E.Lerner

Honestly, it's this aspect of Hilton's persona that got me thinking about the Munchausen angle. I think most people would have considered her a villain in real life at the time this came out, and so part of me wondered if the movie was building to a big reveal of some ulterior motive behind her character's relationship with June. As professional wrestling connoisseur, especially as it informed modern reality television (and now politics), I thought that she was at least leaning into her intrinsic heel-ishness and might be on board with that curveball. Paris Hilton, the human, epitomized the toxic beauty standards of that era. I don't think it's exaggerating to say that thousands, if not millions, of women and girls were made to feel like the Nottie to her Hottie. That this movie unironically embraced that dynamic is just further evidence that every person involved should be in jail.

100% agree. There's only one live-action character on the "positive portrayals" list in the (seemingly comprehensive) Wikipedia page "Albinism in popular culture" and it's from a fan-made short film parody of The Da Vinci Code.

Spoiler alert for Rampage (which is inevitably going to be on HDTGM, c'mon), but George the Albino Gorilla ends up saving the day.

I think we need to consider the possibility that Cristabel and June's relationship was a Munchausen by Proxy scenario. The off-the-charts levels of misogyny in the movie makes assessing this more difficult. We don't wan't to pathologize June's appearance, which is one of the reasons Cristabel comes off as a (surprisingly) good and supportive friend. She doesn't judge June or think that she needs to change her physical self to be happy or find love. The movie takes on a different tone, however, if June wants to change her appearance but can't for some reason. It's also not as if the movie's moral is that having self-love and confidence is more important than being "conventionally" attractive — June is otherwise smart, funny and self-possessed, but only gets her wants and needs met after a total physical makeover. The fact that she says she tried to overhaul her look in the past but had since given up makes me think that she was being secretly undermined by Cristabel. Our first impression of young June is that she was perhaps the victim of neglect or abuse; June's fluorosis is some evidence to that effect. I think this neglect and abuse was perpetrated by Cristabel for decades as an extension of her own narcissism. Munchausen by Proxy, now known as Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another, is when "a person acts as if an individual he or she is caring for has a physical or mental illness when the person is not really sick." The movie talks about June's appearance in medical terms, we know that she wanted to change her appearance, and that she was capable of doing so relatively easily under the right circumstances. By the movie's own logic, June's Nottie-ness was a factitious disorder. Cristabel was imposing it on her as part of ploy to gain attention, sympathy and control from her many suitors. My theory is that she only released June from her clutches after Johan came into the picture because he operates in a very similar way and could be a potential accomplice moving forward.

We see the virus capsules have entered her bloodstream, so they would have quickly circulated around her entire body, not remained in her hand. This is as good a place as any to break down just how ridiculous the virus-extraction machine is in terms of a fake piece of biotechnology. Nicole's Theranos joke was one of the best lines of the episode, but at least Holmes' bullshit was in the general vicinity of scientific plausibility. This machine, however, is so straight-up magical that Cliff Curtis fixing it with a 3D printer is one of the more realistic aspects of the movie. Putting aside how the virus is actually designed to work, let's focus on how it's delivered and that it's designed to be extracted if necessary. The virus appears to be encapsulated in engineered particles that are roughly the size of red blood cells. These particles are designed to naturally degrade in 72 hours, releasing the virus into the bloodstream. Let's also assume that these particles have been engineered to flawlessly hide from the immune system for that long, and aren't getting caught in any of the body's physical filtration systems, like the kidneys or spleen. All of this is impossible to do with the level of precision necessary to prevent the carrier from being pretty much immediately infected, but the real challenge is getting every last one of those particles out of the carrier's body before your Domino's order is delivered. The zoom-in shots we see of the particles being sucked up implies that a sharp metal tube knows the difference between them and the surrounding blood cells, but since that's the equivalent of "a wizard did it," let's walk through what it would need to do if it was working like a super-fast dialysis machine. Once Hattie's blood is inside the machine, it needs to be able to identify and capture the Eteon particles while leaving the red blood cells (and the various other healthy blood components) alone. The options are basically either a physical filter, which would be need to be tuned to the particles' exact weight, diameter, etc., or a chemical sensor, like antibodies, custom DNA strands or complex molecules that bind to biomarkers found only on the particles' exteriors. These are more-or-less in line with the kind of multi-purpose blood diagnostics machines Elizabeth Holmes was trying to build with Theranos. The problem she ran into is that all of these technologies are so delicate — dealing with physical properties that are right on the edge of single-molecule detection — that they can't be reliably used to tell whether you have high cholesterol, much less prevent you from contracting Genocitus-Shmenocitus. And that's assuming you know exactly what physical properties you're looking for on these 5-micron-wide particles. So unless Cliff has a scanning electron microscope in the back of his remote Samoan chop-shop, plus a fully equipped wet-lab for making new reagents, plus a forced-air-sterilized clean room for doing the nanoscale fabrication necessary for actually getting the particles back into the vial, everyone is shit out of luck. All of this leads me to believe the only thing that could be broken on the machine is the screen and the injection microfluidics — two things Cliff would absolutely be able to fix due to their similarity to the nitrous systems on his cars.

How's this cop working a pro-wrestling event and not realizing that Samoans are canonically immune to head injuries?

And both scenes feature a Deckard!

I suppose I specifically had Paul and Casey's arguments and definitions in mind, but especially I'd love to know what being on Team Sanity means to you.

First, I want to say the entirety of questionmarks post is amazing and is 99% of what I wanted to say in defense of Team Fred before I even got to the boards. Thank you, and thanks to all of the other posters here who have been candid about their personal relationships to the super deep themes of mental illness, misogyny and abuse that are all over this zany(?) kids(?) movie. I think the overarching elements of magical realism and imaginative mental spaces more-or-less paper over the logistical question of whether Fred is his own entity or an aspect of Lizzie's psyche. The fact that Fred was revealed to be a storybook character in the original ending, explaining why Mickey's daughter also knows his name and what he looks like, would have answered this pretty neatly, but I don't think it needs to be engaged on that level to resolve the main issue I think Team Sanity has with him. My sense is that the fear and distrust of mental illness is at the heart of Team Sanity's instinct that Fred must be his own entity. An on-its-face reading of the movie where Fred is an aspect of Lizzie's personality would inarguably lead to the conclusion that Lizzie isn't merely working out the gender-based repression she's experienced as child, but that she is literally psychotic and a danger to herself and others. Fred cannot be an agent of liberation and self-actualization if he's actively destroying Lizzie's life and her relationships. Despite (or maybe because) being on Team Fred, I think one of the flaws of the movie is that it treats mental illness pretty flippantly. But I don't think Fred being an avatar of Lizzie's mental illness, rather than simply being her id, invalidates any of the points June or Jason were making. Just the opposite, really — the Fred parts of Lizzie's psyche can indeed be very problematic, even life-threateningly dangerous, but they are still a valuable part of her that she needs to learn to control. Polly, by forcing her daughter to fully repress and ignore those symptoms, is doing real, lasting, traumatic harm, rather than getting her daughter the mental help she needs. I think the way to resolve this for Team Sanity is not to just say "it's a movie" but to say "it's an allegory." Lizzie is explicitly an unreliable narrator, and I think that gives us license to say some of the havoc "Fred" causes is also exaggerated. For example, her dad may have called the police when she was playing "burglars" but they didn't really almost shoot him or have him arrested — that's just what it felt like to her as a child. Or as an adult, she may not have literally sank her friend's houseboat, but accidentally caused some major damage that insurance eventually covered. Lizzie has been told from an early age that her mental illness ruins everything, including her parents' marriage and her mother's love for her. It's totally believable to me that she sees everything through that catastrophic lens.

John just called me Eric (?) Lerner on the mini-episode, so we're deep in the rabbit hole on this one.

It seems like a pretty high-concept joke to be deployed in the middle of a song, but I think there's at least the possibility she was making a reference to Paul's routine butchery of people's names.

I know several people have brought up Tony Clifton as Cage's reference point for Eddie, but is it possible that we was going for The Joker? Cage is a noted comic book obsessive — he has/had a multi-million dollar collection, including a lot of vintage DC stuff — so he'd be deeply familiar with the source material. Points in favor: Largely green and purple wardrobe Insane smile and laugh has been disfigured in some way — disguising his appearance with wig/glasses/fake voices/etc. Carries a deck of cards consisting solely of jokers All of this, plus his outsized presence in what is otherwise a fairly stock noir/small-time-crook setting makes me think that was the overall vibe he was going for. Thoughts?

Was this right around when The Disaster Artist was coming out? We were in the same showing if an extremely drunk girl barfed in the front row right as everyone was getting to their seats.

Johnny Castaway, 1992, "the world's first story-telling screen saver."

Now that we know what an actual deadfall is, have we gotten any closer to identifying what it means in the context of the movie? It does sound like the name of a con pulled from Tim Robinson's box of gangster movie props, but I'm pretty sure both Jameses Coburn call the con they pull with Biehn something else. I guess it could be a reference to the meta-con, since Biehn gets trapped in it after he thinks his father is dead, and is pulled in further by falling in love with the plant. The utter stupidity of that as an explanation actually makes me think I might be on the right track here.

Very excited for this episode. Cage's portrayal of The Joker is up there with Ledger's as far as I'm concerned. Joaquin has got some big shoes to fill!

I don't have it handy, but I recall the line about the step-father's profession at the end was that he was "in construction." I didn't take that to mean that they weren't actually wealthy, but rather that the step-father was mobbed-up — which would explain his overall affect, propensity to violence, and the inability for the son/mother to seek "justice" through traditional channels.

This is basically the twist of a certain Black Mirror episode, but instead of a holonovel/game, the program is a modeling simulation — calculating probabilities, suggesting possible outcomes, and informing decision-making in the real world. (I never watched it, but the finale of Enterprise takes place in one of these, in the holodeck of the Enterprise D during the events of the TNG episode "The Pegasus") That's what I keep gravitating to when I try to explain what the kid was trying to accomplish with this game — his way of asking his dead dad what to do about his abusive new dad. But the problem I keep coming up against is whether Dill has agency or whether he is essentially being controlled by his son. I just don't know if there is an internally consistent answer there.

Also, there are a lot of dumb mistakes that can be lampshaded by the universe having being created by a disturbed 12-year-old, but I object to the idea that this kid knows that a Swizzle is an authentic, rum-and-bitters-based Caribbean cocktail, but not enough about it to know it's a tall drink with a lot of ice, fruit juice, falernum and an eponymous stirring stick. Looks like he got his Swizzle recipe from this woman:

In the (psychic, question mark?) phone call at the end, Dill gestures at the moral of the story, which is that the murder wasn't a good thing to do but it was the right thing to do. But if Dill is ultimately the product of a deterministic universe created by the kid, this is really just a post hoc justification for a decision the kid has already made. Are we as an audience supposed think he made the right or wrong choice? Both the Dill construct and the kid are ostensibly rewarded for their parallel murders by being virtually reunited, so I'm guessing Knight's intention was to convey the former but wow is it a mess.

This was my interpretation, and I think it's borne out by some of that out-of-nowhere voiceover that gestures at how consciousness might be an emergent property of this kind o code. But as the gang touched on several times — and what was really at the heart of June's confusion whether this was a video game at all — it's not clear whether the son is playing his own game. Like, when you see screenshots that are anything but code, it appears to be a relatively simple-looking first-person view of a person fishing off a boat, which suggests he's playing as Baker Dill. But if you take everything that's happening in Plymouth as how it appears to Baker Dill, and not how the kid sees it, you're positing that Dill is an AI consciousness, not as an avatar the kid is merely piloting around. That distinction is super important because it's the answer to the question of "who makes the decision to kill Abusive Greek Dad?" It seems to me that the kid has already made up his mind and is guiding Dill to that conclusion. Which means Dill doesn't have agency and there really are no consequences for the moral dilemma he's placed in (especially the last minute wrinkle with Lucky Gas Pumper, as you said earlier). But all this really goes back to what Jason said at the top of the audience Q&A — if the questions are about the internal logic of the video game world, we can just stop right now because there simply aren't answers to be found.

I went in cold other than know there was some kind of twist, though iTunes blurb and the first few minutes make it pretty clear. My first instinct was that this was more of a What Dreams May Come scenario than a Jacob's Ladder scenario, but it wasn't until they kept on doing those weird camera pans that I figured out what was really going on. This one reminded me a lot of The Secret, in that there were a few different directions that it could have gone that would have resulted in a genuinely good movie, but the director decided to do all of them at once and ended up with such a farrago that they didn't even bother finishing the CGI. Like, this would have been (or been at least derivative of) a perfectly good Black Mirror episode if the game was a way for the son to essentially ask his dead dad for advice on whether or not to commit a murder, by making a realistic simulation and seeing what he'd do in a similar scenario. But the son seems to have already made up his mind, and is pulling all of the strings in the game rather than letting them play out on their own? I was genuinely confused as to what that dynamic was supposed to be. Either way, I genuinely enjoyed the tropey video game stuff once they started leaning into it, to the point where it would probably have also worked better as a Spike-Jonze-dark comedy if they had fully gone in that direction. It also reminded of The Secret because of the heavy parent-child sex themes?! Whatever the purpose of the simulation, the kid has essentially created a very realistic deepfake of his parents having passionate sex on a boat. Like, he's coded it so his dad can't run a red light, but he can have sex with an NPC for money? This was a wild one. Can't wait for the episode.

Regarding the logistics of this bear-human world: To the best of my recollection, I don't think anyone in the movie ever says the word "bear" in a way where it couldn't be construed as shorthand for "one of the Country Bears." Even Dex, who is flabbergasted that no one will acknowledge that Beary is anything but Mr. and Mrs. Barrington's biological son, pointedly refuses to directly address it. Beary himself does not follow the implication that he was trapped in the woods by a parked ranger, but neither does Dex spell it out for him. Does that mean we are in a full on Animal-Farm-scenario, where the animals are extended metaphors — in this case, coming to understand one's own minority identity and finding community through the arts? There are other bears in the world, and there are bear-oriented cultural artifacts, like the "TeleCub" telephone-receiver extenders, and Cha-Cha's bear-themed bar. But might these just be part of the extended metaphor as well? Is the Swarming Hive really just a gay bar?