No secret to Mike Leigh's appeal

New to video this week, Secrets and Lies offers the neophyte a painless and rewarding introduction to the distinctive work of offbeat British writer/director Mike Leigh. Leigh has been active in British television and cinema for 25 years but has largely been confined to cult status on this side of the Atlantic, mostly in communities served by more discriminating video stores. Nominated for five Academy Awards this spring, Secrets and Lies has finally catapulted Mike Leigh into the North American mainstream.

Nobody else makes films quite like Leigh does. They tend to revolve around a series of common themes: the slow death of British working class life; how people in families tend to destroy each other; the monstrous side of human nature; and—potentially most disturbing—how utterly hilarious all of the above can be, provided you’ve a mind to see it that way. A visit to a Mike Leigh film is a visit to the post-Thatcher human zoo, a place where budget cuts have forced the keepers to mix incompatible species together in cages, where they all drive each other crazy.

Leigh’s films are also largely collaborative efforts: for the most part, he and his stock company of actors come up with the whole script in rehearsal. They will start with a basic idea or theme, improvise around it for weeks or months, expanding and polishing characters and action. Then Leigh writes it down as a conventional script, everybody goes in front of the cameras, and they make a movie.

This way of doing things tends to produce movies for actor-watchers rather than plot-watchers; films where feelings and emotions are more important than narrative. Watching the final product is sometimes unnerving; like being invited to observe a two-hour experiment in which the lunatics are invited not only to run the asylum, but to write the rules and design the therapy as well. You are never unaware that something very different from your average Hollywood script is unspooling before you.

The strength of this process is—when the experiment comes off successfully—that you are presented with the kind of characters which rarely come from a screenwriter hunched alone over a typewriter. When it doesn’t work—and there are places in all of his films when it doesn’t—you get characters who the natural-selection process of normal scriptwriting would have consigned to extinction. It’s as if both actor and director fall prey to Stockholm syndrome during those months they’re locked up together, and some material sticks around that really should have been spiked. You also get storylines that are pretty whacked out—or at most a provisional actors’ aid: characters show up, get into each other’s way, and people cry.

All of the above are on display in Secrets and Lies. Secrets and Lies was the winner of the 1996 Palm D’or at Cannes (which it didn’t entirely deserve) and Brenda Blethyn won the award for best actress (which she deserved in spades). It is perhaps Leigh’s most conventional and accessible film to date, even having what could be described as a plot: Hortense—middle-class, black and cultured—when her adoptive mother dies decides to search for her biological family. Her pursuit leads her ultimately to Cynthia—working-class, white, unstable and completely unprepared for this intrusion from her past, particularly for the unflattering light it throws on her current unhappy life.

As you might have guessed from the title, Secrets and Lies is a movie about families, silence and untruth being simultaneously the glue that holds them together, and what makes life within them miserable. This is not exactly a startlingly fresh insight into the human condition, (“We’re all in pain,” Cynthia’s brother complains, “why can’t we share our pain?”) but it’s a thoroughly reliable starting point for great bits of actor-business, and actor-business is what the man’s movies are all about.

The most brilliant, ferocious piece of actor-business in a Mike Leigh film was rendered by David Thewlis in 1993’s Naked—another performance honoured by the Cannes festival. Thewlis—who looks like a drowned rat that somebody’s had a go at with a pair of garden shears—plays Johnny, a borderline psychotic and paranoid philosopher who cuts a swath through the lives of his ex-girlfriend and a half-a-dozen others one ugly weekend. Naked is a comedy—or at least there are some set-pieces that are as insanely funny as anything you're going to see on a screen this year—and yet it's also the bleakest movie you may ever have laid eyes on. Naked is what you might call kitchen-toilet drama; think of a Tom Stoppard-scripted evening of bear-baiting and you’ll get some idea of what you’re in for.

Thewlis later reported that he approached nervous-breakdown territory on the set of Naked, and you get a sense of that kind of actor commitment throughout the Leigh canon. Life is Sweet, High Hopes, Abigail’s Party and (if your video shop is particularly zealous) half a dozen other Leigh titles together offer more dedicated, interesting performances than we are likely to get from a year’s worth of Hollywood product.

To venture through Mike Leigh’s back catalogue is more often than not to glimpse the best of what low-budget filmmaking can be; to have a tantalizing look at what a cinematic universe would be like if the players in the drama had to do all those mundane things like developing plot and narrative, and actually coming up with their own words. As you might expect, it’s a wild and anarchic place with flights of profundity and dead ends butted up against one another.

And yet it all has the inescapable feeling of reality to it: in the lives we actually live, we too are actors in a sometimes bleak comedy that has no writer. Mike Leigh makes films the way we live our lives—making it up as we go along, on a modest budget, and with a lot of help from our friends. His is the cinema of human solidarity.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1996

Adaptations and Jane Campion

Jane Campion is surely one of the most impressive talents to have arrived on the  cinematic scene in the last ten years. She is a complete filmmaker: her images are exciting and literate; her stories original and absorbing. Her first three features—Sweetie, An Angel at my Table and The Piano —together memorably showed not just great promise but the arrival, fully-formed, of a tremendous contemporary cinematic artist. So why then did she go and try to film Henry James’ virtually unfilmable novel The Portrait of a Lady?

The cheerless result of this attempt arrives in video stores this week, and it is not a happy sight. Sumptuously mounted, (so much devotion and hard work goes into the visual design and art direction of any period film that to criticize is to feel the crunch of innocent spines under your boots), decently cast and intelligently presented, Portrait is nevertheless so complete a failure that it leads you to question the idea of adapting classic novels to the screen at all. If Jane Campion can’t get under the skin of a great book, who can?

Or perhaps the real question is, why try? Those books generally regarded as world’s great novels have never made the world’s greatest movies, and adaptations of classics have never proven to be any director’s best work. In 1992 Sight and Sound magazine polled 200 critics and filmmakers to draw up their list of the 200 or so greatest films ever made, and precisely two were (loose) adaptations of classics: Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight—based, respectively, on Conrad and Shakespeare.

The urge to adapt classic novels to the screen is a habit that filmmakers fall into and out of periodically, and lately we seem to have been through a flood stage. Adaptation has usually been a reaction against the cinema of the day by someone who wants to be literate and respectable—something like Samuel Goldwyn’s production of Wuthering Heights comes to mind, as does as the entire career of James Ivory. (The only thing necessary to note about the parade of recent Jane Austin adaptations is that none of them have made particularly compelling movies. They have been stolid, safe entertainment for those weary of the Die-Harding of Hollywood, or people who might have read the books if reading were less work.)

But Campion’s attempt at adapting James smacks of a more reckless agenda. Given the constraints of a theatrical feature—that is, telling a story in visual terms in no more than about two hours—you should film a classic only when you know it will make a good movie. (This is often not much more than picking the right dead white guy to adapt: Kipling makes good movies; Henry James doesn’t.) Campion is after tougher game: she desperately wants to put across to the viewer what she got out of a memorable book. “If only I could make a movie out of this,” she must have thought, and with that impulse Jane Campion regressed from a filmmaker into an evangelical reader.

To allow reader aesthetics to overpower hard-nosed filmmaker logic like this and try and film the unfilmable is to inevitably court viewer bewilderment: People who read the novel will think that the book was better; people who didn’t read it won’t be able to figure out what the hell you’re after. Campion surely must have anticipated this. Or perhaps she didn’t: I have a friend whose ambition is to transfer great works of literature to the screen. She has never seen a good movie made from a book she has liked. She still thinks it a viable ambition.

Last year’s Jane Eyre was not so obviously the work of an evangelical reader, but the unfilmability is similar, even though as one of literature’s great dysfunctional romances it seems tailor-made for the 90’s. The abused title character is locked up in an attic by her Aunt Hideous and then packed off to the Tuberculosis School for Orphans. Here she spends years so wretched that by the time she’s ready to enter the workforce she’s unable to express any emotion whatsoever. She gets tangled up with the master of Dismal Mansion, who also has cold coffee running through his veins, and a terrible family secret scrabbling about in the attic. When he finally proposes to her you expect him to say something like “darling, won’t you be my enabler?”

But there are only one or two ways you can translate material like this into even remotely cinematic terms. First, you can abandon fidelity with the novel, give it to David Cronenberg and go for the psychotic love story to end all psychotic love stories. Or—if you prefer that your project make back it’s investment—you can do what the producers did here and give it the Suffering Brad Pitt treatment—Legends of the Fallen.

As such, it’s terminally underpowered: as with Portrait, most of the important action is internal—things there that the characters can’t express but that the narrative voice of a novel can reveal. Director Franco Zeferelli can show nothing more than surfaces, which are mute and truncated: major emotional moments pass so quickly that only somebody raised on a steady diet of TV commercials could really be moved by it. The final product is neither good Bronte, nor good cinema.

And unfortunately, that’s the choice awaiting the filmmaker who wants to adapt a classic: you can make either a bad paraphrase of a novel or a good movie. Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady is a bad paraphrase of a novel, and you have to hope that it’s failure kills that evangelical reader within her and drives her back to her regular job—making good movies.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1996

Sylvester Stallone is my Kind of Man

There may be no actor alive today who has managed to survive as many bad films as Sylvester Stallone. For that matter, few stars have survived being an indifferent actor with as much panache; certainly no one in the history of cinema has as endearingly triumphed over being so mediocre an actor/writer/director. I like the man: with 25 starring vehicles in 20 years—14 of which he wrote and five of which he directed himself—Sly is the lumpen filmgoer’s very own renaissance dude.

Alas, fate has not been as kind to Stallone lately, as a quick viewing of Daylight—released on video this week—will attest. Daylight is not the ideal stripped-to-the-waist Stallone vehicle: Sly’s hero is somewhat subdued and unsure of himself, and his performance fails to distract you from the sinking feeling that what you are watching is not much more than a remake of The Poseidon Adventure. It has most of the old Irwin Allen thumbprints: It’s set in a collapsed automobile tunnel between New York City and New Jersey; it’s got fires and rising water; and it’s got a supporting cast of caterwauling idiots who appear to have been locked up in a room and forced to watch The Towering Inferno for about six weeks. It’s got everything except Shelly Winters, and she is profoundly missed.

She is missed almost as much as the loud, over-the-top Stallone character that used to be Sly’s sole stock-in-trade. It was the one thing he did that was fun to watch and it has been largely missing from his recent work. It is as if he became suddenly embarrassed to be making $20 million a picture just for doing what comes naturally, wanted to try his hand at real acting, and the studio hacks were dumb enough to give him a shot.

It is perhaps the most expensive failed experiment in recent Hollywood memory. Sly’s crisis-of-conscience cop in Daylight and the quieter, gentler killers he is asked to play in movies like The Specialist and Assassins and are simply boring. When Stallone is quiet, he disappears; he needs to be noisy in noisy movies, going hand-to-hand and chin-to-chin with monsters or machines or flamboyant bad guys even bigger and more obnoxious than he.

You can boil it down to a rule: If it would look out of place on the cover of a Marvel comic book, he shouldn’t do it. In Daylight he pulls extras and supporting players around a set, argues, and looks worried. It’s a role that would give even a real actor trouble; getting Sly to do the existential shtick is like asking Shopenhauer to write the first draft of Die Hard.

He is not much fun to watch in The Specialist, either, playing a free-lance bomb designer who spends a lot of time communicating with other people through e-mail—the cinematic equivalent of watching paint flake off a stove. Stallone characters should never be given a quiet profession: You don’t ask Batman to run a soup-kitchen and you don’t ask Sly to operate a laptop computer and furrow his brow. The only interesting bit he participates in personally in The Specialist is a bit of clutch-and-grab with Sharon Stone in a hot shower, where he and Stone appear to be comparing pecs. (He wins.)

Ironically, the producers have chosen to give the bulging-eyes-and-neck part in The Specialist to Rod Steiger, who single-handedly almost saves the picture by delivering Hollywood's most preposterous racial impersonation in years—a Cuban Mafioso, decked out with a Frito Bandito accent where "you" is pronounced "Jew". The scriptwriters then sprinkle the word "You" into his lines like grass seed: "Jew want to kill me, Jew bastard? Well, Jew gonna die!" It sounds like an anti-Semitic rant every time he opens his mouth.

There is no such levity to save Assassins—bad guy Antonio Bandaris really is Spanish and for the most part leaves his accent in the dressing room. Once again, Stallone is virtually inaudible and invisible, leaving the viewer to ponder some of the movie’s more questionable conceits—like casting Vanya on 42nd Street’s Julianne Moore as an action heroine. This proves a less satisfactory experiment than its converse might have been, i.e., casting Stallone as, say, Uncle Vanya or Richard III. (Actually, it’s a shame Al Pacino didn’t bring Sly along for a few scenes in his Looking for Richard. It would be interesting to see Richard III given the Stallone twisted-lip and knotted-temple treatment: Imagine Rambo declaiming “now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York,” and try to keep a shiver of excitement from running up and down your spine.)

It would work, I swear it: With the iconic Stallone acting at full steam, there is no good or bad performance; no appropriate or inappropriate role; the jollies you get from Sly as Richard III are exactly the jollies you’d get from Sly as Rambo III. It’s an in-joke on the part of a pectoral type with the gift of self awareness; an actor who knows that—like Rocky’s—his stardom is a fluke, a cosmic joke not to be taken very seriously.

When he moves outside the icon, he vanishes; he’s not fun to watch any more. The unfortunate trend established by his last few movies looks likely to reach some kind of apotheosis in this summer’s Copland, a serious actor project for which he’s gained weight and surrounded himself with people like Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro. His performance in Copland promises to be restrained, earnest, and nothing that a hundred other real actors couldn’t do a lot better. Copland is not just the end of an era, it’s three movies past the end of an era.

I think I’ll prefer to remember Sylvester Stallone as Judge Dredd—a lousy movie but the archetypal Stallone performance: overblown, overwrought—most of the time it looks as if the cords in his neck are about to explode—and over-everything. Judge Dredd is the most splendid Stallone performance of all for a very simple reason: in a movie full of bombs going off, property destruction without end, and a soundtrack designed to make your ears bleed, Sly is still the biggest, loudest thing on the screen. We shall not hear his like again.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1996

Broken by the Waves: Lars Von Trier in 1996

A movie, according to Danish writer-director and ex-wunderkind Lars Von Trier, should be like a stone in your shoe. His latest film, released on video this week, is called Breaking the Waves and it fits the description perfectly. Breaking the Waves won the Grand Prix at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for its lead actress Emily Watson, and has generated a lot of critical acclaim. My reaction was viscerally contrary: I thought Breaking the Waves was designed to make me feel like I was having nails driven through my feet.

The struggle between style and substance is never very far from the surface of Von Trier’s work—and consequently the surface is unfortunately never very far from anything else. This is not a problem in a film like 1991’s Zentropa—which won both a Special Jury Prize and the backhand-complement ‘Grand Prix de la Technique’ at Cannes. Zentropa is pure Cannes-bait; a calling card for its maker as the most terrible enfant of them all, and it succeeds at every level it deigns to pursue—mainly superficial politics and deep flashiness.

The pursuit of deep flashiness is a problem in a work like Breaking the Waves, which stakes out tougher ground: Von Trier is chasing a Christian metaphor here; a parable of faith, piety and redemption, none of which have ever reared their heads in his work before. In a 1995 interview he let on that he might not have the appropriate tools for the job: “With Breaking the Waves, we are treading on the verge of kitsch—it’s melodrama’s answer to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”

Unfortunately, that’s an apt description of the movie. Breaking the Waves tells the unhappy story of Bess, a simple and pious soul from a tight, religious Scottish community with little of the congeniality that Bill Forsyth found there in films like Local Hero and Comfort and Joy. Indeed, you might call this Severe and Joyless: Bess is looked at with extreme suspicion by the community elders when she marries a Scandinavian oil-rigger rather than one of the young men from her own town. Isolated and extremely lonely, she prays one day for her new husband’s speedy return from the North-Sea oilfields, and gets her wish in the most terrible way possible: he has an accident and comes back paralysed and on the edge of death.

For reasons that are hard to remember after the fact, Bess’s husband asks her to indulge in a strange regimen of morale-boosting: she is to take on a series of lovers and then describe the goings-on to him; in a perverse way, she’ll really be making love to him, and that will keep him alive. That at least is the theory.

The gimmick is that it seems to work: she picks up guys; he gets better. After a while, she notices that she doesn’t even have to tell him about her trysts; it is as if merely through her self-sacrifice and self-debasement the mercy of the lord shines upon her husband.

It’s around this point—perhaps even earlier, depending on just how committed you are to a religious vision based on sacrifice and degradation—that Breaking the Waves starts to unravel; that a religious film in the tradition of Ingmar Bergman and Von Trier compatriot Carl Theodore Dreyer morphs ominously into a religious film as given us by Cecil B. DeMille.

Bess’s behavior naturally gets the community up in arms; she is persecuted and abused, and we are shown that her faith is pure as the driven Ivory Snow while the village’s is ring-around-the-collar corrupt. Ultimately, she makes her way to a personal Calvary where, Christ-like, her sacrifice redeems the one she loves. Even if you do believe in God, the final frames of Breaking the Waves are pretty hard to take—Frank Capra does The Passion of Joan of Arc. There is a big, ugly barrier reef lurking at the end of Breaking the Waves and Lars Von Trier crashes into it, taking all hands down with him.

The video archive provides a happier prospect. Virtually all the Von Trier that matters is available, and that amounts to two films: the aforementioned Zentropa (a real treat if you’ve got a big screen and hi-fi, or better yet, a rep. cinema showing it up the block) and The Kingdom, a 4 1/2 hour project for Danish television which, along with Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, is perhaps the best TV miniseries ever made.

Described by dust-jacket publicists desperate for North American reference points as a combination of E.R. and Twin Peaks, The Kingdom is a apocalyptic, occultish medical drama set in a decaying, byzantine Copenhagen hospital. It is not the most heroic of places: a malingering patient fakes symptoms so she can conduct seances for the patients; a doctor who has taken up residence in the basement runs a black market in vital goods and keeps a mock graveyard of patients killed by incompetent surgeons; the ghost of a child murdered years ago haunts an elevator shaft; and so on and so on—two dishwashers with Down’s syndrome periodically pop in to keep the audience informed about just what is going on.

The Kingdom is probably the best introduction to Lars Von Trier’s work—it is certainly the most flat-out enjoyable—and it reveals in Breaking the Waves a spiritual wrong turn in the career of someone more suited to social satire. The Kingdom displays a variety of spirituality more in line with its creator’s talents: we live our lives surrounded by spirits all right; but this time they’re pissed off and determined to give us grief. Rather like the director himself.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1996

No, Virginia, there isn't a Santa Claus movie

Christmas has always posed something of a challenge to Hollywood—that is, how to take advantage of a season where, despite the universal triumph of blood-for-bucks corporatism in every other sphere of human existence, visions of sugar-plums still dance in people’s heads, and peace on earth and goodwill seem to be the mass illusions of choice. How can you squeeze money out of as wimp-assed an audience as this?

One would think it might be with a steady seasonal supply of wimp-assed movies on Christmas themes, like It’s a Wonderful Life, or A Christmas Carol or Miracle on 34th St. But if you take a look at what has actually played in movie theatres over the last 50 years, it comes as a bit of a shock that those three—along with a few later titles like 1983’s A Christmas Story and 1994’s The Santa Clause—are just about it; the number of theatrical features having Christmas as their genuine raison d’être  can be counted on the fingers of not much more than a couple of hands.

So, why is a movie theatre at Christmas so rarely a Christmassy place? One reason is probably cynicism brought on by the debasing of the coinage: To a big movie studio, anything released after American Thanksgiving that’s not hard-core porn or has the word ‘Alien’ in the title now seems to count as a Christmas movie. A Disney representative with whom I broached the subject began by saying “well, last year we released 101 Dalmatians....”

 I’m sorry, but 101 Dalmatians is not a Christmas movie. Neither is Die Hard 2, even if it is set at Christmas. Father of the Bride, Junior, Richie Rich and Little Women, all recent Christmas releases, aren’t Christmas movies. A Christmas movie is about Yuletide: It is a film in which either Santa Claus or angels appear, and Bruce Willis doesn’t.

What Hollywood counts as a Christmas theme has become overly-comprehensive probably because Christmas as a stand-alone movie subject is simply a tough sell—for one thing, people who are into Christmas tend to be huddled around the fireplace, not the box-office of the local octoplex. And the most seasonal, creative will in the world is also no insurance against a film generating indifferent business: The best Christmas movie ever made was One Magic Christmas—a film I have seen reduce planeloads of viewers to tears—and on its release in 1985 it flopped. Sometimes it’s better to simply do whatever you do best and call it Christmassy. Father Christmas gives way to Christmas fodder.

For a while not so long ago, Fodder Christmas was actually pretty good to us, as Hollywood used December as launch-time for a great swack of any given year’s prestige films. Audiences softened up by the season would generate revenue and build Oscar credibility for movies that would have perished in the heat of a summer release. For a time, Christmas became a celebration of the season’s other miracle: Hollywood made money by giving us good movies.

It doesn’t look much like that any more. In a typical Christmas release ten years ago, Hollywood gave us three of that year’s five Oscar nominees—Rain Man, Working Girl, and The Accidental Tourist. The last three nativities have seen only one—last year’s Jerry McGuire. Six of the eight Oscar winners immediately before 1990 were December launches. Since then, there has been only one—Schindler’s List in 1993. What happened?

What happened in 1990 was Home Alone—a lump of coal in our collective cinematic stocking that grossed half-a-billion dollars worldwide, spawned two sequels, and made its author, John Hughes, the most powerful and influential writer/producer in the world. Home Alone set the template for the next generation of holiday movies and stripped the last vestiges of sentiment from the Christmas movie season. It showed that the secret to making money at Christmas is the same as for the rest of the year, that is, with blockbusters designed to make $100 million in three weeks, supported by 2500-screen openings and carpet-bomb advertising.

Accordingly, the big nativity-season hits from the last three years have been films like Jumanji, Dumb and Dumber, Grumpier Old Men, Mrs. Doubtfire, Scream and Michael. These are movies that don’t simply take advantage of our seasonal good will the way Driving Miss Daisy or Out of Africa did; instead they bulldoze it completely, make their money and then vanish, leaving nothing behind. (Can anybody remember anything at all about Michael? Neither can I.)

 Still, Home Alone’s  most profound influence was in the video market, where it made as much money the next Christmas as it had on its initial U.S. release. (Two years later, retail sales of the Home Alone 2: Lost in New York video did even better, considerably outgrossing the theatrical release.) If Home Alone perfected the recipe for the theatrical Christmas money-maker, Home Alone on video showed us its future—which is out of the theatre and under the Christmas tree. (The ghosts who visited Scrooge were never this cruel: They showed him Christmas yet-to-come only once; he didn’t have to watch it on video the next year with Tiny Tim .)

For the Christmas feature, a movie theatre is rapidly becoming not much more than way-station on its journey to video. (One gets the impression that next week’s theatrical release of Home Alone 3 is designed mostly to give it credibility for a video release next Christmas) If it sees a theatre at all, that is—this year’s only big-studio Christmas subject is being released direct-to-video: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas. The real battle of the Christmas movies this year is going to be a fight for your VCR between Beauty and last year’s big theatrical release, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Jingle All The Way—a story, ironically, about a guy trying to buy his son a Christmas gift.

In a more reflexive movie, Arnold would probably have bought him the Beauty and the Beast video, since in the final analysis, TV is probably where all this stuff belongs. TV has always been a more Christmas-friendly medium than the movies—in fact, it’s likely the place we all got the notion that there was some kind of golden age of Christmas movies in the first place. There is some poetic justice to the process coming full-circle: Television—or more precisely, television’s constant need to fill empty broadcasting space with product—has given us our vision of Hollywood’s Christmas past. Now TV (or at least that part of it hooked up to a VCR) is poised to deliver Hollywood’s Christmas yet to come as well.

Meanwhile, back at the multiplex, things are in a state of flux and December 1997 is shaping up to be a holiday movie season explainable only in terms of chaos theory: In a month that promises to be as productive and exciting as a multi-vehicle freeway collision, American distributors are releasing close to 30 movies in 30 days—Disney is opening four movies on Christmas Day alone. Hidden away somewhere among them, there’s even an actual Christmas movie, a little independent film from France called Will it Snow for Christmas?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have been given a Canadian release. Perhaps it’ll be on video in time for next Christmas.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1997

Night of the living Peanuts

The Toronto Star TV Guide recommendation for Sept. 1, 1989 read: "For every season, there is a Charlie Brown special. From 1969, It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown has Charlie moaning about how the boys never won a game against the girls at summer camp. A great way to prepare the kids for that dreaded first day at school."

As soon as I read it, I felt a surge of nostalgia for those halcyon 1969 times when I took some time from my carefree days of evading the 106 neighborhood bullies in River Heights to watch the show's original broadcast. Peanuts was hot stuff then, being the world's most popular comic strip, and every Charlie Brown TV special was an event.

After I thought about it for a while, though, I realized was that the show's return for the nth time was probably more to prepare we adults for that dreaded day the kids go back to school---Charlie Brown is, after all, our symbol, not our kids'. Snoopy works for Metropolitan Life, now.

A scene drifted into my head: the family has all gathered around the television to watch It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown. Dad tells the kids that he watched exactly the same show when it originally came out in 1969. The program begins, and as the images flash by, the parents positively glow with emotion, secure in the certainty that the kids at this very moment probably feel exactly as they themselves did 20 years ago.

This is now expected to be a point of real contact between generations; a meaningful family moment, rather like taking Dad to see Field of Dreams, and then going home with him to get good and drunk and listen to all of his Benny Goodman records and a scratchy old copy of Tommy by The Who. It made me dewy-eyed just to think about it.

But then, there is also something vaguely sick about the whole idea of a group of otherwise intelligent adults re-experiencing their video childhood in front of the family, and then thinking that this somehow better connects them to their kids. Points of real communion between generations used to revolve around the concrete common experiences of growing up or growing older: A first day of school, or a last day of summer vacation. Childhood humiliations. Falling in love. First hot-wired car. Childhood victories. These are experiences our parents had, we had, and our children have. They are common episodes which jump generational boundaries to connect us.

But, witnessing all of the above second-hand in a Charlie Brown TV special as a point of family communion? Something funny is going on here: The way-back machine has crashed in flames, or at least does something radically different than it used to. Maybe the idea now is just to get in touch with your own childhood, and the guise of communing with the kids is just so much sentimental malarkey. Maybe Gil Scott-Heron was right: We just want to go back as far as we can, even if it's only as far as last week.

I may be making too much of this, but look at the commitment to a kind of diseased, second-order, bad-media nostalgia in recent offerings from the marketplace: ancient, adolescent-fodder comic books like Superman and Batman are now live-action movies, with live-action renderings of The Flintstones, Dick Tracy, and Boris and Natasha (from the 60's TV cartoon show Rocky and his Friends) on their way.

George Lucas remakes the garbage sci-fi serials of his youth as Star Wars I-III. Steven Spielberg remakes the garbage serials of his youth as Indiana Jones I-III. (Didn't these guys experience anything real when they were growing up?) Both make literally billions, as an entire generation resonates in harmony. In a weird variation, the old literally become young again in Freaky Friday, Like Father, Like Son, 18 Again, Vice Versa, Cocoon I & II, and Peggy Sue Got Married.

On TV, a seemingly endless parade of haggard reruns of Danger Man, Leave it to Beaver, Perry Mason, I Love Lucy, Dick Van Dyke, The Honeymooners, Andy Griffith, and a truckload of others, wanders across the late-night TV screens of a host of sentimental yuppies, who are all coked up and trying to re-experience a childhood when those shows were the highlight of their existence. Hell, I'd love to rent a couple of episodes of The Outer Limits and wander back to the days when I was about nine, and had to sneak into the TV room to watch it. But that's a thoroughgoing bit of self-indulgence I would never inflict on someone a generation younger than I.

Star Trek movies. Remakes of Mission Impossible. Contemporary 60's radio. The Big Chill. Sequels. Gomer Pyle, USMC on video. The glorious moment when Team Canada's Paul Henderson scored the Only Winning Goal That Ever Really Mattered---that moment which brought history to a close, now available to be relived again and again. Millions mainline video reruns of their childhood while their children shave their heads and rerun the childhood of Nazi Germany in the streets of Anyville, Canada....

Aw, c'mon now. Meaningful contact between people who don't really know each other often takes the form of an exchange of artifacts; offerings left at the edge of the Other's village in the dark of night.

But this? This is crazy: When we awake it seems that the only artifact that the first TV generation has to offer the second is Watching.

-Published in Between the Lines, 1989