happily” to the extent that Mark is exposed as a creep and must leave the world of wholesome suburban reproduction.
Now, let us move on to the even more diabolical case of Young Adult:
YOUNG ADULT (2011)
In this case, we will put Mark (Patton Oswald) at the top of the square. Taking a page from Planet Apatow, Cody uses the narrative shorthand of a superhero figurine collection to signify Matt’s regressed status. And yet, Matt remains the only adult “conscience” in the film, consistently trying to talk Mavis (Charlize Theron) out of her ridiculous scheme to win back her old boyfriend, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson). Buddy is for the most part a cipher, but as a seemingly committed husband and enthusiastic father, he fills out the necessary position of Adult–Non-Child.
Now, you might think Cody was somewhat harsh with Mark in Juno for punishing him so excessively just for enjoying the rock ‘n’ roll music and finding a witty teenager attractive. Thus the genius of Nipple Confusion. By placing Buddy’s wife, Beth (Elizabeth Reaser), in a cover band made up entirely of new moms, Cody finds a more nuanced strategy for engaging question #2: “What is the proper relationship for a “normal adult” to have with popular culture?” While Juno addresses this question in its most general form, Young Adult provides a much more focused analysis of the spectrum of regression by asking, “What is the appropriate relationship for a ‘normal adult’ to have with Teenage Bandwagon?”
Recall that during the opening sequence, we witness Mavis obsessively rewinding and re-listening to the first verse of Teenage Bandwagon’s song, “the Concept”–included on a now 17 year old mix-tape that Buddy made for Mavis when they were dating. Mavis’ fixation on repeating a moment of pop epiphany (crucially, she only wants to listen to the first verse/chorus over and over again) suggests that her relationship with Teenage Bandwagon is profoundly regressed and thus wholly dysfunctional. Mavis’ rewinding of the tape is offered, initially at least, as a playfully regressive memory for any audience member old enough to remember the courtship and technical protocols attending analog “mix-tapes”–but as the story proceeds, her fixation on “The Concept” retroactively becomes a sonic marker of Mavis having become “stuck” in the past. She therefore has an “inappropriate” relationship with Teenage Fanclub.
As the drummer in Nipple Confusion, however, Buddy’s wife Beth demonstrates a healthy and non-regressed relationship to Teenage Bandwagon. This is because Beth, unlike Mavis, enjoys Teenage Bandwagon within the context of successful marriage and reproduction. Indeed, Nipple Confusion is “cool” precisely because they have the “proper” perspective on life by virtue of their marriages and collective motherhood. Single and without children, Mavis foolishly regards “The Concept” as a powerful anthem of romantic affect and possibility; Beth has the higher knowledge that the song is simply a quaint curio of their generation’s heritage in ’90s indie-rock culture. Thus Mavis’ profound horror when she discovers that Buddy has shared “their song” with obstacle-wife.
Which brings us to Mavis, who we see occupies the same position as Mark in Juno: CHILD–NOT ADULT. And, also like Mark, the ideological work of Young Adult is to ensure that Mavis be kept as far away as possible from the precious, precious baby. Taken together, the two films demonstrate just how profoundly invested the Codyverse is in maintaining rigorous moral parameters related to proper suburban breeding.
Young Adult, however, is a much more mean and nasty film. Consider that in Juno Mark must leave in shame because he questions the centrality of breeding and parenthood in adult life. This is a harsh judgment, perhaps, but at least Mark has some agency in his own fate. He chooses to end his marriage and go live in a loft where he can spend more time listening to punk rock and watching horror movies.
Young Adult, on the other hand, makes the following division:
Successful Breeders “Crippled” Breeders
Buddy (functional penis and sperm) Matt (crooked penis)Beth (functional uterus and ovum) Mavis (had a miscarriage)
Thus, Matt and Mavis’ “regressions” are explained by a physical inability to assume the role of an adult breeder. Unlike Mark, they are denied even the opportunity of questioning the breeder position–it is simply assumed that both desperately want a marriage and family (especially Mavis), but have “regressed” to a non-adult position as an effect of their reproductive failure. Matt and Mavis are doomed because, in their cases at least, biology is destiny.
I would submit this is a fairly loathsome position to take on these issues.
Okay, I’m done.
January 21, 2012
Sheldon Wigs Out
Family HistorySubject S. was born in Galveston, Texas in 1980. Father (G) remembered as a “stereotypical Texan” with interests in hunting, football, and other “masculine” pursuits—deceased with S. still in grade school. Mother (M) a devout evangelical Christian. S. recalls repeated attempts at religious indoctrination. Two siblings: a fraternal sister (M2) and an older brother (G2). Both unremarkable and apparently socially functional.
Early testing established extraordinarily high IQ (self-reported at 187). Subject’s growing interest in mathematics and science only exacerbated tensions within the home and at school. Advanced intellect and lack of interest in peer pursuits led to extensive bullying. Early evidence of Asperger syndrome (undiagnosed). Enrolled in college at age 11. Completed first Ph.D. at age 16, second doctorate at age 20. One year abroad in Germany. Age of first masturbatory experience unknown. Apparently remains a virgin at age 31.
Symptomalogy/provisional diagnosis At the time of the homicides and subsequent institutionalization, S. had been working for approximately five years at a prestigious university of science and technology in Southern California. Two male victims (H and L) were co-workers, while L was also subject’s roommate. Third victim (P) was a female acquaintance of S, H, and L living across the hall in subject’s apartment building. All victims appear to have been killed by a single weapon—a prized reproduction of a large sword used by “the Klingons” in the television series, Star Track.
While it is unclear if any single event precipitated S’s violent attack on H, L, and P, subject was heard to be screaming “Big Bang! Big Bang!” when admitted by police to emergency psychiatric ward. Asked his “occupation” during intake interview, subject showed signs of automatism and echolalia, stating repeatedly, “I am a theoretical physicist. I theorize physics and I exist in theory.” Subject punctuated this recitation with childish giggling. Evidence of hypergraphic tendencies collected at subject’s apartment (fig. 1) provides additional diagnostic insight into this ideation.
After administration of haloperidol and a 24-hour course of sedatives, S. engaged in slightly more coherent attempts to explain motivation for the homicides. Subject appears to have been incensed by L. and H’s “incessant yammering about the social protocols attending coitus” and by L’s inability to master a simple “differential syntagm of cereal box order.” This fixation, in conjunction with other odd ritualistic behaviors, suggests long-standing and apparently untreated presentation of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Asked as to why he had severed L.’s head from its body and apparently presented it to P before also murdering her, subject protested that L’s head had been employed as a type of “comic knocker.” When interviewing physician pressed for more information on this odd detail, S. would only respond, “They know what they did.”
Blunted affect indicative of schizoaffective disorder. Subject also presented with First Rank symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. In initial psychiatric interviews, subject insisted that his actions were monitored weekly by “millions of Americans.” Moreover, S. was frequently heard to boast that millions more watched him than the neighboring “community.” As evidence of his surveillance, S. drew a diagram of his apartment and demanded hospital staff search for three cameras hidden in his living room (fig. 2). This delusion had become elaborated to the point that S. spoke of his tormentors as Camera “C,” Camera “B,” and Camera “S.” Subject also expressed delusions of grandeur in his repeated claim that he was “the smartest person currently alive” and that he was a personal friend of actor Wil Wheaton (known primarily for his work in the Star Track television programs). Partly to humor subject, hospital staff allowed S. to call “Wheaton” during his second day on ward so that their supposed friendship might be confirmed. When call went unanswered, S. claimed Wheaton was “not home.” Subsequent court documentation demonstrated that actor Leonard Nimoy (also famous for his involvement in Star Track) and comic book author Stan Lee had previously filed for restraining orders against S. Subject also expressed severe delusions of contamination, especially related to food preparation. Subsequent interview with peers confirmed this to be a life-long issue.
PrognosisNot good. Arrival of mother from Texas instigated cascade of pathologically regressive behaviors that, quite frankly, were embarrassing even to seasoned psychiatric professionals. These included repeated demands for the recitation of a beloved childhood lullaby (“Soft kitty”) and requests for a highly sexualized application of “vapo-rub” to subject’s chest. Subject also received a brief visit from another co-worker, “R”, who himself appeared to be suffering from various forms of psychiatric distress. After a short detention, “R” was issued a prescription for valium and released.
January 21, 2012
"I Had Sex with Hitler and then Almost Fed His Brain to a Condor"
If you’re like most dolts produced by the American education system, you probably actually believe Adolph Hitler died in his bunker in 1945 when the Russian Army reached Berlin. Such ignorance is understandable, given how important it was, then and now, to protect the world from the terrifying REALITY of the situation, namely this: At the end of WWII, Adolph Hitler’s brain was surgically removed, placed in stasis, and then transplanted into a willing new host! Most likely, “Hitler” is still somewhere on the planet today, scheming, ever scheming, to return and complete his plans for world domination. My money says the brain is now in Rick Perry. Every Texas yahoo talks about secession now and then, but Perry’s recent campaign pledge to annex the Sudetenland is troubling to say the least.
They Saved Hitler’s Brain (aka The Madman of Mandoras) (1963) dared speak this truth in the tortured logic of Z-cinema some fifty years ago. Legend has it that the film began shooting in the late fifties–only to be shut down by Nazi agents in Hollywood looking to suppress its startling revelations. It took the courage of a rag-tag band of UCLA students in the early sixties to shoot some additional framing footage, thereby padding out the original film by ten or fifteen minutes so that it might get distribution and thus see the light of day. But it turns out the Nazis had nothing to worry about. The temporal rift created by grafting together the film stock and styles of the late fifties and early sixties was so jarring that the movie elicited only jeers and ridicule. For years it played in the post-fringe graveyard of late-night television, leaving an astonished few to admire the stamina of the actor forced to kneel for hours at a time behind an old ham radio set and under a bell jar in order to “sell” the illusion of functional decapitation.
Happily for lovers of historical drama, the saga of Hitler’s itinerant brain did not die with that noble, yet failed cinematic experiment. In 1973, novelist Roland Puccetti tried once again to alert the world to the ongoing hazard presented by allowing Hitler’s brain to remain at liberty, giving us the sublime revisionism of The Death of the Führer (Arrow Books-1973).
I have now read Puccetti’s book. Before recounting its alternative history of the years after the Second World War (absolute and total spoiler alert), let me say this: The Death of the Führer MUST be adapted for the screen as soon as possible. How it hasn’t already ended up as a major motion picture is a true mystery, one that makes me suspect Nazi sympathizers are once again pressuring Hollywood to ignore the R-rated bombshells contained in this book. The Death of the Führer is everything Inglourious Basterds hoped to be–but done with such economy and ease that it utterly shames Tarantino’s lumbering attempt to pass off what are essentially five interminably long dialog scenes as some kind of fast-paced caper film. If you want brutal and stunning Nazisploitative action, then Puccetti is your man.
We begin at a Bavarian ski lodge some time in the 1960s. A young man–his name is unimportant, call him Mr. Framing-Device if you like–has twisted his leg and must stay off the slopes. An old man sitting on a bench nearby accurately diagnoses the skier’s condition from afar–for you see, this old man is a doctor: Karl Giesvius. As so often happens when strangers meet in the Bavarian Alps, their conversation soon turns to Hitler. Karl, it turns out, knows the REAL story, which he proceeds to tell us:
Ten or so years after the end of WWII, Karl had been sitting in a Parisian cafe when suddenly a local rushed in and begged him to attend to a dying man elsewhere in the city, a dying man who claimed to have information about the whereabouts of….Hitler! Understandably intrigued, Karl rushed to the man’s bedside to hear a startling confession: “I assisted in the removal and transplantation of Hitler’s brain!” Later, after the man dies, Karl looks through some old photos and verifies that the dying man had indeed been a member of the Führer’s personal medical team. He decides to fly to Berlin and begin his investigation.
First task: get inside the Führerbunker and see if any clues are still there. Now, you might think the Führerbunker would have been picked over for just about any and all items of historical import, and that accessing it would be difficult if not impossible. But this turns out not to the be the case. Consulting a map of the compound, Karl figures out where the ventilation shaft should be, and after moving a few well-placed rocks, he’s unearthed the entrance. After shimmying down the vent, he’s the first person to stand in the Führerbunker since the Russians collapsed the entrances at the end of the war. What’s down there? Junk, mostly. It would also appear a Russian soldier took a retributive shit on Hitler’s bed, an extremely resilient shit considering it somehow survived for a decade before Karl descended into the bunker to witness it. He checks out the conference room. Nothing. Eva Braun’s bedroom. Nothing. He’s just about to give up and/or suffocate from a lack of oxygen when finally Karl discovers a hidden passageway connecting Hitler’s bedroom to… a secret surgical theater!
Looking around the tiled room with his flashlight, Karl discovers a bloody operating table and scalpels that still have hair on them (the hair of Hitler!). Strangely, though the Nazis had apparently pioneered the art of brain transplantation, they still didn’t quite understand that one should shave a surgical area before operating. Karl continues his search for evidence. His flashlight illuminates a strange object on the floor. Bingo! It’s a brain!
Hitler’s brain? Well, no, actually–Karl quickly reasons it is the brain of the poor schmuck who donated his body so that Hitler could have a new ride. This was some particularly good writing, I thought. Here Puccetti captures the urgency of the situation back in 1945. With the allies advancing, Nazi doctors had no time to wash down the operating theater nor throw away the old brain–a point Puccetti emphasizes by revealing that the floor-brain is still in the steely clutches of the forceps used so many years ago to wrench it from its skull! There’s also a bucket of congealed blood nearby, but Puccetti does not speculate as to why the brain didn’t end up there rather than on the floor. Also, we are left to wonder how this brain tissue, much like the enduring pile of Russian infantry crap in the next room, could survive more or less in tact for over a decade.
Karl’s investigation continues. He finds a plaque bearing the name of the surgical genius responsible for all this brain shuffling: Dr. Wilhelm Tager. Karl is flabbergasted. Tager, as it turns out, was his buddy from medical school before the war, his old fencing partner, and a genius of neurology who finished at the top of their class. That just about seals it. Find Tager find Hitler’s brain, he reasons. And then he can kill them both!
After a little more detective work, Karl tracks Tager down to a remote castle somewhere in Spain. Next obstacle: How to infiltrate a well-guarded compound full of evil Nazi scientists? Here Karl decides for an elegantly direct approach–he simply floors his motorcycle and breaks through the front gate (as seen on the action-packed cover above). That might seem crazy, but Karl’s plan is actually a bit more complicated. After taking a few Nazi bullets and wrecking his bike into a tree, it is Karl’s hope that Dr. Tager will attend to him and then recognize him from their college days. And this is precisely what happens. After surgery, Karl wakes up and tells his “old friend” that he just happened to be vacationing in Spain and that the throttle on his motorcycle just happened to get stuck–that’s why he crashed through the gate uncontrollably.
One might think that the Nazi brain trust (those entrusted with the Nazi brain, that is) hiding out in Spain would be the most paranoid gated-community on the planet–but no one seems to question the fact that Karl, unseen by Tager since before the war, has suddenly and seemingly coincidentally arrived on their doorstep. Before you know it, all the Nazis have welcomed Karl into their little clique, probably because Karl wastes no time fishing for Hitler leads by constantly bemoaning the fate of the Third Reich.
Later, once he’s completely healed from his injuries, Karl is invited to a big party hosted by the owner of the castle, the beautiful Baroness Gerda Bach-Wisliceny. The party goes well as Karl learns a few new tidbits by eavesdropping. But still no sign of Hitler’s noodle.
Things really heat up later that night when a guard knocks on Karl’s door. The Baroness has requested a private audience. Well, one thing leads to another, and before you know it Karl and the Baroness are in her bedroom ripping off each other’s clothes. And then this happens:
Her fingers dug into my arms with sharp nails, her back arched spasmodically, she started to pull me down deep into a bottomless pit. Somewhere within my body a train of cold liquid left its station with relentless fury and plunged on to its destination.
Here Puccetti is telling us, as artfully as he can, that Karl is about to ejaculate into the Baroness. The story continues.
Gerda’s eyes opened widely now. The pupils looked dark in the fire glow, much darker than before, and somehow beyond them and behind them there was a deep rustling of Teutonic forests, of shadowy predators roaming in the night…Only then did I raise my trembling, terribly tired fingers to her head, slide them under the golden hair and feel the bony ridge across her skull. Only then did her lips part to give the fateful cry.
‘ICH BIN DER FUHRER.’
Yes, friends, our intrepid hero and narrator has just enjoyed a simultaneous orgasm with Adolph Hitler– a drop-dead gorgeous Hitler, mind you, but Hitler nonetheless (an alternate cover for the book foregrounds this reveal a bit more forcefully). 
Some might be thinking this was surprisingly enlightened on Hitler’s part, this willingness to have his brain transplanted into a woman. Funny thing about that–it was actually a complete surprise for the Führer. Later we learn that Tager and his team had a young, strapping Aryan male all ready to host Hitler’s brain, but the kid died during surgery from an unforeseen complication. The original Baroness Gerda Bach-Wisliceny, a loyalist if ever there was one, stepped right up and volunteered her body. Man, was Hitler ever mad when he woke up. But we are told that the Führer eventually warmed up to and even embraced the idea of being a sexy Baroness. Realizing it made for a good hiding place, the brain decided to stay put.
But back to the post-coital revelation that our narrator just had some manner of queerly heteronormative gay sex with Hitler. “What would I do,” wonders the reader, “under such circumstances?” Given that Karl is dedicated above all else to his mission, he loses no time recovering from this quite literal “mindfuck” and stabs Baroness Hitler-brain straight through the heart, leaving her for dead.
For the next twenty or so pages, Karl is on the run trying to evade capture in the compound. He jumps a guard and steals his uniform, which buys him a little more time to wander around the castle in search of a way out. Eventually he finds another series of hidden passageways leading deeper and deeper into the castle’s foundations. Finally he stumbles upon, wouldn’t you know it, another goddamn secret operating theater! No sooner have you killed Hitler’s host body than his evil surgical team is right back at it putting his brain in yet another body. Actually, Karl probably should have seen this coming. After all, as narrator, he of all people should understand the basic premise of his own story. Caught off guard indulging in some well-deserved self-recrimination, Karl is taken into custody and whisked away to a holding cell.
You’re probably thinking at this point that Karl himself is destined to be the new donor body for Hitler’s brain. Makes sense. Hitler needs the body and the Nazis no longer need Karl–that’s certainly what a lesser writer would settle for here. But Puccetti has other and much more incredible ambitions. Karl is wheeled into surgery alright, but finds that his nemesis Dr. Tager instead plans to implant a type of experimental electrode “harness” in Karl’s brain. In fact, he forces Karl to remain awake as he cuts off the top of his skull and inserts the electrodes one by one. Later, in post-op, we discover that Tager and his assistants can now control Karl’s actions simply by pushing the appropriate buttons: THIRST, HUNGER, LUST, etc. This is the sort of thing Nazi doctors live for, apparently. Bouncing Hitler’s brain from body to body is a neat trick and all, but Tager’s real ambition is to rule the world by implanting electrodes in every human skull! We also discover here that Tager has no real investment in Nazi ideology–he chose to ride Hitler’s coattails only because Hitler seemed–at the time at least– the most likely to make his dream of global brain control come true. He would just as easily have cast his lot with the Americans or Russians, if need be. That’s just how evil Tager is–the pure evil of pure science.
After some pleasure/pain interrogation from Tager and his buttons, Karl is taken back to his cell, which it so happens is a glass cube. There he devises a brilliant plan. He will break the glass by ramming his head into the wall, which will also probably disable the brain-electrode stuff at the top of his brain. At the very least, he reasons, it will interfere with its optimal operation. Gathering his strength and courage, he runs headlong into the glass–so hard that he blacks out. When he comes to, however, he finds the plan has indeed worked–there is nothing but shattered glass all around him (and no guards, apparently). Karl quickly runs back to the lab and pulls all the wiring out of the control-console so that Tager cannot send any more brain signals.
But the console can be quickly repaired, Karl reasons. No, there is simply no way around it, the electrode net in his brain must come out. But how? Who will do the delicate surgery? Karl. Karl will do the surgery. Karl will do the surgery on himself. Brain surgery. Karl will perform brain surgery on his own brain.
Are you beginning to understand why this novel must be committed to film as soon as possible? I already have Scarlett Johansson down for the role of the Baroness. As for Karl…well, who cares really? I just want to see the scene wherein Scarlett Johansson reveals that she is actually a busty receptacle for Hitler’s devious brain. I would trade you any number of Final Destinations and/or Centipede units for such a moment to be captured on film.
Back to the brain surgery. Karl sets up a mirror to see the top of his head. “The scalp was easy,” Karl tells us. Then the skull bone. Then the membrane covering the brain. Underneath are the electrodes. Though delicately inserted only hours earlier by Dr. Tager, Karl finds he is able to simply rip them out of his brain with no real consequences. But the suspense isn’t over:
There I was, nude and exhausted, unarmed and with the whole top of my brain exposed to raw air. If I so much as leaned forward, the cerebrospinal fluid encasing my brain would spill out; I could imagine the sticky liquid dripping over into my face and blinding me.
To make matters worse, a guard suddenly appears and interrupts the operation. Luckily, Karl still has the presence (and fluid) of mind to dispatch him with a nearby bone saw. But there he remains, his brain still exposed to “raw air” and all of his brain juice about to spill out. He decides he has no time to stitch the membrane and just goes for wiring the skull back in place. After that he’s so tired that he just kind of flops his scalp back over the bone, figuring he’ll deal with that after he’s finished killing Tager and finding Hitler’s new cranial hideaway.
Eventually he corners Tager and forces him at gunpoint to the “vault”–the most secret of secret chambers in the bottom floors of the castle. Inside is the requisite vat with Hitler’s pulsating brain floating inside, awaiting its new host. As an incidental detail, we are also told there are two crossed sabers on the wall as part of the castle’s Coat of Arms. Almost immediately, however, this proves not to be incidental as Tager calls Karl’s bluff on the number of bullets in the gun, which leads directly to the two men retrieving those very same sabers and reliving their days as college fencing opponents (remember? I told you about that earlier). Karl is worried, for he never beat Tager in their university matches, but it remains his only hope. Thrust and parry. Thrust and parry. And then Karl spies an “Auto-Destruction” button on the wall. It’s true. He really does. A big red button that will blow everything up. Even if Karl can’t escape, he can blow up the entire castle, Hitler’s brain, and all the remaining Nazis at the same time!
Karl pushes the button. No, you fool! screams Tager. Ten minutes to absolute annihilation. Just then Karl sees that the brain vat has become unmoored and is rolling into the periphery of his vision. Two quick ballet leaps and he is standing over the bubbling vat. He then drives his sword directly into the Fuhrer’s brain! Tager screams in horror, and Karl takes advantage of his shock to stab Tager “in the crotch” all the way back to the pelvis. Tager collapses, and in doing so, knocks over the now pinkish red vat of brain and blood. Hitler’s brain slides across the floor where Karl, not wanting to leave anything to chance, scoops it up. 
Karl must escape–the castle is still going to blow at any second. Miraculously, he discovers another secret door leading to some kind of mining-car contraption below. Still clutching the well-stabbed yet still relatively cohesive Hitler brain, he jumps in and releases the brakes. A bloody Tager crawls along the tracks begging for mercy. But no dice. Karl rides the mining-car out of the castle and out into the open air. There he sees a mighty condor flying through the sky, and considers throwing Hitler’s brain on the grass so that the majestic bird might swoop down and carry it away. For that would be a fitting final indignity for Hitler’s stupid evil brain–snatched up by razor-sharp talons and fed to a nest full of baby condors. Just then the earth rocks with the force of the castle exploding. In the end, Karl simply falls on the brain and “collapses” it good and flat.
Victory!
Back to our Bavarian ski-lodge in the present day. The story over, Mr. Framing-Device doesn’t know what to think. Did this old man really have sex with Hitler in a woman’s body, operate on his own brain, and then almost throw Hitler’s brain to a hungry condor? Just then a nurse appears on scene to retrieve Karl–the sun is setting and it’s time to go back home. Mr. Framing-Device takes the nurse aside and asks if he might visit Karl again some day. “Why not?”the nurse responds, “visiting hours at the sanatorium are open to everyone.”
And there we leave it. Karl might be crazy. Then again, he might just have a bad case of tuberculosis. I guess the next generation of historians will have to make the ultimate determination: did Tager somehow get the brain back and put it in Scarlett Johansson, or did it end up in the bellies of a dozen hungry little condor chicks?
January 21, 2012
I Saw That Show Where People Travel Back in Time to a Spielberg Movie from the 1980s.
Conventional wisdom has it that science-fiction doesn’t do well on television, or at least on network television. Too expensive to produce and too limited in its appeal. Earth 2. Firefly. The Event. V. None made it beyond 30 or so episodes. “But what about Battlestar Galactica?” cries the guy with the phalanx of Cylon Centurions protecting his iMac from the incursion of various snack-related threats, “that was the greatest TV series of all time!” Cool your jets there, space-boy, that was first-run syndication and a whole other kettle of space-fish. For the most part, network executives listen to sci-fi pitches with the same enthusiasm that label heads used to reserve for concept albums. A plucky band of space pirates raiding ships in the Van Allen belt, played for love and laughs but still true to the principles of actual science? Great…let me clear Thursday night for you.
Meanwhile, over at NBC, the peacock has made the daring decision to program sci-fi during its storied Thursday-night block of comedies. Taking a nod from the 80s girl-robot oddity, Small Wonder, upcoming episodes of Whitney will reveal that the show’s sassy lead is actually under the brutal cybernetic control of her bionic ass, an implant turned sentient that now demands endless display and tribute. As seen so prominently in the first two episodes, the imperious buttocks frequently compel their helpless host to wear silly costumes that better accentuate the bio-butt’s perky insouciance. Will Whitney’s jaunty yet evil ass ultimately demand admiration and tribute from all of the earth? Just what does Whitney’s ass want of us? Stay tuned and find out.
But it is Fox that may well be taking the biggest sci-fi gamble, partnering with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin’ productions for Terra Nova, a mind-bending entry into that subgenre of sci-fi typically known as “a real hoot.” The basic premise here involves the standard Spielbergian narrative-focalization family-unit traveling back in time 85 million years to start over in a new human colony, one that seeks to escape the tech noir future so cruelly foisted upon the earth by Arnold Schwarzenegger back in the 1980s.
We open in the Chicago of 2149, where every cliché of our collective dystopian future must be mobilized in just under twenty minutes in order to motivate Jim and Taylor Shannon’s rather impulsive decision to flee the civilized world so that their children might touch dinosaurs. In this horrible future of 2149, we are told, the air is really bad, oranges are rare, kids have never seen the moon, and the government strictly enforces a two-child limit on breeding. Worse yet, decent middle-class families with Irish surnames are forced to live in small apartments that, while they would be palaces to most of the world’s population in 2011, are shown here to have the bad taste and abysmal feng shui that comes standard with a galley kitchen. 
Now, I realize I’m supposed to think this is the most horrible fate imaginable, and that any sane person would gladly run blindly into a wormhole for the chance to eat a fresh peach and see the Big Dipper. Perhaps it’s because I live in the Windy City, but all I could think of was how amazing the Chicago of 2149 looked, as if five Hong Kongs had been smashed together on the shores of Lake Michigan, all interconnected by tubular monorails and reaching up into a perpetually hazy sky. It looked like a city where a million different adventures were taking place at that very second—an urban paradise where you could eat any cuisine in the world, network on your quad iReality device, solve a perplexing future-crime, and have your scrotum painlessly tattooed… all at the same time. Why anyone would leave this citadel of wonder is anyone’s guess, especially for little more than an opportunity to repeatedly hammer one’s thumb building some kind of prehistoric hut in which to store a sumptuous harvest of nuts, twigs, and berries, most of which no doubt fished out of the great steaming piles of Apatosaurus shit surrounding the Terra Nova compound. 
If you subscribe to Spielbergian logic, of course, you would do this because nebulous “government” agents represent a hazard to your dear sweet innocent children. Sure enough, as the Shannons gather at home to savor their precious orange, the police arrive unannounced to investigate a rumor that the family is harboring an illegal third child (which they are). Not being the sharpest tool in the shed, dad (Jason O’Mara) hides the contraband toddler inside an air vent, thus insuring that the child will start crying from claustrophobia and dust mite infestation in under a minute (which she does). Jim takes a swing at the cop and ends up in jail, thus initiating a pre-credit action sequence in which dad must escape from the pokey, pick up a suitcase stuffed with child #3, and get to the wormhole in time to meet his wife (Naomi Scott) and other two kids. Once again, our sympathies are supposed to be with the Shannons, sharing their outrage that the government would be so evil and repressive as to enforce a ban on having more than two children. Still, you have to think that if ol’ Jim would have just snipped his vas deferens, his family and the world would have been better off, leaving more oranges and kitchen space for everyone else.
Once we get to Terra Nova, both the Shannons and the viewers have a lot to learn in order to make this a functional weekly franchise. We discover that Terra Nova was founded by Nathanial Taylor (Stephen Lang)—a great white father who was the first to stumble through the wormhole. There are dinosaurs, of course, and a big fence separating the community from the more interesting narrative possibilities outside. Then there are “the sixers,” a group of castaways that apparently crashed on the other side of the island—a splinter group of settlers who live near the quarry and continually hassle the Terra Novenians. There are also lots of boss machine guns and sonic pulse weapons, as well as a motor pool stocked with all kinds of military vehicles.
So, in this effort to “save” the human race and rebuild humanity without “repeating all the same mistakes,” we can see that Terra Nova is already D.O.A. from scene one. A charismatic patriarch, nuclear families, guns, gasoline, and a mysterious Other living out in the woods—why not call the show Red State Nova instead? How long until the Shannons are standing in line for a shot of cyanide-flavored Kool-Aid, convinced the mysterious Robamanites are about to raid the compound and take away the colony’s best guns and cutest children?
I will admit that at this point I took a break to pay the delivery guy and eat some Thai food, so I missed a good 15 minutes or so of the premiere’s first hour. From what I can surmise, however, this is when we learn that Terra Nova exists in an “alternate time stream,” which is of course the chicken-shit way of explaining oneself out of various time-travel paradoxes (i.e. if Terra Nova “succeeds,” isn’t it inevitable that it produce the very future that allowed the Shannons to go back in time? Or, wouldn’t the existence of Terra Nova skew history to the extent that the Shannons might never have existed in the first place and thus could not go back in time to follow House? An “alternative time stream” takes care of all that, space nerd, so just enjoy the ride).
The true highlight of the first episode, however, is the moment when the Shannons are shown to their tasteful bungalow, complete with hardwood floors, a breezy open floor plan, and even a little SoCal landscaping. Incredibly, though they were just living in a supposedly hellish cube in a Chicago high rise of 2149, everyone seems vaguely disappointed—like they expected better digs in 85 million B.C. Truly, American privilege knows no limits. Happily, Mom decides they might salvage the space with a rug of some kind…that is, if they have rugs in 85 million B.C. It is an anxious moment, played for pathos, in which the family realizes–perhaps for the first time–that they now live in a world without the riches and comforts that come from living in proximity to a strip of Big Box stores.
With some basic exposition out of the way, Terra Nova then chugged into a second hour that was strictly about making work for Spielberg’s old raptor pals from the nineties. The terror begins when the son (Landon Liboiron), like any rebellious high school senior, ditches his mandatory orientation session to hang with a cute girl and some other teens from the rec center. Together they sneak outside the fence so they can drink some moonshine they have brewing out in the jungle and play a little G-rated grab ass. Before you know it, they are at the center of a standard Jurassic era scenario—trapped in a vehicle and getting knocked around by a pack of bloodthirsty dinosaurs! The producers must think this is a major draw for the series, since this dinosaur evasion sequence ended up eating about thirty minutes of screen time. Run! Shoot! Growl! Scream! Run some more! But in the end, everyone’s okay, and the son has learned important lessons about obeying dad, respecting the rules of Terra Nova, and following the directorial cues for interacting with CGI beasts that aren’t actually on set.
The second episode ends with an attempt to get us invested in the mystery of some inscrutable cave scrawling, folding in a bit more Lost folderol to hook the easily hookable into thinking something more profound might be at work here (beyond a table of writers treading water from week to week). The scribbling, it would appear, is the work of the Great White Father’s missing son, who now lurks the jungle as a primordial Boo Radley. Given the already pissy relationship between the men in the Shannon clan, this certainly puts Terra Nova in the running for the most Oedipal series of 2011. 
All in all, Terra Nova is just what you’d expect in a craven attempt to travel back in time to the stronger and more certain entertainment franchises of the golden nineties. Apparently, though, not everyone was pleased with the two-hour premiere spectacular, as evidenced by the following comment at imdb (the very first, no less):
Apparently, the dinosaurs are bullet proof because they wouldn’t take ANY damage! All you saw was a ricochet effect off them, and in some cases they were using a 50 caliber gun mounted on a transport vehicle. This wasn’t a plot point or anything so it comes off as very lazy special effects. This then leaves the problem, if the guns don’t hurt the dinosaurs, why would you take a weapon out to defend yourself from them if it doesn’t work? I mean they had about 6 guys shooting one and it eventually turned and ran. I can see maybe they wanted to tone down the blood and death a bit in the pilot but it came off as a major flaw.
So there you have it, Fox. You wanted to do science-fiction? Just remember the type of fans that come with the genre. This customer won’t be happy until you spend a couple extra million animating some convincing bullet trauma to T-Rex’s face. And are you ready to withstand the overly long and ridiculously self-righteous letters you will get once you cancel Terra Nova? Maybe it’s not too late to greenlight that new Gordon Ramsey show where he tears down little kids’ lemonade stands. Or, given that Terra Nova’s premiere got bested by the second episode of Two and a Half Men, maybe we can look forward to Charlie Sheen emerging from the wormhole at mid-season. That would be Terraterrific!
UPDATE: Episode 2 (or 3, depending on how you count them) featured a pretty straight forward rip-off of The Birds (1964), with tiny (but deadly!) pterodactyls taking the place of Hitchock’s murderous crows. Episode 3 (or 4) promises an “amnesia virus” sweeping through the compound. Could Terra Nova signal its fundamental contempt for television any more loudly?
January 21, 2012
Generation X: Still Relentlessly and Hopelessly Screwed
firing off angry letters to anonymous institutions (like Starbucks), tirades that are to be read as feeble evasions from taking control of his own life. When his niece arrives and throws a big house party, a coked-up Greenberg (in probably the film’s best scene) delivers an agitated generational rant against “these kids today” and their wholly unearned sense of confidence (a recurring X-er complaint about the young ones). There is also the age-inappropriate haircut that Stiller gamely endures for the entire film.
Eventually we learn that the great trauma in Greenberg’s life, as well as among his former circle of friends, was the formation and subsequent break-up of their “next-big-thing” rock band back in the early 90s. On the verge of making it to the national stage, Greenberg refused to sign a record deal that, he claims, would have sacrificed the band’s artistic freedom and turned them into “sell-outs.” Such is the central conceit of Gen-X cinema: the only moral compass that really matters in the end is the issue of subcultural authenticity, a divide as old as the celebrated case of Punk v. Part-Time Punk. Everyone else, as it turns out, would have gladly become plastic popsters, and they all still resent Greenberg for screwing everything up.
This premise, it should be noted, speaks to a certain contradiction in this genre. If, as the film argues so adamantly, Greenberg (and by extension all X-er’s) need to “grow up” and become functional adults, then it would seem he did his band mates a favor by breaking up their adolescent fantasy machine and forcing them into real jobs with real wives and real kids. Strangely, however, no one sees it that way.
Will Ferrell’s “Nick Halsey,” meanwhile, has taken a different route in Everything Must Go. When we first meet Nick, a slimy twenty-something is firing him from his job as Assistant Vice President. Halsey, we learn, is a recovering alcoholic, and his termination stems from a relapse at the Denver office that may or may not have led to the sexual harassment of a co-worker. On the way home, Halsey loads up with some 12-packs to make his fall off the wagon official. Arriving at his home, however, he finds that his wife has thrown all of his possessions out on the front lawn, changed the locks, and left a note demanding a divorce. Dealt this double-whammy of adult problems on the same day, Nick takes the one reasonable course of action available—he decides to live on his front lawn for a few days in a drunken stupor until he can figure things out.
From this inspired premise (courtesy of Raymond Carver), Everything Must Go doesn’t really know what to do with Ferrell or the situation. Through movie logic we establish that Nick has five days to get his shit together (literally, by clearing his lawn, and figuratively, by devising a plan for the future). Nick spends the five days checking off many of the same plot points that occupy Greenberg. He also revisits an old romantic possibility, showing up unannounced on the doorstep of single-mom Laura Dern. Nick also finds a twenty-something woman (Rebecca Hall) to feel his pain—a new neighbor that seems to have relationship problems of her own. Nick eventually learns “everything must go” in a giant garage sale, except of course for his impressive collection of vintage and thus authentic vinyl (there’s that Gen-X line in the sand again—it’s all about the good taste of appreciating “real” music, a quality that, in truth, does tend to make every male over 35 basically insufferable).
The strongest link between Greenberg and Everything Must Go, however, is a rather relentlessly heteronormative insistence that the only thing preventing both characters from achieving happiness is successful reproduction. Greenberg is unmarried and childless at 40, while Nick notes, when asked if he has any kids, that he and his wife “have fish” (a collection of Koi swimming in the back yard). Drunk and crossing the line with his new and very pregnant neighbor, Nick predicts how her marriage will eventually fall apart just like his (as a salesman, Nick prides himself on “reading people”)—but by the end, when her absentee husband finally arrives, her prodigious baby-bump tells us maybe, just maybe, they’ll be okay. 
Of course, stepping straight from the “irresponsible” narcissism of childlessness to becoming a dad is not something that can be done in one step. Happily, both films provide their dysfunctional X-er’s with a “training child” so they can get some practice first. Greenberg must care for a suddenly ailing German Shepard, forming a temporary interspecies family with Florence. Nick, meanwhile, temporarily adopts a chubby, fatherless neighborhood kid to help with his garage sale (“Will you teach me to play baseball?,” the kid asks at one point. No, I’m not kidding, he really does say this). As the film ends, we sense Nick is probably only a few months away from acquiring the necessary skills to take over in the Dern household (he’s been invited back, once he gets his life in order).
Now, here is what makes Greenberg and Everything Must Go such a diabolical one-two X’er punch. Nick goes to college, gets married, gets a job, buys a house, and works like a chump for 15 years—only to be end up divorced and miserable on his front lawn. Greenberg, meanwhile, stays “true to himself,” refusing to join the rat race of marriage, work, and responsibility—only to end up institutionalized, alone, and borderline suicidal. The generational message for 40-somethings could not be any starker: work or don’t work, marry or don’t marry, join society or reject society—it doesn’t matter, you’re fucked either way. Goddamn boomers!
I think my favorite of this genre remains Step Brothers (2009), featuring Ferrell once again, this time alongside John C. Reilly. It is a much broader, borderline gross-out comedy that actually seems more intellectually honest than either Greenberg or Everything Must Go. Ferrell and Reilly play two guys in their mid-30s who, having been insulated from the “real world” by virtue of their rich single parents, basically live the dream-lives of 14 year-old boys. When the parents get married, the two must learn to live together as “step brothers,” which they do blissfully until thrown out to fend for themselves. As each takes the first tentative steps toward adulthood, there is a major falling out and ongoing feud. What is their reward for becoming adults? They both become incredibly boring and generally miserable. Courageously, the film finds a way for them to remain “independent” at the end while also allowing them to regress back into their personas of endless adolescence. I haven’t read Judith Halberstam’s new book on 
For those annoyed, finally, that this genre is so obsessively focused on retarded masculinity, you might want to check out The Future (2011), written and directed by Miranda July. Here the specter of adopting a sick cat sends a 30-something couple into a major life crisis, constituted in large part by their realization that by the time the cat dies (in about five years), they’ll both be 40 (“and 40 is the new 60,” they both agree in classic anti-Boomer logic). From here the film becomes an art cinema hallucination with July suddenly and seemingly randomly having an affair with a 50-something man, presumably because he’s an actual adult who owns an actual house. I’d write more about it, but as that would require me accessing a form of subjectivity that I don’t fully understand, I’ll leave it there. Some, I’m told, find July’s movies insufferably cutesy, but I appreciated the fact that the film made at least some attempt to escape the scourge of Hollywood naturalism. And it was nice, for a change, to see a woman as the center of all the generational floundering.
