I'm staring at the asphalt wonderingWhat's buried underneath (where I am)- Death Cab for Cutie, "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight"
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| Here (2024) |
On a recent transatlantic journey, I had the opportunity to watch a couple films including The Northman, a re-watch of Spielberg’s West Side Story and also Bob Zemeckis’s adaptation of the graphic novel Here.
The film Here came and went last fall, cost $50 million to make and made $15 million at the box office. That it was based on a short comic from 1989 that I had found very inspiring at the time had piqued my interest, but the negative reviews kept me from seeing it. Recently, however, in describing my new play The Right Room to a number of people, one said the concept reminded them of this movie (which they had liked) and of course, that filled me with great concern. I will go into the comparison in a moment.
Like the 1989 comic and the 2014 graphic novel, both by Richard McGuire, the film depicts the corner of an American living room from one fixed vantage point. The camera never moves (until the very end) but the narrative moves back and forth in time, from the 1940s to the 1970s, back to the 1910s, forward to the 2020s, even further back to before the house was even built and even into prehistory.
The major failing of the film is that an in-depth narrative is laid upon it, and that this narrative is not terribly compelling. A young man (played by a CGI de-aged Tom Hanks) grows up in this house, and just as our vantage point is stuck in one place, so is he, confined by the expectations of his father, his inability to succeed in business, that in spite of having a loving wife (Robin Wright) and family, he is unhappy and cannot move on from "here."
The movie’s fatal flaw, however, is its score by Alan Silvestri, an award-winning composer, responsible for iconic themes found in wildly successful movies like Back to the Future and Avengers. You can hear them, right? Of course you can.
The Here score put me in mind of Elmer Bernstein’s legendary score for the 1962 film adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The main theme to that film is like liquid nostalgia, at once sweeping and sweet, grand yet intimate.
The first time I read Mockingbird, I found the first half to be interesting but disjointed – a selection of unassociated small town tales. When the trial happens, however, all the elements of the first part come together to define what happens next. And Bernstein's music serves to underscore lost innocence that comes with seeing the world as it really is, while remembering what it used to mean to you.
The thing about the graphic novel Here is that it has no narrative, it is an abstracted rumination on the meaning (if there is one) of time and space, and our brief place in it. These moments sometimes turn back on themselves, as when a 20th century child plays with a plastic dinosaur in the same frame as an actual dinosaur from millions of years ago that once occupied the same space, or a young woman is offering a cocktail in the same panel as she, as a baby years earlier, is being nursed with a bottle.
The Here screenplay by Zemeckis and Eric Roth includes a few brief, abstracted moments like these within the larger narrative (the one defined by the the Tom Hanks character) but they clash with the movie's serious, dramatic tone, and come off not as humorous but obvious and heavy-handed, especially as they allude to recent events, like COVID or the BLM uprising.
Meanwhile, Silvestri's score keeps reminding us that this is meaningful, this is important. But all we are seeing is a number of (mostly white) people living, growing old, and dying. And while there is a common philosophical argument that death gives life meaning, death does not in and of itself give life meaning.
A professor of playwriting once described to me what he called the “dead baby” plays. He had had a number of students – people in their late teens and early twenties – drop a dead baby into the narrative of their scripts, which he saw as cheap, unearned poignance, and he absolutely has a point. When I was a young man, I dropped suicide into the narrative of more than one project, and that was also sloppy writing, and thoughtless.
Death does not provide meaning, but it can inspire meaning.
My new play, The Right Room, takes place in four different time periods, and in four different rooms, but they are all hotel rooms (or three hotel rooms and one room in a boarding house) in four different cities. And it follows the story of one family, in these elements I can see how I was inspired by McGuire’s original 1989 comic Here.
In my first draft, there were four distinct scenes, which I have since braided into one continuous scene, and so four couples share the same room, all at once. And I like to think that meaning is revealed by the actions that take place in those rooms, by those characters. Not time, nor place, nor even death. That it is life that gives life meaning.
"Here," a student film by Tim Masick and Bill Trainor (1991)
The film Here came and went last fall, cost $50 million to make and made $15 million at the box office. That it was based on a short comic from 1989 that I had found very inspiring at the time had piqued my interest, but the negative reviews kept me from seeing it. Recently, however, in describing my new play The Right Room to a number of people, one said the concept reminded them of this movie (which they had liked) and of course, that filled me with great concern. I will go into the comparison in a moment.
Like the 1989 comic and the 2014 graphic novel, both by Richard McGuire, the film depicts the corner of an American living room from one fixed vantage point. The camera never moves (until the very end) but the narrative moves back and forth in time, from the 1940s to the 1970s, back to the 1910s, forward to the 2020s, even further back to before the house was even built and even into prehistory.
The major failing of the film is that an in-depth narrative is laid upon it, and that this narrative is not terribly compelling. A young man (played by a CGI de-aged Tom Hanks) grows up in this house, and just as our vantage point is stuck in one place, so is he, confined by the expectations of his father, his inability to succeed in business, that in spite of having a loving wife (Robin Wright) and family, he is unhappy and cannot move on from "here."
The movie’s fatal flaw, however, is its score by Alan Silvestri, an award-winning composer, responsible for iconic themes found in wildly successful movies like Back to the Future and Avengers. You can hear them, right? Of course you can.
 |
| To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) |
The first time I read Mockingbird, I found the first half to be interesting but disjointed – a selection of unassociated small town tales. When the trial happens, however, all the elements of the first part come together to define what happens next. And Bernstein's music serves to underscore lost innocence that comes with seeing the world as it really is, while remembering what it used to mean to you.
The thing about the graphic novel Here is that it has no narrative, it is an abstracted rumination on the meaning (if there is one) of time and space, and our brief place in it. These moments sometimes turn back on themselves, as when a 20th century child plays with a plastic dinosaur in the same frame as an actual dinosaur from millions of years ago that once occupied the same space, or a young woman is offering a cocktail in the same panel as she, as a baby years earlier, is being nursed with a bottle.
The Here screenplay by Zemeckis and Eric Roth includes a few brief, abstracted moments like these within the larger narrative (the one defined by the the Tom Hanks character) but they clash with the movie's serious, dramatic tone, and come off not as humorous but obvious and heavy-handed, especially as they allude to recent events, like COVID or the BLM uprising.
Meanwhile, Silvestri's score keeps reminding us that this is meaningful, this is important. But all we are seeing is a number of (mostly white) people living, growing old, and dying. And while there is a common philosophical argument that death gives life meaning, death does not in and of itself give life meaning.
 |
| Here (1989) |
Death does not provide meaning, but it can inspire meaning.
My new play, The Right Room, takes place in four different time periods, and in four different rooms, but they are all hotel rooms (or three hotel rooms and one room in a boarding house) in four different cities. And it follows the story of one family, in these elements I can see how I was inspired by McGuire’s original 1989 comic Here.
In my first draft, there were four distinct scenes, which I have since braided into one continuous scene, and so four couples share the same room, all at once. And I like to think that meaning is revealed by the actions that take place in those rooms, by those characters. Not time, nor place, nor even death. That it is life that gives life meaning.
"Here," a student film by Tim Masick and Bill Trainor (1991)
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