Rewatching Truman Show for the first time in a long time, and the detail that’s stuck with me this time is the set design.
The characters drive modern cars and hock modern products, but it’s all presented with a veneer of 1950s wholesome applecheeked Americana. Truman’s life is presented as an escape for the audience from the drudgery of the modern day, and the aesthetic they’ve chosen for this is the post-war economic boom. This is the simple time, the movie says. This is the good time. Doesn’t the modern day suck? Let’s go back and see our friends from the days when life was good.
And it’s a lie. Truman’s life is a lie, and the image of white picket fenced suburbia they’ve presented is a lie. It’s an elaborate construction to recreate a false memory that’s comfortable for advertisers. The movie is a satire, but it’s also a very blatant statement against the nostalgia for a golden age which never existed. It’s a lie. It doesn’t exist.
I don’t know. I’m spitballing. I’m biased because I despise mid-20th century Americana and I naturally treat it with hostility, but it’s very gratifying to see a movie kind of agree with me.
Let me tell you a story.
Earlier in the summer, I went to Florida with my friend. We decided to visit a town nearish to where we were staying called Seaside, as we had heard it was a cute place. What I did not know at the time was that Seaside is the place where they filmed The Truman Show. It was a “master-planned community,” constructed in the 80s to be the perfect beach town.
Seaside, FL
Seahaven
And yes, it really does look Like That. Not just in their tourist-agency photos, in real life it looks like that. Arguably the irl Seaside is even prettier than movie Seahaven, because the the office buildings where Truman works don’t exist; the town is 100% cutesy homes and little shops.
Even Weird Al has had that™
experience with Tony Hawk
Tony Hawk IS Forrest Gump
So I looked up why and how this happened, and it turns out Weird Al hired a company called Birdhouse Skateboards to provide some “skate/punk” extras for the video. Birdhouse Skateboards is a company started by Tony Hawk, so not only did Weird Al end up putting Tony Hawk in his video without realizing it, he actually hired Tony Hawk’s company without realizing it! And then Tony Hawk just decided to go along as one of the extras himself.
BTW, he’d already won like 40 contests already, some of them international skateboarding contests. So it’s not like Weird Al cast some unknown skateboarder who ended up becoming World Famous Skateboarder, he was already well known and was running his own Skateboarding company.
Think of it this way. This wasn’t ‘Weird Al got Tony Hawk to be in his video’, this was ‘Tony Hawk found a way to be in a Weird Al Video.’
The chance that Tony Hawk has infiltrated your location or piece of media is low
I really hope the effects of the WGA and SAG strike bleeds into all sorts of entertainment industries, especially the ones that don’t have any unions. I want to hear animators, music composers, voice actors, and translators all go on strike.
TAG (The Animation Guild) covers animators. Recently it’s been in the news as it’s trying to unionize not only artists/writers in animation, but also production workers (there’s a petition for Disney to recognize production workers you can sign here!) Though TAG has been fighting for its workers for a long time, animation is usually siloed away from other narrative media to its detriment, as it hasn’t won some of the protections the WGA and SAG-AFTRA have. TAG is under the umbrella of IATSE, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.
Film/TV composers are unionized under the American Federation of Musicians. A lot of film/TV scoring is done in London (this is a 2012 article that talks about that phenomenon) so unfortunately the union isn’t particularly strong.
Voice actors are included under SAG-AFTRA (read here on the SAG-AFTRA website.)
Translators don’t have a trade union but can join the American Translators Association, which itself is under the International Federation of Translators. Since this isn’t our industry we’re unsure of how equipped the association is to protect its workers, but it seems like because it isn’t a formal trade union it can’t do much.
This isn’t to say there’s no more work to be done. These industries are exploitative and need better union protections! But let’s not spread misinformation in the name of pro-union solidarity.
These unions already exist; let’s acknowledge and support them!
also according to michael collins when the three of them were discussing what neil armstrong should say when he first stepped on the moon, collins suggested armstrong say “Oh, my God, what is that thing?” and then scream and cut out his mic.
Everyone forgets Michael Collins and it’s fucking tragic.
I’m not about to argue the finer points of Southern culture with anyone, because I can accept that I was born and raised in the hot flames of a dumpster fire, but I’ll tell you gotdamned commie Yankees one thing: I’d rather be dead in the hallowed halls of a Cook Out than alive in an In-N-Out
Two hot dogs is too much? Two hotdogs is what drives this Californian to hp lovecraft protag seeing a shoggoth?
Everyone else talked about outdoor cats, it’s time for me to talk about offleash dogs
Reasons not to have your dog offleash at a public park:
1) roads (this one is self-explanatory)
2) it makes the park inaccessible to like, entire swathes of the population. If you have experience with police dogs or guard dogs in your neighborhood, or you’re a new immigrant from somewhere with a large population of feral dogs, it sucks ass going to the park and having someone’s massive lab bound up to you!
3) If, for example, you are in a protected wetland area plastered with friendly signs asking you to please leash your dog to avoid causing an ecological impact, having your dog offleash might cause an ecological impact! “Oh no, my dog is well-behaved, they would never bother the wildlife” wrong! your dog is in the pond trying to eat the endangered Blandings’ turtles!
4) Non-zero chance of a jokerified park guide (me) just clipping your dog to a leash and stealing them
5) “Oh but my dog is friendly!” If your unleashed “friendly” dog runs up to my leashed UNFRIENDLY dog, and my dog bites yours, guess who’s getting the blame despite doing everything right?
6) Allergies. “Oh but my dog is friendly!” oh well that’s great I guess I can just put the epipen away because, yknow, he didn’t mean to induce anaphylactic shock, it was all in good fun, nothing to worry about!
7) Small children, the elderly and disabled people. “Oh but my dog is so friendly!” When your friendly dog slams into me/jumps on me/knocks me over I am just as injured.
in recent events of that zoo losing the clouded leopard, it reminded me of the time i went to a large petting zoo and there was a free roaming little black sheep. cutest little guy i ever saw, soi went to the zookeeper nearby and said ‘i think its really cute how you have a sheep thats allowed to just walk around. ‘ then the zookeepers eyes widened and he grabbed his walky talky and ran
One of my favourite character types is the one that is universally acknowledged both by the story and by the audience to be a fundamentally horrible person, but at the same time they are so fascinating and well written as a character that everyone really enjoys them, like you love to hate them because they’re written in such a way that even what makes them hateable is interesting