News You Can Bruise for 2024 July

A little late this month since everything sucks and Sumana and I have been watching a lot of TV shows instead of movies. But that just means you'll get a big Television Spotlight at the end of this post.

• The Big Lebowski (1998): Possibly the first time I've ever seen a movie in a theater where everyone in the theater had seen the movie before. Since this was my seventh viewing of The Big Lebowski, I decided to do something different by sitting way up in front and focusing on small background details. Here's what I noticed that I hadn't noticed before:
  • The last thing Jeffrey Lebowski does in the movie is hit a dog.
  • On the porch of the unit opposite the Dude's apartment there's a huge pile of shoes. Shoe-free household, I guess. Was it set up as part of set dressing or is that just the situation of whoever actually lived there?
  • The Dude's landlord seems like a Prop 13 guy who inherited the apartment complex and is able to live his LA artist lifestyle on the irregular proceeds of the rent.
  • In the scene on the beach near the end, you can see someone just walking around on the cliff up above, unaware that they've become an extra in Leonard's favorite movie of all time.
• The Long Goodbye (1973): Why not, while Lebowski is fresh in my mind? This started out as a lot of fun but made the mistake of really caring about the plot and the mystery. I loved the early adventure to find cat food, Marlowe giving a pep talk to the hood assigned to trail him, but lost interest when he started taking his job seriously. Not bad for my first Robert Altman film, though.
• The War Between Men and Women (1974): Jack Lemmon plays James Thurber, if Thurber was Lemmon's age in 1974. (He was actually 80 and had been dead for 13 years.) Thurber's brand of quippy sexism is on its way out in 1974, but it still kinda works. The animated scenes distinguish this a bit from the average Women's Lib-era sex comedy, but otherwise I wasn't enthralled.
• Streets of Fire (1984): A goofy, over the top attempt to create a big movie musical that the kids will like, but it was made by baby boomers whose idea of cool is stuck in the James Dean era. There's just not enough punk rock in this; in particular it's much less cool than The Warriors, directed by the same director (Walter Hill) four years earlier. However, Streets of Fire is so wacky and off the wall that Sumana and I had a great time watching it. It's a classic good bad movie: a bizarre idea competently made and greenlight because hey, who knows what will be a hit?

  I think you could have made a big movie musical enjoyed by kids in 1984, but the kids in question would have been theater kids, right? Not the punks. This movie and Pennies From Heaven (1981) are off the mark with their fixation on recreating a time in the past when musicals had mass appeal. You need modern sleaze and transgression, a la Rocky Horror Picture Show.

  I made a bet that at some point in the movie a street would be literally lit on fire. Reader, I won that bet. There's also a classic "make this character a woman but change nothing else about the screenplay" character here, a la Ellen Ripley, which creates a sadly compelling female character by 1984 movie standards.

• Bullet for a Badman (1964): I don't have much to say about this generic 60s western. I remember that the location sites are beautiful, and the horses do a lot of good stunt work, falling over when their riders are shot and whatnot. I mean, I hope that's stunt work.

And here is the promised Television Spotlight:

• Franklin (2024): I think me and Sumana might be the only people who have ever watched this. It seems like an Apple TV honeypot designed solely to collect award nominations. I do recommend it if you're a major Franklinhead, as it's full of snappy quips. Probably way too slow and ponderous for the general public. We both thought Thibault de Montalembert was outstanding as the Comte de Vergennes.
• Star Trek: Discovery (2017-2024): Time to bid adieu to the weird eldest child of the rapidly-closing Stream Trek era. Unlike Star Trek: Picard, Discovery had tons of great episodes and a really good season. Unfortunately, it was season 3, four years ago. Season 5 was all right, so I'm not super disappointed, but only because my expectations have been well lowered by this point.

  I haven't looked into this in detail, but I have to assume there was major turmoil behind the scenes at Discovery, since the showrunner kept changing early on and the show kept lurching in different creative directions, occasionally doing things like casually spinning off a much better Star Trek series. But Discovery never lost sight of its pole star: the belief that Michael Burnham is the most important person in history and has to save the universe all by herself once a year. Honorable mention to the way Star Trek's traditional countdown-to-everything-blowing-up timers would inexplicably pause for minutes at a time so that everyone could have their character beat, though they did tone that down in the final season.

  My biggest Discovery regret is that Michelle Yeoh and Jason Isaacs spent so much time playing contemptible Mirror Universe characters that we barely or never got to see their (presumably) heroic, Star Trek-y Prime Universe equivalents. Doing a show that doesn't focus on the captain was a bold experiment but it left a void at the core of the show that took a really long time for Michael and Saru to grow to fill... by becoming captains.

  Oh yeah, Saru! One of my favorite Trek characters, period. Especially in the early seasons, he was a believable and sensitive portrayal of a sentient prey animal. And... yeah, I like most of the other characters (not you, Burnham's various love interests) but Saru is the standout here. The secondary cast was neglected from the start and it feels like they never recovered. I love the eventual Chekhov-Sulu bromance between Owosekun and Detmer but it was such a long road, getting from there to here.

• The Prisoner (1967): I believe "hot mess" would be an appropriate term. This is so stylish and has tons of good ideas, many of which remain quotable 55 years later, but the impetus for the series in the first place—Patrick McGoohan's weariness of being typecast in spy shit—also drives it over the cliff at the end, with the last few episodes willing to put complete nonsense onscreen as long as the cliches of the spy genre are averted or mocked. We enjoyed seeing the titular Prisoner become more and more adept at using his environment, manipulating the Village and its government to his advantage. Definitely worth a watch.

  I've mentioned before Dave Hutchinson's "Fractured Europe" series of books and how they have a MEGA TWIST which, now that I think on it, seems strongly inspired by the setting of The Prisoner. This makes me feel a little better about my inevitable theft and adaptation of Hutchinson's twist.

I just read The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth, with annotations by Leonard S. Marcus. The annotations were excellent regarding earlier drafts of the manuscript, and the correspondence between Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer. But some of the annotations brought in scholarly analysis of the book's concepts, and I thought a lot of those fell flat compared to the gold standard of annotated children's books, Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice.

However, a couple things I noticed as I reread the book with those annotations put me in the mood to answer a specific high-concept question: when does this story take place, exactly? I did come up with an exact answer: though published in 1961, The Phantom Tollbooth begins on Tuesday, April 11, 1967. But getting there requires several leaps of logic. I think these leaps make sense, but I also don't think the story was designed to support this kind of analysis. Certainly Norton Juster didn't plan this, since the answer relies on societal trends that played out after the book was published. But here we go:

How to interpret background assumptions?

Several of the inferences I'm going to make depend on an assumed geographic or cultural background. The Lands Beyond is, well, beyond, but it's an extremely American sort of fantasy world. Everyone speaks English, all the puns are in English, all the spellings are American, and Dictionopolis only recognizes the 26 characters of the Latin alphabet. Two characters in chapter 16 refer to American currency ("ten dollars apiece", "dollars or cents").

Specifically, I argue that the Lands Beyond are a New York tri-state area fantasy world, mainly because of the titular tollbooth. I grew up in Los Angeles, land of freeways, and when I first read this book as a child, a "tollbooth" seemed as weird and magical as a talking dodecohedron.

For this analysis I will assume that Milo lives in or near New York City, both for Doyleist reasons (that's where Norton Juster lived when he wrote the book) and Watsonian reasons (Milo lives in an apartment building with at least eight stories and knows what a turnpike tollbooth is). The background assumptions of the Lands Beyond are the midcentury East Coast American assumptions Milo will recognize; there's no Watsonian reason given for this but it seems indisputable. In the 1969 film, Milo lives in San Francisco, but that's only one of the problems with that movie.

What year?

Next, let's establish the year The Phantom Tollbooth takes place. In the absence of any internal cues, we tend to assume a book is set in the year the book came out: 1961 in this case. This assumption worked until I hit chapter 16, where I ran into a big problem: the average boy, of "ten dollars apiece" fame, who is the .58 in his 2.58-children household.

In 1961, worldwide fertility was 4.58 children per woman, and fertility in the United States was 3.52 children. The baby boom was winding down, and the Pill had been approved by the FDA the previous year, but no matter how you map "average fertility" to "size of family," I don't see how you get 2.58.

Norton Juster was 32 years old in 1961, and I think this bit, which reifies averages, is based on things he heard long before, at the start of the baby boom. Especially since the average child also says "A few years ago I was just .42". This is the detail that makes me very confident Juster wasn't meticulously piecing all of this stuff together so someone could figure it out 60 years later. Nonetheless, I press on, because I'm having fun.

As I see it we have two options. We can say The Phantom Tollbooth takes place in the future—say, 1967, when the US fertility rate was 2.52; or we can say it takes place much earlier than 1961: right after World War II, on the upswing of the baby boom. I really don't see how that second option can work, since the average child says "each family also has an average of 1.3 automobiles." I didn't look up the statistics for, say, 1947, but that sounds like 1950s-level prosperity at least. (On top of all the other things that would no doubt become anachronistic if this story took place in the 1940s.)

So I'm saying The Phantom Tollbooth takes place in 1967, six years in the future relative to when the book came out.

Where does this leave the statement "A few years ago I was just .42", if "a few years ago" refers to the 1940s? Well, this kid is an average, not an individual. He doesn't age; he waxes and wanes. In the 1940s he was .42, and by 1973 he, or one of his siblings, will disappear altogether.

What date?

The Phantom Tollbooth takes place in spring, based on this quote from the final chapter, when Milo returns to the real world from the Lands Beyond:

The tips of the trees held pale, young buds and the leaves were a rich deep green... there were... caterpillars to watch as they strolled through the garden.

Milo goes to school on the day he finds the Tollbooth. After school he spends several subjective weeks in the Lands Beyond, but he returns to the real world the evening of the day he left. He then goes to school the next day. So Milo leaves for the Lands Beyond during the school year, and not on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.

For the rest of this, I'm relying on what happens to Milo Inside the Lands Beyond. This is tricky because of the fairy-logic time dilation, not to mention that an entire week passes without notice in chapter 11. But I argue that we can nail it down using only clues before the missing week.

In the Doldrums, Milo learns that "smiling is permitted only on alternate Thursdays." This is right after he enters the Lands Beyond, so I think it's fair to assume this is happening on the same day he left. If it's a Thursday on the day you go past the Tollbooth, it seems like a reasonable assumption that it's still Thursday on the other side. But if Milo had left on a Thursday, this rule would have required clarification—"this isn't one of the Thursdays you can smile." So he probably didn't leave on a Thursday. (If you don't find this convincing: we don't need this clue to narrow it down, but my final answer is consistent with this analysis.)

Now it gets a little more complicated. I'm going to argue that the events of chapters 1-10, basically the first half of the book, happen in a single subjective day. This encompasses a ton of activity (another reason why I think Juster didn't meticulously plan out the timeline), but here's a summary of what happens in between all the clever conversations:

Milo arrives in the Lands Beyond while the sun is shining. He drives to Dictionopolis, gets thrown in the dungeon, hears some stories from the Which, then immediately escapes the dungeon to be greeted by "a shaft of brilliant sunshine"—so it's still daytime. There's a royal banquet and then Milo drives out of Dictionopolis. At this point (chapter 9) it is "late afternoon." They stop for the night, Milo watches Chroma conduct the sunset, and then falls asleep.

So we have a lot of driving while the sun is out, a meal, more driving, and then watching the sunset. All, I would argue, over the course of a single day. You can argue that's too much to cram into a single day after school, and I agree, but the first half of the book has a pretty tight perspective on Milo's activities, and we only see him eat one meal and sleep once.

Now here's the important part: the sunrise the next day is scheduled for 5:23 AM. If it's the spring of 1967, this means the only day Milo can have entered the Lands Beyond is Tuesday, April 11. (Remember, the implicit assumptions of the Lands Beyond are calibrated for Milo's tri-state area self, which is why I'm using NYC as the location from which the time of sunrise is calculated.)

So, there's our answer: The Phantom Tollbooth begins on Tuesday, April 11, 1967. A spring day during the school year that's not a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.

Beyond that point things are less reliable, because of the week that's lost in chapter 11, but fortunately I only found one more clue that needs to be slotted in. In chapter 12 the Soundkeeper says her vault is open to the public "only on Mondays from two to four", with the strong implication that this is not Monday. But this looks like it happens on Milo's second day in the Lands Beyond (apart from the missing week), which would be Wednesday the... 19th, I guess. So that's consistent with an April 11 start date.

In Conclusions

I've said a couple times before but I'll repeat: I don't think The Phantom Tollbooth was meant to hold up to this kind of analysis. Here's another example: in chapter 18, Tock says they've been traveling for "days", and then we read this:

"Weeks," corrected the bug, flopping into a deep comfortable armchair, for it did seem that way to him.

The narrator clearly thinks "weeks" is an exaggeration, and I think that's correct, if you don't count the missing week from chapter 11 as an actual week. Looking at the map, and seeing how much happened on Milo's first day in the Lands Beyond, I think they could have made it to the Castle in the Air in 6-7 days, depending on how long they spent on time-sinks like swimming back from Conclusions and doing tasks for the Terrible Trivium. (They spent at least 21 hours in the grasp of the Trivium, by the way. I remember counting this up when I was a kid, so I've always been like this.)

After the return of Rhyme and Reason, there are three days of feasting, and then Milo heads back to the real world. At the beginning of chapter 20, "it suddenly occurred to Milo that he must have been gone for several weeks." But that's the same idea that was treated as a silly exaggeration just three days earlier, in chapter 18! In actual fact, Milo was gone for (lets say) 17 days by the calendar, and ten subjective days, since the missing week passed in a few seconds.

So... the timeline here is not exactly intended to snap together like a Lego set, is what I'm saying. But I am very happy that there seems to be a unique date where The Phantom Tollbooth began, even if Norton Juster didn't plan it that way and couldn't have anticipated that the question would ever have an answer.