There Will Be Questions
My boyfriend and I recently saw There Will Be Blood,
and we've had a bit of a debate ever since. [Warning: spoilers ahead.] Early in the
movie, Paul Dano comes to Daniel Day Lewis' character and introduces himself as
Paul Sunday. Later, Day-Lewis meets Eli, also played by Paul Dano.
My question is, did Paul Sunday exist, or was
Eli simply crazy? I, personally, thought his existence was made clear when Eli
attacked his father and blamed Paul for the problems the family had been
having. The boyfriend, however, thought that Eli was simply crazy and that near
the end of the film, when Eli tells Daniel Plainview that his investments dried
up, he's talking about the money Plainview gave Paul at the beginning, in
exchange for the information about the oil on the Sundays' land. So which is it?
Does Paul Sunday exist? Or is it never made clear either way?
Brian
There Will Be Blood superfan Josh Modell
responds:
The first time I saw it, I thought that Paul and
Eli were the same person, at least until later in the movie, and that there was
some sort of wink when Eli and Daniel first "met." On subsequent viewings, I
think they're definitely different people, brothers. Though it is a little
confusing, I can't imagine Paul Thomas Anderson doing that on purpose, leaving
us hanging about the question of whether Paul Sunday is real.
Here's support for your theory that they're two
different people—a
Hollywood.com interview in which Anderson explains why Paul Dano
plays both roles:
HW: Originally Paul Dano was only supposed to play the
role of Paul Sunday, and then it was expanded for him to play Eli Sunday. Can
you talk about expanding that?
PTA: We had an actor, and it didn't really work out;
and we had Paul—and he was in a small part. We thought, "God, why is he
in such a small part?" And then, better yet, maybe because of my obsession with East Of Eden,
I thought, "Well, they've got to be twins, right?" I had actually been talking
to a friend at the moment that all of this was happening, who was also telling
me about his twin brother. I thought it was too good to pass up.
In addition, it's worth noting that in the
official script, available online, Paul is introduced as "A YOUNG KID
(Paul Sunday aged 16)," and Eli is introduced as "…a very skinny man/boy, the
son: ELI SUNDAY (aged 18)." So as interesting as it is, I can't subscribe to
the "Eli is crazy, there is no Paul" theory; they clearly started out as
different characters, and there's nothing specific in the movie to suggest that
Anderson decided otherwise.
And incidentally, the money he invested would've
been the $5,000 that Plainview gave to the church after being "saved"—the
promised but long-owed "down payment" on the $10,000 that Eli initially
demanded for his church. (At the end of the film, Eli demands the other $5,000,
with interest. You probably remember where that leads.)
The Mah Nà Mah Nà Phenomenon
I love the fact that TV commercials for Big
Lots use a naggingly familiar tune that first infected my brain in childhood
(where I think it involved Billy Barty running around in a green Martian suit,
but maybe that's just me. Ricky Gervais did an a cappella version of it, either
on The
Office or as an outtake on one of the DVDs.
It goes (I know this never works) something
like this: "Ma-na-ma-na! / Doo-dooo-da-dooodoo / Ma-na-ma-na!" Do you have any
idea what the name of that tune is? If I call it by its true name, maybe I can
make it go away.
Gobal
Keith Phipps has an answer:
Sometimes it does work, especially when the chorus
is just a bunch of nonsense syllables, and the person you're asking has heard
them a bunch of times. The song is "Mah Nà Mah Nà," by Italian soundtrack
composer Piero Umiliani. First released in 1968, it was written for the Italian
film Svezia, Inferno E Paradiso (Sweden: Heaven And Hell). I've seen only clips of
it, but it appears to be a documentary in the "mondo" genre that thrived in the
1960s after the success of the 1962 film Mondo Cane. Exploitative
travelogues, mondo films featured "shocking" cultural practices from around the
globe, often staged and always with a special emphasis on sex and violence. The
form reached its terminal velocity with the Faces Of Death series, but enjoyed a
short window of respectability. Mondo Cane was even up for the Palme D'Or.
But I digress. "Mah Nà Mah Nà" debuted as the
accompaniment to a topless sauna scene. And here it is! But be warned, the clip
cuts off before it gets NSFW:
Released as a single, Umiliani's song
became a minor hit worldwide and a popular background tune for comedy shows.
(Maybe even one involving Billy Barty and Martians. Who knows?) But it reached
critical mass thanks to Jim Henson's Muppets, who performed it on The Ed
Sullivan Show, Sesame Street, and, most famously, The Muppet
Show, where it became a number by "Mahna Mahna And The Snowths." It
looked like this:
Umiliani, who died in 2001, worked
tirelessly in film from the '50s through the '80s, composing music for every
popular Italian genre film from spaghetti Westerns to sexploitation movies
while creating lounge-y jazz on the side. A good chunk of that work has found
its way to CD and online download services like eMusic and if you're a fan of
film scores, especially Ennio Morricone, I can't recommend it highly enough.
Also: Mah Nà Mah Nà!
The
Extra B Is For BYOBB
I
have been reading Keith Phipps' Box Of Paperbacks blog entries and thinking
back on the huge boxes of classic science fiction that my parents had in their
garage. For a while now, I've been trying to recall the name of an essay from a
collection of short stories and essays—I think it was by Asimov or Arthur
C. Clarke—and over the years, in fits of curiosity and boredom, I've
searched the online table of contents for every one of their collections I
could find, but I can't seem to locate the essay. In it, the author describes a
means of simplifying the spelling of English. He suggests that every year, a
letter be removed and another re-tasked. Each time he makes the suggestion, he
begins spelling that way, until it is almost impossible to read. I don't recall
the name and I'm not sure of the author, any ideas?
Sean
Donna Bowman is lucky enough to have a name that's spelled
perfectly sensibly:
If I were a sadist, Sean, I'd write this answer in reformed
spelling, of the kind that Melville Dewey (inventor of the Dewey Decimal
System) advocated. I'm sorry—that should be Melvil Dewey, since he
simplified the spelling of his own first name, though he balked at changing his
last to "Dui."
Dewey's efforts in the 1920s, as well as those of other
famous reformists like H.G. Wells, Andrew Carnegie, and George Bernard Shaw,
inspired the creation of the short-short story you remember. Titled "Meihem In Ce Klasrum," it appeared in the science-fiction
periodical Astounding Stories in September 1946. The author, W.K. Lessing
(writing under the pseudonym Dolton Edwards) advanced a modest proposal in
which each year, the president would nominate a single spelling simplification,
which would then be implemented. By eliminating useless letters and
counterintuitive combinations gradually, year by year, written language would
be improved at a pace that the American public could accept.
The gimmick, of course, is that the essay's spelling scheme
changes every time a reform is mentioned. The first simplification is the
elimination of the soft "c" (substituting "s" for all occurrences), followed by
the elimination of "c" altogether (since "k" can be used for its other sound).
After Lessing gets rid of double letters and instituting phonetic diphthongs,
the real craziness begins:
In
1951 we would urg a greit step forward. Sins bai this taim it would hav ben
four years sins anywun had usd the leter "c," we would sugest that the
"National Easy Languag Wek" for 1951 be devoted to substitution of "c" for
"Th." To be sur it would be som taim befor peopl would bekom akustomd to
reading ceir newspapers and buks wic sutsh sentenses in cem as "Ceodor caught
he had cre cousand cistls crust crough ce cik of his cumb."
By 1975, all superfluous letters would be removed from
circulation. "Even Mr. Yaw, wi beliv, wud be hapi in ce noleg cad his drims
fainali keim tru," the author triumphantly concludes.
You probably read the story in Isaac Asimov Presents: The Great SF Stories
8, which
collected the piece as one of the best of 1946. It's understandable that the
prolific master's habit of slapping his name on books he didn't actually write led
you on a wild goose chase.
Versions of "Meihem In Ce Klasrum" have enjoyed renewed (if
pseudepigraphous) life as e-mail forwards in recent years. One is attributed to
the European Union; another purports to be the work of Mark Twain. But Cornell
Kimball (or is that Kornel Kimbal?) of the Simplified Spelling Society investigated both in 2002, and find that more than likely they
are rewritten versions of Lessing's original satire. (Both employ the "one
reform per year" trope, and both have the same basic order of spelling
changes.) The EU e-mail is a joke through and through, and the Twain piece is
nowhere to be found in that author's collected writings.
If your fixation on this short story inspires you to get rid of the
horrible randomness of the suffixes -able and -ible, we'll be in your debt
forever, Shawn. (I assume you'll change your name so we won't all be thinking
"seen" when we read it, like we do now.)
Stumped
No More!
As
is so often the case, we threw a lot of questions your way last week, and you
came through for us:
Elizabeth was looking for a movie
that "was only on around Christmas, and was about a little goblin prince (part
of a clan of goblins that lived in a cave in the mountains) who really hated
his nasty, evil family and wanted to be good. The goblin ran away from the
mountains, met a little girl with blond braids (the entire thing was very
Scandinavian) and a pair of gnomes, husband and wife with tall pointy
hats—and (long story short) eventually converts to Christianity and
becomes a gnome through the love of Jesus." Many people wrote in to confirm
that this is The Little Troll Prince, an hourlong 1985 TV special featuring the vocal
talents of Don Knotts, Cloris Leachman, Vincent Price, and Jonathan Winters,
in addition to cartoon-voice staples like Frank Welker and Rob Paulsen. A
little digging reveals that it was animated by Hanna-Barbera (which would
explain the familiar visual style), but funded by the International Lutheran
Laymens League (which would explain the overt Christian content).
You
can "enjoy" music and video clips from it here:
Kirby was also looking for a kids' film, "about these
little puppet people from another dimension who came to earth and stayed hidden
with this girl in her house in the suburbs, where she was hiding them from her
parents. The puppets looked kind of like Cabbage Patch Kids." Group consensus
says this is another 1985 TV special, The Hugga Bunch. Some people who wrote in
remember specific scenes that Kirby was asking about, but The A.V. Club was unable to stomach more
than about 60 seconds of the damn thing to confirm it. The whole special is
painfully available on YouTube, in suicide-inducing segments:
Benjamin was wondering
which Star Wars book claimed that "Boba Fett slept without an
alarm clock, his ninja-like abilities allowing him to rise from sleep on
command." Geeky fans are split between whether this is from a story in the
collection Tales From Jabba's Palace or from Tales Of The Bounty
Hunters—both reportedly include Boba Fett stories. Jabba's
Palace got a lot more votes as the overall source, but the only person to
cite a specific story by name was "Talmanes," who thinks it's a Bounty
Hunters installment called "A Barve Like That": "It's about a
conversation Fett has with another person trapped in the belly of the Sarlacc.
The title is a variation on the old joke about the three-legged cow, which I
will not retell (as it features heavily in the story, which is surprisingly
good)." If the Sarlaac-stomach thing seems familiar, Benjamin, you might start
there.
Chris said, "I
remember catching the tail end of a science-fiction movie (possibly a short
piece) featuring a man playing a futuristic game of chess on a glass board with
stylized chrome geometric laser-firing tank-like pieces. He was playing said
game against a kind of apelike alien who, when beaten, screamed horribly, and
the bearded human protagonist was beamed outside of some kind of pyramid. It
was that weird." Board commentator Chris S pointed us to "Quest," a
short film "directed in 1983 by Saul and Elaine Bass. Yes, the Saul Bass of
countless movie title sequences and corporate logos. It was based on a short
story by Ray Bradbury and even features Barrett Oliver of The
Neverending Story fame in a small role." He even kindly provided the relevant
footage via YouTube. Way to go, Chris. And way to go, Ray Bradbury, still the
reigning source of Ask The A.V. Club questions.
Next week: Star, or porn star? Plus
reasons to care about producers. Send your questions to
[email protected].