thought about this again. kind of amazing how we’re all just chasing ways to duplicate how this scene makes us feel, either in life or in art.
thinking about when mark told the story of how when they were shooting, he said to george, “darth vader has a musical theme, han, leia all have themes, do i have a theme song?” and george going “mark, the main theme is your theme song”
The thing that always comes as a surprise to me, somehow, every time I rewatch this movie, is how much of it is setup. There’s *so much* that happens after Luke joins up with Han Solo, including nearly everything iconic about the movie, that it’s really easy to forget that it opens with a lot of slow-paced establishing scenes, setting up the world and Luke’s life and just letting you wander around in this interesting and visually delightful universe and experience and explore it without feeling like you’re always being hustled off to the next action scene. There are a lot of reasons why the movie took off like it did, but I really feel like part of its magic and part of why it’s still fun to watch after all these years (even after we know the story and all the character beats) is because of that “tourist in a foreign land” experience that you get from the first half of it.
Is there a subgeneric name for that type of black comedy about someone with zero personal boundaries who can only be repelled through abject cruelty (if at all)? Movies like WHAT ABOUT BOB? and THE CABLE GUY may come to mind, but Mike Leigh’s GROWN-UPS is way more intense than either of those. I might also appreciate it more because in the standard version of this kind of narrative, the interloper is portrayed as intrusive yet basically sort of innocent, whereas the person defending themselves and their territory is shown to be curmudgeonly and uptight, and deserving of a hard lesson about love or something. This is totally maddening to me as someone who needs a lot of personal space, who doesn’t like to be touched, and who enjoys her own company. People who like a lot of contact just can’t imagine this, and often when I tell someone not to hug me, they insist on it anyway like they’re doing me a big favor, as if I just don’t know what’s good for me or I’m too shy to ask for what I truly want (which is for someone to mash their body all over me while grunting and sighing obviously). Anyway, GROWN-UPS is a movie that makes a hilarious and terrifying ordeal out of the need to defend your own boundaries, without insinuating that you should just give in and let people do whatever they hell they want to you because cherishing your own privacy is somehow the same as rejecting other people.
I got a similar charge out of THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN, although that movie is a little more ambiguous on the subject. But don’t even get me started on movies like THE STATION AGENT, where someone who is perfectly happy in their solitude has their privacy violated over and over again until they’re bullied into submission by extroverts who think everyone should be just like them. Shiver.
don’t know what happened to me in the womb but I was born without the necessary brain components to 1. believe in any god or spiritual system and 2. give a fuck about a career
