FernGully: The Last Homophobic Rainforest.

My childhood lies in ruins around me.

I loved FernGully: the Last Rainforest as a kid, though if I'd realized they'd smashed two words together like that while keeping the capital letters I might have reconsidered. And so I thought it would be fun to give it another viewing tonight while the love of my life worked on his NaNoWriMo word count and I knit him a scarf like the good fiancée I am.

And yeah, the pushy environmentalism is still there, and and yeah, fairies, and I had forgotten all about the unfortunate Robin Williams turn as a rapping experiment-abused bat, but still. The biggest surprise -- and remember, we just had us an election where domestic partnerships were very much on the table -- FernGully hates teh gays.

No, I am not making this up, I swear.

Exhibit A: the swishy queen of a lizard voiced by Tone Loc, who threatens in (a distinctly techno-ish) song to eat our hot young douche of a protagonist. (Seriously, he is the prototypical early 1990s movie douche: distant, mildly abusive, easily cool, uses words like "tubular," the whole bit.) The song's lyrics include: "I just can't control this hunger / I just can't seem to cut it back." And do you know why he ends up not eating the hot young douche? "Any friend of a fairy is a friend of mine." I mean, come on.

Exhibit B: As a kid, my favorite part of the movie was the song Hexxus sings about being evil. The villain's songs in an animated movie are always great -- and if you don't believe me, consider Ursula, Scar, Rasputin, and Gaston. And it's just as great and big-bandy as I remember. And it occurred to me that Hexxus was voiced by someone whose name I knew. And then it turns out that somebody is Tim Curry, and he's gasping and writhing and splooging his essence all around.



Sounds familiar, doesn't it? This number is right out of Rocky Horror. Our antienvironment villain who gets poisonous gunk all over everything is Dr. Frankenfurter.

At several times during his song, Hexxus eats himself. At one point he holds up a chainsaw that looks more like a cartoon penis since any cartoon penis outside of The Little Mermaid.

The movie was released in 1992 -- one year after Magic Johnson admitted he was HIV positive and Freddy Mercury died of AIDS. People were freaked out about AIDS, and rightly so, but very wrongly considered it a specifically gay problem.

Add to this the fact that our film's douchey hero and our really preternaturally stupid heroine essentially save the world with their douchey, stupid heterosexual attraction. Fertility is everything in this movie -- FernGully is basically one giant, teeming vagina (think of the name!) where nobody wears underwear -- and yeah, I suppose it makes sense that nonreproductive sexuality would constitute a threat. I mean, we all know nothing is gay in nature, right?

And maybe the homophobia comes about because FernGully obviously thinks women are magic. Sure, who can't make plants grow instantly just by cupping their palms over a seed? Whose hands don't glow blue when they want their significant others to share their powers of flight? Oh, that's right, everyone. And check out this screencap from the big romantic number. They swim through a long dark tunnel (!) and then kiss in the magical cavern on the other side, complete with giant boobs:



It would be easy to argue that this was a simple gender breakdown along familiar lines (nurturing female sexuality versus destructive male sexuality), were it not for the fact that we have a couple of heterosexual males firm in their defense of FernGully and its bass-ackwards inhabitants. But it's true this movie is also obsessed with the power of seeds and fertility. Representative quote: "All the magic of creation exists within a single tiny seed." This is first said as the elder female fairy hands over a magic glowing seed, while the other fairies fly around them, glowing green, but only from the waist down. At the end, it is echoed in the heroine's memory when she defeats Tim Curry by taking a seed from here:



And our heroine can only perform plant-growy-magic after she's fallen in love with the hero. No, hetero sex is just fine with FernGully.

Admittedly, that's Elton John playing over the end credits, so maybe I'm wrong about all this. But then, the soundtrack also features Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Sheena Easton, and Raffi. Tone Loc's number is written by Jimmy Buffett and Mr. Utley. The music's a big old mess, is what I'm saying.

Maybe it just bugs me that our idiot heroine ignores hot redheaded Christian Slater in favor of a blond condescending asshat who impresses the stupid, stupid fairies with his Walkman. God, fairies are morons.

Masterpiece, my ass.

There are a few things I would like to say to Jimmy Stewart after my first viewing of Hitchcock's "Vertigo," and since I am trying to study for a Finnish exam I am going to write them first in Finnish and then retranslate. Because, let's face it, retranslated English is comedy gold.

Perkele, Jimmy Stewart! Minä en ollut koskaan katsonut "Vertigo"-elokuvaa. Aina minä kuuluin, että oli tosi hyvä elokuva, että näyttelijät olevat tosi rohkeat. Joo, kaikki rakastaa tätä elokuvaa.

Mutta en minäkään. Haluaisitko sinä miksi, Jimmy Stewart? Voisinko minä ilmoittaa? Koska sinä et ollut kilti, Jimmy. Elokuvan ensimäisessä osassa sinä rakastuit Kim Novakiin, ja oli ihmeellistä, oli kaunista. Mutta toisessa osassa Kim Novak kuoli, vaikka hän ei ollut oikeestaan kuollut, ja sinä tuli hulluksi. Sitten taas sinä tapasit Kim Novakin kanssa, ja taas rakastuit häneen. Mutta sinä halusit että toisen Kim Novakin tulla ensimäiseksi Kim Novakiksi -- sinä ostit vaatteet, sinä muutit hänen tukan vären! Hän ei ollut onnellista, mutta hän rakasti sinua. Sitten sinä oppit että ensimäinen Kim Novak ei ollut kuollut -- että toinen oli ensimäinen -- ja sinä päätit tappaa häntä! Ja tämä ei ollut ihmeellistä. Ei ollut kaunista. Nyt inhoan sinua, Jimmy Stewart. Minä menen katsomaan "Rear Window"-elokuvaa taas.

Oh, and by the way, there are going to be spoilers in this. Read ahead and save yourself the trouble.

Goddammit, Jimmy Stewart! I had never seen the movie "Vertigo." Always I heard, that it was a really good movie, that the actors were really fearless. Oh yeah, everyone loves this movie.

But not me. Would you like to know why, Jimmy Stewart? Should I inform you? Because you weren't nice, Jimmy. In the movie's first part you fell in love with Kim Novak, and it was wonderful, it was beautiful. But in the other part Kim Novak died, but she hadn't really died, and you went crazy. Then again you met Kim Novak, and again you fell in love with her. But you wanted the second Kim Novak to become the first Kim Novak -- you bought clothes, you changed the color of her hair! She wasn't happy, but she loved you. Then you learned that the first Kim Novak hadn't died -- that the second was the first -- and you decided to kill her! And this wasn't wonderful. It wasn't beautiful. Now I hate you, Jimmy Stewart. I'm going to go watch "Rear Window" again.

Diseased Ovines and Spilled Beer: Not a History of Scotland

The benefits of studying a foreign language are etc. etc. But also, there are tongue-twisters.

I once came across a list of Finnish ones. Finnish is a tongue with a relatively limited supply of phonemes -- in fact, to the Indo-European eye it looks as though a typist has fallen asleep on the letters k, p, and t -- which means the potential for the kind of repetition upon which the tongue-twister thrives is fairly high. Reading the list (with its handy translations) was a delight, and one in particular was so appealing a sentiment that I promptly undertook to memorize it:

Ääliö, älä lyö! Ööliä läikkyy!

Idiot, don't hit! The beer is spilling!

Now, the Finnish front vowels -- ä, ö, and always y -- bedevil an English speaker such as myself, but still it took very little time before this phrase was tripping gaily off my tongue. Among other things, it seemed useful: the impulse to prevent some drunken, thoughtless partygoer from upsetting one's own beverage -- say, onto the shoes or shirt of a person with whom one aspires to hook up -- is an abiding human motivation. But then again, is this phrase actually practicable? Doesn't its nature as a tongue-twister prevents its use in real life? After all, in English, if one should turn to a friend and say to them, "Pass the peeled poached pears, please, Peter," it comes across as repellently, abhorrently cute (NB: not the kind with puppies -- rather the kind with lisping children of adorable precocity and cherubism). And honestly the Finns are much less likely than the Americans to respond favorably to cute.

Also at issue here is the ease of repetition, which at length began to puzzle me. Finnish tongue-twisters rattle easily from my lips, but telling a simple anecdote in the same language is fraught with pitfalls; on the other hand my English has native fluency, but I cannot opine about the sixth sheik's sick sheep with anything approaching reasonable speed. Is this due to the difference between vowel pronunciation and the damnable fricative "sh" -- or is there in fact an inverse relationship between comprehension of a language and facility with its most deliberately challenging form? I am able to memorize the Finnish sentence as a mere progression of syllables -- almost as a musical rather than a linguistic phrase -- while I am forced to deal with the English one as a set of discrete units and images. And something about my awareness of these images short-circuits the relationship between my brain and my mouth. Bizarre.

But now, having brought up the idea of meaning, we can't get away from it. The meaning of a tongue-twister is an inherently paradoxical business. On the one hand, what the phrase means is entirely subordinate to the sound: 'the sixth sheik's sick sheep' is not at all the same as 'the sextile desert chieftain's diseased ovine.' At the same time, no legitimate tongue-twister strings words together randomly. There is always the pretense of a story, even if that story makes no sense. Case in point: Peter Piper. How in the hell did the peppers get pickled before being picked? Or take sinful Caesar, in whose time snifters had yet to be invented. And what happens to those anachronistic snifters when he proceeds to seize his knees? A further sampling from Finland proves this odd quality is international:

Vesihiisi sihisi hississä.
The sea-monster was hissing in the elevator.

Höyhen löytyi yöllä työpöydältä.
A feather was found on the work bench in the night.

What is really at stake here is nothing less than the purpose of language. Generally our culture falls into two camps on this topic: 1) language as code, as a means of carrying information that is separate from mere human memory, and 2) language as fantasy, as imagination, as symbolic somehow of the real (or some unreal) world. What tongue-twisters point to is the elusive idea of language as specifically aural, a notion which only a very few poets these days really remember, in our world of type and text and videography. Sound, for all our musicophilia, is growing increasingly less important to language: it's strange even to think that the great poets of the ancient world wrote and performed works of staggering length and complexity without writing any of it down. (So far as we know -- but Milman Parry makes a good case.) And somehow -- and it necessitates stating at the outset that I still don't quite know how this tangent struck me as relevant, but I can't get it out of my head -- I thought about action movies. The lines we all remember, the quotes that become cultural currency -- it's at least partially because of the sound. Our greatest and most recognizable action stars: Sean Connery, Arnold Schwarzenegger (way less awesome as a politician than an actor -- a sort of reverse Reagan), Clint Eastwood, Sylverster Stallone, John Wayne, Robert de Niro, Bruce Willis -- all of them have something distinctive in the way they speak, whether it's an accent (Connery, Scwarzenegger, Wayne) or merely an inflection (Eastwood, Willis -- who, come to think of it, kind of sounds like Clint Eastwood). Lines that have virtually no linguistic content out of context -- "I'll be back," "The day is mine, Trebek!" -- become verbal milestones. The cinema studies world is crying out for an aural analysis of the action genre and its contribution to characterization. Maybe this also explains the lack of similar stardom in van Damme and Segal. Sorry, guys, you just didn't have the right sound.