Idea Store links, and some boring quasi-academic crap

Before I get into anything else, I need to pull an "idea store" update. As I've already mentioned, David Welsh came up with ten great ideas of his own (and, with luck, one of them might get made!). During my week of not-updating, Chris Brown dropped twenty interesting ideas of his own, and Jason Richards throws out... one. But it's good, and really fleshed out. Jason's also thrown out some ideas for some superhero concepts. Also, some people have said they might take some of the ones I threw out, so that was kind of neat. Hey, take them all. They're free.

I'm slowly going to start my reviewing thing up again. I've got a big pile of stuff to go through, so I'll be splitting the reviews up between here and Comic World News over the coming weeks. My renewed interest in the site has nothing to do with the new columnist coming on board soon--honest. In the meantime, though, go read Kevin's thoughts on Brandon Graham's excellent Escalator, published by Alternative Comics.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get the reviews underway as quickly as I would have liked, because I've been working on something else, which I'm going to throw out there for comment. Every year, I end up getting drafted to do a guest lecture for my alma mater's Film as Literature class. This year, the theme of the class is "community," and since I suggested Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming to Dave and Dick as a possible film for the syllabus, they've asked me to do my lecture thing on that. The lecture's tomorrow night, but if anyone has any suggestions for my rough once-through on the topic, I'd be glad to hear them. Why should Fiore have all the fun? This will be wedged between the opening comments and closing comments Dave and Dick already have lined up (which means I get to skip all the introductory stuff), and I'll probably end up going off-plan and making things up on the spot. But, this is where it is, for now. It's usually just something I do, but doing it now as I wait to hear back from graduate school has me really hoping that I will get in--I think I'd be much happier working a T.A. position for a few years than working in television like I am now.

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What Kicking and Screaming presents isn’t a community so much as it is a microcommunity. And, like any community, there are norms and mores central to the group dynamic. When the guys start playing their trivia game, they are the only ones that follow the rules, and reprimand others that don’t understand them, tightening their bond while pushing away everyone else. While Jane, Grover’s father, Miami and Chet are all part of the focal characters’ lives, they remain outsiders. They, too, recognize this. The line “You all talk the same” comes up too often to be coincidental. Language bonds the four as much—if not more than—common experience. And yet, as communal as their language is, they seem unable to actually communicate. When Max sleeps with Skippy’s girlfriend, Skippy hears it from everyone else in the group (and from Miami herself) before he hears it from Max. Similarly, while we know that Max was an English major from early in the film, Skippy is under the impression that he majored in Philosophy. Also, no one seems to know for sure that Otis studied Engineering until the first time he attempts to leave for graduate school. The characters talk a great deal, but no one is listening. It’s not so bad, though, considering that nothing is actually being said. As Jane discusses leaving for Prague with Grover at Max’s graduation party, Grover focuses on throwing out witty quips rather than discussing anything of substance, and avoids her suggestion that he go with her. This is reflected in Grover’s stories—in workshop, while everyone else in class if fawning over his latest story, Jane is the only one to notice that nothing the characters say is of any importance.

What, then, is the bond that holds these men together? In his review of the film, Roger Ebert suggests a commonality of class, which he calls “the great unspoken basis of the friendships” in the film. To him, the movie “is about a group of smart, articulate college students who have just graduated, and are hanging around the campus before the icy blast of real life begins. They have few plans or prospects, but they trust they’re clever enough to land on their feet.” However, Baumbach presents certain details that show how dissimilar the characters are in terms of class and education. Max comes from wealth—his family not only lays out for an elaborate graduation party, but also subsidizes his post-college inertia. Grover, on the other hand, doesn’t have the financial support that Max does, which troubles him. He points out that now, post-college, he and Max are no longer on equal footing when he laments spending his last twenty dollars on groceries. Similarly, education doesn’t bond them as much as Ebert suggests. While Max and Grover can talk about books the way most guys their age talk about sports, Otis can’t bring himself to read the book for the book club he starts in order to bond with Chet. Even more separated is Skippy—while he talks like the others, it comes across as emulation rather than kinship—he needs to feel connected with the others in that regard, but he is obviously more comfortable speaking with those outside the core group. Also, when starting a game of the trivia challenges that the four use to bond, his first inclination is to ask for “eight movies where monkeys play a key role,” which Max casually dismisses as “stupid” while Otis lets fly a litany of monkey movies, some of which I’m not even sure are movies. Skippy is the one who feels their club needs a name like Cougars or Hawks, “something that will look good on a satin jacket,” an idea he will later realize is silly. When he goes back to school, Skippy is doing it for two reasons. He’s worried that the dynamic of his relationship with Miami will change, but he’s also concerned that he needs to learn what he missed the first time around, perhaps to be on a more equal footing with the rest of his friends.

Instead, what bonds these characters is their inability to act, or to effect change in their lives. Grover recognizes this before the action of the film begins—in fact, he goes against his plan of remaining uninvolved when approaching Jane in one of the film’s flashbacks. And, when pressed for a post-graduation worst-case scenario, he responds “Ding—Jane dumps me to move to Prague, I spend the rest of my life with you idiots.” When Otis finds food in his beer, he doesn’t want to confront the waitress regarding what’s floating at the top. Instead, he drinks it, and ends up with a mouthful of someone else’s chicken wing because that is somehow less awful than confronting another person. The characters feel trapped in their inertia, and they recognize this. They’re stuck in a moment—even though they’ve graduated, time in the film is still demarcated by school terminology. While most films on college end with graduation, this one starts with graduation, and continues to signify time with plates reading “Fall term,” “midterms,” and so on. In many respects, they’re still children. Both Max and Grover become involved with women much younger than they are. When Chet gives the group a housewarming present, Otis replies, “Cool! A dictionary! I'm gonna look up blowjob.” Jane, again, as an outside observer, tells Grover that he is acting like a child, to which he replies, “but if I was a child, you'd find that endearing.”

Kicking and Screaming isn’t a long movie—-that would defeat the point entirely. Twenty minutes more, and the audience would likely despise the central characters as much as the characters themselves often seem to despise one another, because the line between familiarity and weariness would be crossed. At ninety-six minutes, the familiarity we feel with the characters on screen is still predicated on people we know, people we see reflected in Grover, Otis, Skippy and Max.

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