2004-09-05
PREFACE: Life has been just swell the last few days. It's been warm and sunny, the Cards are in first place, Bush has an 11 point lead over Kerry, I had an evening out in the Central West End two nights ago with two lovely ladies, and this morning I woke up without the reluctant help of my alarm clock. Yet...Last week, Rob came to my place with the 2000 Japanese film, "Battle Royale". The premise of the film: A group of 42 (that number again!) 9th graders are kidnapped and brought to a remote island. Once there, they are told that they are part of a game, the object of which being that the students will kill each other off until only one is left standing at the end of three days. To sweeten the deal, if at the end of three days there is more than one student alive, automated collars that have been strapped around each student's neck will explode. They are then released out into the jungle with food, water, a map, and a weapon with a varying degree of lethal might. For example, one student receives a sub-automatic machine gun, another receives a lid for a cooking pot. That's it.
Go.
It sounds especially brutal and almost crushingly violent, and it was on the outside, but beneath its hideous exterior the film had a surprisingly large undercurrent of wit, style, and grace. A lot like Gwen Stefani, were I to be lying about the wit, style, and grace.
This film deeply affected me. Just ask Char, Amie, and Rob, who were witness to 20 minutes of me pacing around the room muttering to myself once the film had concluded as if I were in some sort of sugar coma. Thing is, once the aforementioned framework for the film was spelled out in the first fifteen minutes, I was already processing how the plot would develop and conclude had my old classmates and I been the characters. It wasn't really so much the movie's violence that messed with me as it was the connotations that I drew to my life. What if I were stuck on an island with the Peoria Notre Dame class of 2000 and we all had to kill each other? Who would I buddy up with? Who would I off first? Would I have the grapes to off anybody at all? How long would I last?
Would I stalk Dan Olsson through the jungle for hours, following his panicked and clumsy footsteps, finally forcing him into a clearing and waiting till he's about 40 yards out before dropping him with a leg shot, then standing victoriously over him as he begs for his life and saying, "THIS is for starting that fist fight with me in 7th grade which by the way I TOTALLY won. Plus, you weren't all that great in 'Once Upon A Mattress' junior year," and when he starts to disagree about 'Mattress,' shooting him in the face? Or... would it all be the other way around?
Suffice to say, it's been tough getting this flick out of my mind. Even in my sleep. To wit:
THE "BATTLE ROYALE"-RELATED NIGHTMARES THAT I'VE HAD SINCE VIEWING THE FILM:
1. THE CAST OF "SURVIVOR ALL-STARS." Richard Hatch had set a booby trap by leaving Sue Hawk's decomposing corspe out to be found by All-Stars winner Amber Brkitch. As Amber stood dumbfounded over the body, a net swept up from the ground and hoisted her skyward. Richard then proceeded to turn on some Three Dog Night and roast Amber over a slow fire. Given my obsession with "Survivor," this dream was only bound to happen.
2. THE MARQUETTE HIGH SCHOOL SPEECH AND DEBATE TEAM. I actually arrived late for his one. Everyone was already dead and, yes, Laura Mathis was the last one standing. She was covered head to toe in blood. I said, 'Didn't you graduate?' She smiled, shrugged her shoulders and said, 'Nope!' I woke up just then. Glad I didn't get to see what happened next.
BUT THE BEST ONE, FROM LAST NIGHT:
3. ROADRUNNER AND COYOTE. Same cartoon characters, same premise, only switch the American Southwest to a dense tropical jungle. Now, anybody who survived childhood and owned a TV would be a fool not to handicap that Battle in the coyote's favor, given his never-ended arsenal. And don't give me that weak shit, 'Well, the coyote always falls off the cliff or gets crushed by the boulder! How can you ever think he'll win?' Because, the roadrunner ALWAYS falls for the dupe. If there's a big pile of iron bird seed inexplicably sitting in the middle of the road with a sign pointing to it that says "FREE BIRD SEED," the Roadrunner ALWAYS takes the bait. Despite the fact that the coyote jumps out from behind a big rock wearing roller skates, pulls out the giant magnet and makes chase, only to end up falling off of a thousand foot cliff after a series of comical accidents... the roadrunner was STILL ignorant enough to eat a entire pile of metal pellets sitting in the road that was spray-painted yellow and labeled "bird seed." Ever since I was a kid, I always believed that the roadrunner was so dense that the coyote would eventually get his man. Someday he may yet.
But I digress.
In the nightmare, the coyote befalls his usual fate as his Rube Goldberg-esque contraptions and ideas continually backfire. But here's the funny thing. As we move from vignette to vignette of the coyote trying to kill the roadrunner and failing, every once in a while, a body of a coyote would appear in the background. Not conspiciously, just another part of the setting. After a while, there are more and more. Soon the landscape was blanketed with bodies of Coyotes, some crushed, some blown up, some skewered.
And when I woke up... I felt as though I had taken a hard right hook of clarity. It was as if God had told me in a dream that ANDY, IT'S NOT THE SAME COYOTE EVERY TIME. Think of it! How could a coyote fall a thousand feet and land so hard that he creates an AUDIBLE puff of smoke only to be chasing the roadrunner down a road at full sprint a few moments later??? "It's just a cartoon???" Next time you see the cartoon, think of it this way: an army of coyotes, only ONE roadrunner. It will BLOW. YOUR. MIND.
You think about that while I'm making eggs.
-Andy