#Sure we as an audience can maybe say “well sparrow doesn’t deserve that”

[rooolt]

my thing with normals epilogue is that I think it comes from normal and sparrows like fundamental misunderstanding of each other. Like I think normal is unable to see sparrow as a full person past his parenting decisions, but I also think that sparrow doesn’t really understand the full extent of the effect his words had on normal and what it would’ve taken to rectify that. Like they’re both so caught up within themselves to fully understand the other and that’s so real and true to me.

[mst3kproject]

415: The Beatniks

 While I am, it must be admitted, as old as dirt, I am not quite old enough to have any firsthand experience with Beatnikery.  I am nevertheless under the impression that it involves black turtlenecks, round sunglasses, unkempt facial hair, and bad poetry.  None of these make any sort of appearance in The Beatniks.

Eddie Crane is the leader of a small gang of very stupid criminals.  I assume they chose him for the position because he’s the only guy they know who actually started seventh grade.  They’re celebrating their latest robbery when forces beyond Eddie’s control, in the form of a talent agent who looks weirdly like Sir Ian McKellan and a TV station manager who looks worryingly like Arch Hall Sr., conspire to propel him to stardom whether he likes it or not!  Eddie doesn’t want to be That Guy who let fame go to his head and forgot about his friends, so the gang tags along, looking for places to vandalize and people to murder until Eddie just can’t keep the charade up any longer.

I wonder if names like Bud Eagle and Eddie Crane are meant to suggest that these guys can sing like birds.  If so, it would have behooved them to choose birds that are actually known for singing.  Then again, I guess Bud Nightingale and Eddie Sparrow wouldn’t have sounded nearly as tough.

The Beatniks is actually a fairly engaging and watchable movie.  It moves along at a good pace, never allowing the viewer to get bored, but it’s full of contrived situations and awful dialogue spoken by barely-competent actors, so it’s perfect for MST3K.  It’s also got a fair amount going on below the surface for me to analyze, and the songs are… uh…

Well, they’re not good.  They’re not very memorable (except the first one, which sticks in the mind not because of the tune but because of the refrain my sideburns don’t need no sympathy. What the fuck?), they sound more like Glenn Miller than anything that would have been popular by 1960, and the lyrics are maudlin and predictable, but they’re nowhere near as awful as anything sung by Arch Hall Jr.  Tony Travis has a decent set of pipes and I can see him being the Clay Aiken or Josh Groban of his day, enormously popular with little old ladies and middle-aged gay men.

That’s not what we're shown in the movie, though.  If the writers had tried to make Eddie’s meteoric rise to stardom as ridiculous and implausible as possible, they couldn’t have done much better than this (‘meteoric’ is a particularly apt description of Eddie, who shines very bright for ten seconds and then hits the ground real hard).  His success is so sudden and so total, from small-time crook to household name in no more than a few days, that it feels like at any moment we’re going to see a bunch of people stand up and shout, “April Fool!”

I don’t know how these things worked in the fifties, of course, but I seriously doubt talent agents just wandered the wastes signing random people they got into car accidents with.  Most actors and singers have to put in years of work before anybody notices them – Harrison Ford was George Lucas’ carpenter and Demi Moore was a girl of the week in Master Ninja!  With Eddie, everything is just handed to him, and it’s really rather detrimental to his character.  We don’t see him as somebody who deserves success, because he wasn’t depicted as having any ambitions or any desire to reach beyond what he is.  He’s just some jerk who had a stroke of good luck.

This is topped off by the movie’s I Accuse My Parents-like unwillingness to really depict Eddie was a criminal.  The gang’s store robbery at the beginning seems to be something they’ve done so often that the owners are expecting them – the man asks, “don’t you guys ever rob anyone else” and seems more resigned than terrified.  Eddie issues some mild threats but the actual stealing is done by his friends, and as soon as stardom knocks on Eddie’s door, he abandons violence entirely.  It’s his buddies who trash the hotel room and shoot the barkeep, while Eddie begs them not to, as if putting on a suit and tie has suddenly transformed him into a grownup.

Like many 50s and 60’s Rebellious Teens movies, The Beatniks is intended as a warning.  It’s a little more subtle about it than things like Reefer Madness, but not too much.  The message here is that someday, even the angriest of teen rebels will grow up, and when they do, they may find that leaving their pasts behind is not as easy as they thought.  It turns out to be particularly difficult for Eddie, whose bad decisions are embodied in his reckless and violent friends and follow him in a very literal sense indeed.  He wants to leave that past behind for a new career and a more adult relationship, but they catch up with him every time.

I guess this is why Eddie’s rise has to be so sudden – so that he can’t have any opportunity to ditch these people from his past.  That sort of makes sense, but it’s still lazy writing and leaves Eddie with almost no character whatsoever.  Throughout the film he appears mostly as somebody being manhandled by destiny, both his rise and his fall so entirely out of his own control that he’s still basically a victim even when good things are happening to him.

The single most confusing thing in the movie is Eddie’s romance with Agent Magneto’s blonde secretary, Helen.  It’s easy to see why he likes her: Helen may not be what is usually considered beautiful (the Brains compared her to “Donald Sutherland in drag”) but she’s clearly intelligent and sophisticated, well-dressed and good-mannered.  What you find yourself wondering is what she sees in him. He’s not witty or charming and the movie suggests he’s quite a bit younger than she is.

Of course, you’re not supposed to ask that because the women in this movie are not characters, they’re symbols.  Blonde, glamorous Helen represents the glittering world of stardom that Eddie is being ushered into.  Clingy, criminal Iris is Eddie’s past, with its obsession with money and good times.  She still lives with her mother, making her also a representation of childhood, while independent Helen with her own apartment is an adult.

Is this misogynistic?  Eh, maybe, but the rest of the gang are more symbols than characters, too.  The one who stands out most is Mooney, the guy who actually kills the fat barkeep and stabs Agent Gandalf, and then insists he did it for Eddie, since these men would have gone to the cops if he hadn’t. The movie makes it clear that his two victims said no such things, and Eddie is pretty sure that Mooney is lying about it, but the audience may get the impression that Mooney believes it.  He’s terrified of being caught and sent to jail and lashes out at anyone who might be a threat.  Claiming he’s doing it for Eddie is just a way of telling himself that he’s not really being selfish and impulsive.

Some have seen this as homoerotic – that Mooney is in love with Eddie and tries to protect him for that reason, while he’s actually just lashing out at the things that threaten to take the object of his love away from him.  I can definitely see that, but I think what the writers may have been going for is that Mooney represents selfishness.  The movie is saying that the things juvenile delinquents do are out of selfishness – the group robs the store for money and booze, drive the other restaurant patrons out as they seek a good time, and kill the barkeep out of fear.  The same fear selfishly keeps them from seeking medical help for Red.  They spare no thought for their effect on society as a whole, but society is something we are all part of whether we like it or not, and so our selfish acts will eventually come back on us, as they do on Eddie.

The love stories in the movie fit in with this theme, too.  Iris’ love for Eddie is about what he can provide her with – money and songs when he’s just a criminal, and furs and fame once he becomes a star.  Helen’s love for him, and his for her, is unselfish: each wants the other’s happiness, even if there is a personal cost.  Eddie tries to distance himself from Helen when he fears he’ll drag her down with him, she tries to encourage him to do what’s right even if it means she loses him.  If we believe that Mooney loves Eddie, then this love is also selfish.  He wants Eddie to himself, and destroys the things that threaten to separate them.

This is a really bad movie but like a number of other MST3K features, including Manos and The Magic Sword, it’s got a lot for me to get my analytical teeth into.  It makes a great episode not only because the movie is so entertainingly terrible and the riffing so good, but because enough of its seventy-seven minutes made it into the theatre that you can pick out all this stuff and chew on it.  It’s not a movie I would have watched without MST3K, but I’m kinda glad I did.

[koalas-koalas-everywhere]

Why’s everyone on Hiccup’s dick for the whole Mi Amore Wing? I mean, here are the facts. Astrid has this sort of crisis about their relationship. Hiccup doesn’t know this because what triggered this crisis didn’t affect him. She looks for a way to reassure herself, and finds it in trying to get Hiccup to notice that she’s wearing his betrothal gift. Hiccup doesn’t notice it. Astrid gets upset. The very next scene that we see them Hiccup notices she’s upset and asks if everything’s alright. Astrid tries to tell him, but Daggur interrupts them. Snotlout adds fuel to the flame, again, without Hiccup knowing. Astrid, at a crucial time in the task they’re there to carry out, asks Hiccup if he’s seen something. Hiccup focuses on the dragon. The next time they’re “safe”, he tries to talk to her again because he’s noticed that she’s even more distressed than before. Astrid pulls a “classic passive-aggressive move”. Hiccup insists on trying to fix the problem. Astrid tells him what it is, which is... something at least the audience has never even heard about before (since, like, there was this episode where they gave them an intervention about not being too engrossed in each other?) (also, don’t mistake this as me shitting on Astrid, no feelings are wrong, but some of them can be pretty irrational) and then she gives him back the necklace. 

The thing is, should he have noticed Astrid’s necklace right away? Given that the in-universe logic is that everyone wears the same thing every single day, yeah, probably. (the “it’s right in front of her breasts” thing... well, a “gentleman” wouldn’t look there, but we know Hiccup from the first movie would have noticed it, for sure.) But since when has he taken her for granted? He has, at the very worst, treated her like he would anyone else from the gang, kinda, only that she’s usually the most competent out of all of them and that shows in how he treats her at those times. Not questioning her support doesn’t mean “taking her for granted”. The moment he saw her get frustrated, he went to make sure she was okay and got, not distracted, interrupted. Is Hiccup a bad boyfriend because he didn’t notice Astrid was wearing a necklace, even if it was a very important necklace? No, he’s not. He’s just got, how do I put this, the... attention span of a sparrow? which was overwhlemed, in the movie by... meeting a dragon?

Also, it’s... ok, away from Hiccstrid for a sec. It’s this thing with theTV show, y’know? Especially girls in the TV show. They are as complex as they can be otherwise. Meaning, they all kick butt and are pretty violent and are traditionally manly, but they look pretty while they’re at it and they have a love interest, so we can’t say they’re one dimensional. Also, at least in the first few seasons, their backstories got developed and they focussed on them for things other than romance, or plotlines they share with their twin brothers. Pretty much plotlines that have to do with guys. (I don’t count Heather’s storyline being connected to her brother’s. Although, why isn’t her mom included in it? Wait, did they mention her being dead or something and I don’t remember?) The other times they’re of relevance are short moments of badassery or the odd episode where they have a special connection with the Dragon of the Week, and the most recent one with Astrid and Garf wasn’t even the real focus of the episode. And that incident is what brings me to what started me off on this rant. They keep showing her to be really irrational, especially with the things that are, in narrative, traditionally femenine. There is the slightest imbalance to her relationship (or the way she sees it) and she... well, she gives off signals that, at least on modern society, mean something like “let’s take a break while we rethink things”. She feels a strong connection to a dragon and she refuses to listen to common sense (and we’re all praising her for it, just because she argued with a man). In most femenine traits Astrid (and, most of the time, all the women in the TV show, maybe even the franchise) shows this sort of... weakness? Irrationality. All the women we’ve seen so far seem to reject femininity (except maybe Heather?) except in this kind of “girls are strong! Or girls CAN be strong, shown by me a strong, therefore superior, girl.” I don’t know if I’d trust them (in the TV show iteration, at least) to meet a “girly” girl and not roll their eyes, or for the narrative to show that their way is better than this girl’s way. But at the same time, like I’ve said, most of the time they get a special focus is because of romance, and they seem to like it. I might just not remember it, but I think we didn’t get any (explicit) indication from Hiccup that he liked Astrid like we did with Astrid when she and Heather had their “girl talk” before they got together. 

And apart from all that... am I the only one annoyed as Hell by the fact that only the girls blushed on that episode? I mean, that’s what sealed it for me. Because you can say “that’s not a female characcter being irrational, that’s a CHARACTER being irrational”, but then why would they only make the girls blush? I’ll tell you why: because the writers see them as female characters with all that carries for them. Yeah, our women are strong, and they like to fight, and they’re pretty, but not on purpose, they just woke up this way (except Heather, I’m p sure she’s wearing eyeliner), and they could beat up any guy, like any other woman in the world, because women are OTHERworldly, amirite? They’re these wonderful creatures who you shouldn’t touch with a flower’s petal. And they have this different, better understanding of the things they do, like romance. (this is why, although both Hiccup and Astrid were at fault for their fight in Mi Amore Wing, Astrid not only was in the right about the [let’s face it, irrational] argument, she got an extra apology for something we hadn’t seen until then.) 

I might be coming off like I’m contradicting myself, but bear with me: they portrayed her like they think women are (irrational [I’ve said this a lot of times already], passive-aggressive, closed-off until they feel like complaining [which usually happens because we don’t feel secure sharing our feelings until we can’t hold them back anymore]) and then made her be right, because it’s not about what she said the fight is about at all, really, it’s about a deeper issue that the common mind can’t understand, so they’re not irrational, and men should really pick up on their signals without needing to be told [I mean, they should, but not with this, relationships need communication], but they’re just too dumb, so it’s not passive-aggressive (and if it is, they deserve it, after all, they should really have got it by now), and if they’re closed-off it’s because you’ve wasted every single chance they’ve given you to let them explain and now they’re completely done with you, which you deserve. But it’s okay, because they’ll see how hopeless men are at the end and forgive us when they see we can’t do without them. [This last part, exemplified by Hiccup being too distressed about the fight to think straight until Astrid forgave him, has more to do with this adoctrination to see men as children and women as more mature which makes them think this is just how things are and how they’ll always be because it’s in their nature and so it wouldn’t serve any purpose to leave. (I mean, in Astrid’s case it’s probably bc the fight was too small and she actually loves Hiccup. I’m not saying, and I don’t think, that Astrid stays because she feels she has no choice. But that’s the thing. They don’t seem like they have any problems, so this ap is just really frustrating.)] They mixed it up with this weird idea that might seem feminist but it’s actually this sort of bening sexism that... well, go back to the last paragraph. “The world doesn’t deserve the strange, magical creature that is the woman.” So, women are above it all, so they’re not petty, even when they’re petty, because they’re not actually being petty, men just don’t undertand these fantastic creatures. (And if from time to time they do make mistakes, it’s understandable, they’re from another plane of existance. They could be forgiven, if there was anything to forgive, which there’s not. Actually, it’s pretty inspiring when they wrangle enough agency from the hands of the horrible, horrid, horrorizing men, no?)