August 30, 2009: Gremlins
Gremlins (1984) was another in the stream of 1980s movies for which I’ve braced myself when revisiting, because some of them really hold up and are timeless, and others clearly don’t rise above their era. Gremlins, for me, is one of the latter.
Gremlins, for those who aren’t familiar, is a story of a father (a travelling inventor/salesman) who brings his son Billy a strange pet for Christmas, which he finds in a creepy Chinatown shop. The palm-sized little creature (known as a mogwai, and named Gizmo) emotes as a human, of course, and provides plenty of cute factor for the kids. Needless to say, the three simple rules for caring for this new addition to the family – don’t expose him to bright light, don’t get him wet, and don’t feed him after midnight – are violated one by one and we witness the results as things fly out of control in this small town after the cuddly creatures turn into nasty, ugly Gremlins. Can Billy and his hot new girlfriend (played by Phoebe Cates, very popular at the time in large part due to her co-starring role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High a couple of years earlier) save the day?
I was around 10 years old when this was released in theatres, and managed to see it twice, which was very unusual for me at the time. I recall loving it, and what I remembered most were the opening sequence in the Chinatown shop, the father’s strange inventions, and the cozy scenes in Billy’s attic bedroom where he got to know Gizmo and where the first occasions of the rule-breaking occurred. I didn’t recall much about the second half of the movie, aside from the iconic scenes of the theatre filled with Gremlins eating popcorn and watching a movie. I watched this with my wife and 11-year-old son, figuring that if this was OK for me when I was 10, it was probably an OK movie for kids.
It seems we were wrong, and I remain confused about who the target audience actually was, unless movies for kids 25 years ago simply weren’t sanitized the way they are now. Of course, when I point out that kids’ movies today are “sanitized”, even that is a perverse claim, since they still throw in plenty of sexual innuendo, violence as long as it’s not against human characters and doesn’t cause permanent injury, and bathroom humour for cheap laughs. Gremlins doesn’t contain any more sexual tension than you’d expect among young adults and their budding movie romances, and the bathroom humour isn’t there, but the violence is over the top in a disturbing way for a movie which is marketed to children. More on that later. Additionally, we have a liberal sprinkling of racist and politically incorrect comments, including Chinese stereotypes, and a guy ranting about foreign cars as if people from other countries couldn’t possibly build anything of quality (which itself is a curious foreshadowing of today’s typical American attitude and the offshoring of manufacturing). I turned to Roger Ebert’s original review of the film for some perspective, and I think it’s telling that he focuses on the movie cliché parody aspect of Gremlins and nowhere does he talk about this being aimed at children at all. That’s a good angle from which to approach the film, and on that level it works to some degree, but the marketing is clearly aimed at children and thus I declare Gremlins to be muddled in its intent and disappointing to revisit.
The film just seems to have aged really badly, in the way that some 1980s TV shows have, where it’s impossible not to cringe when watching them again and wondering who in their right mind thought this was good at the time. The heavy-handed metaphor for “gremlins” as the mysterious little monsters we like to blame when things go wrong with mechanical devices is demonstrated in the approach to the climax, with a number of fun little scenes of machinery breakdowns and the catastrophic results (curiously reminiscent of Dead Like Me), a montage played out with goofy music running the whole time. The only problem with this is that the malfunctions we witness cause death and serious injury and destruction – a woman’s stairway chair-lift goes haywire and shoots her out the top of her house and to her death on the street out front, wonky traffic lights cause major car crashes, the gremlins themselves attack people with knives and other weapons. The tone is jarring – is this a case of mischievous little creatures causing mayhem, or evil little creatures destroying lives and property? And in either case, how does this warrant silly music as we play it all for laughs? Going back to Ebert, parody of movie conventions explains the situation, but family entertainment it is not. And let’s not even get into the story Phoebe Cates tells about the death of her father, which is enough to give children nightmares just on its own. It’s almost like this movie wanted to be in the lighthearted but horror-violent adult-comedy tone of An American Werewolf in London, but was hampered by pressure to keep a PG rating. Notably, this was the other film in 1984 (along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) which triggered the push for the PG-13 rating in the US.
And in that pressure may lie the answer. In what may have been a sign of my movie obsession to come, pretty much all I remembered of the original trailer were the intro “Steven Spielberg presents Gremlins…” and the outro “…directed by Joe Dante”. This was in the era when Spielberg had all the Hollywood clout one could hope for but not enough time to direct all the movies he wanted to make, so he acted as executive producer on a huge pile of films, and Dante was one of the journeyman directors he could count on to not personalize the movie too much, so it would get made exactly as Spielberg wanted. With the prominent placement of Spielberg’s name in the marketing, the film got the desired attention. But Spielberg has always, with really very few exceptions, been known for keeping his movies fairly clean, content-wise, in order to keep his audiences general and BIG. I suspect he wanted to dabble in the burgeoning comedy-horror genre pioneered by John Landis with An American Werewolf in London a few years earlier, but didn’t have the guts to take it all the way and lose his popular audience, most importantly children and the related merchandising opportunities they would bring. He had seen his good friend George Lucas become a near-billionaire by that point with Star Wars merchandising tie-ins, and Spielberg’s own E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) a couple of years earlier was no slouch in that department either. Tell me you’re shocked that you could buy a wide variety of mogwai and gremlin action figures and other toys at Christmas time in 1984. In light of the controversy surrounding the updated re-release of E. T. recently, for which Spielberg digitally removed guns which were carried by some federal agents, I shudder to think what kind of havoc he would wreak on Gremlins if it were to be “updated” as well.
Alas, we won’t likely see Gremlins return to the forefront any time soon (despite a recent video re-release), and not just because it is a curious retro piece which has aged very badly, but because of the embarrassingly prescient coda which wraps up this tale and which is in fact a very fitting ending. The old man from the shop in Chinatown returns, after the Gremlins have been destroyed but not before they caused their fair share of destruction, to reclaim Gizmo and take him home (he did not initially permit the sale of the mogwai to Billy’s father – it was the shopkeeper’s son who arranged the deal). The old man quite bluntly suggests that the Chinese have the patience and temperament to keep the gremlins under control, pointing out that the over-the-top lazy consumer lifestyle is a conceit of the west. Billy’s father being an inventor of newfangled convenience gadgets of course only serves to emphasize this point. Seeing these scenes play out in the context of today’s US economic collapse and loss of manufacturing base, as China has patiently and quietly built its power and influence over the past 2-3 decades, is striking. Does it make it worth revisiting this movie, though? I wouldn’t say so.
Classic turns out not to be.
{ 1 } Comments