Shit, Actually

by Lindy West

  I’m getting a dog.

  RATING: 7/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.

  Footnotes

  1 It’s possible this line of questioning reveals a lack of faith, on my part, in the creative imagination. Just as Pollux Troy gave his mega-bomb “Sinclaire” the persona of a cartoon woman with outrageous sky-high naturals, perhaps the creator of the T-800 too wanted to imbue his metal son with something personal, a signature of sorts, the accent of a beloved grandfather, maybe, or the dick of another beloved grandfather. Not everything has to have utility, Lindy!!!!! Some things are just art!

  2 Also, I know that T-1000 is technically very skilled at mimicking the exact body and voice of a person, but here’s a harsh toke: Terminators have bad personalities and are obvious robots no matter how much their perm looks like your mom’s! Sorry!!!

  3 Why do you keep shooting him? That just gives him more metal for finger knife!

  4 It was way more successful than his previous catchphrase, “Auf wiedersehen, kinderbjorn!” Unrelated: I do not speak German.

  Manual for Shitheads

  Few things have shaped my existence more profoundly than the realization, courtesy of the 1994 film Reality Bites, that there are two kinds of women—Janeane Garofalos and Winona Ryders—and that I would never, ever be a Winona, the only kind that really matters. I wrote about this in my last book, The Witches Are Coming. That line of thinking fucked me up until I was about twenty-seven.

  Rewatching Reality Bites, I nearly cried when it dawned on me: I can’t believe I ever thought I’d rather be Lelaina than Vickie. Not that I don’t still love (/hate) Lelaina the impossible saucer-eyed night-elf, but Vickie’s the only non-dickwad in this entire dang movie! I know you’re not really supposed to identify with these characters (I hope you’re not really supposed to identify with these characters) because Reality Bites is a commentary on ’90s slackerism or whatever, but I identify with funny, second-fiddle, lost-at-sea Vickie, and I’m pretty sure those teen feelings have had a tangible effect on how I turned out as an adult. I be’d the Vickie I wanted to see in the world. And you’re not going to trick me into wanting to be Lelaina by dangling that Ethan Hawke–shaped carrot in my face because Troy is a petroleum-jelly-dipped turd and I make plenty of those already with my butt.

  Anyway, Vickie aside, everyone else in this movie is the fucking worst, and the worst thing about them is the stuff they say. (Oh, my bad, Sammy. You’re fine too.) But oh my GOD, as a ’90s teen, did I ever want to sit on a fourth-hand couch in a smoke-choked apartment and have these conversations and then eventually get “picked” by an emotionally abusive band guy!!! I had never come across any better thing to want. So, in honor of my long-deceased naivete, let’s take a look back at all the garbage words we thought were profound when we were twelve. (Spoiler: most of them come out of Troy.)

  1. Lelaina: I know this sounds cornball, but I’d like to somehow make a difference in people’s lives.

  Troy: And I’d like to buy them all a Coke.

  Hey, Troy, I get that it’s part of your anti-consumerist schtick, and was likely the apex of wit in 1994, but do you ever say anything that isn’t just a corporate slogan parroted back in a sarcastic voice?

  Troy: [begins nihilistic seashell poem]

  NOPE, DON’T EVEN WORRY ABOUT IT.

  2. Troy (when Lainey’s dad tries to give her a BMW): Yeah, just think about all those starving children in Africa who don’t even have cars.

  Lainey’s mom: Troy, does your father give you gifts like that?

  Troy: Well, actually, my father’s dying of prostate cancer, so I don’t really trouble him much for gifts.

  Jesus fucking Christ, Troy, could you be normal for one second? These grown-ups are just trying to have a conversation with you because their asshole daughter brought you along to family dinner (without asking, probably). They don’t actually give a shit about what you think—YOU’RE A TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD UNEMPLOYED POET—they’re just being nice. They have mortgages.

  3. Lelaina: He’s so cheesy I can’t watch him without crackers.

  This is kind of a good line if you’re Bugs Bunny in 1952.

  4. Vickie: Welcome to the maxi pad.

  Sammy: Yeah, with new dry-weave, it actually pulls moisture away from you!

  Look, Sammy, I know you hang out with Troy a lot, but it doesn’t have to be like this. You can just do you.

  5. Lelaina: I finally figured out what your problem is.

  Troy: What’s that—I’m not a pepper?

  Seriously, it’s like a verbal tic at this point. It doesn’t even make sense.

  6. Lelaina: Troy, aren’t you excited?

  Troy: I’m bursting with fruit flavor.

  :-|

  7. Sammy: I don’t understand why this moment has to be Memorexed.

  LOL, “Memorexed.”

  8. Troy: Lelaina. You know the punishment for premature evacuation.

  What does that even MEAN!!? I see that you’re doing a pun on “premature ejaculation” because it rhymes and stuff, but how does “evacuation” apply in this context? You mean evacuating the apartment? But what’s the “punishment”? You just sitting there some more? Her not “getting” to hang out with you for the rest of the night? Because that was kind of the idea. Seriously, Troy, I think you have some significant style-over-substance issues you’ll need to deal with if you really want to be a professional, um, whatever it is you’re into. (Just a reminder: Condescending Guy Covered in Oil is not a job!)

  9. Lelaina: The most profound, important invention of my lifetime. The Big Gulp…I guess it really doesn’t take much to make me happy.

  Lelaina and Michael: Blah blah blah blah blah blah…

  Michael: I should have stayed in college and got a degree in astronomy or something.

  Lelaina: Oh, god, I love astronomy.

  Michael: Really?

  Lelaina: Yeah. I just—the math, though. It was the math that just, like, got me every time.

  Michael: I loved astronomy too, and I got into class, and it was like, everything was three-squared times pi equals the root of pi. And I just wanted to look at the stars.

  This movie’s like a Shithead Manual.

  10. Troy: I am really in love with you…….…PSSSSHHHHHHH!!!! Is that what you want to hear? Well, don’t flatter yourself.

  Okay, so clearly Lelaina should have never spoken to Troy again starting from this moment AT THE ABSOLUTE LATEST. And I’m supposed to be happy that they end up together at the end?1 Nobody’s happy in the long term with someone who’s this much of an emotionally abusive, weird, manipulative, controlling, wet snake. Boooooooo. Or, as Troy would put it, “Easy, breezy, beautiful. Cover girl.”

  11. Troy: It’s all just a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes. So I take pleasure in the details. You know, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. Those are good. The sky about ten minutes before it starts to rain. The moment where your laughter becomes a cackle. And I sit back and I smoke my Camel Straights and I ride my own melt.

  It’s possible that I hate Troy more than any other fictional or living human. I know he’s brooooooken, or whatever, and he’s scaaaaaaared, and twelve-year-old me is horrified/bewildered by this entire sentence, but “broken and scared” and “not being the most unbearable blowhard on earth” are not mutually exclusive. And twelve-year-old me is still mad that Jo didn’t end up with Laurie, so what does she know?

  12: Lelaina: I’m not going to work at the Gap, for Christ’s sake!

  Vickie: Shut up.

  That line’s not embarrassing. That line is fucking boss. VICKIE 4 LIFE.

  13. Troy: [runs hand through hair]

  TAKE A SHOWER. YOU LOOK LIKE A BARBECUE MOP.

  14. Troy: What happened to your normal clothes?

  Michael: Wow!…You look like…

  Troy: A doily.

  Lainey: I’m gonna change.

  Michael: No, don’t change.

  Troy: Don’t go thinking for yourself eith
er.

  Michael: Come on. Let’s go. You don’t need this.

  Troy: You don’t know what she needs.

  Michael: I think I know what she needs in a way that you never will.

  Hey! Or maybe you could actually treat her like a human being? Nightingales R people 2!!! This is approximately the thirtieth time in the movie when you’re like, “Oh, you should not be talking to these dicks anymore.”

  15. Lelaina: They’re just videotapes, right?

  Yeah, kinda, actually.

  16. Lelaina: I worked so hard on them, you know?

  Did you? I mean, did you really? Are you sure you have a solid perspective on what “worked hard” means? Because it seems like mostly you just hung out and got drunk with your friends and carried around your Memorex.

  Man, there’s nothing America loves more than a really pretty woman who kind of tries. That’s the most sympathetic thing in the world. A really pretty girl who tried a little bit.

  17. Lelaina: I just don’t understand why things just can’t go back to normal at the end of the half hour like on The Brady Bunch or something.

  Troy: Well, ’cause Mr. Brady died of AIDS.

  I hope Troy dies of GLIB.

  18. Michael: I just feel like maybe I deserve another shot here.

  Troy: Yeah, this girl is kookoo for Cocoa Puffs.

  YOU’RE JUST FUCKING WITH ME NOW, RIGHT?

  FROZEN EMBRYOS > HEY, THAT’S MY BIKE.

  19. Lelaina: I win the big commitment cook-off and you just run away!!!?!

  You see, what’s going on in this scene is that Lainey won the big commitment cook-off, and in response Troy has run away.

  20. Troy: I’m sorry, Lelaina, but you can’t navigate me. I might do mean things, and I might hurt you, and I might run away without your permission, and you might hate me forever. And I know that that scares the shit out of you, because I’m the only real thing that you have.

  Lelaina: Yeah? Well, that ain’t real much.

  At this point in the rewatch, you realize that you are nearly a decade older than these characters, and what you’re watching is a movie about children yelling nonsense at each other.

  21. Troy: What happened was that I kind of got this arcane glimpse of the universe, and the best thing I can say about that is…I don’t know. I have this planet of regret sitting on my shoulders, and you have no idea how much I wish that I could go back to that morning after we made love and do everything different. But I know I can’t do that, so I thought that I would come here and tell you something. And what I wanted to tell you was that I love you. And, uh, I just wanted to make sure that was clear so that there wasn’t any confusion.

  If these weren’t attractive white people, they’d definitely have to explain how a couple of jerks who hate jobs got a free house at the end.

  I absolutely love this movie.

  RATING: 7/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.

  Footnotes

  1 My horrible secret: I AM AND I CAN’T ESCAPE IT.

  Never Boring,

  Always Horny

  One thing you can say about Twilight is that it is not boring. There are a billion characters, they’re always saying some crazy shit, and they’re SO HORNY! Twilight feels like it was written by an AI that almost gets it. Something is just 2 percent off about every line and every interaction, which, taken cumulatively, is like a window into one of those dimensions where everything is identical to ours except cats and turtles are switched and Prince never died. Twilight took me out of my body in a way that did not give me pleasure but did give me fascination, and when it was over, I couldn’t believe it, but I felt compelled to watch the next one just to continue the satisfying, itchy glitch of it all. Twilight kept me awake, which honestly is more than I can say for Top Gun, peace be upon Tony Scott (I stan Déjà Vu).

  For instance, this is the opening line of the movie, delivered in sullen voice-over by Bella (Kristen Stewart): “I’ve never given much thought to how I would die, but dying in the place of someone I love seems like a good way to go.”

  WHAT????????????????????????????????????????????

  How is that a “good way to go”!? There are zero versions of that “way to go” that don’t involve some sort of violent hostage situation and/or dystopian fascist cull. How about a “good way to go” is dying of old age gently and simultaneously with everyone you love while lying on a quilt and holding hands in a big circle and reminiscing about the time you reversed climate catastrophe and squashed the global Far Right together? If you’re picking a hypothetical “way to go,” pick something that doesn’t include your life and the life of a dear one being leveraged against each other in some zero-sum villainous endgame! What!?!? You weirdo!

  The thing about that line is that it is both semantically ambiguous in a way that obscures its meaning, AND it turns out to be borderline cyborg argle-bargle anyway!!! That’s Twilight.

  When we meet Bella she has just moved from Phoenix, Arizona, where she lives with her mother, to Forks, Washington, where her father is the chief of police, because her mom wants to “go on the road.” You can tell this is Bella’s childhood room because it’s still decorated with her old childhood construction paper hand turkeys, you know, like kids love to make for themselves and show off to other kids on their walls year-round (SEE? ALIENS).

  Her dad gives her an old truck that he bought from their neighbors, and the neighbor kid is like, “Hi, I’m Jacob. We used to make mud pies when we were little.” Bold intro, also, “mud pies” is one of those phrases people casually throw around that I feel like is not tethered to any foundational meaning. I’m not talking about “mud pie” as a euphemism for a dank dump; I’m talking about when people use it not to mean that, which they absolutely do! It’s, like, a pervasive child stereotype! Why do I know the phrase mud pie but don’t know what it is? Is it just a…pile of mud? What do you do with it? Eat it? Am I the only one who didn’t grow up slapping mud into a patty and going hog wild on it? Anyway I think Jacob meant the dump kind.

  Bella goes to her first day of school, and all the kids glare at her like, “Who’s the dweeb with the truck?” because if there’s one thing teenagers hate it’s an extremely gorgeous new girl. Now, most movies would be content with giving Bella two to three friends at school, especially since they are shooting on location in FORKS, WASHINGTON, but Twilight gives Bella seventy-five distinct friends who all have names and personalities and LINES (which = MONEY), and they’re all flirting and doing slapstick comedy and kissing one another on the face and falling down and taking pictures of Bella for the school paper (“It’s like first grade all over again, you’re the shiny new toy” <—WHAT) within the first ten minutes of the film and it is truly, truly bonkers.

  Then the Cullens arrive, and Bella is like, “WHO are THOSE???????”

  Her new friends explain that the Cullens are a family of wealthy and mysterious foster children who are also all dating one another—THIS IS THE REAL PLOT—because the dad, Dr. Cullen, is “like this foster dad slash matchmaker.” (Foster! It’s Australian for incest!) To recap, this teenager is saying that a local doctor legally adopts pairs of teenagers that he thinks would be romantically compatible, and makes them date, which they do. Absolutely no one acts like this is weird at all, Bella takes it completely in stride, and everyone forges ahead.

  Bella has a class with one of the Cullens, Edward, and when she walks into the room, he vomits (blood, I guess?) into his mouth. He cannot stop staring at her and gagging for the entire period, and then tries to switch out of the class to get away from her. When the registrar won’t let him switch, he says, “Fine, I’ll just have to endure it,” and then stops coming to school ENTIRELY because Bella stinks so bad. Hahahahaha.

  Bella goes out for a Gardenburger with Dad and does such a bad job with the ketchup bottle it seems like she should go to the hospital. She’s still thinking about Edward and how he hurt her feelings: “I planned to confront him and demand to know what his problem was. But he never sho
wed.”

  Bella’s dad tells her that the security guard at the mill got killed by some kind of animal.

  Bella: Animal?

  Dad: You’re not in Phoenix anymore.

  Yeah, they definitely have animals in Phoenix, sir!

  It’s not a spoiler if I mention that the Cullens are obviously vampires using the seamless and extremely low-profile cover story of “weird incestuous foster family,” right? Because I cannot wait one more second to talk about how fucking bananas it is that any of these old-ass sexy corpses still go to HIGH SCHOOL. You don’t have to keep going to high school!!!!!! If a Forks, Washington, truancy cop comes up to you and says, “Shouldn’t you be in high school right now?” just be like, “Yeah, I’m twenty-five, haha, yeah, I know I look young.” DONE!

  Regardless, Edward returns to biology class and is assigned to be Bella’s lab partner. Which is a fucking huge win for her, since he’s already taken biology 179 times. His first year of biology, they dissected humans.

  Bella tells Edward that she doesn’t really like cold, wet things [twitch twitch], which is awkward because he’s a cold, wet thing.

  Edward: If you hate the cold and the rain so much, why did you move to the wettest place in the continental US?

  Bella: It’s complicated.

  Edward: I’m sure I can keep up. I’ve been alive for seven hundred years. I’ve read EVERY BOOK.

  They twitch at each other for the rest of class.

  From this point on, Edward is just constantly staring at Bella around corners and peeking at her from under manholes and disguising himself as a potted plant so he can watch her pee. Heads up: your children think that is romance now!