The Incredible Shrinking Man is a movie that could only ever be about a white, straight, able-bodied man. The movie fits a very specific definition of science fiction I was taught and always found oddly limiting: a single fictional process, extrapolating from scientific principles, which is treated as plausibly as possible. In this particular context, it’s another way of saying ‘what if something really fucked up happened?’, putting it in the tradition later followed by films like The Substance and Old (aka The Beach That Makes You Old). Scott Carrey (Grant Williams), the protagonist, is intended as an Everyman, which only reveals the expectations and impulses of the character and the storytellers as he reacts to shrinking (this could be interpreted as an insult against them, but I consider it a neutral fact of life).
There is no queer subtext in TISM, but there is disability subtext that quickly evolves into text. Scott is miserable, lonely, and humiliated. He was supposed to be able to walk around without anybody staring at him; he was supposed to be normal. One part that gets me is that it goes into detail about Scott losing his job due to his new disability and having to sell his story (and privacy, though that was shot anyway) just to get by. His mood only changes when he meets a woman with dwarfism (April Kent) who takes his condition philosophically, inspiring him to write his story to make it meaningful – to connect him to other people.
There is an extent to which Scott’s situation and the pleasures of the movie are at odds – by which I mean, the situation that makes him so miserable is fun to watch in a movie. Most obviously, there’s the giant props and special effects designed to make him look tiny. If there’s one thing thirty years of computer-generated effects have taught us, it’s that nothing is quite as cool as a physical prop an actor is actually standing in or holding; my favourite part is the dollhouse Scott is forced to live in, which simulates the artificial feeling of a tiny dollhouse despite being clearly built by normal people for an average-sized man to live in.
Part of the reason props are cool is because we imagine a real person building them. Human beings are attracted to stories; part of the wide rejection of generative AI is rooted in the fact that a person didn’t go through making decisions behind everything. I accept a factory-built toothbrush because it’s a practical object I own to deal with a practical problem; why would I give a fuck about a factory-built painting? Audiences in general are with me on this; what people love most of all are artforms that look difficult to make.
The other cinematic thing about this film is its action. Scott begins the film trying to solve the philosophical problem of his shrinking, but as his situation progresses, he’s forced to solve more and more practical problems, until he’s fighting a spider for scraps of stale cake to survive. This combines with the practical effects – we find ourselves looking at familiar situations from a totally different angle – but it combines even better with the emotions of the movie. Scott has spent the movie desperately running from the shame of being disabled – as he puts it, getting increasingly tyrannical with his wife – and, at the end, his pride ends up taking over completely, and he takes on the spider less for food and more to prove he’s been alive this entire time.
Part of the reason this film works so well is because the storytellers don’t actually take him quite as seriously as he takes himself. His emotions are real – his fear, his shame – but that doesn’t necessarily justify his actions. He admits before killing the spider that his actions aren’t really rooted in hate, and afterwards, he feels curiously empty. One of the fascinating things about the film is its bleak, cosmic ending; Scott recognises that he’s going to continue shrinking to the atomic level, and must try to believe that God’s observation of him is the only proof he needed that he was alive.
This is what the struggle of the Other is. It’s hard for me to resent marginalized people for being petty, egotistical, or even mean; this world demands that you be a very particular kind of person, and if you don’t fit in this mold, you’re at least a little lonely and resentful. It’s work every single day just to convince yourself that you’re worth being alive for. It would be easy to be dismissive of Scott – oh, yeah, welcome to the club – but I don’t think it would be fun.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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"Obi-Wan never told you about your father."
"I love you." / "I know."
"I'm terribly sorry - no no, please don't get up--"
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Live Music
We went out to a music performance – the opening band was Raspberry Terrapin, a local band my partner really likes. More accurately, it was two of them; they’re a dreamy folk-rock duo who, as the lead singer observed, occasionally have anywhere from three to seven other players. Very straightforward stuff. After them was a jazz quintet playing mostly standards – “My Funny Valentine” was in there.
Red vs Blue, Season Two, Episode Eight
“It’s amazing what Caboose will do if you promise him a cookie and a glass of orange juice.”
“Church, if I die, I want you to have my orange juice.”
“My body is trying to die.”
“Sometimes I’m amazed our entire platoon hasn’t starved to death.”
Tubi isn’t consistent at all about censoring the word ‘fuck’.
“Sheila, if he corrects me again, please blow him up.”
“Seriously, what’s with all these feelings for Donut?”
“Seems like just yesterday he was born.”
“Well that’s because he was born… today. Like an hour ago.”
“We need to cherish these times. I wish I knew how to scrapbook.”
It’s amazing how much Joel Hyneman’s performance carries Caboose saying anything. To an extent this is true of all the actors.
“Quick, Grif, give me the latest list of celebrity breakups!”
“I WILL FUCKING STAB YOU, COMPUTER PHONE LADY.”
“I’ll bet the Blues don’t have to deal with anything this annoying.”
“To leave a playback message, press eleven.”
“THERE IS NO ELEVEN, YOU FUCKING WHORE!”
One reason Church works as a comic foil is because he is so clear on his goals that, when he doesn’t get them straight away, he gets angry. It’s relatable AND stupid.
Grif’s sister shows up in this episode. I forgot about her entirely. She’s actually kind of a rip of Caboose, but it’s okay because Grif and her have a different relationship than any Caboose has, and her actress plays her as more of a teenager than an infant. There’s also a great bullshit rationalisation for how she managed to show up 800 years in the future. I suppose, to an extent, comedy benefits from blatantly forcing the thing you want in a way you can’t get away with in drama. On top of this is the fact she was sent by Command to replace a dead commander – meaning she’s here to help the Blues.
“Once we learn all the colours, we’ll learn why you shouldn’t judge people by them.”
The Broadway Melody
Exciting first beginning on my Best Picture journey – I’m only on my second film and I’ve already gotten to one that just kind of sucks. In trying to create a new era of talkies, it’s caught between two traditions: the silent film and the Broadway musical. The core idea of two sisters – one clever and plain, the other talented and simple – trying to make it in Broadway is compelling, but the main male love interest is a wet sock and the movie drags – partially because of long, tedious sequences, and partly because the pacing is largely set to silent standards when that doesn’t entirely work. Towards the end of the film is where it starts to take on the energy of the talkies as we know it.
Though I will concede it’s funny to watch a silent film where the women talk in the broadest Noo Yawk accents.
I just want to throw in my support for “Raspberry Terrapin” as a band name.
Woo, live music! Good band name there. Sounds like one that’d appear on Nuggets.
Wooo live music! Shame about the largest members of Raspberry Terrapin eating the other musicians though.
Saturday Night Fever
For Movie Club. As if to counterbalance the liveliness of the disco and the colorfulness of the costumes, many people had told me in advance that this was dark, and it is–we have rape and attempted rape (Travolta’s protagonist stews in awkward, complicit silence in the front seat as the first happens behind him; in the second, he’s the guy doing the attempting), we have suicide, we have the misery of various dead-end lives. But this is also an extremely funny movie that gets its (sometimes also dark) humor from a keen eye for its characters (fantastic youthful posturing here, and it plays for comedy and then gets shot down for drama that’s also kind of comedy). I realized in the discussion for this one that I also tend to read certain types of escalation as inherently tied to comedy-style plotting, even if it’s dramatic in content and tone.
What a fucking movie star Travolta is here. Absolutely electric.
Desk Set
Valentine’s Day viewing! I’m sure this is not the first time we’ve used it as such, either. This is a charming, emotionally mature romantic comedy that underplays the misunderstandings to make a sweet, light, nuanced portrait of two middle-aged professionals–both slightly battered eccentrics–falling in love. Nice drunken Christmas party. Fun reference librarianship. Well-crafted, funny scenes: the bathrobe one is a favorite. Hepburn and Tracy have such a warm, lived-in chemistry, and part of the power of the studio system was knowing how to deploy them: this is how you cast your movie when you want the characters to immediately have that mysterious click.
For 1957, this makes it fairly obvious that Hepburn is having sex with the boyfriend she has at the start of the film, and I give it bonus points for that.
Theatre of Blood
Saving it for Streaming Shuffle. The true genre of this film is “camp,” which is not entirely the same as its true genre being “Vincent Price,” though both are laudable genres that can combine very well.
Inside No. 9, “Love’s Great Adventure”
A bit of a warm slice-of-life family drama, with shades of Mike Leigh (especially in the partly improvisational style) and kitchen sink realism. Possibly the most emotionally delicate and tender episode the show has had, where even the humor is fairly naturalistic and grounded (the “grandma’s knickers” running bit is a family joke that really feels like one). There is a bit of suspense plotting here, but it’s cleverly buried in implication: I was delighted to realize what had happened and equally delighted that what was up-front-and-center was just this Christmas story of a working-class family holding on to each other through the holidays. Gut-punch partway through with the number 9 Advent calendar door: the structural reveal there really worked for me, especially when I thought about the timeline again and realized how moving the next sequential bit was in light of that.
I always like the move of starting a character off as a purely comedic creation and then slowly revealing they have more dramatic/emotional power than they showed off at first: Reece Shearsmith was the guy in the superb “Nana’s Party,” and he’s that guy again here, beginning as a bit of a cheapskate knob and then both processing that (and acting on it) and revealing that he’s been struggling too. The short scene where he breaks down with his brother (Steve Pemberton) is really lovely, and it further contributes to the episode’s realistic emotional texture by giving a sense that we are, again, only seeing slices of life here.
Saturday Night Fever does feel like it could have been more of a comedy about a bunch of losers out for a good time. And, disturbingly, attempted rape/rape scenes (or how we’d now interpret them) appear frequently in films that are, or are adjacent to, teen sex comedies (Sixteen Candles, for example). It’s the suicide (and, perhaps to a lesser degree, the results of the dance contest), though, that makes Saturday Night Fever go from a film about “a night where stuff goes wrong” to one that uses some powerfully dramatic scenes of working-class life to set up an ending that captures 70s filmmaking on the way out.
Desk Set now has added relevance, because of the premise of a computer that can answer questions people have, thus threatening the reference librarians’ jobs. The premise is delivered with a lightness of tone, and the happy ending arrives right on time, as romantic comedies are expected to do. But I think the film retains a little subversive reminder that business management “innovations” often cause problems, that once solved, are forgotten about, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to let the dumbasses who made the mess off the hook.
Having the payroll computer in Desk Set–the one that led to all the layoffs that have our librarians on edge–wind up accidentally firing everyone, even people not formally on the payroll, has aged very well as both a believable error and a bitter acknowledgment of how this kind of thing usually goes.
A film such as Desk Set anticipates the famous adage, stated in the 1979 IBM training
manual: “A computer can never be held accountable; therefore, a computer must never make a management decision.”
Desk Set is a god damn delight. Last week I was musing on What If as an exemplary aughts/teens (or more explicitly Obama-era) rom-com, Desk Set feels similar in its heightened depiction of the mid-century workplace as background for a couple with great chemistry.
And the true genre of Theater Of Blood is “murder hobo,” Price’s refusal to understand this and properly compensate his team is his downfall. Do not be rude to your murder hobos, sir! They’re doing all the work here.
It is bananas how irate I felt at the end of Theatre of Blood when Price’s daughter is talking to the murder hobos and keeps calling her father their “master.” They were indisputably correct to unionize.
Stranger Things, “The Rightside Up” – Or, if you inexplicably paid for a ticket to see something you were already paying for with your Netflix subscription (indeed, something you had funded to produce), Stranger Things: The Finale. Honestly, I am not sure what to make of this. At one level, it was pretty emotionally satisfying. At another, it was a bit of a letdown. At a third level, it was the final in series of episodes over the past two seasons that were with few exceptions fifteen to thirty minutes too long. On the whole, cromulent TV with some good moments, maybe a couple of great moments, a few things that go too long (like the entire epilogue), and a giant gaping plot hole. Oh, and at the end Strahd dies, and we can all get behind that, right? But please don’t make me watch the play when it comes to Netflix. (Quality recordings of Hadestown or Pulizter winning plays? Nope. A Stranger Things prequel? Sure.)
Outland – I shouldn’t be so grumpy, but…they don’t make things like this anymore. Whatever its flaws in melding the look of the first alien movie and the arc of High Noon, this was made with practical effects. The sets, the costumes, the action have weight, a weight sorely in short supply in the Stranger Things boss battle and almost every other FX-heavy work. But beyond that, it doesn’t hurt that Connery is quite good as a space marshal who refuses to let the boss of a mining colony on Io ship in illegal and dangerous greenies, and Frances Sternhagen is excellent as a worn out doctor who makes Dr. McCoy look cheerful. Peter Hyams is pretty good directing this sort of stuff. And we have to admit this: the ISS looks a lot closer to the industrial settings of Laser movies than to the Enterprise.
The Practice, “Evil/Doers” – The new plot has Jimmy and Eugene defending a rape suspect whose twin brother shows up to provide an alibi. Only to confess to the rape himself. It’s unlikely but messy and interesting, and Dorian Harewood does a good job as both twins. A pre-fame Chelsea Handler plays the rape victim, and is quite good. Meanwhile, Guy Who Thinks He’s Hannibal Lecter might or might not stalking Lindsey, so she maneuvers to have him committed but the judge sees this as violating double jeopardy. But don’t worry. When he shows up at Lindsey and Bobby’s apartment, she shoots him. I wonder if this wakes the nearly-forgotten baby. We’ve been here before, and it wasn’t fun the first time, plus Lindsey’s refusal to consider seeking therapy is just bizarre. Alas, more to come of this.
Miss Marple, “Sleeping Murder,” part two – “You believed what he told you. It’s very dangerous to believe people – I haven’t for years.” The second half of this is not as interesting as the first, but it’s kind of a joy to encounter this sweet old lady who has the cynicism of the most worn out of noir detectives. I read the book, and didn’t remember who the killer was, and it’s sort of a stretch, but the pieces do add up.
Frasier, “Proxy Prexy”- Frasier still dreams of being condo board president, but knows he still can’t win, so he has his dad run with a plan to be a figurehead. This doesn’t work of course, but in the end, when Martin is just as maltreated by the board as Frasier’s been, the son defends the father’s integrity. Not entirely sure what the point of this one was. There is also a somewhat raunchy second plot: after Roz misunderstanding what a “melange” is – it’s a fruit salad – and thinks Daphne and Niles have invited here for a threesome, the happy couple spend the next two weeks teasing her. Only for an actual swinger to overheard them and invite them to a meetup. Not sure what to make of that.
My only context for Outland is Harlan Ellison really giving it the business back in the day, which, surprise surprise I suppose. He was down on it as sci-fi and I suppose that is fair enough but everything I’ve read since makes it sound like a damn fine time (especially Hyams, an underrated action dude), I really need to check it out.
The science fiction is utterly dodgy (Io, for instance, is too close to Jupiter’s radiation to be inhabitable). But you would think the man who thought there would be drug use on the Enterprise would have appreciated that aspect. But, well, Harlan.
Send Help – Yeah, this slaps, we got Evil Dead-style fast steadicam POV shots, blood and vomit, cartoony violence, the whole shebang. It’s also termite art, less interested in facile “eat the rich” revenge movie shit and more power, and what you will do to maintain it. McAdams is of course great, sinking her teeth – sometimes literally – into this material, and Dylan O’Brien is doing very good scumbag work in the traditional Campbell role of “dumb guy subjected to physical horrors”. Give Raimi 40 million every few years to make more lean, mean horror movies like this.
Started The Pitt S2, largely very good though I am wincing at Al-Hashadi having a potential Trauma Plot with the baby. Nevertheless, her presence and insistence on “improving” The Pitt (starting with a hopeful nickname change and what appears to be more useless shit for patients to look at) creates more dramatic tension, as do the new interns, who both seem like jerks in a recognizable way. Oglivie visibly needs to be perceived at all times and Joy is almost indifferent to the bodies and suffering. Whitaker is back with a longer haircut and more confidence (his leading them in a moment of silence like Robby would is a great touch), as is Langdon, exiled to Triage and sincerely making amends even when it’s probably not the best time to do so. People worried about AI being presented positively this season and even before real news came out about the tech assigning the wrong surgeries to patients, it’s obvious the errors will pile up in the new tech. Conflict this season appears to be the gut instinct of Robby, and the simple lack of TIME to improve things when there is literally one emergency after another, clashing with Al-Hashadi’s insistence on bureaucracy and lack of risk-taking.
I have got to see Send Help. Hopefully it’ll still be out in theaters this weekend.
My Pitt S2 hot take is that I just … do not care about Baby Jane Doe. I wish babies the best, but I am indifferent to them 90% of the time except as cuddly plot devices.
I like the ones that are related to me and even then it depends on how much noise they’re making.
Hard Eight – erm, Valentines viewing? Girlfriend suggested doing a PTA season, this is one of the two she hadn’t seen and I’d only seen it once. I think it’s tough to make an argument for it being anything other than a solid debut that he would surpass with every other film but that’s still quite fun – I love the first half with the inscrutable Philip Baker Hall teaching John C. Reilly how to get the most out of the casino system, the second half just feels a bit more generic to me even though it’s still thoroughly enjoyable and watchable. Annoying: I bought a Spanish blu-ray (because there isn’t a UK one apparently) and the text on the spine is in the opposite direction to all the other PTA movies on the shelf. Horror!
Breathless – screening at the not-so-local cinema, annoyingly the local one also announced a Breathless screening on the SAME DAY after I’d bought tickets for this one. Was curious to revisit this after seeing Nouvelle Vague, but I largely felt the same about it – it’s striking and easy to see how it would have been a shock to the system in 1960 but for the most part it’s a hang-out movie with a guy I don’t want to hang out with, which gets a little exhausting.
Seinfeld, S6 – “The Jimmy”, “The Doodle”, “The Fusilli Jerry”, “The Diplomat’s Club”. A solid run of episodes with some pretty dark themes that might have aged poorly if the joke wasn’t always on the characters themselves. George’s attempts to prove he’s not racist still made me cringe myself half to death though (excellent punchline was worth it) and I’m not sure how bad I should feel about laughing at Kramer’s post-dentist run-in with Mel Tormé. Enjoying Bryan Cranston’s recurring role and looks like Patrick Warburton is going to stick around too?
Live Music – an attempt, at least. Langkamer, who made my AOTY so far, were in town and I was advised (by the friend who was putting on the gig) that I would definitely still make it in good time after some previous commitments. Turned up to find out that everything had been shifted earlier by venue shenanigans and only saw the last five or so songs. Oh well.
Wooo live music! Booo venue shenanigans! Tell them they owe you tunes!
“The Jimmy” and in particular the reveal of Kramer at the end is both very funny and something that absolutely would not be done now, and that is for the best.
Anderson’s style has changed so drastically and that center on adoptive fathers is still at the core of his movies.
Blind Detective — expiring Johnnie To on Criterion! As a lot of people noted, this is a twist on he and Wai Ka-Fai’s previous Mad Detective; that flick has a ghost-seeing See Title solving crimes through increasingly fucked up immersion and this one has a blind See Title doing the same thing, but with the assistance of a fellow officer who thinks he’s hot. And he is, he’s Andy Lau, but Sammi Chen is also gorgeous and even better funny as shit, Kaitlin Olson level physicality in her fearless comedy. Mad is the better movie in my book, its wacky premise is followed through to a despairing end that could be a fuck you to how a movie with this premise would normally play but instead feels natural and sad; Blind stays more in rom-com territory but also adds in heaping helpings of crime and there are a lot of tonal shifts to navigate, along with extremely outsized performances (particularly from Lau). It’s a movie you have to accept on its own terms, but doing so gets you Chen and some interesting riffs on love, blindness and obsession, along with a ton of food porn and a seeming hatred of taxi drivers, who are all evil here.
Weapons — the main image from this movie, a kid running down the street in the middle of the night, arms held out, is brilliant. The arms especially, they’re uncanny and don’t need to make sense because they just are. Zach Cregger unfortunately makes a two-hour movie out of that level of engagement, if Blind Detective is stuffed full of material it does all come together; part of why Cregger uses the jumpback achronological structure is to hide that the story doesn’t make a lick of sense (if you posit a neighborhood with Ring cameras for some people, the Ring cameras for others solve this mystery immediately). Fortunately it builds to a hilarious ending, I was hooting and hollering and wished I caught it in the theater. Better than Barbarian but still weak in places where it could be better, Cregger has skill but needs a mean producer (and maybe a new villain besides a gross old lady).
The Dead Don’t Die — first off, the Sturgil Simpson theme song rules, not just as a great song but as one that can bear the weight of being heard over and over in a movie. It is sad but Simpson’s voice is almost comforting, which is good in a movie that gets increasingly grim. The riff on zombies obsessed with whatever material goods they were in life — chardonnay, coffee, wi-fi — is funny and clearly indebted to Dawn of the Dead, but it is also a nasty turn on Jarmusch himself, who loves a good cool object, and the young hipsters who like all the cool things meet a very bad end here. And the bad end is known (by Adam Driver, who won’t shut up about it) and inevitable, the “polar fracking” business makes the environmental angle pretty damn clear. So tonally, as the deadpan reactions to increasingly horrifying carnage are snuffed out, Jarmusch is drawing less from Dawn as from Day, the bleakest zombie movie out there. And with Bill Murray as a sheriff who is mostly there to observe, he seems to be closing the circle on a Murray line from 40 years ago, existential cheer chewed up by ghouls: It just doesn’t matter. This is not a well liked film and I can see why, but it is its own thing and a bitter pill if you’re so inclined.
Face/Off — SHIT BLOWED UP REAL GOOD
The directors of the 2010s/2020s are convinced nothing is scarier than nude/evil old women! Have they met any old women? They tend to be pretty nice! Correct on the ending though, I was cackling in the theater and had been mildly irritated by much of it. (Good segments, the crackhead logic on display here is real, not a truly good movie.)
Knives out: Wake Up Dead Man. This is the true spiritual sequel to The Last Jedi, with Rey as Fr Jud, Kylo as Wicks, and Luke as Benoit. Not rwally, but there are thematic parallels about the loss of faith and its persistence or its echo. It’s also an overall very sympathetic view of religion, from, to my knowledge, a not at all religious director, even while all
the villains are also religious. Johnson is, per the themes of the movie, being gracious to people he disagrees with. (He may be too gracious. It would be impossible to exaggerate the flaws of MAGA catholics too much, and he’s a little too quick to let the Church off the hook and treat the MAGA catholics as aberrational rather than representing a significant minority faction in institutional leadership).
Anyone, eccentric super detective solves an impossible murder is difficult to mess up, and Craig loves doing his foghorn leghorn voice and chewing up the scenery. I loved it and hope they make 5 more of these.
Next up, I want to see Benoit Blanc plopped directly into the setting of the Wicker Man or Midsommar.
Fallout, season 2, eps 1-2. . [adjusts glasses, tightens ponytail] Um, the Novac dinosaur faces away from the motel courtyard, not towards it. I hope someone was fired for that blunder.
The new vegas setting is a lot of fun. So I don’t know why they’ve spent two hours only hinting at it? They’re really surf dracula-ing this.
I also don’t like the characterization of the Khans as mere raiders, which they aren’t. That was a big plot
point in New Vegas. And the Brotherhood are all chad chuds, basically raiders with tech. The upshot is that the world is much flatter than the actual games (and having less depth than a game where you shoot well over a thousand nameless goons is pretty dire!). I’m sure they’ll handle the super mutant ski resort and the ncr base with more tact.
What did we play?
Zelda: Twilight Princess. The dungeon puzzles are fun, not particularly hard but not mindless. I’m really enjoying the story; Link is accompanied by Midna, a little imp from the land of twilight. She’s a fun npc. You get cursed with being turned into a wolf and later you can switch at will, which is fun. The biggest problem is that the boss fights are way too easy.
Midna is pretty great. Easily my favorite videogame companion, and probably my favorite character in this series. Still a little moved by her final scene here.
Colaborador estrella
Street Fighter Alpha 2 – Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection on Nintendo Switch
Played a few rounds. As usual, was pretty happy to pull off a few super moves and call it a night shortly after.
Pilotwings – Super NES – Nintendo Classics on Nintendo Switch
Never played a Pilotwings game before and got intrigued. Played the first level twice, a simple, straight-ahead landing with a light plane. Crashed both times. Will try again.
Bionic Commando – Game Boy – Nintendo Classics on Nintendo Switch
Beat a few levels. Still having to pull a guide and/or a YouTube longplay whenever I hit a tricky section or a weird boss that stumps me, just like old times. Also, I just realized that the controls for diagonal grappling are different when you’re on the floor and when you’re in the air, which I wish I’d known sooner. Wonder if it’s the same in the NES games.
Great piece. This has always sort of hypothetically been on my to-watch list, but I’d had doubts about how well it could really pull off the premise. All the bits about the props here are very encouraging in that light, but even more encouraging is everything you’ve picked out about Scott’s emotional journey and adjustment. The last beat sounds like an intriguing–if sort of hilariously 1950s mainstream–shift from the novel’s conclusion, in that it’s the same occurrence with a different slant. Matheson’s is more SFnal but also less beautifully bleak (it has a very Twilight Zone hopefulness to it, unsurprisingly) and existential.