| Tuesday, February 22, 2005 |
21:21 - Do the chickens have large talons?
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At the urging of my brother, this weekend I rented Napoleon Dynamite... and now I know what all the strange little expressions and quotable phrases creeping into people's speech patterns are about. Man, what a weird, weird movie. And thoroughly original. I enjoyed it a ton.
It defies all the usual conventions of filmmaking, in the sense that it's so cinema verité, in a way, that you find yourself startled to realize just how formulaic most movies are these days. It's like the anti-Austin Powers, sort of. In both movies, the main character is defined largely by a bunch of signature expressions and behavioral quirks; but Austin Powers, it turns out, and though we don't even realize it at the time, follows some very strict and ingrained norms of storytelling whereby at certain points in the narrative Austin Powers just has to say "Yeah, baby!" or another of his trademark phrases. But in Napoleon Dynamite, it's more like the cameraman just followed this guy around all day and recorded him dancing to some mysterious music playing inside his head, following a script only he can read. The end effect is intoxicating: you never can anticipate quite where it's going to turn next. Nothing happens the way you're trained to expect. Just when a situation arises where you think Napoleon is perfectly poised to emit some phrase you'd heard him say forty-five minutes ago, thus to turn it into a cliché the way you'd expect from a movie like Austin Powers, instead he ducks his head and bulldozes his way right out of the template you thought you'd trapped him in, making up a new quotable word or turn of phrase, or slapping someone unexpectedly in the face and running away..
Plus it's got Jon Gries, a.k.a. Lazlo Hollyfeld.
Incidentally, the movie's IMDB page had a hilarious forum thread (as of three days ago, but it seems to have been deleted) about how the movie is all a big Mormon propaganda vehicle. Evidently because the hero's direst oath is "Gosh!" or how it takes place in Idaho or something. I wish the thread still existed, because I'd have loved to link to it and show everybody some really amazingly silly theories, like about how Uncle Rico (whose door-to-door flannel-tie tupperware-selling business is meant to represent LDS proselytizing) leaving his wife because she didn't understand his infatuation with 1982 is a clear illustration of the fruits of polygamy. I can't help but wonder—if these supposed consequences of Mormonism are presented as vaguely negative and stupid in the movie, how is it a Mormon propaganda piece again?
I guess it goes to show that if the filmmakers of any given movie are a given persuasion, the movie—no matter how determinedly meaningless and silly it is—is automatically "propaganda" for that persuasion. Ah well—since the thread has apparently been closed, Google searches on "napoleon dynamite mormon propaganda" now turn up hits on white-power sites, so I guess it's not much of a mainstream theory anyway.
"I wish you'd go eat a decroded piece of crap!"
Aaagh! Get it out of my brain!
UPDATE: Just last night I found myself telling someone that FedEx's online tracking system was, "like, infinity better than UPS". This stuff is toxic...
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Brian Tiemann
