Philip J Reed, Author at Noiseless Chatter

An Xsms Carol

Since the dawn of time, mankind has worked tirelessly to adapt Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol into as many forms as possible. The original claymation special has been translated into all three languages, and has also been reworked in film, on stage, on paper, on differently-colored paper, and as a thing with Bill Murray in it. But until now, St. Chuck’s dream of an all-text-message version of his tale of ghosts and old people has gone unrealized. Which makes me, if you insist, a kind of literary hero.

But, yeah, basically I just wanted to play around with the idea of how a story like this might unfold in an age of electronic detachment. I think you’ll agree that NONE OF THE IMPACT IS LOST.

Enjoy. And don’t forget to come back one week from today, for the First Annual Noiseless Chatter Christmas Party, which is totally a real thing and it’s live so if you miss it then you might as well kill yourself because it’s gone.

Happy Christmas!

Fantastic Mr. Fox, Revisited

I have a blind spot in the Wes Anderson filmography, and it’s a deliberate one. It’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, though I’d have a hard time telling you why.

I saw it upon release, in theaters, and it left me cold. That’s a perfectly fair reason, I think, but the fact is that all of Anderson’s films left me at least relatively cold the first time through. The first time I saw Bottle Rocket I was bored out of my mind. While I still don’t like it very much today, subsequent viewings have revealed an awful lot of gorgeous moments and a subtle thematic resonance that I overlooked completely the first time.

The first time I saw Rushmore I slept through almost the whole thing, but when I revisited it several years later, I was in genuine awe of the sheer mastery that went into composing the film. I also slept through part of The Royal Tenenbaums the first time…but I must have been genuinely exhausted then because I went out and bought the film the next day so that I could experience it properly.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is my favorite film of all time…but I remember leaving the theater after the first time thinking it felt a little light. Now I’m writing essays about every scene for Steve Zissou Saturdays, so you can probably see clearly enough that my stance on that has changed as well.

Then there was The Darjeeling Limited, which similarly felt light to me the first time I saw it, and while it’s no Life Aquatic it sure as heck grew in my estimation. The second time I watched it I cried like baby through the entire thing.

Then there’s Moonrise Kingdom, which I admittedly liked quite a lot when I first saw it, and yet it only gets better with each new viewing, and every time it surfaces in my memory I find myself responding to and being moved by more and different things.

But then there’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. While I’ve revisted Anderson’s other films multiple times, and have felt every one of them grow on me to at least some extent, I’ve more or less written off Fantastic Mr. Fox as a failure. I didn’t buy the DVD. I never really thought about it again. In fact, when I analyzed the trailer for the upcoming Grand Budapest Hotel, I suggested that that might be Anderson’s first out-and-out comedy.

…but it’s won’t be. That’s Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Why I’ve never revisted it, I don’t know. I think I was just afraid that I’d sit down to watch it, and find it to be even worse than I remembered. Maybe I thought it reflected poorly on Anderson as an artist, whereas my previous disappointments reflected more on me as a viewer. I really can’t say.

But I watched it again recently. I watched it again because of how much so many other people seemed to like it. Because of the great defense of the film that my friend David Black wrote for this very site. Because of the conversations in The Wes Anderson Collection* that made me wonder if I’d overlooked what this film really had to offer.

And you know what? It takes a lot for a big bully like me to say this, but…I did.

I did overlook what this film had to offer.

And I’m the one who was poorer for it. Because while this might never stand up to Anderson’s best works in my estimation, it absolutely does belong in their company. It’s a good movie.

One thing reading The Wes Anderson Collection made clear to me was just how much of Anderson himself was in the film. For whatever reason, I had overlooked that completely. I couldn’t tell you why…maybe I was caught up on the fact that, as Royal Tenenbaum himself might have said, it was just a bunch of animals. I doubt it, considering there are at least two childrens’ films that I would put on my list of all-time favorites, but who knows?

The fact is that what I saw in the theater wasn’t what I saw at home a few nights ago. Or, rather, it is, but I saw it in a very different way.

I appreciated the little artistic flourishes that have characterized Anderson’s films…the whip-arounds, the long horizontal pans, the distant action that utilizes dialogue to guide our eyes rather than the motion of the camera. And thanks to reading Anderson’s interview in the book, I realized how much harder it was to do that with entirely artificial sets than it would have been in live action.

I don’t know why, but Fantastic Mr. Fox seemed careless to me when I first saw it. And now I see that it’s not. It’s a bit more upbeat than most of Anderson’s films, but that’s just due to its silliness. When you look at it, Mr. Fox follows the same trajectory of Anderson’s best characters. He has something, isn’t satisfied with it, believes he’s capable of more, and ends up losing nearly everything he had to begin with. Then he gets something back, learns a little more about who he is, and ends the film in a state of relative triumph that is still beneath where he started.

Don’t ask me how I missed all that, but I did. I remembered the dancing. The snarling. The silly music that played while they tunneled around like cartoon characters. I think I wanted Anderson to do for stop-motion what he did for live action, which is filter it through his incredible, inimitable artistic voice. Instead, he made a stop-motion film that just happened to have been composed by Wes Anderson.

That’s not a bad thing. And because I was seeing it as a bad thing, I missed out.

I missed out on the small moments. I missed out on that scene between Mr. and Mrs. Fox in front of the underground waterfall. I missed out on the melancholy personal journey of poor Ash. I missed out on the glorious scene with the distant wolf.

And I missed out on the humanity. These are still characters. There a moments when tears well up, but then don’t fall. There are sounds of life and a larger universe in the background of almost every scene. There’s a strange, warped camaraderie that grows between Mr. Fox and Kylie.

This time, watching it again, I was open to that. I went into it knowing more of what to expect. And because I knew what to expect, I was primed to look for things around the margins. To not get hung up on the fact that I was watching a fox in corduroy dancing around a hen house. I was prepared, instead, to engage the film for what it was, and not for what I wanted it to be.

I was wrong. It is a good movie. It’s not the movie I would have made, but that doesn’t matter, because I didn’t make it. And the fact that I didn’t frees me to appreciate what it actually is.

There’s no better feeling in the world than realizing that as wrong as you were, that particular work of art won’t hold it against you. It’s yours to have, and to appreciate, and to let yourself understand.

—–
* By the way, if you do have a Wes Anderson fan on your Christmas list, this is a brilliant, wonderful, fantastic book. It’s absolutely gorgeous. I’ll be reviewing it at some point…but in the meantime, I’ll just say right now that there’s no Wes Anderson fan in the world that could possibly be disappointed by this. It’s a thing of beauty in itself.

ALF Reviews: “Jump” (Season 1, Episode 9)

Alright, guys and gals. Strap yourselves in because this one is a da-hoo-zy.

…no, it’s not. It’s actually just a half hour of Willie mumbling to himself about how worthless he is. And, I have to admit, that’s definitely the way to get me on your side, but man is this episode lousy.

It starts off with Willie’s birthday party. Couldn’t they have spaced out these plots a little bit? Two episodes ago it was Brian’s birthday, and right before this we had three episodes in a row about ALF being in love with different women. This show hasn’t even hit ten episodes yet; does it really need to be repeating itself this much?

I don’t understand. It’s a show about an alien, for crying out loud. It shouldn’t be that difficult to come up with ideas for plots. Certainly not so difficult that in episode nine you have to throw up your hands and say, “Fuck it, we’ll do another birthday.”

Maybe this was the idea all along. Write a handful of scripts and then make minor alterations to them over and over until the show is cancelled. I can’t wait until the holidays; I’m hoping they do five Christmas episodes in a row.

Anyway, Willie is turning 45. And good for him; he doesn’t look a day over 60.

Willie kisses ALF.

I don’t have anything to say about that; I just wanted to take a screen grab in case you were interested in having it for your desktop background.

As strange as it feels to say this, I’m pretty sure this is the first Willie episode. I mean, I know it is, but it feels like that can’t be true. I think it’s just because he’s always such a presence in the show, even when he’s not doing anything. It’s hard for your eyes not to be drawn to the weaselly, stammering lunatic whenever he’s in the room, regardless of what else is going on.

But we still don’t know anything about him. It’s not that he’s a cipher; it’s that the only characteristic he has is that the actor playing him doesn’t bother to learn his lines until a few minutes before the cameras roll.

We don’t know what he does for a living, we don’t know what he likes or dislikes, we don’t know what he thinks of his own children, we don’t know what he thinks of his wife — except that he will never, under any circumstances, allow himself to have sex with her — and we don’t know his history. He’s just this guy who is always there.

So it’s probably good that we finally get around to learning about him, seven weeks after ALF devoted a full episode to the nosy neighbor we never saw again.

But I guess I might as well tell you right now that we don’t come out of this episode knowing anything more about Willie than we knew going in, which was pretty much jack shit. The fact that the writers can spend a whole half hour with one of their central characters and manage to say literally nothing about him is an almost impressive display of ineptitude.

The family gives Willie those trick birthday candles that don’t blow out, so ALF dumps water on them and ruins the cake.

A few episodes ago this might have been fine, because I’d love to believe that this is just his alien mind misunderstanding a concept you and I would be familiar with. But, again, two weeks ago it was Brian’s birthday. He was there. He knows that you eat the cake, and that you don’t fucking dump water all over it like an asshole.

It’s not enough that ALF has ruined Willie’s life? He has to ruin his birthday cake, too? Why is he such a massive dick?

Then the family asks Willie to give a speech, and ALF gets upset that nobody wants to hear him give a speech too. Later ALF is confused by the fact that Willie gets all the presents.

But, again, ALF just experienced an Earth birthday not that long ago, and he didn’t express any confusion then. He knows how this shit works. Maybe these episodes were aired out of order or something, but watching them in sequence it seems to almost deliberately underscore the fact that ALF isn’t confused by this stuff at all…he’s just a cockhole.

Willie’s speech is just a list of the people he lives with, and his relationship to them, so the viewers at home don’t get confused by the foreign concepts of “wife” and “child.”

It’s strange. I can’t imagine being asked to give a speech on any occasion and just saying, “Mike is my friend, Joe is my friend, Tammy is my mother, Otis is my milkman…” and having that go over well. People would probably think I had a stroke.

I guess it was easier for the writers to just list the names of the characters in the show than it would have been to give any thought to who Willie is as a human being. I know I’ve asked things like this before, but, honestly, why would you even pitch the idea that you do a Willie episode if you don’t feel like writing anything about Willie?

The kids bring Willie his gifts, and the first one he opens is from Kate. It’s the Cambridge Atlas of Astronomy, and the moment he turns his head ALF grabs it and starts scribbling all over it.

Kick this guy out! There is no reason to keep him around. At least yell at him! All he ever does is take your shit and destroy it. Willie’s been in possession of this book for all of two seconds before ALF ruins it. Why are there no consequences? How is this even a joke? It would be like me sitting next to you while you’re eating your lunch, and I smack the sandwich out of your hand before you can bite it. Am I a brilliant humorist, or am I a big chain of dicks?

Anyway, Willie opens ALF’s gift next. Wait a minute…I thought ALF was confused by the concept of Willie getting gifts a minute ago…but now he already got him a gift? It’s one thing if he’s confused because this episode was supposed to come before the one with Brian’s birthday, but now they’re ignoring what they bothered setting up a few sentences ago.

This fuckin’ show, y’all. This fuckin’ show.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what Willie’s kids got him, tough shit. He never opens the presents. I bet that makes them feel good. They go out and get some thoughtful gifts for their dad on his birthday, and he just leaves them wrapped on the table without a second thought so he can exchange small talk with the alien who lives in their laundry room.

Can you imagine how you would feel if you were seven years old, and you got your dad a gift for his birthday, and he just left it in the wrapping? You’d probably cry yourself to sleep.

But I guess these kids have seen Willie favor ALF over them every second of every day since he arrived, so this probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody but stupid old me.

ALF’s gift to Willie is a box of old photographs he found. For whatever reason, they’re photographs of men that Kate used to sleep with before she married into a life of sexual dissatisfaction with Willie. It’s a little strange that Kate reminisces about how good-looking her old fuck buddies were on her husband’s birthday, but he just sits there quietly so I guess he doesn’t care and neither do the writers.

One of the pictures is of Joe Namath, and the joke is that she used to get railed by Joe Namath. I hope you can keep up with the amazing comedy.

I don’t know…talking about exes isn’t always the smartest move when you’re in a relationship with someone else — and talking about the sex you had with your exes is almost never a good idea — but don’t you think it would have come up at some point in the past that Kate was with Joe Namath? I remember when I was in college and I was seeing this girl. It wasn’t anything serious, but one of the first things she told me was that she’d been with Tom Jones, and had a picture of him naked on her phone to prove it.

…and prove it she did.

I didn’t get jealous at all. I wasn’t puzzled. Because damn, son…that’s Tom Jones! If you were with a celebrity, I’d say it’s fair game to mention that. It’s kind of impressive. That’s why I keep telling people that I slept with the pink Power Ranger. I didn’t, but I’m pretty sure that the woman who will finally be impressed by that is my soul mate.

But yeah, Kate had some kind of love affair with Joe Namath and keeps a shoebox full of Polaroids of him, but Willie never knew, and now that he does know he couldn’t care less. He finds a menu in the box instead, and it has a list written on it.

It turns out to be a list that he and Kate made of all the things they wanted to do before they die. (“Let Joe Namath go deep” is obviously crossed out.)

Kate’s list included things like running with the bulls in Pamplona, and getting published in a major literary magazine. We’ve never seen anything from Kate to indicate that these might have been realistic desires for her, but the episode tells us that she actually did them, which does round her character out a bit. It doesn’t fill it in, or anything, but I’m happier knowing that Kate likes adventure and enjoys writing, because it at least suggests that she is a character.

Willie’s list, then, should really shed some light on who he is. Right?

Nope. It just says “build a better mousetrap,” which is the vaguest sort of non-committal bullshit any writer’s room has ever come up with, and then it says something about jumping out of a plane, because that’s the plot of the episode. There’s really no other reason. Willie finds an old menu and decides to jump out of a plane. Sprinkle liberally with stalling and dream sequences, and boom, you’ve got an episode of ALF.

Later that night ALF walks in on Willie in the shed, and he’s…

…wait. So “build a better mousetrap” was meant literally? There’s no laughter so I really don’t know if this was meant to be a joke. “Build a better mousetrap” is just a sort of general phrase meant to imply innovation. I wondered why nobody asked Willie what the living shit he meant by that, but now I see that it’s because they all immediately understood that Willie, for whatever reason, wishes to be responsible for improving actual mousetraps as we know them.

This is absurd. Ditto his prototype there. What is that? It’s a fishbowl, a bell and some cardboard. Does Willie even know what a mousetrap is? Has he never seen one before? Since when is he so obsessed with them? And how could he both be obsessed with them and build something this tremendously shitty? This is something I would have done for the fifth grade science fair. And I would have gotten a D.

This useless contraption at least retroactively explains why it took him 10 years to finish assembling his ham radio. This guy really is just a moron. We’re supposed to believe that the guy who tried to make a mousetrap with pipe cleaners could contact extra-terrestrial life? God fucking fuck this show.

ALF convinces Willie to skydive, due to the fact that the episode really needs something to happen at some point, and it was either that or give Willie a goal that has anything to do with who he is as a person. Willie agrees because it will be the first thing he’s ever done in his own show.

Eventually Willie goes to bed, and he immediately starts asking Kate about her exes, because the last thing any man wants to do on his birthday is have sex.

He presses her for information about how successful they are, so I guess he was jealous after all, but he didn’t show it in any way in the earlier scenes because the script didn’t mention anything about it until now. Kate reassures him that the past is the past, and she’s happy with she’s with him because he’s safe and boring and ugly and creepy. He then tells her he’s going to skydive tomorrow, but she’s either asleep or cares even less about it than I do.

And then…yup:

It’s a dream sequence. In it, Willie is graduating from something. One of Kate’s exes — the one he was worrying about a moment ago — is apparently a Roger Daltrey impersonator in an Indiana Jones hat. He talks for a while about how awesome he is while Willie stands quietly off to the side. And I’ll give ALF some credit for that much, because I can’t imagine Willie is creative enough to dream about anything other than formal ceremonies taking place on a cheap sound stage while he shuffles around and mutters to himself in the background.

Then Joe Namath comes out! Woo! And it’s really him! Not like the Roger Daltrey guy I mentioned a second ago. That was just a hilarious joke that you really liked. This, though, is the REAL JOE NAMATH.

I’m guessing this was a big event that the network advertised endlessly for like a week in advance. “See Joe Namath on the next ALF! You’ll never believe what happens!” Crap like that, making people believe he was going to be hanging out with ALF or getting into some adventure with him. Then people tuned in and saw that the big guest star was actually just shaking hands with Max Wright in a high school gymnasium. Take that, hypothetical idiots who looked forward to something.

This dream sequence goes on forever. Willie asks for Joe Namath’s autograph, and Joe Namath writes something about complimenting Kate on the unforgettable snugness of her rectum. Then he says that the only reason he didn’t marry her was that she was looking for somebody safe and predictable, which you’d think Willie should take as a compliment, but it really just pisses him off.

I don’t even understand why. What’s the problem here? That you’re the thing your wife wanted you to be when she married you? The fact that he’s just a useless dweeb must be coming as a shock to him for some reason. How he made it 45 years without even suspecting that fact is beyond me. I guess every time Willie looked in the mirror he saw Steve McQueen staring back at him.

Joe Namath jumps off the stage and it sounds like he’s falling, and Willie calls down to him, so it must be a flying graduation ceremony or something, and I’m less confused about that than I am by the fact that there are only seven minutes left in the episode and literally all that’s happened is that somebody ruined a cake and Willie discovered another reason not to fuck his wife.

Then ALF comes out and my god who cares.

Why are these episodes so padded? They end up recycling plots, but it’s not because they have anything new to do with them. They just set some idea up in the first scene, then dick around and kill time until the credits roll. How is this show so awful? Why did I even like it as a kid? Nothing happens.

Joe Namath comes back on stage, along with Indiana Daltrey. There’s this third guy there too that nobody introduces, but everyone’s hanging around with him like he’s been there all along. I guess it’s somebody else Kate fucked, but we’ve never seen him before and he’s never referred to. Did he have a scene where he showed up and explained who he was in this dream, but it was cut out? And is it possible that they could cut anything out of this sequence and still have it feel so bloated?

Willie doesn’t even react to this new guy. I guess he’s always getting belittled by strange men in his dreams and this is no big deal.

They all start chanting for Willie to jump, like they’re trying to pressure him into doing it, but that’s pretty strange since Willie has already said a bunch of times in real life that he’s going to do it, so I don’t understand the point of having this big long dream sequence that exists just to convince him to do it all over again.

Willie then trains himself to hop off of a step ladder onto a mattress, and if the fact that he still hasn’t opened his son’s gift didn’t scar Brian, this image certainly will.

Brian then does the jump better than his father does, and Willie takes the opportunity to describe to ALF the dream we just saw, in case we forgot quite how padded this episode is. ALF just hangs around listening to it and why in fuck’s name does nothing alien ever happen in this show? This is a full episode about Willie worrying about doing something that literally nobody — himself included — gives even one tiny shit about. This might have worked as a sort of “breather” episode amidst the more frantic installments of alien hijinx, but they’re all like this! They’re all nothing.

I can’t say this enough: this is a show about a fucking alien. Why is it that when they’re tossing out ideas in the writers’ room they come up with things like “an old woman watches a movie” and “the cat runs away?” I have no explanation for why they’re so defiantly uncreative with their own premise.

They’re not even fleshing Willie out as a character here. He doesn’t have a fear of heights or some bad memories of air travel as a kid…he’s just going to jump out of a plane. There’s nothing to be overcome except the episode’s running time. It’s terrible.

Kate comes in and doesn’t seem to mind that this is what she ended up when she could have had Joe Namath. He tells her about his plan to skydive, and she reminds him in the politest possible way that nobody on the face of the planet gives a living fuck about whether or not he does this dumbass thing he wrote on a menu two decades ago, and going through with it doesn’t change at all who he is as a human being, whatever that might be. It’s a pretty reasonable perspective, but Willie feels like he has to do it, because that’s what it says in the script, so to hell with this woman who loves him for who he is.

Willie is sitting in a fake airplane while somebody off-camera blows a hairdryer into his face. Everyone’s waiting impatiently for the point in the episode at which they jump out of the plane, and for once I can identify with somebody in this show because that’s exactly what I’m doing too.

I really have to wonder why they did cut out that third guy’s scene in the dream sequence. It’s not like they had anything else to show in this episode. The whole thing is just padding. It could have been two minutes long and the edit wouldn’t have lost anything of substance. Why bother trimming a whole character out if all you’re going to do with the extra time is show Max Wright waiting quietly for the credits to roll?

Everyone jumps out but Willie, who gives this little speech to the instructor about why he won’t do it. But the instructor can’t hear him over all the noise, so Willie decides to jump after all. I’m not sure I understand the logic behind that decision, but then again I don’t spend my evenings alone in a shed building implausible mousetraps so what would I know?

We then cut to some stock footage of a parachuting baboon, and the fake audience expresses their approval.

Seriously, what the fuck is that? That’s not human.

Later that night everyone yuks it up in the shed, and I guess we’ve learned a valuable lesson about always having to live up to all the people your significant other has ever slept with, and making sure to put yourself in mortal danger whenever the opportunity arises to do something nobody cares if you do.

Joe Namath isn’t listed in the credits, at least not that I could see, which I’d like to think was a non-negotiable demand of his for appearing on ALF. That way he could just tell people they hired a look-alike and he had nothing to do with this garbage.

Anyway, my Christ was that a bad one. It was framed as an episode about Willie, but really it was just the characters wasting time until they could get to the skydiving scene, which lasts all of thirty seconds. It’s not even like there was any conflict; I know the Kate-Fucking Three in the dream sequence all chanted at him to jump, but he already said he was going to do it. He doesn’t even change his mind until he’s in the plane, and then because the instructor can’t hear him he does it anyway.

I know nothing more about Willie than I did last week.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I know the show wants me to think he married a slut.

Ninety more episodes to go. I hope in one of them we learn that Kate also slept with Charles Nelson Reilly. Because I could actually start looking forward to this show if I knew I’d eventually get a little bit of Charles Nelson Reilly.

MELMAC FACTS: One of ALF’s parents was an asteroid polisher. Which is more than we know about either of Brian and Lynn’s parents.

Connecting the Dots with Margot Tenenbaum

Well, the holidays have kind of snuck up on me, and because of that (and the fact that I’m traveling) I don’t have a Steve Zissou Saturdays installment ready to go. But I did rewatch The Royal Tenenbaums last night, and I do have something I found really interesting that I hope will make for a decent substitute.

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen The Royal Tenenbaums. It has to be at least 30 times, and yet I’m still finding new things, every single time I watch the film. Usually it ends up being something to do with Richie, Chas or Royal, as I end up paying a little more attention to them than I do to the other characters.

This last time, however, I noticed some brilliantly subtle layering in the development of Margot, and that’s what I wanted to share here.

Each of the Tenenbaum children self-destructs in their own time, and in their own way. For Chas, it comes a year before the start of the film, when his wife is killed in a plane crash. For Richie, his meltdown occurs a good way into his professional tennis career, and then, obviously, he hits another low point after discovering Margot’s past.

Margot’s descent into self-destruction begins much, much earlier in her life. A private investigator even assembles a file documenting her descent, and it begins at age 12, with her buying a pack of cigarettes.

Her smoking — and her secrecy about it — is alluded to throughout the film as a pivotal stage in her self-destruction. The fact that it’s the first entry in her dossier would seem to support that, as would the fact that it’s brought up in the opening narration, also identifying it as beginning when she was 12.

However that in itself seems rather small in the face of the romantic, artistic, sexual and even physical self-destruction that follows. In fact, it’s so small that the significance both the film and the characters attach to it qualifies as a joke in itself.

But while it doesn’t appear in the background file montage, we do get a scene in the opening sequence of Margot one year prior: the night of her eleventh birthday.

Chronologically speaking, this is actually the first sign we get of the unraveling to come. Yet despite what the film frames as the most important moment at the party — Royal insulting the play she stages with her two brothers — there’s something else that suggests very directly the deliberate self destruction to come: the play itself.

Of course, we don’t see much of it. In fact, all we see is the curtain call, with the three Tenenbaum children on stage, in costume.

Afterward, during Royal’s dismissal of the play — and his adopted daughter — we see that it was Margot who played the zebra. In the curtain call, and again here when she stands up, we see bullet holes and fake blood on the costume. One of these wounds is directly over the heart — Margot’s heart — which implies strongly that the shooting was fatal.

Margot literally cast herself in her own play as the figure that gets destroyed. But so what, right? As Royal points out — callously — it’s just a bunch of kids in animal costumes. It can’t be worth reading any more deeply into that. Perhaps Margot cast herself as the zebra because it had the most important lines, or was the central character, or to best showcase her talent in front of her family on her birthday.

But, no. Not quite.

Earlier in the opening sequence we see Margot at a typewriter, working on a script. And what’s that on her wallpaper?

The zebras are all around her. Throughout the film we can see them from almost every angle in her room; it’s Margot’s symbol. The zebras surround her and watch over her while she writes, while she reads the works of other successful playwrights, while she dreams, and while she does anything at all. The door to her room is always closed, with many locks and KEEP OUT signs, suggesting that she spends as much time in there, alone, as she possibly can. The zebras are always there.

Therefore it’s impossible that she associates the zebras with either of her brothers, or either of her parents, or with Eli, or with Pagoda, or with anybody else in the world. She is likely, however, to have internalized their presence, and for them to have worked their way into her writing, whether consciously or not.

By writing the zebra as a tragic figure, and then by literally climbing into that role herself, she’s foreshadowed her entire path of self-destruction. She assassinated her own image of the night of her eleventh birthday, and played the role herself.

Royal denouncing her artistic efforts? Buying that pack of cigarettes? No, those weren’t triggers. They were simply manifestations of an unspoken desire to self-destruct that had been part of Margot Tenenbaum all along.

The film makes no overt reference to this. It’s one of many carefully placed breadcrumb trails that Wes Anderson trusts us enough to figure out for ourselves.

I’m still figuring them out, and none of them make me feel like I’m reaching. Everything was always right there, ready to be noticed, and if it took me 30 viewings to find them, that’s okay. Anderson’s films are patient. They wait for you. And when you finally get there, they welcome you home.

Speaking of which, in the image I used to open this article I notice that Margot’s listening to Between the Buttons, which is the Rolling Stones album she puts on when Richie comes home from the hospital later in the film.

Oh, and Royal being the only one to criticize her play here is subverted nicely by the fact that he’s the only one who enjoys her new play at the end of the film. So many layers, so many details, so many connections and mirrors and echoes.

My lord I love this movie.

ALF Reviews: “Don’t It Make Your Brown Eyes Blue?” (Season 1, Episode 8)

So, this is it. This is the episode I’ve been warned about by multiple people. (Two is a multiple.) It’s not one of the episodes I remember from its original run, but I guess it’s something that’s stuck with a few others. Honestly, I’m not surprised. It’s definitely memorable for one reason, at least.

The more episodes of ALF I review, the more I wonder if I even saw season one when it first aired. I’m sure I caught at least a few of them in reruns, but I’m starting to think I didn’t join the ALF party until the second season. That’s got the first episode I remember seeing for sure, and man I can’t wait to get to that one.

Anyway…this is a bad episode. Not that that really needs to be said at this point, but just in case you thought I’d end up loving this…nope. It’s fucking bad.

It’s even worse than it would have been otherwise simply because it’s the third episode in a row(!) about ALF dealing with his affections for someone. He sure does rebound quickly, doesn’t he? Last week it was his ex-girlfriend Rhonda that he never dated, and the week before that it was Jodie. Remember Jodie? ALF sure as hell doesn’t. Fuck you, Jodie! You depressed blind nobody!

This week it’s Lynn. Which totally isn’t creepy at all. It starts immediately when Lynn hangs up the phone and announces that Scott Maynard wants to put his band equipment in her garage. “Band equipment” is a pretty obvious euphemism for his penis, but I’m not quite sure which of Lynn’s holes is being referred to as her “garage.” I guess I’ll just make a point of watching carefully.

ALF gets jealous and presses her about whether or not she finds Scott more attractive than him. The family just sits there listening to this, I guess, because, hey, it’s just an alien that lives in their laundry room making it very clear that he’d like to fuck their daughter after they go to bed. No biggie.

Scott is coming over in fifteen minutes, which means Lynn has to cancel her “date” with ALF to redecorate his room. Since they live together and it’s not like either of them do anything with their miserable lives I don’t know why they couldn’t just postpone it until tomorrow, or even later that night, but ALF’s pretty heartbroken. I know I complained about having three episodes in a row with similar plots, but I’m okay with it because each of them focuses around ALF’s increasing sadness, and at this rate the season finale will be about him slitting his wrists over the bathroom sink.

The credits come up and I see that this episode was written by Jerry Stahl. Now, I can’t say anything about this personally, but Stahl is the one that several commenters here have identified as the most likely candidate for my One Good Writer theory. Apparently he wrote a book called Permanent Midnight about his experiences writing for television, and it was later made into a movie. I haven’t read or watched either, but I’m willing to defer to folks who have. Stahl’s later credits certainly suggest he was capable of a lot more than writing for a slutty puppet.

Of course, the fact that Stahl is the credited writer for this episode doesn’t necessarily mean much. It’ll be interesting to see if this one bears a stronger stamp of the One Good Writer than the other ones do, but ultimately it’s pretty moot. The way these shows tend to work is that, yes, there is a credited writer (or sometimes more), but it’s actually “written” by a full staff of people. Who they decide to credit will vary from show to show, but usually it’s the person who pitched the initial idea (whether or not the final product is anything like what he or she envisioned), or the person who took the time to organize everyone’s contributions into a final script (whether or not he or she pitched any ideas that made it into the episode). So, it’s a little confusing. If this episode is great, that doesn’t necessarily reflect on Stahl. Likewise, if this episode is lousy, that doesn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t the most talented one in the room. It just means he got stuck typing up everyone else’s bullshit.

I’ll spoil it for you: he got stuck typing up everyone else’s bullshit.

Scott arrives, and Lynn was right! He’s a total babe. Hunka hunka! Just get a load of that sweater. If that doesn’t scream “teenage rock musician,” I don’t know what does.

There is actually a decently funny moment when he says that his band is no longer The G-Men, because they found out some other band already had that name. Then he holds up a bass drum that reads DOORS. It’s actually an alright moment, but Scott doesn’t get any characterization beyond this. I thought maybe his schtick would be that he’s a bonehead or something, but I don’t even know what his schtick is. His only joke in the entire episode is holding up that drum, so I guess the writers didn’t give him one. It’s a shame, because this is the kind of joke that would work better if they carried it a little further and let it give us some insight into who he is.

Whatever. I’ll take what I can get. While I’d rather this joke serve as some character work, I need to just accept the fact that he’s not a character; he’s a sweater with some meat stuffed inside of it. I’ll just be happy the show got a relatively appreciative “hm” out of me.

Actually this scene isn’t so bad, probably because Lynn’s acting works so much better in this context. She’s nervous around Scott, so, while I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, her “too careful” enunciation of her lines works very well. Of course she’d make a point of speaking deliberately…she’s worried about making a fool out of herself in front of the guy she likes. She fidgets with his instruments, too, and it’s kind of a nice moment.

But then the show remembers it’s about ALF, so ALF starts poking his head into shot in the presumable hopes of seeing Scott take Lynn’s shirt off.

She keeps trying to wave him away and she shouts “No!” when Scott asks her out, but really she’s talking to ALF, only she can’t say that, so she makes up an excuse about swatting a locust and Jesus Christ did this scene fall apart.

ALF gives up on seeing teenaged nip and ropes Brian into helping him decorate his room instead. He has the boy paste wallpaper all over the windows, and Kate comes in and gets upset.

Which, hey, good for her. ALF has proven week after week that he doesn’t misunderstand any human concepts at all, which means that he must be wallpapering their windows just to be a dick.

ALF asks Kate for advice on women, but he does so in such a way that she thinks he has a crush on her. Her response is that women love poetry, so ALF starts writing a poem.

I’m not blaming ALF here, but I’m curious where this cliche came from. You always hear advice like this on sitcoms, but when in the whole of human history did any little boy impress the girl he liked by writing her a poem? More likely he’d just be exposing his feelings in the most clumsy and inexpert way possible, and he’d be providing her with physical evidence of his awkward advances that she can show her friends on the bus ride home and then they all laughed at me. :(

ALF tries setting his poem to music, and Willie walks in on him. Willie says, “AAAALF,” and ALF replies, “WHAAAAT.” I don’t think I’m looking too deeply into this to see it as a dig at Max Wright’s line delivery, and it’s kind of funny that the poor guy was asked to be the butt of a joke about how shitty an actor he is.

There’s another dig at Max Wright immediately afterward…or, at least, I think there is. He asks ALF if he can see his poem, and then he reads it out loud. “Take a look at me / and tell me what you see. / Just another pretty face?” Then Willie looks at ALF’s hideous visage and says, “…very amusing!”

It’s obviously a joke, but the fake audience doesn’t laugh its fake laughter, which has to be a deliberate choice. Maybe Wright complained about not getting any funny lines, so Fusco and crew gave him one to shut him up and then just twisted the knife later by not pasting any laughter after it.

Willie then tries to turn the poem into a song, and the entire history of popular music was just a prelude to this moment, when it’s all revealed to be just one long, elaborate joke on mankind.

ALF tries to make himself vomit, and it’s the only time I’ve felt anything like empathy with him.

It’s really bad, but…well, that’s okay. Because the point is that Willie’s really bad.

But just you wait, friends. Because this doesn’t compare to the mountain of shit that’s yet to come…and that one’s unintentional.

Brian is sleeping, ALF is setting his awful poetry to awful music, and Lynn is getting digitally violated by Scott at a drive-in, which means Willie and Kate have the house to themselves. Kate makes some romantic overtures toward him, but fortunately Willie doesn’t reciprocate, sparing her from a night of sluggish, oily fucking.

The phone rings, and it’s Mrs. Ochmonek. Wait, isn’t she dead? If she’s not dead, then why the fuck was ALF praying to her in the last episode? Maybe they aired these two out of sequence. I don’t know. Either way she doesn’t appear in the episode, so maybe she’s calling from beyond the grave to complain about ALF bashing out shitty music in the garage at all hours of the night. It makes sense, actually…I don’t think death could prevent me from complaining about ALF either.

Willie tells Kate about it, and explains that ALF is setting a poem to music. Kate replies by saying that she thinks it’s because ALF has a crush on her.

And there you go, folks. The only time Willie Tanner has ever smiled, and it’s because he’s laughing at his ugly hag of a wife believing that anybody could ever be attracted to her.

Remind me, please, why Kate is with this putz?

Of course, belittling his wife for being horribly undesirable is really just Willie’s idea of foreplay, so Kate leans in seductively, and Willie makes a sex face that will not only get him laid, but also ensures that I never want to get laid again.

In another stroke of luck, though, ALF interrupts their tender moment and they no longer have to pretend to be attracted to each other. He is holding a VHS and explains that it’s a “rock video” that he made for Lynn. This makes Kate leave, because she’s upset, I guess, that ALF doesn’t want to fuck her.

Willie also leaves, upset, I guess, that ALF doesn’t want to fuck his wife.

These concerns seem to override for both of them the fact that they’ve just learned that ALF wants to fuck their daughter.

This is messed up on all kinds of levels, folks. I can’t even bring myself to unpack it. Just make a list of the ways in which this isn’t messed up, because that will be a lot shorter.

Lynn and Scott come home laughing at something we don’t get to hear, because God forbid the writers of ALF have to write a joke.

ALF spies on them through the window and starts shouting insults and threats at the boy to scare him off, because it’s been well established by this point that ALF is the only one who is allowed to insert anything into any members of the Tanner family.

Really, people. This show. It’s so…ugh.

It’s so gross. When I started doing these reviews I expected to be disappointed by how unfunny it was, and at least mildly embarrassed that I liked it so much as a kid. But I didn’t expect every episode to deteriorate into some kind of alien sex festival.

It’s terrible. The whole time I was watching this I wanted Scott to take Lynn away from whatever the hell was screaming at them from inside the house. Instead, though, he leaves alone, probably to think about what character trait he’d eventually like to pick up for himself.

We’re getting closer, folks. We’re getting closer to that moment.

But first Lynn comes inside to yell at ALF for fucking up her one chance to get date raped by a rock musician. Willie comes out to find out what the hell is going on, but it’s not like it matters because he’d never, under any circumstances, punish the alien.

He pulls up a chair to discuss “the facts of life” with ALF, which means he’s about to have the sex talk with a creature from outer space, while his daughter sits on the other site of the couch observing. I couldn’t imagine a more awkward scene if my life depended on it, and it’s not helped by the fact that there’s a plate between them covered with what looks like a small child’s bones.

ALF ate a kid I guess.

Sure. Why not.

Willie goes to bed because he just taught the creature that’s currently lusting after his teenaged daughter how to have sex, so his work here is done.

ALF reveals to Lynn that he made a rock video for her and SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FUCK ARE THOSE BONES

She wants to see it, but he refuses to show her. She recites to him the moral of tonight’s episode, which is that you should never feel ashamed about videotaping yourself singing about the sex you’d like to have with an underaged girl of a different species. He takes the lesson to heart, and I hope all of you will, too.

ALF asks Lynn to turn the VCR on, because the midget had the day off and the puppet can’t leave the couch.

The video starts and it’s just a slow zoom on the drum kit, and I’m sure Scott won’t mind that ALF scraped off the DOORS thing and replaced it with a sticker bearing his name and his clearly alien face, because seriously fuck trying to hide the fact that an alien lives here anymore. Just fuck it all forever.

And then…

And then.

Oh yes, ladies and gentlemen.

And then.

Yup.

This happened.

ALF filmed himself singing his song to Lynn, cutting between different takes of him, I guess, at different instruments and wearing clothes meant to evoke famous rock stars. In one shot he’s dressed like Bruce Springsteen* and in another he’s dressed like Elton John, who’s very well known for getting all the girls.

It’s really bad. Really, really bad.

And it only gets worse.

He’s singing this really shitty song which is probably called “You’re the One That’s Out of This World,” and I feel humiliated just for watching it.

I know it sounds silly, but while I was taking notes and making screengrabs I was genuinely afraid that I would drop dead at my computer, and somebody would find my body and see what I was watching. That was a serious source of concern for me.

I mean, just look at this shit.

Yep, this must be why people remember “Don’t It Make Your Brown Eyes Blue?” as being such a lousy episode. Prior to this it was just bad in a sort of vague, lamely predictable way, but watching a bunch of ALF puppets performing a song about how fuckable Lynn is definitely elevates this to brave new peaks of shitness.

Seriously. Just LOOK AT THIS.

ALF went all out for his music video, rigging up pyrotechnics, fog machines and laser light shows in the garage. And I’m not even going to question how he edited all this shit together. It’s not enough that ALF knows how to play all of these instruments? He also has to have comprehensive knowledge of how to work videography equipment?

I hate this.

I hate this, I hate this, I hate this.

And it KEEPS GOING.

End! Why won’t this end? This is the longest three minutes of my life.

I guess ALF’s supposed to be dressed up like one of the guys from ZZ Top now, but it just looks like he found a shitty Santa Claus costume in the garage.

How long is this fucking video? It’s been nothing but guitar solos for God knows how long. Did they run out of lyrics? Then why not just end this stupid thing? We don’t need to see a puppet pretending to play instruments. It isn’t funny or interesting. It’s just happening and it won’t end and there aren’t any jokes and the music is fucking terrible and these pointless solos are just padding out a sequence that was already pure padding.

Did they think we’d be impressed by ALF’s musicianship or something? He’s not real, you know. He’s a piece of cloth holding a guitar while somebody else’s uninspired rock solo is dubbed over it in post. We get the point after about ten seconds…we don’t need to watch the extended cut.

It’s not over. ALF is playing the saxophone.

Did the writers just harbor secret dreams of being rock stars or something? Is this music video their chance to show off what they’re capable of? If it is, I can see why they ended up writing for ALF.

It’s so out of place. None of the lyrics are even comic. I guess they didn’t want to ruin this beautiful performance with a laugh track, so they left out all attempts at jokes.

I don’t get it. Did they really think this was a good song or something? There’s no other reason to give over the whole final fifth of your episode to it — not to mention the fact that the whole rest of the episode was building up to it — if it’s neither good nor funny.

I can’t understand this. I can’t even comprehend what I’m watching and WHY THE FUCK WON’T IT END

One of the ALF puppets is at a computer while the rest of the ALF puppets noodle around endlessly, and the ALF puppet at the computer watches instruments and music notes come flying out of the computer because holy mother of cockshit how long is this crap

It’s still going. This must have been the easiest episode to write ever. It’s just some horse shit about ALF wanting to fuck Lynn, then there’s one page that says, “ALF dicks around on guitar until the credits roll.”

Done. Another masterpiece in the can.

My Christ is this painful. I actually never want to listen to music again. I need to avoid triggering memories of this at all costs, because I don’t think I could live through it a second time.

It does finally end, though, and Lynn tells ALF that she really appreciates the nonsensical bullshit she just watched that was mainly just ALF fucking with Scott’s instruments and barely about her at all, but she’d rather be sexually violated by boys of her own age and genus.

ALF is cool with this, probably because he knows he can do whatever he wants to her while she’s asleep and there will never be any consequence to his actions.

Then the music video plays again under the end credits because it’s been almost a full fucking minute since we saw it last and boy howdy do the ALF writers hate you.

This was probably the worst episode yet. Analyze it yourself in the comments, because I refuse to think about it any more than I already have.

Fuck you, ALF.

—–
* When I was a kid I actually had an ALF puppet that was dressed as Bruce Springsteen. I guess that comes from this episode, but it could just be a coincidence since they also made ones where he was dressed as a chef and a gynecologist and shit like that. In addition I had a stuffed Jodie doll that I kept locked in a box where nobody would ever think about it.