Boy, the emails from New York City’s public schools sure hit a Book of Revelations groove this week. Last Friday, it was earthquakes ("As per guidance from the DOE, there is no plan to initiate shelter in place at this time"). This week, it was an eclipse ("Please speak with your child about this event and prepare them for their commute home to ensure they are safe"). So given the general vibe these days, I’m waiting for the one that beings “Dear Families of the MS 404 Community,” and goes on to say:
Happy Wednesday!
Here are a few updates as we swing into Spring. Since the DOE advises that there are wars and rumors of wars, parents should look for nation to rise against nation, rivers to flow with blood, and Volleyball to be canceled on Wednesday but resume the following week. For more guidance on End Times click HERE or email Ms. Diaz at cdiaz$$@schools.nyc.gov.
As we move into the last months of 2023-2024, here are some important dates to keep in mind.
May 1: The sun turns as black as a sackcloth of hair. Students will be dismissed at the usual time.
May 6 The stars fall from heaven, a third of all rivers and springs are poisoned, and our silent auction closes at 8 PM. Click HERE to bid on a variety of items!
May 10 The sky splits, a hail of fire and blood burns up a third of all trees and grass, and report cards for the Second Marking Period are distributed end of day during homeroom.
May 20 An army of hundreds of millions kills a third of mankind by plagues, fire, and brimstone. Please note: this is the last day to collect personal belongs from Lost and Found.
Finally: If you're planning to refuse to have your child participate, you must fill out the DOE’s Apocalypse Refusal form (available HERE) and submit it to myself or Asst. Principal Petrosino by no later than April 30. Forms will NOT be accepted on the Day of Wrath.
Go Tigers!
The funny thing is that such an email wouldn’t phase me much. Because, as a frequent viewer of contemporary family entertainment, I know how the rest of the story goes.
First, the forces of law, order, and decency fall to the tsunami of darkness and chaos. Then our scientists, military, and political leaders show that they’re all helpless. Then parents and teachers gravely side-eye each other and silently ask who will save them from extinction, as if we didn’t all know that the answer is: A diverse crew of plucky, 70-pound 11-year-old Americans with awesome hair, that’s who!
I must have seen some version of this movie a dozen times since becoming a parent and each new version seems a little more insane. It’s not the plots, worlds, or characters so much as the dubious narrative physics. It’s how often frictionless, zero-g efforts defeat intergalactically powerful foes. It’s having to watch yet another skinny 11-year-old with perfect skin and a serene expression obliterate an alien Spetsnaz division with a while ours struggles to finish an online learning module without having a seizure.
Lately, the kid and I have been crossfading Netflix’s lavish new Avatar: the Last Airbender — a live-action reboot of the perfectly serviceable anime series — with the older, palpably CW-produced science-fiction drama The 100. The shows transpose their presumed target audience into, respectively, a tween fantasy feudal China that mixes wuxia with The Neverending Story, and a spaceship that’s orbiting a post-apocalyptic earth whose social order ostensibly mixes Hunger Games with Lord of the Flies but feels more like One Tree Hill, Hart of Dixie, and other atmospheres unsustainable for human life.
Both shows are reputed to probe serious topics: genocide, imperialism, tyranny, tribalism. But both also show characters performing feats of strength, skill, cunning, and courage that are plainly beyond the pint-sized tweens and lissome underwear models we see onscreen.
I want to be a good sport about this. I know these are escapist fantasies and realize that the traditional hacks of “magic” or “powers” should be enough to put it over. I just don’t get why total victory over the arrayed forces of the apocalypse has to look quite so easy.
After the third or fourth time I watched Gordon Cormier — who plays the wee, head-shaved and -tattooed crypto-Shaolin monk Aang in Avatar — stand against an army of huge adult soldiers who are bristling with weapons and hurling a telekinetic fusillade of fireballs, cast them a look of mild concern, and sort of airily wave them away so they all go flying, I called for a time out.
American movie violence was once marked by what Nabokov called the “ox-stunning fisticuffs” of brawlers in bars. In this subset of superkid action, the violence is done to verisimilitude itself, and it looks like an advancing platoon of orcs that’s abruptly blasted apart by an Olympian lightning ball hurled by a talk-to-the-hand gesture from a half-interested sixth grader.
The whole spectacle gave me a minor pandemic flashback, sending my mind back to the 2020 film We Can Be Heroes, which is where these kinds of airy, low-gravity hijinx seemed to reach an annoying new high.
While that film was written and directed by the estimable Robert (El Mariachi, Spy Kids) Rodriguez, and took its title from Berlin-period David Bowie, I still needed to take a bathroom sabbatical midway through the second act, when the chips were down and this crew of middle schoolers with superhuman powers heard the call to action, got over their hang-ups, learned the value of teamwork, and sallied forth to, as it were, kick ass.
It all streamed along painlessly enough in a series of too-bright, too-shiny, cheaply CGI-ed scenes of derring-do that apparently answered the question “What if Sharkboy and Lava Girl had kids?” (though not my own “Who are Sharkboy and Lava Girl?”). It was one more harmless fantasy of middle schoolers whose only barrier to saving the world is detention, and who, instead of having to struggle through English Language Arts tests, need only believe in themselves, feel the love, or do whatever it was that female troll did to restore color to her world and summon Justin Timberlake at the end of Trolls. Yessss!
Indeed, that fist-pumping yesss! suggests the long, winding chain of American pathology that begins either with Macauley Culkin’s one-kid Seal Team Six in A Home Alone, or Drew Barrymore’s pouting preteen doomsday device in Firestarter, and continued over decades to wind up in normal suburban parents who are called to battle by QAnon, people who feel they’ve been granted access to truth and power because they have an independent mind and an internet connection.
After watching We Can Be Heroes, I wasn’t surprised to learn that the aforementioned Sharkboy and Lavagirl were created by Rodriguez’s then-seven-year-old son Racer Max, who produced We Can Be Heroes, a film whose character’s attributes, set designs, and musical score were also created by Rodriguez kids. When, late in the film, one of the kids discovers that the alien invaders’ giant spaceship “wasn’t designed for children. It was designed by children” the whole thing felt just a bit on the nose.
Luckily, a bit later that year, the kid and I found a much more salubrious tale of a preteen supreme during SYFY’s New Year’s Twilight Zone marathon.
In the episode “It’s a Good Life,” Bill Mumy (who’d go on to play Will Robinson in Lost in Space) appears as six-year-old Anthony, a kid with a malevolent bowl-cut and awesome evil stare who can alter reality with his thoughts, knows what everyone else is thinking, and forces the residents of his small town to live in constant, self-censoring terror of a prepubescent Big Brother.
It’s scenario any post-pandemic parent will recognize.The shell-shocked adults stumble around the kids’s creepily silent domain. They mourn the dreams, careers, and family members the kid 86-ed in a fit of pique. And like members of Stalin’s 1952 Politburo, they spend their days getting drunk, sucking up to the petulant three-foot idiot god, getting drunk, or trying to plot his murder.
The best part is the nightly torment Anthony subjects the townspeople to. Each evening, they have to gather in his leafy-suburban home to watch the extremely narrowcast programming he mentally beams to the house TV.
The seas are rising, our society is striven, and life in this country is hard. While I don’t expect kids entertainment to take all this on board, it’s still hard to cheer for stories that make saving the world seem a matter of recognizing your own essential awesomeness. As I revisited that “Twilight Zone” episode, I realized it’s still the most convincing vision of the apocalypse on offer.
Raging, terrified survivors, seated on mid-century-modern furniture, forced to watch stupid, violent, plotless TV shows created by a six-year-old boy. And give every single one a rave review.
Odds/Sods
I came late to Alex Ross’s The New Yorker piece on Arnold Schoenberg’s Hollywood period (prompted by my friend Grant Faulkner whose writer’s substack had a reco of Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron), but wanted to correct a key omission. Since Ross notes that the pioneering composer’s non-tonal vocabulary found its biggest Hollywood use case in “scenes of tension and terror,” I’d like to cite David Shire’s ill, swaggering title score for the grimy 1974 classic of mass-transit noir, The Taking of Pelham 123, which I recently revisited with the kid, and whose title theme is running on a seedy loop in my head. (To cut straight to the 12-tone miasma, jump in at 0:44.)