I know when I think about public information films, I think about George A. Romero.
You know who else thought about him? The 1973 Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania. They commissioned him to make a film on the plight of America’s elderly, but when they saw what any Romero fan could have told them they would get–an evocative, sharply conceived nightmare that would embed itself in viewers’ brains–they can’t have been too pleased: they shelved it, and it only came back to life 48 years later.
I’m angry thinking about that, and it’s the kind of anger Romero’s work was always familiar with: Why the hell does the world have to be like this? Why, if you had the incredible luck of producing an incredibly effective propaganda film, would you not let it out into the world to do its work? This could have mattered. Instead, it’s on Shudder. And I like Shudder and all, but we still had audience-grabbing network TV in ’73. This could have been coast-to-coast, and people would still be talking about it the way they talk about classic Twilight Zone episodes.
Lincoln Maazel plays an unnamed elderly man who meets himself in a white room with a few folding chairs. (This comes after Maazel’s own introduction to the movie, which has one heartwrenching detail of the filming process and a lot of exposition that I feel like may have been mandated by someone other than Romero. Anyway, the amusement park is a metaphor for one’s golden years. Go forth.) The man slumped over in a chair is bloodied, rumpled, and sweat-soaked; his suit is badly stained. The white bandage on his head is so huge and central to his appearance that, in an America distrustful of and squeamish about physical infirmity, it’s like a signal to look past him.
But there’s a fresher Maazel as well, with his summer suit still spiffy and his hair still combed. His poise goes beyond the physical: he’s confident and comfortable with himself, initiating a conversation with his damaged double, whose dazed fearfulness he clearly pities. This bright-eyed Maazel–the same age but still so much younger–is going to the park. He’s excited about it, and he can’t process his other self’s warning that “there’s nothing.”
The park is gleefully realized with Romero’s best satirical eye as a mix of genuine attractions invested with real significance–bumper cars turn into a meditation on older drivers and the shame of being or simply being painted as incapable; a food stand is also a restaurant that is Michelin-starred only for the wealthy, while the poor and the old can only hope to split a plate of hamburger macaroni–and bleak, blistering parodies–hucksters pitch retirement homes while pickpocketing their listeners.
Maazel’s character enters the park in a better position than many his age–he’s white, male, middle-class, able-bodied, and in full possession of his faculties–but the place soon goes to work on him, acquainting him with his new position as a second-class citizen who will be overlooked, dismissed, and disparaged. Maazel’s expressive face, so genial for so long, so eager to connect with others, takes a figurative and even literal beating as he encounters little but impatience and disdain. Even the people who don’t hurt him or steal from him are tired of him.
He becomes fully objectified: a body slowing up a line, a problem to be briskly solved, an unexpected complication, a reminder of everyone’s grim future. The cruelest move of all may come when someone sees him as a person again, offering him kindness and recognizing that he has something to offer too, only for the moment to get ripped away.
We don’t tend to learn from this, The Amusement Park says, when we don’t experience it. When the man sees his future self already broken and lost, he can’t relate or even recognize who he’s looking at, and he can’t imagine himself in the same position. But when we’ve followed him all this way, not only do we understand that it can happen to us, we feel like it did. It rouses not just pity but an almost frantic, desperate sense of compassion and the drive to actually do something with it. Anything to help him. Anything to help ourselves.
I’m still upset by The Amusement Park, but I’m even more upset by the fact that more people didn’t have the chance to be upset by it. Its impact deserves to be public, not private.
The Amusement Park is streaming on Shudder.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Year of the Month
Good, bad, and so bad it's good, plus a long-awaited mea culpa.
Anthologized
A cosmic horror variation on The Lady Vanishes.
Anthologized
"I mean, sir, in the eyes of God."
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Justified, Season Six, Episode Seven, “The Hunt”
“You scared of me?”
“Sometimes.”
“Sounds really strange when you say that. / “I’m running shit, I get to use the expression.”
It’s very rare that a show take time off an arc by having a character literally take time off. If this is Raylan considering his future and how he wants to live, it certainly makes a statement with the ending, and it’s a rare case of him being completely rational in his personal life for a change.
Ava has finally told Boyd she’s a snitch for Raylan, and he’s decided he loves her, no matter what happens. The fascinating thing about Boyd is that he really is a True Believer who will ride or die. What gives him his power in this show is his willingness to suffer, not just to get what he wants but as a consequence of being who he is. If anything, suffering seems to empower him; he’s always been someone who wants to be a martyr for a bigger cause.
Biggest Laugh: “Well you picked a hell of a time for ‘bring your daughter to work day’!”
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: The absolute absurdity of a normal beautiful Justified dialogue scene with a demon child screaming through the whole thing.
Top Ownage: “Must not have made an impression. I don’t remember you.” / “Memory loss, that’s a sure sign of old age.” / “So’s losing your hair.” Physically, Ty Walker taking down the fake ambulance drivers.
“But it’s been such a DAY!” Dillahunt having this guy, his Deadwood characters, and Burt from Raising Hope in him is always amazing to me.
Why Don’t You Lose 5 Pounds?
55-minute documentary directed by Chris Blunk, whom Magpies may be familiar with. This tackles eating disorders in athletes, who are personally and professionally entangled with a field that often demands (and rewards) this kind of obsessive clocking of your own body and disregard of its limits; how do you recover while still practicing a sport where your input does matter a lot? Whether people can even manage that varies by person, and it’s unsurprising that even with a lot of good help, many of them can’t and ultimately choose to give up any serious pursuit of the sport.
Stylistically and structurally, this is cool: the early section does a word cloud effect to show you the concepts the athletes are mired in, a list of traits that athletes have only needs its title swapped to become a list of traits people with eating disorders have (with a good call-back to this later on), and subjects rewatch footage of their earlier interviews and pause the video to critique their responses or explain what’s changed since then. There’s a lot to keep things visually interesting, even in small bits of flair like making a caption look like sunlight interrupting a larger shadow in one outdoor scene. Moving, stylish, and likable.
Hombre – Paul Newman is a white man taken and raised by Apaches, and who wants nothing to do with the white world after what it’s done to his people. But circumstances force him to ride the last stagecoach left before the railroad comes, and drop him into a showdown with Richard Boone and his gang. Who are stealing the already-stolen money belonging to a corrupt Indian agent (Frederic March). Based on a well regarded Elmore Leonard novel, this is a reunion of many of the folks who worked on Hud – Martin Ritt, screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., James Wong Howe – and it has a similar bright but bleak look and feel. And this one is definitely bleak, with Newman showing very little human warmth and generally unsympathetic and hard characters. But within the western revisionism is a morality tale as Newman has choose just low little to care about the others. Overall good if perhaps a bit slow and murky.
Elementary, “The Best Way Out Is Always Through” – A judge from New Jersey is found murdered in a subway station, and soon enough we learn his death was part of a plot by one private prison to discredit another and steal its business in the Garden State. As a mystery, it’s the latest in a string of this sort of complex plot, all fine taken on their own but kind of rote at the moment. Plus once Michael Kostroff is just big enough that once we see him, he’s obviously the mastermind. Meanwhile, Holmes deduces that Detective Bell’s girlfriend is secretly part of Internal Affairs, and then tries to help Bell not ruin things with her since at least one of Holmes’s friends should not be a recluse. Interesting that while Bell of course loathes people in Internal Affairs like almost every fictional cop ever, Holmes is glad such watchdogs exist. Oh, and for some reason Sherlock discovers the Stanley Cup is being sold on the dark web, and returns it to the NHL. No idea if they actually got to borrow the real thing or not.
The Twilight Zone, “What You Need” – I don’t know if we needed a simple but entertaining little morality tale, but I liked it. More to come.
“What You Need” is just quite warm-hearted for a story that technically has a kind of murder in it. It may not be a masterpiece, but it’s one I’m always especially happy to watch.
Hombre had a poster tagline I probably think of, oh, once every other week or so: “‘Hombre means man. Paul Newman is Hombre!”
“Paul Newman is Man” sounds like an English subtitle from a Japanese VHS somewhere.
Family Nightmare – Short 2011 film by Dustin Guy Defa where he dubs over his family’s home video. At first, it’s merely unsettling and clever as aunts and grandparents get married, drink (beer cans decorate every single scene), and play-wrestle. The real gut punch is in the ending title crawls revealing what happened to many of these people. No one gets out of here alive.
Tales From The Crypt, “Mournin’ Mess” – Like many of the episodes this season, there’s a certain satirical, heh, bite to the story of an increasingly deadbeat reporter played by Steven Weber investigating a homelessness nonprofit. Weber as almost always is great playing sleazy and desperate; not the best script and yet the implicit point about his character becoming the kind of bum he looks down on is made without pointing directly at the camera.
I think my face could have been an illustration of, “Well, that makes sense” when I hit “played by Steven Weber” right after “an increasingly deadbeat reporter.” Guy nails a very particular vibe.
Absolutely! There’s a moment of discovery/exasperation he plays right at the end that is quite funny.
Year of the Month update!
And for August, send us your pieces on any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 2001!
TBD: James Williams: Millennium Actress
Aug. 2nd: Tristan J. Nankervis: Ocean’s Eleven
Aug. 7th: Gillian Nelson: Recess: School’s Out!
Aug. 14th: Gillian Nelson: The Princess Diaries
Aug. 16th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Mulholland Drive
Aug. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Disney’s California Adventure
Aug. 27th: Cori Domschot: The Mummy Returns
Aug. 28th: Gillian Nelson: Walt Disney Treasures
And there’s still time to write about any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1979.
Jul. 24th: Gillian Nelson: Don Bluth
Jul. 28th: John Bruni: All That Jazz
Jul. 29th: Lauren James: Ghost Story
Jul. 31st: Gillian Nelson: Big Thunder Mountain