Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

“The Dogcatcher” Unleashed:  The Story behind My Debut Novel

September 20, 2023 / / 55 Comments

My first novel, The Dogcatcher, is now available from DarkWinter Press.  It’s an occult horror/dark comedy about a municipal animal-control officer whose Upstate New York community is being terrorized by a creature in the woods.  Here’s a (spoiler-free) behind-the-scenes account of the project’s creative inception and development; how it’s responsible for my being blackballed in Hollywood; how the coronavirus pandemic challenged and ultimately elevated the story’s thematic ambitions; and how these characters hounded my imagination—forgive the pun—for no fewer than fourteen years.

The Dogcatcher is on sale in paperback and Kindle formats via Amazon.

In the spring of 2007, I came home from L.A. for a week to attend my sister’s graduation at Cornell University.  My first occasion to sojourn in the Finger Lakes region, I took the opportunity to stay in Downtown Ithaca, tour the Cornell campus, visit Buttermilk Falls State Park.  I was completely taken with the area’s scenic beauty and thought it would make the perfect location for a screenplay.  Only trouble was, all I had was a setting in search of a story.

CUT TO:  TWO YEARS LATER

Binge-watching wasn’t yet an institutionalized practice, but DVD-by-mail was surging, and my wife and I were, as such, working our way through The X-Files (1993–2002) from the beginning.  Though I have ethical reservations about Chris Carter’s hugely popular sci-fi series, I admired the creative fecundity of its monster-of-the-week procedural format, which allowed for the protagonists, his-and-her FBI agents Mulder and Scully, to investigate purported attacks by mutants and shapeshifters in every corner of the United States, from bustling cities to backwater burgs:  the Jersey Devil in Atlantic City (“The Jersey Devil”); a wolf-creature in Browning, Montana (“Shapes”); a prehistoric plesiosaur in Millikan, Georgia (“Quagmire”); El Chupacabra in Fresno, California (“El Mundo Gira”); the Mothman in Leon County, Florida (“Detour”); a giant praying mantis in Oak Brook, Illinois (“Folie à Deux”); a human bat in Burley, Idaho (“Patience”).

Special Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) in “The X-Files”

But the very premise of The X-Files stipulated that merely two underfunded federal agents, out of approximately 35,000 at the Bureau, were appropriated to investigate such anomalous urban legends.  I wondered:  If an average American town found itself bedeviled by a predatory cryptid—in real life, I mean—would the FBI really be the first responders?  Doubtful.  But who would?  The county police?  The National Guard?  If, say, a sasquatch went on a rampage, which regional public office would be the most well-equipped to deal with it…?

That’s when it occurred to me:  Animal Control.

And when I considered all the cultural associations we have with the word dogcatcher—“You couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in this town”—I knew I had my hero:  a civil servant who is the butt of everyone’s easy jokes, but whose specialized skills and tools and, ultimately, compassion are what save the day.

But it was, to be sure, a hell of a long road from that moment of inspiration to this:

When the basic concept was first devised, I wrote a 20-page story treatment for an early iteration of The Dogcatcher, dated August 25, 2009.  That same summer, I signed with new literary managers, who immediately wanted a summary of all the projects I’d been working on.  Among other synopses and screenplays, I sent them the Dogcatcher treatment.

They hated it.  They argued against the viability of mixing horror and humor, this despite a long precedent for such an incongruous tonal marriage in commercially successful and culturally influential movies the likes of An American Werewolf in London (1981), Ghostbusters (1984), Gremlins (1984), The Lost Boys (1987), Tremors (1990), Scream (1996), and Shaun of the Dead (2004), to say nothing of then–It Girl Megan Fox’s just-released succubus satire Jennifer’s Body (2009).  (I knew better than to cite seventy-year-old antecedents such as The Cat and the Canary and Hold That Ghost; Hollywood execs have little awareness of films that predate their own lifetimes.)  I was passionate about The Dogcatcher, but it was only one of several prospective projects I was ready to develop, so, on the advice of my new management, I put it in a drawer and moved on to other things.

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Into Each Generation a Slayer Is Born:  How the “Buffy” Franchise Demonstrates the Differences between Gen X and Millennials

March 29, 2023 / / 30 Comments

A cultural blip, disowned and dismissed.  A cultural phenomenon, nurtured and celebrated.  Is there any doubt Kristy Swanson’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an Xer, and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s a Millennial?

Joss Whedon famously dislikes the movie made from his original screenplay for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui and starring Kristy Swanson.  Seems he’d envisioned a B-movie with a Shakespearean soul, whereas Kuzui saw pure juvenile camp—an empowerment tale for prepubescent girls.

Buffy arrived right before it became cool for teenagers to brood about real things like depression and the cost of Doc Martens.  But something about this particular movie was bewitching to a tweeny bopper with an alternative undertow.  It had gloss and edge—but more gloss than edge.  This was a pre-Clueless, Skittles-tinted ode to California ditz. . . .  The result was an unfussy pre–Spice Girls girl-power fantasy for a 12-year-old kid.

Soraya Roberts, “I’ll Always Love the Original Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Atlantic, July 31, 2022

Only a modest success during its theatrical run, the cult horror/comedy found an appreciable audience on VHS.  Three years later, nascent netlet The WB saw an opportunity to bring the inspired concept of Valley girl–turned–vampire slayer to television—only this time under the auspices of the IP’s disgruntled creator:

Building on his original premise, he re-imagined the monsters as metaphors for the horrors of adolescence.  In one climactic scene, Buffy loses her virginity to a vampire who has been cursed with a soul; the next morning, his soul is gone and he’s lusting for blood.  Any young woman who had gone to bed with a seemingly nice guy only to wake up with an asshole could relate. . . .

In those early days of the internet, before nerd culture swallowed the world, fans flocked to a message board set up by the WB to analyze Buffy with the obsessive zeal of Talmudic scholars.  Whedon knew how to talk to these people—he was one of them.  He would visit the board at all hours to complain about his grueling schedule or to argue with fans about their interpretations of his work.  Back then, as he pointed out to me, the internet was “a friendly place,” and he, the quick-witted prince of nerds, “had the advantage of it.”

Lila Shapiro, “The Undoing of Joss Whedon,” Vulture, January 17, 2022

It is impossible to fully appreciate the monopolistic stranglehold geek interests have maintained on our culture over the first two decades of this millennium without acknowledging the pivotal role Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) played in elevating such pulp ephemera to a place of mainstream legitimacy and critical respectability.  It was the right premise (Whedon pitched it as My So-Called Life meets The X-Files) on the right network (one willing to try new ideas and exercise patience as they found an audience) by the right creator (a card-carrying, self-professed geek) speaking to the right audience (impressionable Millennials) at the right time (the dawn of the Digital Age).  It all synthesized at exactly that moment.  Forget Booger—Buffy was our culture’s revenge of the nerds.

Sarah Michelle Gellar and Joss Whedon on the set of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

In what was surely a first for any geek or screenwriter, let alone a combo platter, a cult of hero worship coalesced around Whedon.  His genius was celebrated on message boards and at academic conferences, inked in books and on body parts.  “He was a celebrity showrunner before anyone cared who ran shows” (ibid.).

Master storyteller that he is, Whedon didn’t merely reset the narrative of Buffy; he reframed the narrative about it.  While serving as a loose sequel to the feature film, the television series wasn’t Buffy the Vampire Slayer 2 so much as Buffy the Vampire Slayer 2.0—a complete overhaul and upgrade.  This was Buffy as it was always intended to be, before Hollywood fucked up a great thing.  That the startup-network show emerged as a phoenix from the ashes of a major-studio feature only burnished Whedon’s geek-underdog credentials.  To utter the word “Buffy” was to be speaking unambiguously about the series, not the movie.

What movie?

In 1997, Whedon premiered his Buffy series on The WB and essentially wiped the film from the collective memory.

By that point, I had turned 17, and even though the show was more serious than the movie, even though its universe was cleverer and more cohesive, even though the silent episode “Hush” was probably one of the best things on television at the time it aired, Buffy was still a vampire show—to me, it was just kids’ play.  My adolescence adhered to a kind of Gen-X aimlessness, to indie films with lots of character and very little plot.  Whedon’s show seemed more like the kind of thing Reality Bites would make fun of—a juvenile, overly earnest studio product.

Roberts, “I’ll Always Love the Original Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

As a member of Ms. Roberts’ demographic cohort, four years her senior, I’ll second that appraisal.  Yet for the Millennials who came of age in a post-Whedon world, and who were introduced to Buffy through the series—who fell in love with her on TV—Whedon’s creative contextualization of the movie became the universally accepted, unchallenged, and perennially reinforced perception of it:

You actually can’t watch the Buffy the Vampire Slayer film online, and honestly, you might be better off.  Luckily, all seven seasons of the Whedon-helmed (and approved) masterpiece that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer the series is easily streamed.  25 years later, Buffy movie is proof that our heroine was always better off in the hands of her maker.

Jade Budowski, “The ‘Buffy’ Movie At 25:  A Rough, Rough Draft Of The Magic That Followed,” Decider, July 31, 2017

The simultaneous display of blind devotion, proprietary entitlement, and self-assured dismissiveness in a statement like that, far from the only likeminded Millennial assessment of Buffy, is the kind of thing we humble Xers have spent a lifetime swallowing and shrugging off, even—especially—when we know better.  Not that anyone much cares what we have to say:

Here’s a refresher on the measliness of Generation X:  Our parents were typically members of the Silent Generation, that cohort born between 1928 and 1945—people shaped by the Great Depression and World War II, people who didn’t get to choose what they were having for dinner and made sure their kids didn’t either.  The parents of Gen X believed in spanking and borderline benign neglect, in contrast to the boisterous boomers and their deluxe offspring, the millennial horde. . . .

. . . Baby boomers and millennials have always had a finely tuned sense of how important they are.  Gen Xers are under no such illusion.  Temperamentally prepared to be criticized and undermined at all times, we never entirely trusted the people in charge anyway.

Pamela Paul, “Gen X Is Kind of, Sort of, Not Really the Boss,” Opinion, New York Times, August 14, 2022

Whereas the Millennials who deified Whedon have in recent years had to square their enduring love for Buffy with the spate of damning accusations against him—marital infidelity, feminist hypocrisy, emotionally abusive treatment of subordinates—the geek god’s fall from grace is no skin off Gen X’s nose; Big Daddy disavowed our Buffy, to the extent we feel that strongly about it one way or the other, decades ago.  Lucky for us, as Ms. Paul observes, we never entirely trusted the people in charge anyway.  And since Whedon’s critique of the Buffy movie remains to this day the culturally enshrined view of it, perhaps that merits reconsideration, too?

For the past quarter century, the differences between the Buffy movie and TV series have been authoritatively chalked up to all the usual cinema-snobbery bullshit:  tone and aesthetics and emotional depth and worldbuilding breadth.  Wrong.  The tonal disparity between the two Buffys has from the outset been greatly overstated.  The gap between Swanson’s Buffy and Gellar’s is, at its heart, generational.

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EXT. LOS ANGELES – ONE YEAR LATER

June 27, 2022 / / 20 Comments

I thought I’d said everything I had to say about Los Angeles last winter.  Should’ve known Hollywood would demand a sequel.

Even at the height of its considerable cultural influence, I never much cared for Sex and the City—for a very simple reason:  I didn’t in any way recognize the New York it depicted.

As someone who’d grown up there, Sex seemed like a postfeminist fantasy of the city as a bastion of neoliberal materialism, conjured by someone who’d never actually been to New York or knew so much as the first thing about it.  It certainly didn’t reflect the experience of any working-class New Yorkers I knew.

(It would seem the more things change, the more they stay the same:  The recent SATC revival series, And Just Like That…, is reported to be full of unintentionally cringe-inducing scenes of the gals apparently interacting with Black women for the first time in their lives.  Sounds on-brand.)

But this isn’t a retroactive reappraisal of a 1990s pop-cultural pacesetter—those have been exhaustively conducted elsewhere of late—merely an acknowledgment that the impression the series made on the generation of (largely) female Millennials who adored it is undeniable, legions of whom relocated to New York in early adulthood to have the full Sex and the City experience, and who, in turn, in many ways remade the city in Carrie Bradshaw’s image, for better or worse.

I can’t say as I blame those folks, really.  That they were sold a load of shit isn’t their fault.  Here in New York, we were just as susceptible to Hollywood’s greener-grass illusions of elsewhere.  As a student in the 1990s, the Los Angeles of Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990–2000) and Baywatch (1989–2001), of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) and Clueless (1995), seemed like a fun-in-the-sun teenage paradise in stark contrast with the socially restrictive experience of my all-boys high school in the Bronx, where the only thing that ever passed for excitement were spontaneous gang beatings at the bus stop on Fordham Road.

The high-school experience depicted on “Beverly Hills, 90210” is one I think we can all relate to

The sunny schoolyards and neon-lit nighttime streets of L.A. carried the promise of good times, the kind that seemed altogether out of reach for me and my friends.  The appeal of what California had to offer was so intoxicating, in fact, my two best pals and I spent an entire summer in the mid-’90s trying to make the streets of the Bronx look like Santa Cruz—a place none of us had ever been—for an amateur sequel to The Lost Boys, the ’80s cult classic about a coven of adolescent vampires who’ve (wisely) opted to spend eternity on the boardwalk.  That notion unquestionably took hold of my impressionable imagination—it made me want to be a part of that culture, and tell those kinds of stories.

Accordingly, it’s fair to say it wasn’t merely the movie business that brought me to Los Angeles in my early twenties as an aspiring screenwriter, but arguably the romantic impressions of California itself imprinted upon my psyche by all those movies and TV series on which I came of age.  Yet for the two decades I lived there, the city I’d always imagined L.A. to be—a place full of golden possibilities, as low-key as New York was high-strung—wasn’t the one I experienced.  Not really.  Not until last month, anyway.

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“Young Indiana Jones” Turns 30:  Storytelling Lessons from George Lucas’ Other Prequel Series

March 28, 2022 / / 18 Comments

A television series based on an immensely popular action-movie franchise shouldn’t have been a creative or commercial risk—quite the opposite.  But with The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which premiered on March 4, 1992, filmmaker George Lucas had no intention of producing a small-screen version of his big-screen blockbusters.  Here’s how Lucas provided a richly imaginative model for what a prequel can and should be—and why it would never be done that way again.

Though he more or less innovated the contemporary blockbuster, George Lucas had intended—even yearned—to be an avant-garde filmmaker:

Lucas and his contemporaries came of age in the 1960s vowing to explode the complacency of the old Hollywood by abandoning traditional formulas for a new kind of filmmaking based on handheld cinematography and radically expressive use of graphics, animation, and sound.  But Lucas veered into commercial moviemaking, turning himself into the most financially successful director in history by marketing the ultimate popcorn fodder.

Steve Silberman, “Life After Darth,” Wired, May 1, 2005

After dropping the curtain on his two career- and era-defining action trilogies (Star Wars concluded in 1983, then Indiana Jones in ’89), then failing to launch a new franchise with Willow (his 1988 sword-and-sorcery fantasy fizzled at the box office, though even that would-be IP is getting a “legacy” successor later this year courtesy the nostalgia–industrial complex), Lucas did in fact indulge his more experimental creative proclivities—through the unlikeliest of projects:  a pair of prequels to both Indiana Jones and Star Wars.  And while both arguably got made on the strength of the brands alone, the prequels themselves would, for better and worse, defy the sacrosanct conventions of blockbuster cinema—as well the codified narrative patterns of Joseph Campbell’s “heroic journey”—that audiences had come to expect from Lucas.

A perfunctory scene in Return of the Jedi, in which Obi-Wan finally explains Darth Vader’s mysterious backstory to Luke (a piece of business that could’ve been easily handled in the first film, thereby sparing the hero needlessly considerable risk and disillusionment in The Empire Strikes Back, but whatever), served as the narrative foundation for Lucas’ Star Wars prequel trilogy (1999–2005), in which a precocious tike (The Phantom Menace) matures into a sullen teenager (Attack of the Clones) before warping into a murderous tyrant (Revenge of the Sith).  Underpinning Anakin’s emo-fueled transformation to the dark side is a byzantine plotline about Palpatine’s Machiavellian takeover of the Republic.  Meanwhile, references to the original trilogy, from crucial plot points to fleeting sight gags, abound.

You’ve all seen the movies, so I’ll say no more other than to suggest the story arc—which is exactly what Obi-Wan summarized in Return of the Jedi, only (much) longer, appreciably harder to follow, and a tonally incongruous mix of gee-whiz dorkiness and somber political intrigue—is precisely the kind of creative approach to franchise filmmaking that would’ve been summarily nixed in any Hollywood pitch meeting, had Lucas been beholden to the corporate precepts of the studio system from which the colossal success of the original Star Wars afforded him his independence.

George Lucas on the set of the “Star Wars” prequels

Which is not to say Lucas’ artistic instincts were infallible.  Financially successful though the prequels were, audiences never really embraced his vision of an even longer time ago in a galaxy far, far away:  Gungans and midi-chlorians and trade disputes didn’t exactly inspire the wide-eyed amazement that Wookiees and lightsabers and the Death Star had.

Maybe by that point Star Wars was the wrong franchise with which to experiment creatively?  Perhaps it had become too culturally important, and audience expectations for new entries in the long-dormant saga were just too high?  In the intervening years, Star Wars had ceased to be the proprietary daydreams of its idiosyncratic creator; culturally if not legally, Star Wars kinda belonged to all of us on some level.  By explicitly starting the saga with Episode IV in 1977, he’d invited each of us to fill in the blanks; the backstory was arguably better off imagined than reified.

As an IP, however, Indiana Jones, popular as it was, carried far less expectation, as did the second-class medium of network television, which made Lucas’ intended brand extension more of an ancillary product in the franchise than a must-see cinematic event—more supplemental than it was compulsory, like a tie-in novel, or the Ewok telefilms of the mid-eighties.  The stakes of the project he envisioned were simply much lower, the spotlight on it comfortably dimmer.  In the event of its creative and/or commercial failure, Young Indiana Jones would be a franchise footnote in the inconsequential vein of the Star Wars Holiday Special, not an ill-conceived vanity project responsible for retroactively ruining the childhoods of millions of developmentally arrested Gen Xers.  Here Lucas expounds on the genesis of the series:

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Here Lies Buffy the Vampire Slayer: On Letting Go of a Fan Favorite—and Why We Should

March 15, 2021 / / 40 Comments

Last month, actress Charisma Carpenter publicly confirmed a longstanding open secret in Hollywood:  Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator and Avengers writer/director Joss Whedon is an irredeemable asshole.

For years, fans of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” which aired on the WB and UPN from 1997 to 2003, have had to reconcile their adoration for a show about a teenage girl who slays monsters with the criticism that often swirled around her creator.

Mr. Whedon’s early reputation as a feminist storyteller was tarnished after his ex-wife, the producer Kai Cole, accused him of cheating on her and lying about it.  The actress Charisma Carpenter, a star of the “Buffy” spinoff “Angel,” hinted at a fan convention in 2009 that Mr. Whedon was not happy when she became pregnant.

In July, Ray Fisher, an actor who starred in Mr. Whedon’s 2017 film “Justice League,” accused him of “gross” and “abusive” treatment of the cast and crew. . . .

On Wednesday, Ms. Carpenter released a statement in support of Mr. Fisher, in which she said Mr. Whedon harassed her while she was pregnant and fired her after she gave birth in 2003. . . .

Over the past week, many of the actors who starred on “Buffy,” including Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played Buffy Summers, have expressed solidarity with Ms. Carpenter and distanced themselves from Mr. Whedon.  The actress Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Buffy’s younger sister, Dawn, alleged on Instagram on Thursday that Mr. Whedon was not allowed to be alone with her.

“I would like to validate what the women of ‘Buffy’ are saying and support them in telling their story,” Marti Noxon, one of the show’s producers and longtime writers, said on Twitter.  Jose Molina, a writer who worked on Mr. Whedon’s show “Firefly,” called him “casually cruel.”

Maria Cramer, “For ‘Buffy’ Fans, Another Reckoning With the Show’s Creator,” New York Times, February 15, 2021

If the copious fan-issued blog posts and video essays on this damning series of insider testimonials is an accurate barometer, Millennials have been particularly crestfallen over Whedon’s fall from grace.  It’s only over the last few years, really, I’ve come to truly appreciate just how proprietary they feel about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  That surprises me still, because I tend to think of Buffy as a Gen X artifact; after all, the modestly successful if long-derided (by even screenwriter Whedon himself) feature film was released five years before its TV sequel.  (If you don’t remember—and I’ll bet you don’t—the movie’s shockingly impressive cast includes no less than pre-stardom Xers Hilary Swank and Ben Affleck.)  I recall seeing this one-sheet on a subway platform during the summer between sophomore and junior years of high school—

Fran Rubel Kuzui’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1992)

—and thinking somebody had finally made a spiritual sequel to my formative influence:  Joel Schumacher’s Gen X cult classic The Lost Boys.  (Turned out, however, I was gonna have to do that myself.)  I was sold!  I marvel still at how the advertisement’s economical imagery conveys the movie’s entire premise and tone.  So, yes—I was the one who went to see Buffy the Vampire Slayer in theaters.  Guilty as charged.

But it was the TV series, I’ll concede, that took Buffy from creative misfire to cultural phenomenon, so it stands to reason it made such an indelible impression on Millennials.  I submit that more than any content creator of his cohort—more so than even celebrated pop-referential screenwriters Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino or Kevin Williamson—Whedon is preeminently responsible for the mainstreaming of geek culture at the dawn of the Digital Age.

Buffy not only coincided with the coming out of geeks from the dusty recesses of specialty shops, it helped facilitate that very cultural shift:  As John Hughes had done for Gen X a decade earlier, Whedon spoke directly to the socially and emotionally precarious experience of adolescent misfits, and his comic-book-informed sensibilities (before such influences were cool) endowed the Buffy series with a rich, sprawling mythology—and star-crossed romance (beautiful though it is, Christophe Beck’s Buffy/Angel love theme, “Close Your Eyes,” could hardly be described as optimistic)—over which fans could scrupulously obsess.

What’s more, all three cult serials Whedon sired were alienated underdogs in their own right:  Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a reboot of a campy B-movie on a fledgling, tween-centric “netlet” that no one took seriously; Angel, a second-class spinoff that was perennially on the brink of cancelation (and ultimately ended on an unresolved cliffhanger); and Firefly, his ambitious Star Wars–esque space opera that lasted exactly three months—or less than the average lifespan of an actual firefly.  That these shows struggled for mainstream respect/popular acceptance only burnished Whedon’s credentials as the bard of geek-outsider angst…

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Mirror/Mirror: On Seeing Ourselves in Fictional Characters

August 26, 2019 / / 16 Comments

Over the past few months, I’ve been helping plan an old friend’s bachelor party, the experience of which has made me starkly aware of just how conservative I’ve become in middle age.  Not politically, you understand—personally.  When I was a kid, I was like Leo Getz in Lethal Weapon (I was seriously that annoying) who nonetheless fancied himself Martin Riggs; somewhere along the way, though, I grew up to be Roger Murtaugh.

Riggs (Mel Gibson), Leo (Joe Pesci), and Murtaugh (Danny Glover) in “Lethal Weapon 2” from 1989 (Mary Evans Picture Library)

And that got me thinking about how, at different stages of life, we’re sometimes lucky enough to closely identify with a particular fictional character in an exceptional way; I would say the experience is even as random and as rarified as true friendship:  How many times, really, have we “met” a character who speaks so directly to us, whose emotional circumstances so closely reflect our own, that through them we vicariously attain some measure of insight… and maybe even catharsis?

We’re not necessarily talking favorite characters here; those come in spades.  God knows, I love Indiana Jones and Jean-Luc Picard and Philip Marlowe and Chili Palmer, but I don’t necessarily—much as I want to—relate to those characters so much as admire their characteristics.  In that way, they’re more aspirational than they are analogous.

I’d like to know which characters from fiction speak to you—and for you.  I’ll get us started, selecting examples from three distinct phases of my life:  childhood, adolescence, and midlife.  (For those interested, I’ve included each narrative’s Save the Cat! genre.)

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Oh, Snap! The Nostalgia-Industrial Complex — ’90s Edition

July 29, 2019 / / 13 Comments

Et tu, Millennials?  The old nostalgia-industrial complex got its hooks into you, too, huh?  I must ask:  Have you not witnessed in firsthand horror what pining for the good old days has done to Generation X…?

To recap:  We Xers have thus far spent the twenty-first century reliving all our childhood favorites—Star Wars, Super Friends, Karate Kid, Ghostbusters, Lethal Weapon, Halloween, Bill & Ted, Tron, Transformers, Terminator, Top Gun—a pathological exercise in self-infantilization that has catastrophically retarded both the culture as well as a generation of middle-aged adults who are at this point more passionately invested in Skywalkers and superheroes than are the juvenile audiences for whom those characters were originally intended.

Always keen to recognize—and replicate—a winning formula, a new permutation of forward-thinking backward-gazing has recently seized Hollywood:  Sell nineties-era nostalgia to the generation that came of age in that decade!  Over the past few years, we got a pair of Jurassic Park remakes-masquerading-as-sequels that didn’t inspire a single word of enthusiasm (certainly not a second viewing), but nonetheless earned over a billion dollars apiece, while our last conventional movie star, Dwayne Johnson, used his considerable clout (or more aptly muscle?) to resurrect both Jumanji and Baywatch.  As for this year?  Hope you’re excited for warmed-over helpings of The Lion King, Men in Black, Toy Story, Aladdin, and yet more Jumanji.  And while we’re at it, let’s welcome back slacker duo Jay and Silent Bob, because surely their grunge-era stoner humor still holds up in middle-age—

Our sentiments exactly, fellas…

—as well as Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, back from buddy-cop purgatory for more Bad Boys badassery!  You know damn well whatcha gonna do when they come for you:  Buy a ticket!

For an indeterminate, but clearly not immeasurable, swath of moviegoers, there is no marketing campaign more alluring than one that taps into foggy childhood memories. . . .

. . . The great nostalgia-industrial complex will [continue] steamrollering us against our better judgment into multiplexes, hoping for a simulacrum of the first high we felt watching great characters years ago.

Tom Philip, “Summer ’19 Brought To You By Nostalgia-Bait Movies,” Opinion, New York Times, July 4, 2019

Not just multiplexes.  (And how are those even still a thing?)  On the small screen, VH1 revived game-changing nineties slasher franchise Scream this summer (how, for that matter, is VH1 still a thing?), and new iterations of decade-defining teen melodramas 90210 and Party of Five are on the way.  Dope.

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