How The Brady Bunch Damaged Him

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“The thing about being human is,” Bob Peters said to initiate a conversation with my friend Arnold Glass.

“No, I am human,” Arnold said. “I’m standing right before you, two arms, and two legs just like you.” 

That was funny, I thought, examining Arnold’s face for a break that would reveal the joke. It wasn’t award-winning funny, or even knee-slapping funny, but I considered it a fairly decent trap to set for Bob Peters for future jokes. Depending on where he took it from there, I thought he laid some pretty decent groundwork. The three of us were co-workers at a company, on break, shooting the stuff. I didn’t know Bob Peters. He was kind of a floater, who moved from person to person, group to group, but I thought I knew Arnold. We were co-workers who spent so much time around each other that I suppose I could’ve call him a best friend at work, but that just seems like such a grade school/high school designation. It just feels odd to call a grown man that I didn’t know before we started working at the same company a best friend, but we did a lot together over the years. Arnold could be funny occasion, but he was more knock-knock joke funny. This level of dada comedy, or what I thought might be intentionally irrational comedy without a base or direction was so out of character for him that I thought he might follow it up with, ‘Sorry, that just sounded like something to say. It didn’t work as well as I thought it would.’ Not only did Arnold not say something like that or give any cues that he was joking, he was all bowed up. I was almost positive that he wasn’t looking to throw down, during a 15-minute break on company grounds, over something as odd as this, but he looked so defensive. What an odd thing to say, I thought, and what a weird thing to get defensive about.

Bob Peters obviously dismissed Arnold’s comment as nothing more than an obnoxious attempt to interrupt him before continuing, “As I was saying-”

“No,” Arnold interrupted, growing uncharacteristically confrontational. “You called me out here. I’m a human being with all the same hopes and dreams as you. I’m going to need you to acknowledge that before you continue.”

“Fine, I acknowledge that you are a living, breathing human being with all the same hopes and dreams as the rest of us,” Bob Peters said. “Now, can I continue?”

***

“What was all that about?” I asked after Arnold and I finished our conversations with Bob Peters, and he walked back to the office.

“Cripes, I forgot to apologize to Bob for all that didn’t I,” Arnold Glass said. “He just happened to step on one of my land mines, but he didn’t mean anything by it did he?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I think he just thought it was a clever intro … but what do you think he meant by it?”

“I don’t know. It’s that name thing,” Arnold said. “I thought Bob was trying to be funny, but now that I think about it, I’m not sure Bob even knows my last name. I know I don’t know his. We’re not on a last name basis.”

“Peters,” I said. “Bob Peters.”

“Okay, Peters. Well, God bless him for having such a normal last name.”

“Glass? What’s wrong with Glass?” 

“We’ve never talked about this?” Arnold asked me with some fatigue. “You obviously didn’t grow up watching The Brady Bunch, did you?” I said I had, and the name George Glass immediately came to mind, but I feigned ignorance. “There was an episode where Jan Brady made up an imaginary boyfriend. When she was pressed for his name, she said, “George,” and then she looked around and saw a glass of water. “George Glass,” she said.”

“Okay, yeah, I remember that.” 

“I’ve had nightmares about that scene.”

“You’ve got to be joking?” I asked with suspicious but confused laughter. 

“I’m not. I’m really not,” Arnold said with a most serious face. “We were all too young to know the episode when it first came out, but, you know, reruns. I might’ve been in 2nd grade when Mary Beth Driscoll said, “Are you even real?” I didn’t get it, because I never saw the episode, so she explained it. I didn’t think it was funny, but everyone else did. Everyone else did, and they joined in on the joke. It hurt a little, but mainly because I didn’t understand it. Then, every time they reran that episode, I’d get some semblance of that joke, and I probably took way too personal, but I was young, real young, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. ‘We’re just joking, for gosh sakes Arnie’ they’d say, and that never made it any better. Things like that are stupid, insignificant, and irrelevant, until they start to gather moss. Every time you meet a friend’s mom, they ask if you’re real, or they say it’s nice to finally meet you. We thought you were fake. It sort of petered out after a while. The harmless and stupid jokes never ended, but I didn’t hear them as often for quite a while there, until the 1996 movie A Very Brady Sequel came out, and then the internet picked that whole joke up as a meme for imaginary boyfriends, girlfriends, and imaginary friends, and it started all over again.” 

I could’ve, and probably should’ve, expressed some sort of sympathy, but I couldn’t help but find it so harmless that it was cute and cute-funny. The general idea of a man being mentally badgered about anything calls for a sympathetic response, but to hear someone say that a Brady Bunch joke was the source of his pain was so unprecedented that I couldn’t help but find humor in it. I managed to keep a straight face, a solemn, sympathetic face, until he said:

“I’ve even considered changing my name more than once. I’m serious. Totally serious,” he added when I ‘C’mon’ed him’. “If my dad didn’t talk me off that ledge, talking about breaking the long, storied history of the Glasses, and their proud British heritage, I would’ve gone through with it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said when I laughed. “It’s just the words breaking the Glass got to me,” I confessed. Those words weren’t funny, but it didn’t take much to tip me into laughter, and I considered it a decent excuse for laughing.

“It’s really not funny, and it’s not a joke,” Arnold said defensively. “When I was in my teens, and I’d meet my girlfriends’ families, their sisters would jab me in the shoulder with their finger and say things like, “I just wanted to make sure you were real.” Another person, a mom, a nice, sweet maternal mom said, “We thought it was like that time Jan Brady made up a boyfriend, and she said his name was George Glass. We thought Julie did that with you. Sorry, but we thought she made you up.”

“My guess is that’s probably happened a million times,” I said after I achieved some level of control. “Nerdy girls and boys have made up boyfriends and girlfriends since, probably since the cavemen.”

“I get that,” Arnold said, “and if it happened once or twice, I’d say it’s only happened once or twice, and that’s normal, as you say, but it’s happened so often that … that you can’t help but question your identity and your existence.”

“Your existence?”

“Well, I never thought I wasn’t real, if that’s what you’re asking,” Arnold Glass said, “but these things, these little tiny, and seemingly insignificant things, can have a cumulative effect that can, regrettably, end up all over someone like Bob. Remind me to apologize to him when I see him.”   

“Example?”

“Example, let’s see,” Arnold said. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your nose. Let me make that clear, because I’d hate to put you through what I’ve been through. I mean it’s not too long, too big, or crooked. You have a very normal nose on your face, but imagine if someone joked that there was something wrong with it. Imagine if it was nothing more than a dumb, insignificant and untrue comment on your nose. You’d tell them to shut up, or some variation thereof that allows you to swat their comment away, like a pesky mosquito. Now imagine that someone else, someone who had no relation to that first person, says the same exact thing. You might start to think there’s something to it. You might be a little paranoid about your nose, right? Maybe? Now imagine that this silly, stupid thing is the same thing your grade school peers hit you with when you were young, very young, too young to know how to deal with it properly. It has a way of chasing you into adulthood, until you’re impulsively launching on someone like Bob. Do you think it could lead to a cumulative effect equivalent to wanting to change your name, like getting a nose job or something? And the whole time, you know you have a perfectly normal nose, because everyone says there’s nothing wrong with your nose, like I had a perfectly normal name, until some writer on some stupid show decided your last name would be the perfect name for an imaginary person.

“See, what you saw was a one-time, seemingly insignificant incident,” Arnold continued. “But you didn’t see the buildup, the accumulation, and you probably just think it was bizarre, and all that, but it was the result of a cumulative effect. Have you ever heard of the Chinese Water Torture effect? They strapped a guy into a chair so tight, he couldn’t move, under a slowly dripping water faucet. Now, we can drop anywhere from one droplet of water to a million drops of water on a person’s forehead, and it won’t cause any physical damage to that forehead, but psychologically? Psychologically, it’s been documented as one of the most cruel, brutal, and inhumane forms of torture ever invented. Why? It is the accumulation of seeing the next drop of water, knowing it’s going to hit your head, and it finally hitting. It’s the same thing here, but my slow drip has occurred over the years, the decades, and it can manifest in ways you saw today with Bob Peters. Some say it can be stressful to the point of panic-inducing attacks. That’s never happened to me, those final stages, but it could. Some say it could.” 

I still couldn’t see it, and in many ways I still can’t. The whole idea of it obviously still fascinates me, but no matter how well Arnold researched what happened to him that led him to his unusual outburst, and how persuasive he was in the moment, I still couldn’t wrap my arms around the idea of what he described as a cumulative effect, even under the umbrella of Chinese Water Torture effect. It was hard to see through the bizarre, silliness of the idea, and it’s still difficult for me to wrap my mind around the idea that a person could be so damaged by a Brady Bunch joke that he’s reflexively lashing out at anyone who even hints that he might not be real, imaginary, or in this case not human. The only thing I can come up with is it’s the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is something we feel for someone experiencing something foreign to our experience. Empathy is almost a shared sentiment we have for someone who is experiencing something for which we experienced ourselves to such a degree our knowledge of it can be intimate, and the only people who can understand The Brady Bunch Glass effect are those who have experienced themselves. 

The Bullied Bully

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Have you ever been bullied? Have you ever bullied? Have you ever unwittingly played both roles, in the king of the hill landscape we call childhood? Decades after grade school, I met a fellow classmate. When we met, after decades apart, he seemed reluctant. I noted it, but I attached that to a reluctance to reliving the past. Some of us don’t enjoy a walk down memory lane. They don’t even enjoy talking about all the funny memories we share. I love it, and I had that smile I had on my face when we met. I couldn’t believe it when I found out he worked for the same company I did. I couldn’t wait to start reminiscing. Bruce was not near as anxious. Over the course of a week or so, he dropped his defense shield, and the two of us began sharing some of the happiest moments we had in grade school. We brought up names we hadn’t thought of in decades. We brought up events we jokingly hated and loved way too much when we were kids. I remembered certain hilarious incidents of our shared youth that he didn’t, and Bruce remembered many I didn’t. Eventually, after months of these interactions, a conversation turned to the bullies who picked on us in grade school. We talked about the worst offenders, the worst of the worst, and we both agreed on a top three. We shared a certain level of animosity that resulted in smiles and some laughter, but we achieved such distance from those years that we could finally discuss the matter dispassionately. After a seven-second lull, that conversation turned ugly. 

“You know you bullied me, right?” Bruce said with a mild level of confrontation. 

“What?” I asked. He repeated himself with another level of confrontation. Bruce wasn’t one who looked another in the eye, so that made it a little more intimidating when he did. He looked me in the eye and held me there, watching me squirm. We had been adult friends for months at that point, as I said, so I think Bruce thought our friendship could either survive the confrontation, or some part of him thought this was a matter we needed to deal with before he could continue being friends with me. 

“There’s no way,” I said, stunned. “You’re mistaking me for someone else. There’s just no way.”

Bruce recalled specific moments, incidents, and the nature of my bullying. And just like that, as if Bruce pulled a curtain back, I was there, decades younger, laying into him. “You weren’t a mean kid,” he said when he saw recognition color my face. “You weren’t one I would call a ruthless bully, but your teasing was so…constant that it got to me at times. It got under my skin.” 

Prior to hearing that, I basically accused him of having faulty eyewitness testimony, but after hearing it, I realized I was the one who colored my version of history in such a way that I was always the victim never the villain. A lyric from the famous Sweet song Ballroom Blitz popped in my head, “He thinks he’s the passionate one!” except my version of that lyric went, “He thinks he’s the virtuous one!” 

I didn’t feel like a fraud or a hypocrite for my selective memory, but it did put me in an unusually vulnerable position. I thought of saying, “Those were just jokes, Bruce. I was needling you, and you shouldn’t have been so sensitive.” Yet, those were the exact lines my bullies said to me to diffuse or deflect my complaints.  

I could’ve also used the time-honored, “That was so long-ago Bruce” rhetorical tactic, and it was. It was decades ago, but it obviously bothered Bruce so much that he remembered it, and he still harbored some resentment. I then thought of how I would deal with it if one of my bullies used a rhetorical tactic on me. In that uncomfortable space, with Bruce still glaring at me, I swept away the excuses that would’ve made me feel better, and I said, “I apologize for any pain that I caused you.” I could’ve qualified it by saying, I was just a kid, a dumb kid, who was just as dumb, scared and insecure as you were, but I didn’t. I could’ve said, “Hey, I was bullied too,” and I was. I could’ve said a number of things, but I offered him what I would’ve wanted to hear from one of my bullies, a sincere apology without qualifiers. 

Prior to Bruce putting me through the paces, I was the bullied. I was the nerd who didn’t do what was necessary to keep up with the cool kids. I didn’t do things the right way, and they mocked me for it. How did I deal with that? I bullied someone else. I looked for someone I considered lower in the hierarchal chain, and I put it to him.

Why did I perpetuate that vicious cycle? Why do kids do anything? They’re confused, they don’t know how to handle their complexities, and they seek a release valve to relieve the pressure and/or a tool to help them define themselves. These might sound like excuses, but they’re a genuine search for answers. What’s the alternative? Offer a heartfelt apology and attempt to rectify it over time? I did that. Feel terrible about it? Did that. Go back in time with my current knowledge and don’t do it? I obviously couldn’t do that. 

Those who were bullied will never forget the damage our bullies did to us, our childhood, and our resultant adult mindset, but what do we do with all that rage? Rage goes through a person, and it can spiral out onto the ones we love. Can you imagine bullying your own kids? How do we deal with the mistakes they make now, in their youth? Is the manner in which we correct our kids’ mistakes similar in nature to the way our bullies dealt with our mistakes? We don’t intend to do it, but bullying can prove cyclical. That anger, that rage, might also please the bullies to learn that what they did, decades ago, still haunts us. We all know the line “Success is the best revenge”, right? How about we replace the word success with happiness. “Happiness is the best revenge.” It’s easier said than done, and for some it’s impossible, but if I were still boiling raging about it, I would consider it their victory.

“It helps to know that our bully probably peaked in high school,” our fellow bullied say. “If you ever run into them, or find pictures of them on social media, it’s so gratifying to see that they put on weight, to know they can’t hold a job and that they’ve been married a number of times, and their kids hate them. It’s thrilling to see how miserable they are now.” 

“Right on!” Is our impulsive reaction. We love to learn details of their suffering, because they caused us so much, and I’m not immune. The idea that my bullies experienced some setbacks in life suggests that high school was their peak, and that used to give me some short-term satisfaction, until I thought, “Who cares?” How does it benefit me to learn that he is now a bank vice-president, a Walmart greeter, or homeless? Do you delight in the fact that he’s been divorced twice, filed for bankruptcy, or his kids hate him? Was he so awful to you in high school that when you find out he has a heart defect now, thirty-years later, you cheer? If so, he’s still living rent-free in our brain. Let him go, because chances are that he, like me with Bruce, may not even remember his offenses. If you consider that doubling down on the offense, think about how much you’ve forgotten from decades prior. You might have your own Bruce who was so insulted by something you said, or did, that it affected their lives decades later. You didn’t do anything to anyone, right? You were always the victim, never the villain. Yeah, that’s what I thought.

When were you bullied? If the peak happened in fifth grade, you were ten-years-old, but so was your bully. Take a look at a ten-year-old now. Do you honestly think he acts in a malicious manner? You didn’t know how to deal with him at ten, and that messed you up. He didn’t know how to act either. He was a dumb kid like you were, and everyone else you knew. He acted impulsively, and he said the first thing that popped into his head. He, like me at ten, and your worst bully doesn’t full gauge the ramifications and consequences of his actions. He didn’t think, he just did. That ten-year-old you see now is not only dumb, he’s scared, insecure and vulnerable, and he doesn’t want to be any of those things, so he looks for someone lower on the hierarchal pole and he tries to mentally or physically squash him, because it makes him feel better about himself.

I had another person confront me at an employee reunion with an offhand comment I made about them a decade prior. She hit me at the door with it, and she badgered me throughout the afternoon. I offered her the unqualified apology I gave Bruce, but it didn’t work with her. “Oh, no. No! No! No!” she said. “You’re not getting off that easy. You are an awful person. Everyone thinks you’re nice, but you’re not. A nice person wouldn’t say something like that about someone else.” There was nothing I could do or say to this woman, she obviously planned to ruin my afternoon in the manner I had presumably ruined so many of hers. I had to just sit there and take it. There was really no lesson, or takeaway from this moment, for me, except that some of the times even the bullied becomes the bully.   

Bullying is wrong. It doesn’t matter if you were making an offhand comment just to make someone else laugh, whether you were just joshing, or you considered your comments relatively harmless. It’s possible that someone out there might misinterpret what you said or did, and they’ve been harboring rage for you in the same manner you just can’t let go of the rage you have for your bully. 

They shouldn’t do it that way, and if our kids are handling all of their pressures that way, we should correct them, but psychologists say that our brains don’t fully mature until we’re around twenty-six-years-old. That’s a relative number, of course, as some mature faster than others. If that number is any where close to true, though, we’re not mature enough to handle the complexities of life until we’re approximately a third of our way through life. I don’t intend to write any of these as an excuse for all that happens between birth and twenty-six, but to try to explain that for most of us, our mechanisms for dealing with the complex matters of life aren’t refined with maturity yet. We’re dumb kids, confused teens, and worried young adults who don’t know how to deal with everything that’s being thrown at us. Instead of focusing, internally, on how to do it right, we poke fun at others who we think are doing it worse, because we want to think that we’re doing it better. The full-fledged adults who continue to do it, and we all know who they are, are another matter altogether.

As we gain distance from our childhood, we accidentally assign adult motives to the 10-year-olds who bullied us decades ago. If we know a 10-year-old, or we have the chance to talk to one, we might find out that they are not nearly as advanced as we remember. We might fall prey to the “But my bully knew what he was doing” conceit when comparing them to the current ten-year-old we see. If anything is possible then it’s possible, but if psychologists are correct in their assessment that the human brain doesn’t fully mature until age 26, it just seems unlikely. What’s more likely is that as you’ve aged, you’ve assigned matured motives to those who bullied you.  

If you were bullied, and you ever encounter someone who accuses you of bullying, my advice to you is offer them the unqualified apology you would’ve loved to hear from your bully, and follow it up with a whole lot of kindness. It worked for me, as Bruce and I are still good friends in the years that have followed our initial conversations. I would love to go back in time to correct undo, erase, or find some way to ease his pain in some way, but I can’t. The only thing I can do is try to reverse what I’ve done by showering him with kindness today.  

At the Movies

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No matter how hard they try to wreck movies, I still love them. I love a great book, a fantastic album, and even a mind-blowing painting, but nothing beats spending ninety minutes in the hands of a master movie maker. Thanks to the VHS, and every medium before and since, I’ve watched more movies than just about anyone I’ve ever met. I write “just about”, because I had a “Who’s watched more movies” showdown with a fellow movie freak who cut the debate short by asking, “Do you watch porn?” I said I didn’t. He said, “I win!” 

Nobody ever died wishing they watched more movies, and it’s not something we normally lord over someone to a point of superiority. When comedians start dropping references from movies, however, movie freaks enjoy getting those jokes that the others –who didn’t waste so much of their life watching movies–don’t.  

“Before we go to a movie, we have to get to the movie theater, and is there a better way of getting there, or anywhere, than in a Jeep Wrangler? (Cue the video backdrop of a Wrangler managing various rough roads, icy snow, and large rock terrains.) “Hi! I’m somebody famous, but I have a moderately-dressed family (cue the entrance of the wife and kids and remind the paid spokesman to put his arm around his daughter’s shoulder), who need a reliable automobile to get them places. We put some serious consideration into purchasing a sensible family sedan, and then the snowstorm hit.   

“When hazardous conditions hit, the 4-wheel drive (4WD) drivetrain of the Jeep Wrangler will go from a luxury to a necessity. We don’t always need it, of course, but hazardous conditions strike, we can push, pull, or otherwise engage the 4WD to the supermarket, the drugstore, or the movie theater with comfort. The comfort 4WD owners know can be so great we might consider it a little weird. Most of us don’t care if others have a faster car than we do, and we don’t care if they think have a better car, and we never have. We’re not car guys. When that snowstorm hits, however, and it brings ice and everything else that defines hazardous conditions, there is something embarrassingly unusual that happens to us when we’re not only able to manage hazardous conditions but dominate them. 

“We all learned how to drive in the snow and ice in other cars, and those cars taught us to be cautious and never over-confident in hazardous conditions, no matter what we drive, but how often have you felt so intimidated by the “here/there be dragons” roads that you decided not to leave home. If this was you, the makers of Jeep have the antidote. The 4WD Jeep Wrangler not only provides the piece of mind that comes from making a decision that protects your family, but it can lead to some feelings of masculine machismo as you conquer nature. (Cue the son’s growl.) And now back to the show.”  

The Action Movie

“Jason Statham is our new action hero!” they say with all sorts of exclamation points. I yawn. Action movies? Does anyone still lust after a great action flick? I have nothing but compliments for Jason Statham. He’s a quality actor who picks some quality movies to star in, the Crank movies stand out as his best so far, but action movies as a whole are just dead to me? We all loved what Stallone and Schwarzenegger did to and for the genre, in the 80’s and 90’s, but didn’t the whole action movie format kind of peak in that era? How many twists on the genre can we put on this otherwise tired genre? The John Wick movies supposedly proved I am wrong. People were a buzz about them. “You have to see this next one. Do you want to see it? Do you want to see it with me? If this one is anywhere close to the first one, it’s a must-see.” So, I saw it, and as action movies go, it was really good, but I couldn’t have been more bored. Maybe there was a time when I found choreographed fight scenes exciting, but I can’t remember it. All scenes in movies require some suspension of disbelief, but we all know they’re going to win the fight. They are all so formulaic. 

To introduce his guest action-hero Steven Seagal to his show, Arsenio Hall had a great line, “This man could probably whip your tail with a french fry.” I’m sure Steven Seagal could probably beat me up, and I kind of don’t care,, but we’re talking about a man who played a character in a movie, and most of his physical exploits were choreographed with players executing moves that allowed him to punch them or kick in pre-planned moves. Does that mean he could beat me up with a french fry in real life? We all know they’re not fighting for real, of course, but we suspend our disbelief long enough to enjoy the choreography involved. If it’s not real, and all the moves by the main character and his adversaries are choreographed, aren’t we basically watching a ballet with some punching, kicking, and bullets thrown in? “But you’re male, and every male has just been intoxicated with fight scenes since about Bruce Lee. Why, because we’re males. It’s as every bit apart of us as our ring-a-ding-ding.” Well, then, I’m obviously not as male as you, because I’d prefer the verbal, cerebral exchanges we can hear in even the most average Woody Allen film over the finest choreographed fight scenes of the best Van Damme flick. 

The Car Chase   

Some say that the greatest car chase scene that ever took place in the history of cinema occurred in 1971’s French Connection. People still talk about this scene as if it’s one of the greatest scenes in movie history. They talk about how dangerous it was, and Screenrant.com writes that director “William Friedkin had no permission to film the car chase the way it was done, which is why The French Connection could never be made today.” They also drop a note about how the car accident in the scene was real, and Friedkin kept it in the movie to add to the scene’s gritty realism. I drop a big “who give a crud” thud. When I saw that that scene for the first time, before I knew anything about the hoopla and the hollering, I thought the scene ran too long. After hearing people gush about the scene in the decades since, I watched it again with a renewed sense, and I thought it ran too long. That scene, one car chase scene, runs approximately six minutes. About five minutes too long. “But you have to understand how difficult the logistics of the scene were,” they say. “You have to sink yourself into the drama of the moment, and how well it was edited to a perfect pulse pounding pace.” No, I don’t. I don’t care about the particulars of the artistry of the film-making, I just want to sit down and enjoy watching a movie. I also don’t plan on ever shooting a car chase scene, so why would I be influenced by anything involved in the shooting of it? I watch a movie to be entertained, and when a chase scene, or a fight scene, interrupts the pace of that movie, “because that’s what we love”, I now have the luxury of fast forwarding through it to see what happened.

The Bad Guy

Our familiarity with portrayals of bad guys began in preschool when our teacher put on a puppet show and introduced the bad guy, “And here’s comes mean Mr. Johnson,” “BOO!” we all shouted in unison. “All I care about is money!” she has mean Mr. Johnson say in her mean guy voice, as our throng of boos strengthened. It was fun and funny back then, but we fully grown, mature and responsible adults are still doing that today. When the bad guy enters our adult productions today, the writers will introduce him by having him kick a cute, little puppy down a flight of stairs, light a physically-impaired individual’s house on fire, or do some other equally heinous act such as declaring there are some virtues to profit. At some point in the production, he will declare that a side character isn’t pulling their weight in the company, and he will do it in such an over the top, mean, bad and dastardly way that it’s almost embarrassingly cheesy to watch. Enter our good guy, “C’mon man, that’s no way to talk to a person.” We all but cheer our good guy for saying what needed to be said, but doesn’t anyone else see this as the movie’s obnoxiously obvious way of endearing the main character to the audience?

I would submit that the characterizations of bad guys haven’t progressed much beyond that preschool puppet show portrayal of the mean Mr. Johnson bad guys. “Hey, if you don’t think money is important, I’d like to see you get along without it!” mean Mr. Johnsons say in modern, adult movies. “Boo!” we shout in unison. Most adults don’t openly boo in theaters, but do we avoid openly booing because we’ve matured past that impulse, or does decades of movie going let us know that the writers and directors of our beloved productions are going to make something awful to him? That’s what separates us from preschoolers, we know the movie makers are going to expose him as the bad guy he is, and we know he’s going to get his comeuppance. We’re not talking about comedies either, where it’s more acceptable to have exaggerated characters for comedic purposes. We’re talking about otherwise complex dramas that basically write Scooby-Doo bad guys as actual characters. “He’s going to get his comeuppance,” someone in the audience says, as if they’re watching a sporting event. He’s one of those “I told you,” guys who love to say they knew what was coming, even though it is as obvious as it was in our preschool puppet plays. As I wrote I don’t need, or even want, a complex, deep narrative on par with a Dostoyevsky novel, but I wouldn’t mind seeing some writers shake up these tedious, bullet point tropes that adhere to the 80’s cookie cutter characters that Scooby Doo made famous.    

My favorite illustration of this point comes from Quentin Tarantino: 

“Critics always really preferred Bill Murray movies to Chevy Chase movies,” Tarantino said. “However, it does seem as if the point of all the Bill Murray movies is that he’s this kind of hip, cool, curmudgeon, smartass guy, who in the last 20 minutes gets a transformation and becomes this nice guy. And almost apologizes for who he was the entire movie before that happened.” 

Tarantino continued with examples: “Stripes, Groundhog Day, Scrooged. The whole thing. For instance, Stripes. How does he go from where Warren Oates kicks his ass, deservedly kicks his ass…to where now he’s rallying the troops? Now, he’s getting their army on during the parade and now he’s leading a secret mission. Same thing with Groundhog Day. I mean, does anybody really think a less sarcastic Bill Murray is a better Bill Murray? Maybe it’s better for Andie MacDowell, but not for us as the viewer.”

“Yet, Chevy Chase movies don’t play that s***,” Tarantino said. “Chevy Chase is the same supercilious a**hole at the end of the movie that he is at the beginning. He never changes in his stuff…I mean, unless they have him playing a dope like he is in the Vacation movies. But when he’s playing like a Chevy character, he never apologizes for who he is, stays the same way through the whole film, and even if there’s a slight change, that’s not the whole point of the movie, like changing him into a nice, cuddly guy.”

Information Age and Movies

Another huge component of watching modern movies is all of the insider information we have at our disposal. Thanks to news aggregators, the internet in general, and the other chairs on late-night talk shows, we now know so much about movies that we crossed a tipping point of too much information about the production of a simple 90-minute movie. I used to find the information actors, directors, and everyone else involved in the production provided in the other chairs on late-night talk shows somewhat fascinating, but somewhere along the line I realized it’s all just self-imposed deification, and their sign to them that they made it. For some reason, we all want to know everything we can find about our definition of our royalty, and the roles they play in movies, and we can never get enough. I did. When the actor told me that they put weight on to play the role, I didn’t really care, but I considered it a worthwhile dedication to the role. When the host began to ask questions about the diet they used to add weight, I turned the channel. When the person in the other chair informed us that she didn’t wear make-up for their role, I didn’t care. When the host said, “You are very brave,” and he appeared to mean it, I turned the channel. When it was revealed in an aggregator, that this actor didn’t get along with that actor, their onscreen lover, we all learned that many considered working with that actor difficult. When we learned that the actor became so immersed in his method acting that he demanded everyone on set call him Weasel, because he’s playing Weasel, I found that fascinating at first. Then, when everyone copied that immersion technique, I found it trite, redundant, and a little pathetic and dumb. We learn that some actors aren’t nice, but others are. “It’s true. I know he’s a good guy, because he asked me my name when giving me an autograph, and he called me Harley from then on, and he even winked at my kid.” That director used this technique, this setting, those cameras, that soundtrack, and the movie studio budgeted it at such and such an amount, but as usual the artistically demanding director burned through that the first week. We still care about the quality of a movie, of course, but all these other late-night talk show talking points enhance the movie experience for us. Why? I honestly don’t understand how any of this information enhances your cinematic experience. You like a movie better, because you found out she’s nice, and you won’t go to see another movie, because you heard a report about how one time that star didn’t hold an elevator for an old lady carrying groceries? You might be a victim of too much information. 

Even with all that, I still love movies. I find a trip to the theater, a night at home with Netflix, Prime, etc., and a quality movie, a great evening. No matter how hard they try, they can never take that away from me.