Eek Week Day the 13th: The Final Chapter, in that it’s the fourth one and nowhere near final
(Note to readers: the discussion spurred by yesterday’s Eek Week entry got me in a Foggy kinda mood. The following piece assumes familiarity on the part of the audience with both John Carpenter’s The Fog and Errol Morris’s The Fog of War for maximum humorous effect)
(Note to readers familiar with both films: The following piece assumes a rather low bar on the part of the audience for what constitutes “humorous”)
(Note to readers familiar with both films who possess a rather low bar for what constitutes “humorous”: LET’S DO THIS)
John Carpenter’s The Fog of War
(Blake the undead revenger looks around, fidgets with machete)
ERROL MORRIS, OFFSCREEN: You can start.
So um… should I state my qualifications, all that?
ERROL MORRIS, OFFSCREEN: No, just talk about the relocation.
That last, fateful voyage, yes. I would say that being the ad hoc leader of that leper colony was…
(still image of lepers being herded into a camp, slow zoom on central figure)
Well, it’s not a spotless legacy, let’s just say that. They trusted me. They trusted me, and I could go on and on about how it was due to factors beyond my control, but let’s state the obvious: I lost the ship.
Here I have to go back to the beginning. I remember back in 1870-something, guy comes to me, says there’s this place, “Antonio Bay,” and I’m thinking, California, hey, why not.
Turns out we got set up. They outsmarted us, pure and simple. Lured us into the rocks, and there we were, fighting amongst ourselves as we drowned.
(footage of a ship-in-a-bottle falling to the ground and shattering)
ERROL MORRIS, OFFSCREEN: Would you say that incident clouded your judgement?
Well, when you say clouded—yes, I suppose that’s one way to describe lingering on the boundary separating this world from the next just to… I mean, in the end, it wouldn’t have turned out any differently, I don’t think, if we hadn’t killed all six, as foretold by the talking driftwood.
Or was that me, speaking through the driftwood via the reel-to-reel it was sitting on top of and dripping water onto? That’s where I get confused about the sequence of events.
So, yes, there was a sort of haziness there, those choices we made. I remember telling Hook, “Put that body in the locker,” and he looks at me like I’m crazy and says “Why? That’s pointless.”
And Hook was right, you see. But then later it fell out and scared someone, so you never know how what you do now will affect events in the future.
(commercial for the game “Mousetrap”)
ERROL MORRIS, OFFSCREEN: Didn’t you reanimate that corpse also?
Oh, sure, best we could, but that just wasn’t feasible, beyond scrawling cryptic messages. We were good at random unexplained phenomena, the big, clumsy, car-horn-honking stuff, but the puppeteering proved impossible to sustain.
Ooooo, he wrote “3,” I’m so scared! If he had been a mere eight feet closer I’d need a tetanus shot!
ERROL MORRIS, OFFSCREEN: How do you feel about killing the priest?
Well… oh, I don’t know. He was clearly contrite about his ancestor’s wickedness and he gave us back the gold, so I don’t know. The best I can tell you is, and it comes up awful short, is that Worm Face was of the belief that you never show mercy once you’ve identified the accursed. I went along happily with that reasoning, I’m not trying to reassign blame.
(1970s-era photograph of mustachioed gentleman in “I’m With Stupid” T-shirt, slow zoom on torso)
You just—there are things you do when you’re seeking vengeance from beyond a watery grave that you probably wouldn’t do otherwise. There’s no accounting at a time like that, no mechanism for sanction. Little old lady answered the door? Check another one off, that’s four. Or maybe five, I forget when we killed the meteorologist.
(remember those onomatopoeic text balloons that popped up during fights on the old Batman TV show? Like that, except they say “STRANGLE!” and “STAB!”)
Point is, you just… things have been set in motion. You’re operating as though through a mist—no, not a mist, thicker, like you’re under a blanket or something.
ERROL MORRIS, OFFSCREEN: A fog?
A fog, exactly. That’s exactly what it was.
(slow-motion footage of a head of cabbage bouncing down the steps of a Mayan temple)
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 10/25/09 at 06:13 PM • Permalink
Categories: Geek Speak • Knee Slappers • Movies •
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