"Everybody Plays the Fool" or Eternal Childhood and the Works of James Gunn

The Fool in The Tarot

[This post contains plot spoilers and discussion of explicit content!]

The "man child" trope has a derisive name, but I don't think it's automatically a bad character within the realm of fiction. I go to books and movies because I want a satisfying story and stories usually need a character to learn something. With this trope, we tend to start with someone naive, which could mean anything from emotionally stunted to frighteningly optimistic, who needs to be kinder, better, or more self-aware. While rarer in popular entertainment, this "man child" has shown up as a female character (see: Amy Poehler in Baby Mama [2008], Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher [2011]). So if we're talking more classic, gender-neutral archetypes, this person would be closely related to The Fool, someone usually more clever than smart and unable to see the big picture.

I'm most interested when this character a) is a fictional entity with whom I don't have to interact with in reality if I choose not to and b) does immature things that have consequences.

Frank (Rainn Wilson) in Super (2010) gets to don a mask, defeat the bad guys, and save the girl, but he has to shed a great deal of blood in the process. Jimmy in James Gunn's first and only novel, "The Toy Collector" (2000), focuses on drugs and his collection of toy robots to the exclusion of family and friends. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) can play Han Solo as long as he wants, but he has to fight to put together a family that resembles the love and support he has before leaving Earth as a child. The through line of all these works is both the celebration and deconstruction of the eternal childhood. Director/writer James Gunn gives us characters who live the power fantasy problematized by real world outcomes.

Read Your Books

When writing a review of anything, whether it's a collection of Garfield comics or Ulysses, please remember to read the source material.

And that the work in question has actually been published.

The A.V. Club is an excellent entertainment review site; I have a feeling this incident is an isolated one.

I'm probably biased because I'm a big fan of regular features like Nathan Rabin's My Year of Flops column (and now book), with its in-depth cinema essays that transcend the usual pessimism of critical analysis, and The Inventory, an attempt to connect partially-related songs, movies, books, actors, etc. into eclectic and entertaining lists.

Some of the reviews on the rest of the site are hit or miss, but in general, it's a great thing, this A.V. Club.

That's why a fake review is such a shock.

Don't lie, kids, especially when you work for an otherwise very neat site.

Huckleberry Finn Fans Forget to Read Their Source Material

Found at StarTribune.com, a tale of why fiction and reality are very separate things:

"Dreaming of a Huck Finn-style adventure on the Mississippi, a young couple are instead afoul of the law."

Claire Boucher and William Gratz had their sights set on the southern reaches of the Mississippi River when they packed their chickens, a sewing machine and 20 pounds of potatoes into a houseboat they crafted from scratch.

[...]

Strangers gave them bikes, a mattress and the sewing machine (powered by on-board batteries). They got a copy of Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," which neither of them had read.

Reading doesn't inspire bad ideas, at least not when people are so good at coming up with them on their own. I wonder if they thought the original text had something to do with chickens and potatoes? And I just can't place the sewing machine.

But I guess they get a couple literacy points for naming their boat, which now "rests next to burned-up and smashed car carcasses," after Daniel Clowes's surreal graphic novel, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. The comic is a good read, but I don't think snuff films have much to do with boating down the Mississippi.

One of my favorite parts of the article involves park police officer Rob Mooney who tried to convince the couple to buy "life jackets, paddles and other supplies" when he first found them. I think it's pretty obvious they didn't do much research before their journey. A week later, he returned to give them "citations for camping and alcohol consumption in the park." He actually seems pretty sorry about having to do it:

"I love the idea of the Tom Sawyer adventure," Mooney said. "The problem is it's not 1883. You can't do that anymore. You have to follow the rules."

All I have to say is follow your dreams, kids, but not when it means breaking the law over getting drunk on a homemade boat.