The Apathy Angle: Shakespeare In Love & The Nightmare Before Christmas

There are lots of compelling stories that sell lots of copies of  DVDs and do pretty well in the box office, but sometimes I get the feeling that these aren't compelling stories. No, not if you consider how most of the time whenever stuff happens in real life, no one really gives a rat’s ass. Central to so many plots is the idea that a character, or a group of characters, care about something. But what if that isn't the case? What if the real story is much less interesting than that? These are blurbs about movies and how we all missed the point. Because there never was one.

Shakespeare In Love

Yeah, I didn’t watch this movie, but I did see a preview and thought about it afterwards. So the idea is that an attractive female lady (played by Gwyneth Paltrow, who if you don’t think is attractive then it doesn’t really matter, just try to keep reading my words) puts on some facial hair and then everyone thinks she is a handsome male man (see what I did there). She gets to be in plays, and the audience gets to think she’s a guy, but then they’re all shocked when it turns out she was just a she the whole time. Compelling, and it takes a couple hours. Here’s the thing though, what if no one in the audience was ever fooled by a lady who looked like her pretending to be a guy by simply applying whiskers? With so many years of just seeing male cast after male cast, they just figured that a female had been added with a beard to kind of ease them all into the social climate change. The shock at the end when she reveals herself to be female could have been caused by the audience legitimately thinking that she thought she was a boy, and the crowd feeling obliged to play along with the charade the whole time as to not shatter her gender bending fantasy. Maybe they were a socially enlightened audience that was cool with trannies, or maybe no one in the audience really gave enough of a shit to care if a lady wanted to be in a play. Maybe they all just sat there and watched a bunch of actors act out a bunch of plays because it passed the time. Maybe it didn’t matter who they were looking at as long as that fucking time passed.

The Nightmare Before Christmas*

Jack is a skeleton man who has the job of decorating the “real” world for holidays. He is bored. To break the monotonous holiday decorating cycle, he decides to decorate for a different holiday than the one he was assigned. Sort of like if you were tired of being a janitor, you could spice things up by cleaning up shit in a bathroom a couple buildings over.  Anyways, Halloween presents for Christmas = total chaos ensuing. Reviewing the details, I’m thinking that chaos may have ensued because people are pretty apathetic about holidays already, probably due to the fact that Claymation cartoons never seem to show up and decorate and give us presents. You know, now that I think about it, Claymation cartoons never seem to show up in general. Maybe the central theme of the movie wasn’t the shock of Halloween happening on Christmas, so much as it was the shock of anything happening on any day. Or maybe it was just that the Claymation people were visiting Jewish and Chinese families, who were shocked to even have any holiday happening on December 25?

*this article is not intended for children under 7, maybe putting the asterisk text below the text I’m referring to was poor planning on my part…