This adult animated film (from 1997, re-released by Deaf Crocodile) left me with a question: where has Bill Plympton been all my life?

Well, drawing, obviously (his illustrations were once in every men’s magazine). A better question: where have *I* been all of *his* life? This rocked from beginning to end, and was the most fun I’ve had with a movie in a long time.

I call it an *animated film* with some reservations—Plympton’s drawings are thrillingly dirty and itch like a hair stuck to the inside of your mouth, but they remain *drawings*. There’s little attention spared for the temporal language of animation (timing and anticipation and so on), and it’s largely filmed on threes and fours—characters don’t flow, they jerk and stutter. These cost-saving measures soon become part of the film’s scrappy, relentless charm. It’s a descendant of those extremely early 1910s cartoons (think *Mutt and Jeff* and *Krazy Kat*) that were basically flipbooks of moving images. Plympton’s art has a visibly constructed quality that I quite like. As noted in the accompanying audio commentary, Bill Plympton would often erase a drawing and then redraw on the same sheet, meaning you sometimes see ghosts and afterimages of erased work in the final shot.*

^[1]*I was reminded of Will Vinton claymation—the way he doesn’t seem to care that his clay models have fingerprints and bulges and so on. A lot of labor went into it, and that labor is allowed … Continue reading

But animation is great because of one thing, and it’s a thing the film grasps hard enough to draw blood: *you can create anything*. The film is tailor-made to exploit this idea: a newlywed man named Grant is zapped by a radio signal and gains the power to control reality, which has terrible consequences for those around him—particularly his new wife, Keri. Grant’s new “superpower” (I guess) is that all his intrusive thoughts manifest as literal reality. The human brain is an association machine, a demon monkey flinging shit at the wall, and we’ve all had our moments of “thank *fuck* nobody can see the thought I just had.”

Grant has no fucks to thank. Whenever he imagines something—no matter how obscene or bizarre—it just *exists* out in the open. His wife comments that he has “bedroom eyes”, and his face literally transforms into a bedroom (it makes sense in context…kinda). Her breasts remind him of balloons, so he literally can twist them into balloon animals. Throw in some cute songs c/o longtime collaborator Maureen McElheron, and a recurrent steel guitar jag, and that’s the movie. Grant’s innermost fantasies just burst out of him all the time like animals escaping a zoo, leading to all sorts of perversely amusing gags and adventures. There’s a stock B-movie plot about a totalitarian corporation seeking to control Grant’s powers (this is pretty ordinary stuff, and not the movie’s strongest point), but the movie really is just joke after joke after joke.

It gallops at breakneck pace, six laps ahead of the viewer. I kept having to pause because it was overstimulating the living crap out of me. The film is a triumph of quantity as well as quality: so relentless in its attack that it wears you down and then wins you over. Every scene is stuffed with throwaway gags, jags, riffs, and surrealist fancies, all working by the principle Tex Avery perfected in the fifties: just machinegun the audience to death with *every joke idea you’ve got*—even if only 50% of your material lands, you’ve turned the viewer into Swiss cheese. And Plympton can afford to be far more transgressive and foul than Termite Terrace was ever allowed to be. Things that are (mostly) implied in Avery’s work just get drawn outright here.

It’s not just a lunchroom food fight. The film *does* have stuff to say, if you’re in the mood to trowel through penises, feces, and viscera. Like Grant himself, it has hidden depths.

Grant is depicted as a boring square. (Almost literally, his silhouette is a rectangle with a head sticking out.) He is an accountant, vilified since the days of Monty Python and Arthur Pewtie as the most criminally boring profession to exist. He delays his uxorious duties because of work. Is the most boring person you know just a lunatic who’s good at hiding?

This seems like commentary on the animation trade itself, and the odd way it juxtaposes dreams with drudgery. Bill Plympton’s mind is buzzing with some of the wildest and weirdest thoughts ever thunk…but his body is sitting at a desk, pushing a pencil. He’d look like the world’s most boring man if you couldn’t see what he was drawing. The dichotomy of “boring life, wild art” is on full display here, both textually and subtextually. Grant prefers stability and order, but probably for the same reason a lunatic asylum does: because its fundamental nature is chaos. It’s disturbing to Grant (and even to us—*I Married A Strange Person!* could have easily been a horror film) that his life and marriage are being wrecked, not by the dreams of a mad god bent on tormenting him, but by himself. The call is coming from inside the house!

The film’s core is the relationship between Grant and Keri, which is both a self-aware sitcom cliche (complete with meddling in-laws) and unlike any marriage I have seen in any film. Throughout, Keri ponders what to make of her husband. While he’s in the hell of being unable to hide himself, Keri is in hell of not knowing who he is. She has married a ghost. A mirage. A shape. Who is this man—simultanouely deathly-dull and a wrecker of worlds?

*I Married A Strange Etc* can be clunky when it attempts political satire, but its commentary on married life feels dead on. We’re all strange people. How do we deal with it? By becoming hidden people. We pretend the suit’s our skin and the mask’s our face. But we can’t hide forever. At a certain point, we have to let the disguise drop, and reveal who we truly are. Or be revealed. That’s the thing: eventually your secrets always come tumbling out.

Put more grotesquely, if you’re a guy who’s into feet, your wife is gonna figure that out real soon. There’s an awkward conversation to have or not have, but either way, she will eventually know. You cannot spend ten-plus hours a day around a person without having some cracks appear in whatever social facade exists around you.

The movie’s gross-out gags provoke comparisons with another (more troubling) titan of 90s animation. I grew up on Ren and Stimpy. It briefly dominated my inner sky like Sirius. After the corporate toy-commercial deadness of 80s cartoons, it seemed real and electric and alive. Inside the show was the spirit of Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, and Frank Tashlin, still alive and (if anything) twisted to be *even more* freakish. I was in love. John Kricfalusi seemed like animation’s own Martin Luther King; his show a burning fire to consume the papist heresies of the 80s.

But when I watched Kricfalusi’s ill-fated 2004 reboot of the show (*Ren & Stimpy “Adult Party Cartoon”* or whatever), I was struck by how *miserable* it felt. Had Kricfalusi artistically fallen apart? Had this nihilism always been there, and was I just now watching with eyes open wide? I don’t know, but it was like I was seeing right through the show and into the bleak, cragged mind of its creator: a man who hates women, hates his parents, hates 95% of classic animation (and all of modern animation), hates his audiences, and fundamentally does not have much to say, except to stew and sulk on his resentments endlessly. His animation was still technically brilliant, but what was he *doing* with his talent? Did I really want to watch old wounds getting picked open forever in a technically magisterial fashion? A massive bomb, *Adult Party Cartoon* was cancelled after six episodes. Even if it hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t have bothered watching the seventh. I was done. Before the “Cans Without Labels” Kickstarter debacle, before unfortunate discoveries re: his personal life, my verdict on John Kricfalusi’s deal was a big fat “thanks, I got it.”

By contrast, there’s a joyous, generous warmth to I Married A Strange Person that I found appealing and even emotionally moving. It welcomes the viewer in, instead of freezing them out. It doesn’t sneer; it smiles. It’s not cynical or mean. It’s anything but nihilistic. I guess there’s *some* piss and spite (we get the Tex Avery end of Warner Bros more than, say, Chuck Jones). The riffs about an unfunny and sexually inadequate comedian feel aimed at someone Plympton knows. The nefarious Smile Corporation can only be Disney. Walt would have loved to have an armored tank division, even if they did occasionally hump each other like heat-ridden dogs.

It might also be a story about masculinity. What is a man? What is the role of a man? An oft-mocked . These are your two choices, you’re a Man Who’s Bad to Women, or a Man Who’s Not Bad to Women. But “not a jerk to women” isn’t an identity any more than “not mushrooms” is a pizza topping. What actually are you?

I think the default male experience is one of *freakiness*. The sort of freakiness that leaves you isolated and lonely: you have things that are integral to your psyche yet cannot ever be seen by those around you.

It’s generally true that men are a sex of outliers and extremes. Scholastically, boys seem more variable than women, producing more high and low achievers, and this tendency toward extremity seems to carry itself into art as well. *I Married A Strange Person* was made by a man, not a woman. (There are stories we might tell to explain male misfits: from evolution’s perspective, it’s simply not as large a crisis for a man to die or fail to reproduce. Male gametes are small, numerous, and disposable.)

Yes, women can be strange and perverse. But I still remember the Reddit post titled “How can I get my boyfriend to stop digging his tunnel?” To be clear, this was not a metaphorical tunnel. A woman was idly wondering why her boyfriend was suddenly spending all his time digging an enormous hole. Even if all gendered identifiers had been stripped from the post, you still would confidently predict that the hole digger would be a man. “Digging a hole in your yard for no reason” is just a particular kind of madness that only men seem to have. And I wonder if her boyfriend, when he speaks to others, mentions that he’s digging a hole? He’d probably love to talk about it. But he’s also aware—afraid—that whoever he tells about it wouldn’t share his love.

The curse of being a woman is that you are constantly being perceived, constantly on display. The curse of being a man is that nobody wants to know who you actually are. The average woman, viewing her boyfriend’s internet search history, would react with disgust. *Ew. Ick.*

Being a man means hiding your true self from women, and wondering how much you can safely show her. It’s a troubling spot to be in. Maybe she fell in love with your mask, which is rotting to pieces on your face, an illusion more unsustainable by the day. Or maybe she *knows* you’re a freak. Maybe she knew all along, and is hoping you’ll whisk her off on all sorts of bizarre adventures. That’s what you hope for, anyway. My own mother and father had the same kind of relationship as Grant and Keri in the film, now that I think of it.

*I Married a Strange Person!* is an amazing achievement. A bath of idiocy and filth that leaves you feeling strangely wise and clean. I expect that no movie like it will be made again in my lifetime.

“My baby’s in there someplace,” – David Bowie, “TVC 15”

Smart and sharp. Fans of shit will want to miss this one, for it is emphatically not shit. Few films draw together such broad influences or mix them so confidently. Neo-western, plus Hitchcock, plus genre UFO flick, plus highbrow Baudrillardian meditation on filmic imagery, plus 90s monster anime, plus what else ya got in the fridge?

Many missed the movie’s theme, which seems straightforward to me.

Nope is about mankind’s desire to control wild things via language, to recontextualize the world of dripping teeth and claws into something safe, something human, something we can control and exploit.

This is illustrated in the movie several times. OJ’s horses are harmless entertainment…until they’re not. Gordy is a funny wacky sitcom monkey (clearly inspired by 1951’s Bedtime for Bonzo)…until he’s not. These are wild animals. The metaphors humanity has recast them in are shallow and easily broken. Savage ancient eyes swivel wildly inside the smiling-face masks. We live around things can kill us. The usual solution (shutting our eyes and wishfully imagining that there aren’t also teeth inside the masks) can turn abruptly fatal.

The film is replete with references to extremely early pre-Hollywood cinema. Another one I thought of is 1903’s Electrocuting an Elephant, which documents the death of Topsy, a Coney Island circus elephant that (lazily quoting Wikipedia) had “killed a drunken spectator the previous year who burnt the tip of her trunk with a lit cigar”. What was going through that man’s head? Maybe he thought he was safe. After all, he’d paid for a ticket. Surely the elephant wouldn’t dare harm a paying customer of the circus.

The deadliest animal in the film is Jupiter, who kicks off everything with his amusement park wheeze (or so it’s implied). But note that he could have justified his actions. He had everything under control, bro! Trust me, bro! Nothing had ever gone wrong before, bro! And don’t you work with animals too, bro? That, again, is applying human logic to an alien world. A wild animal has not signed a contract and it is not bound by any natural law to perform as you expect. A cat will merrily play with you. Then a chance hand movement triggers a sparking cascade of neurons, thousands of years of domesticity crash like invalid code, and it lashes out. In that impulsive moment, it wants to destroy you. It’s only cute because a cat is too small to kill. If it was the size of a tiger, your guts would be outside your body. Nobody who ever picked up a snake thought they would get bitten by it.

A few years ago, I noticed people treating their pets as if they were human. Women would call their dogs “fur babies”. They’d talk to their dog in a coochie-coo baby language, as though their dog was a human infant. And when their pitbull mix attacked someone, they’d react with shock. That’s not how they raised their little guy to behave! Imagining a human face on a strange and alien thing comforts us, and affords us an illusion of control. But wildness still lives underneath, and can bite through that illusion as suddenly and finally as it can bite through you.

Always described in terms like “absurdist nonsense”, Holy Grail is far from nonsensical or absurd. It depicts a rigorous and orderly world. Its has bones of laws and tendons of logic. Yes, the rules it works by often strange and always arbitrary, but the characters are still forced to follow them, even when the rules are abruptly changed, subverted, or exposed as hollow and meaningless.

It’s a funny but sinister movie: characters are trapped in predefined roles and although they show some awareness of their artificial world, it’s a world they can never escape. Arthur, Lancelot, etc are checker pieces in a game that abruptly changes to chess, to parcheesi, to Mahjongg, to Starcraft II. It’s almost as much a dystopian satire as Brazil.

If the movie has a point, it’s this: “the rules we’re made to follow are all-important…until suddenly they don’t exist.” That’s an important idea in much of the Pythons’ work, and here it is the motor of the story. This dyadic structure (rule -> subversion) occurs again and again, almost too many times to count.

The Peasant. King Arthur justifies his reign with a speech about the Lady of the Lake giving him a magic sword. This is punctured by a peasant’s paraphrased observation “…but isn’t that a really stupid way to elect a leader?” King Arthur can’t answer (beyond saying “shut up!”) because the peasant’s obviously right. It is.

The Black Knight. He blocks King Arthur’s path, and ignores a royal order to step aside. Yes, Arthur fights and defeats him, yet in a weird way, this disempowers him as king. He has no authority over the Black Knight, beyond the strength of his sword arm (what would he have done if he was someone who couldn’t fight well, like a dwarf or an old man?). A king shouldn’t have to fight pointless macho duels against random subjects on the road. If he’s reduced to that, his kingship is either false or meaningless.

The Knights of Ni. Arthur goes on a long, frustrating quest to find a shrubbery, only to return and find that the people he was dealing with have disbanded, reformed under a new name, and have no intent of honoring their deal. His quest is rendered useless by bureaucracy, flipping from all important to futile.

The French. French soldiers occupy a castle on British land, and taunt Arthur for his inability to dislodge them. This further deflates his stature, because (as with the Black Knight), his kingship gives him no actual authority. People can insult, mock, or defy him, and he has little recourse except to insult them back or clumsily try to fight them—tactics of commoners, not kings. This scene has happened many times through history. Foreign colonizers arrive, establish an outpost or a trading colony, and because of a technological advantage like cannons or horses, the regional power can’t do anything. This triggers a regional power shift: the subjects learn that their king’s power was illusory. He wasn’t chosen by God, and wasn’t the last in the line of serpent people. He owned the land because he was able to defend it, and once someone with brass cannons came along, he was no longer able to defend it and didn’t own diddly-squat.

The Legendary Beast. At Castle Aarrgh, the knights are chased into a corner by a horrible monster. Things look grim…until the animator drawing the monster dies, and the monster turns into a harmless drawing (which, of course, it always was)

The Bridgekeeper’s Riddles. Knights try to cross a bridge, but are blocked by a bridgekeeper who asks unfair riddles. Several knights fail and are flung to their deaths. But then Arthur lawyers the scenario’s rules against the Bridgekeeper, gets HIM tossed into the pit, and the remaining knights cross with no further problems. This is a rare example of a character actually manipulating the logic of their world in a positive direction (although Arthur seems to have done so by accident).

So that’s the film. “The rules matter…until they don’t.”

If the Pythons have a point, it’s this: most of society’s instructions are arbitrary, and can be ignored. We could all collectively believe Britain is part of France, and it would become part of France. Often, the future belongs to the powerful and clever and mad, because they have the “hacker mindset”—they can stare past something’s surface illusion and discover its underlying interface. You can try to speedrun a game by playing it “properly” (the way the developers intended). But someone else has found a way to glitch through a wall and has already set the Any% WR.

Yes, the average Joe has to follow rules—people with big sticks tend to whack you if you don’t—but you’re a sucker if you actually believe in them. They aren’t real. They are largely made up by people who want to control you. Do not love the law: it does not love you back. Those who wave a rulebook and say “no fair! A dog can’t play baseball!” are fated to watch a dog dunk on them, over and over, forever.

I do not regard this as a nihilistic AJ Soprano film about how nothing matters. Just that our sense of the world’s shape (and of things like morality and ethics) is a judgment we should make ourselves, rather than accepting someone else’s. Viewed this way, it’s strangely ennobling. All chains are glass. We can imagine the world into new shapes.

I saw this as a kid. It enchanted me as few movies have done. I could not predict where it was going. And this gave the story, despite its surface silliness, a deep underlying realism.

At six years of age, I was noticing already that certain things always happened in movies: the good person always won, the bad person always lost, side characters often died, main characters never did, and so on. Next to these obvious commercial formulas, Holy Grail was scary. Unpredictable. It seemed ruthless and mad, the way characters just horribly died, the way the quest just seemed doomed to fail. It was like a snake in my mind for a long time. Forget the surrealist parts. For the first time, I had seen the world I lived in depicted in a movie.