Ollie (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
commonpeople1) wrote2011-12-19 08:08 pm
commonpeople1) wrote2011-12-19 08:08 pm
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Bright Light. Bright Light.
At face value, Gremlins is a horror/comedy about a bunch of little monsters running amok in a nice little American town on Christmas eve. But I was watching it last night decades after the last time I'd seen it, and some things in the story made me wonder. It was the logo of the Pegasus in the town's gas station towards the end of the movie that reminded me of the book The Mythological Unconscious, and of how popular culture uses Jungian archetypes sometimes without realising it.It struck me that a) Gremlins is about small town mass hysteria at the encroaching of urban, big city living; and b) it's about Chinese products versus American products, perhaps even in a prophetic way.
The conservative, small American town where boy-next-door goes out on prim and proper dates with girl-next-door, where mom spends her time making ginger bread men, where nice neighbours sing carol songs at your door, doesn't have any of the loose, depraved living that the Gremlins bring with them. No smoking, no partying, no raunchy laughter, no dirty jokes. Are the Gremlins the good people's repressed selves? How lustily does the hero's mother wield her knife when she stabs the Gremlins in her kitchen? Then later, where does the surviving Gremlin run to and multiply into an army? The YMCA's pool!
There's this substory of the hero's father being a crap inventor, full of that American spirit to reach the Dream one day, then here comes along a Chinese "toy" that nearly wrecks the entire town's economy. A little bit like how America now buys everything from China but hardly exports anything. There's also the hero's neighbour, who owns a tractor and complains of foreign cars and televisions, blaming imaginary Gremlins for their malfunction. And the movie concludes with a battle in the town's shopping mall...
The only two scenes that made me laugh involved the hero's girlfriend, who seems to be a bit of a depressive. The hero is trying to get the courage to ask her out and all she can think of is how some people slit their wrists during Christmas. We later learn she's referring to herself because when she was 9 her dad broke his neck falling down the chimney, dressed as Santa, and Christmas was ruined forever for her. These scenes meant for us to feel sorry for her and flesh her out but I was left wondering if the whole movie wasn't a nightmare in her head. Because like any nightmare, Gremlins has some massive plot holes - the kind that only make sense when you are in it in your sleep, until you wake up and laugh. (Such as Gremlins multiplying like crazy if water drops on them, yet they spend their whole time running around on snow with no effect.)
The Gremlins theme song is now my ringtone for when
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wink_martindale calls me...
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I have to admit, I laughed when I first heard Phoebe Cates do her "why I don't like christmas" speech. I get the impression that it was designed to have that effect on certain types of twisted person.
My favourite Dante is film is "Matinee", which is a really sweet coming of age thing set against the cuban missile crisis, but also is a complete love letter to film producer William Castle (The Tingler etc) and gorgeous 1950s atomic age monster movies. The film within the film is "MANT! Half man. Half Ant. All terror".
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Maybe the reaction requires heat as activation energy?
We later learn she's referring to herself because when she was 9 her dad broke his neck falling down the chimney, dressed as Santa, and Christmas was ruined forever for her.
I love this. In fact I find it unforgettable because it's sort of funny but tragic and I can't work out what it really is.
Incidentally, I also loved the sequence in Gremlins 2 where a grandiouse announcement begins something like "Fire, representative of man's eternal quest for knowledge and the light that burns within us all. Fire, protective and warming. This building is on fire." Most epic fire alarm ever.
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But what sort of heat? The Gremlins own body heat, or the heat in a room? Too complicated for the scriptwriters of this movie I fear!
I'll be watching Gremlins 2 sometime soon and checking whether it's as bad as it felt back then. (It was a bit Towering Inferno meets the Muppets, wasn't it?)
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Gremlins 2 was much sillier a film but I enjoyed it.
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