Fire Alarms and Dynamite

[robotech_master]

Came in to the lobby of the Hammons Tower for work this morning to the loud WOOP! WOOP! WOOP! and flashing strobe light of the fire alarm, along with a prerecorded message telling me to leave the building by the nearest available exit. So I lingered in the lobby near the door, where I could make a break for it if the ceiling suddenly collapsed in a shower of blazing embers, along with about two dozen other people—it was heating up outside even then, and nobody was really eager to go out into the head and humidity for what was probably a false alarm. The fire alarm shut off a couple of times, but came right back on again 30 seconds later. A few eyebrows were raised when a fire truck pulled up in the circle drive and two firemen trouped in, one of them wearing an oxygen rig and carrying an axe. They wandered in and out of various halls, presumably looking for a faulty alarm box or something; a couple of minutes later an all-clear was given and I proceeded upstairs to the office.

My parents are in town today; I'm going to be having lunch with my Dad. I plan to take him to Harpo's, as they have steak dinners on special on Wednesdays. I used to go there all the time, but I got kind of sick of eating steak all the time. (Talk about jaded.) I'm also going to be handing back to him Napoleon Dynamite, which he lent me and I watched half of. I know my Mom and Dad love that movie, but I just couldn't get into it. It reminded me too much of my own school days, when I was almost as unknowingly socially inept as Napoleon. Very high cringe factor.

I took the movie with me to the BioKinetic study clinic, just in case anyone else there wanted to watch it, and the comment one fellow participant made about it while looking over my selection stuck in my head. Something to the effect of, "It's stupid, but if you like it you think it's stupidly funny." I find I have to agree with what Roger Ebert has to say about it:

There is a kind of studied stupidity that sometimes passes as humor, and Jared Hess' "Napoleon Dynamite" pushes it as far as it can go. Its hero is the kind of nerd other nerds avoid, and the movie is about his steady progress toward complete social unacceptability. Even his victory toward the end, if it is a victory, comes at the cost of clowning before his fellow students.

We can laugh at comedies like this for two reasons: Because we feel superior to the characters, or because we pity or like them. I do not much like laughing down at people, which is why the comedies of Adam Sandler make me squirmy (most people, I know, laugh because they like him). In the case of Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), I certainly don't like him, but then the movie makes no attempt to make him likable. Truth is, it doesn't even try to be a comedy. It tells his story and we are supposed to laugh because we find humor the movie pretends it doesn't know about.

I don't know, I suppose it just drives home to me how different I am in some ways from my parents. They think it's funny because they never lived through it. I mean, honestly, how were they supposed to know what school was like for me? They weren't there with me. And if I say that this movie hits nerves because it's too close to my school experience, I don't think they really believe me. They're probably thinking I'm exaggerating, that nobody's school life could really be like that.

I kind of get the sense that the writer/director of Napoleon Dynamite might have made it as a form of catharsis, that he had much the same kind of school career as I did and this was his way of dealing with it. My own way of dealing with it is to try not thinking about it anymore. This movie makes it pretty hard.

Comments

[masonk.livejournal.com]

I was Napoleon, when I was in high school. Heck, the movie's even set close to the era I was in high school.

I think it's a sign of how far I've come since those days that I was able to laugh at and enjoy the movie.

[strix-an-stones.livejournal.com]

Napoleon Dynamite sucked. It wasn't funny, it wasn't feel good it wasn't even particularly enjoyable.