We don’t have any hockey to distract us right now, so here are some ideas from us at RMNB on how you could spend your time while in lockdown.
In today’s episode: an academic journal dedicated to the Greatest Movie Ever Made.
All human beings, regardless of where or when they live, operate in three stages:
- childhood, in which you love Gremlins 2 because you’re an idiot
- adolescence, in which you think Gremlins 2 sucked
- adulthood, in which you love Gremlins 2 again
Thanks to the Gremlins 2 advocacy of my very wise partner, birthday gal Aileen O’Hearn, PhD, I am now in stage three. Joining me are all right-thinking individuals, including the Institute of Gremlins 2 Studies. The G2 Institute is a definitely real organization of certainly more than just one sad person endlessly considering the philosophical dimensions of the 1990 popcorn classic, Gremlin 2: The New Batch, starring Phoebe Cates, Dick Butkus, Christopher Lee, and Hulk Hogan.
Generation Z may know Gremlins 2 only through this Key & Peele sketch, and this is a great shame.
But all that dumb stuff isn’t just in the film; that dumb stuff is what gives the film its life. It’s an aggressively whimsical and powerfully stupid movie. It’s a cartoon. And all that early 90s whimsy and stupidity and cartoonishness now just feels like an accurate — maybe even conservative — prediction of our historical moment.
Or, put another way:
The original myth of the Gremlin is a being that lives in our machines, causing malfunctions. This shatters the illusion of naturality – by breaking them, they are revealed as constructions, within our control. More radically, the Gremlin reveals our world is subject to change.
— Institute of Gremlins 2 Studies (@G2Institute) April 28, 2019
Little nuggets of “is this a gag or is this profound?” is extremely up my alley, which is why the Institute has joined the hallowed halls of my Twitter notifications.
There was a time when this twitter account just made me chuckle every once in a while, but now I feel like it is shouting truth directly into my soul.
Many fixate on the third act of Gremlins 2, as if its delirious meltdown is a novelty or aberration. Yet I propose precisely the opposite: the narrative disjunction depicted is now the defining mode of daily life. What is alien is not the breakdown, but its ultimate conclusion.
— Institute of Gremlins 2 Studies (@G2Institute) October 26, 2019
Give them a follower on Twitter. Someone give Joe Dante a ton of money to make more weird movies. And you can rent Gremlins 2 on Amazon for $2.50 right now. Watch it tonight, and let’s take down Daniel Clamp in November.
