Savage Friday: Southern Comfort (1981)

[Editor's note: I did not finish my review of Martyrs [2008] in time to post today. Look for it Friday, November 3!]

“Instead of raising the tragic possibility that a subculture might disappear, Southern Comfort explores our anxiety that the dominant culture itself may be divided and destroyed.  [It] seems to suggest that destruction is the price of the desire to use -- rather than understand – another culture.”

-          Jeffrey H. Mahan, The Christian Century, December 16, 1981, page 1322.

“Southern Comfort” is not only a liqueur (a New Orleans original, so-to-speak…), but a turn of phrase that links a storied American region with ideas like relaxation, hospitality, and succor. 

Walter Hill’s 1981 film Southern Comfort plays ironically on the meaning of the term, and forges the director’s second effort -- after The Warriors (1979) -- that involves outnumbered soldiers trapped in harsh enemy territory and forced to fight every step of the way home.

But Southern Comfort is rather steadfastly not the urban fantasy of The Warriors. 

Instead, it’s a blistering social critique as well as a violent action film.  By setting his film in the year 1973 and featuring as his protagonists soldiers from the Louisiana National Guard, Hill crafts a film that, according to Michael Sragow in Rolling Stone, is a “parody of the military sensibility,” “a metaphor for the Vietnam War” and a “study of gracelessness under fire.”

Southern Comfort gazes at violence on a wide, almost institutionalized basis.  Specifically, it looks at the idea of a nation knowingly unloosing aggression and violence on a mass scale, often times by soldiers who are not educated about the nature of the enemy, are insensitive to cultural differences, and who – finally – crack under pressure. 

Can war ever be a moral “right?” And if so, does it matter who, specifically, a nation sends to war, and how those men wage that war?

These are not easy questions to answer. And these were not small issues in the days of Vietnam, a war that severely tested American beliefs about its own national might and moral rectitude.  Southern Comfort suggests a home-grown Vietnam culture-clash right here, inside our regional borders, and a so-called “primitive” culture dwelling side-by-side with the more “advanced,” dominant one.    

By making this sustained cinematic battle an intra-American one, so-to-speak -- American National Guard vs. American Cajuns -- Walter Hill allows viewers to see concepts not always readily apparent in the case of foreign wars, where patriotism can overwhelm reason and balance. In America we cherish and protect our right and responsibility to defend our homes and even our right just to be left alone, the very concepts that the Cajuns wage bloody war over in the film.  But when we’re the aggressors intruding in the territory of others, our values seem to change.  This film holds up a mirror to that paradox. It is an unromantic, non-idealized view of war and soldiers.  

Notice that I didn’t say negative view.  

The approach here is even-handed, revealing how soldiers can be smart and heroic, as well as misguided and out-of-control.  The trenchant idea seems to be that of the Pandora’s Box.  If you release men with guns into an untamed environment, where danger is everywhere, each will respond in his own way.  Some will find and adhere to a strong moral compass.  Others will degenerate into sadistic violence.

Furthermore, Southern Comfort suggests, as the quote from Jeffrey Mahan above observes, that a dominant culture out to “use” a weaker culture is actually the one in danger of being “divided and destroyed.”  That destruction comes about from a moral failure, the failure to contextualize “the enemy” as human, and understand the enemy on human terms.  Specifically, if we use our might just to take resources from others, or to argue for the assertion of our ideology in someone else’s land, we are in violation of our own cherished beliefs and values.  We say “don’t tread on me,” but if someone else has what we want, we tread on them with the greatest military machine in history.

This cerebral argument doesn’t make Walter Hill’s film any less tense or violent, but rather adds a layer of commentary to the savagery.  As critic Diane Hust wrote in “Heavy Symbolism Ravels Film’s Good Yarn” (The Daily Oklahoman, November 12, 1981): “These ‘civilized’ but allegedly trained soldiers fall apart in a blue-green otherworld, and even the likable heroes...have brutal and vulnerable sides that emerge during the ordeal.” 

The idea here is that all soldiers are not created equal, and until the crucible of combat occurs, it’s almost impossible to determine who will thrive, and who will succumb to cowardice, or animalistic brutality.  The film walks a delicate balance, but not everyone agrees it succeeds.  Vincent Canby at The New York Times noted that Walter Hill is “the best stager of action in practice,” but found the film to be “more an exercise in masochism than suspense.”  Yes, in some way, the same argument could be made of every entry in the Savage Cinema genre.

Time Magazine noted (derisively) that in Southern Comfort “everything is a metaphor for something else,” but that’s okay with me too.  When vetting extreme violence, I prefer that movies boast and reflect an intellectual point-of-view about that violence.  In other words, the violence becomes palatable and meaningful because we sense it is being applied to convey a point of intellectual merit.

In this case, Southern Comfort reminds us that once war is uncorked, and men are encouraged to rely on instinctive, violent impulses, all bets are off concerning outcomes. It also reminds us how people 
with guns can, in a moment of impulse spark a conflagration that can’t be controlled.

“Comes a time when you have to abandon principles and do what's right.”

In 1973, the Louisiana National Guard’s “Bravo Team” practices maneuvers in the bayou, tromping through nearly forty kilometers of treacherous and dangerous natural terrain.

Soon, the squad becomes lost and realizes it must procure transportation to traverse a river.  Accordingly, Sgt. Pool (Peter Coyote) orders the men to appropriate three Cajun canoes.  Worse, one of the soldiers, Stuckey (Lewis Smith) playfully opens fire on the Cajun owners. 

They don’t realize his weapon is loaded with blanks, and respond with sustained lethal force.  In the first attack, Sgt. Pool is shot down, and the Cajuns begin hunting down “Bravo Team.”

Inexperienced and scared, the reservists make a bad situation worse when they seek shelter at the home of a French-speaking trapper (Brion James), and blow up his house using dynamite.

As the reservists die in the swamp, one by one, the level-headed Spencer (Keith Carradine) and a transfer from Texas, Hardin (Powers Boothe) try to hold their own and maintain some sense of order and control.

They eventually escape the treacherous bayou, but end up in a remote Cajun village in the middle of nowhere…

“Well, you know how it is, down here in Louisiana, we don't carry guns, we carry ropes, RC colas and moon pies, we're not too smart, but we have a real good time.” 

Set in “the great primordial swamp,” Hill’s hard-driving polemic, Southern Comfort shreds typical bromides about “supporting the troops” and gazes instead, in rather even-handed at soldiers who are ill-prepared emotionally, intellectually and even physically in some cases, for their particular war.

Powers Boothe portrays Hardin, one of Southern Comfort’s main protagonists.  He’s a chemical engineer who recently transferred from Texas, and he immediately understands the brand of man he’s now training with.  He calls them “the same dumb rednecks” he’s been around his “whole life.” 

In short order, this descriptor proves tragically accurate. His fellow “soldiers” steal private property (canoes), and open fire – as a dumb joke! -- upon unaware American citizens, the local Cajuns. 

The same “dumb rednecks,” meanwhile, deride the Cajuns as “dumb asses” or primitives.  It’s true that director Hill has on occasion rejected the Vietnam metaphor encoded in his film, but it’s apparent that these soldiers view the Cajuns precisely as some Americans viewed “Charlie:” inferiors who couldn’t possibly pose a threat to modern, technologically-superior Americans.

Again, cementing this Vietnam allegory, the Cajuns in the film boast a strategic advantage because they are familiar with the harsh landscape of their “homeland.” 

Also, they resort to guerrilla tactics, deploying deadly booby traps and other hazards against the lost soldiers.  Like the Viet Cong, then, the Cajuns have been underestimated, and prove more resourceful and cunning than the forces of the more technologically-advanced culture. 

This is very much the same dynamic we see in another film Walter Hill produced, 1986’s Aliens.  There, the titular xenomorphs with their underground (sub-level) tunnels (hive) were grossly under-estimated by soldiers packing high-tech weaponry.  They were derided as “animals,” but they executed brilliant battle strategy.  The idea in both instances is the arrogance of military might, and the misapplication of military power.

Much of Southern Comfort finds the Guardsmen lost, confused, and running in circles as the Cajun hunters pick them off one at a time. Making the plight of the Guardsmen even more dangerous and harrowing, they lose their leader early on, in the equivalent of a decapitation strike.  

Also, and again repeating aspects of the Vietnam War dynamic, the Guardsmen are absolutely unable to distinguish allies from enemies, “good” Cajuns from “bad” ones.  They think (literally) that all the enemies look alike and capture and torture one Cajun man they are convinced must be the one that shot the sergeant.   In short, in “alien” territory, the members of Bravo Team are completely clueless about the nature of things. Yet this doesn’t stop them from acting aggressively, impulsively and violently.

Roger Ebert wrote persuasively about this metaphor, though notes the fact that it is plain early on: “From the moment we discover that the guardsmen are firing blanks in their rifles, we somehow know that the movie’s going to be about their impotence in a land where they do not belong.  And as the weekend soldiers are relentlessly hunted down…we think of the useless of American technology against the Viet Cong.”

Tremendous tension is generated throughout Southern Comfort not merely by the presence of the almost invisible, omnipresent enemy, but in the exploitation of another brilliantly-expressed (and, yes… politically incorrect) fear.  This is, simply, the fear that your comrade-in-arms is a redneck idiot who could do something stupid at any time. 

For the most part, and excepting one or two important characters, the members of Bravo Team prove that they are not trustworthy, capable or smart.  It’s a two-front war: battling the enemy, and battling “self.”  This again seems like a metaphor for The Vietnam War, where incidents including the My-Lai Massacre raised questions and concerns about the military’s behavior.

The ineptitude of the Guardsmen is also apparent in the team’s misuse of their resources. They continually waste their limited bullets, so that in the end they can’t even rely on their superior equipment.  Ironically the group is termed Bravo Team according to protocol right up until the very end, yet this group has never been a team, and one senses that this is why things go badly.  There is no camaraderie, no respect, and no trust.  These men are thrown together and have little in common.  Unlike the Cajuns, who work in silent tandem and strike without warning, the Guardsmen blunder and fail, except for a few – namely Hardin and Spencer -- who evidence common sense at least.

Southern Comfort shares core thematic elements with John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), though, as I’ve noted above, in a far more militaristic setting. Both films are set in treacherous, difficult landscapes.  Both films involve a diverse group of men who, individually, see things very differently.  And both films pit the “visitors” (or invaders) against another culture with superior knowledge of the landscape.

Southern Comfort adds to the Deliverance equation the dangerous and unpredictable factor of guns, and indeed, lots of them.   This addition changes the central dynamic a bit.  In Deliverance, the “invaders” on the river never actually did anything violent to the inbred mountain folk that attacked them.  Sure, they were insulting “city folks” who thought they knew better.  They didn’t belong on that river, and were rude to everyone they met.  But they didn’t strike back and wage war until their lives were on the line.  Their posture, in terms of violence, was largely self-defense.

In Southern Comfort, by contrast, Bravo Team steals property and opens fire on the Cajuns.  The Cajuns don’t have the luxury of “knowing” the attack occurred with blanks.  All they know is that they are suddenly under siege, on their own land.  The posture is different.  In this case, the Cajuns believe war is being waged against them.  And foolishly, Bravo Team has started that war.

The last thirty minutes of Southern Comfort are hair-raising and terrifying, as Hardin and Spencer survive the deadly traps and gun battles only to reach a Cajun village.  Hill provides a trenchant image of the soldiers’ plight here. They sit on the back of a Cajun transport, the truck carrying them to ostensible freedom. But placed nearby, in a key visualization, are two pigs trapped in cages.  The Guardsmen don’t realize it yet, but they are in as much imminent danger as the trapped animals. 

When the men reach the village and the increasingly fast, increasingly intense Cajun music becomes a near constant on the film’s soundtrack, the locals ominously ready two nooses in the center of town…either for Spencer and Hardin, or for the pigs.  This portion of the film, fostering ambivalence and paranoia, is almost unbearably suspenseful in my opinion.

Again, the soldiers (and the viewers too) have difficulty understanding this “foreign” enemy and discerning its motives.  In that “fog,” we begin to understand why people react fearfully and impulsively when in danger.  In essence, Hill makes us understand how terrifying it is to be in a place far from home, observing customs you can’t understand, and having to make “calls” that could result in your death.  This ability to place us in Hardin and Spencer’s shoes is one reason why the film doesn’t indict all soldiers.  It makes us “feel” their plight, and understand why mistakes happen.  Again, I count the film as pretty even-handed and judicious.  We see both really bad soldiers, and some really good ones.

Finally, the film ends in a frenetic, almost insane flurry of dancing, spinning and slow-motion, graphic violence as the Guardsmen are drawn into more battle, this time of a much bloodier, personal dimension.  The first time I watched this finale, I was literally up on my feet because it’s so damn intense, and because I felt so invested in the outcome.  Again, viewers wouldn’t feel that way if Hill were indicting all soldiers or making an anti-American film.

There’s no comfort at all in Southern Comfort, and that, finally, is the point.  The film effectively captures the “domino effect” that can occur once groups of armed men -- without leaders and without any real common sense, either -- start letting bullets fly.  Gunfire is a threshold that, once traversed, is difficult to come back from. “Survival is a mental outlook,” one character in the film insists.  Indeed, but survival is made exponentially more difficult when the guy in the fox hole next to you is a moron, or you don’t understand local customs, or you’re lost, or you’re out of bullets. 

This is the very crux of Savage Cinema ideas.  In the absence of safety and security, violence is, perhaps, inevitable. But in that situation I certainly hope there are level-headed guys like Spencer and Hardin around.  They fight to survive, but also never lose sight of the concept of civilization. 

Saturday Morning Cult-TV Blogging: Space Stars Episode #10 (November 14, 1981)

The tenth hour-long episode of Hanna Barbera’s Space Stars (1981) opens with a Space Ghost tale called “Space Cube of Doom.” 

A space lab is attacked while Space Ghost is engaged in a job assisting the Herculoids on Quasar. The heroes discover that the cube-like spaceship is controlled by Ultima, a “space” computer. 

Ultima plans to conquer the galaxy by eliminating human individuality. Ultima reprograms human minds to think like it does, and brainwashes Jan and Jace as its first victims. Space Ghost must free them from this slavery, and trick Ultima into brainwashing himself (itself?)

The second story of the week is “Wordstar,” starring Teen Force. Here, Uglor intercepts a crashed spaceship and finds a chip that grants him total and complete power.

The Herculoids star in “Space Trappers,” a story which sees them captured by an intergalactic circus. This is the same plot, essentially, as the 1942 movie Tarzan’s New York Adventure. We have our Tarzan, Jane and Boy in Zandor, Tara and Dorno, and the Herculoid beasts of Quasar double as the animal friends of the Great Escarpment.

The second Space Ghost episode of the hour is called “The Time Master” and it involves a criminal named Tempus who is using his power to reverse a planet’s time-line, making it a prehistoric world.

The Space Ace episode of the week is called “Galactic Vac is back” and it is a low-point even for this show. Here, the villain “Galactic Vac” flies around the galaxy in a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking up objects I hopes of becoming rich. When he is captured by Space Ace and Astro-mutt, Galactic Vac’s punishment is to hold a “galactic garage sale” where he gives back everything his space vacuum sucked up.

The Space Stars Finale episode of the week is “Uglor Conquers the Universe, and it’s pretty much exactly what is sounds like. Uglor uses the energy of a neutron star to come a giant in space. “I am the universe!” he declares. The Teen Force and the Herculoids team up to stop him, using the long-abandoned technology of the City of the Ancients on Quasar to get the job done.

At the end of the episode, one character notes “with great power comes great responsibility.” Where have I heard that before?

Yes, this is a series that steals from the very best (like Stan Lee, and Marvel) and yet is still the pits.

The Space Magic segment this week has Jan and Blip doing a card trick. The Space Fact involves the birth and deaths of stars. Supernovas are discussed, and featured as part of the Space Mystery.

Next week -- at last -- the final episode of Space Stars!

The Films of 1981: Heartbeeps

A science fiction film directed by Allan Arkush (Rock’n’Roll High School [1979]), starring Andy Kaufman (1949-1984) and Bernadette Peters, and featuring Academy Award-nominated special effects/make-up by the great Stan Winston doesn’t seem likely to be one that would fall into near-total obscurity.

But that’s pretty much what has happened to Heartbeeps (1981).

I remember reading about the film -- with great curiosity and anticipation -- in the pages of Starlog. 

The magazine even devoted a cover photo to the science fiction comedy in December of 1981, for its 53^rd issue.

Btu then the movie pretty much disappeared from existence, though Kaufman memorably offered refunds to any viewers, during a famous appearance on David Letterman’s late night show at the time.

In terms of critical reviews, the film wasn’t exactly received positively, either.

Vincent Canby, writing for The New York Times, wrote that Heartbeeps was “a three-minute television sketch stretched to last nearly 90 unbearable minutes.”

His insult is actually a slight exaggeration. 

The movie barely runs 75 minutes.

In 2002, on the film’s re-issuing in the secondary market, The A.V. Club’s Nathan Rabin noted that Heartbeeps is an “overlooked, nearly forgotten” film that “deserves to stay that way.”

TV Guide’s review of the film tracks closer to what I deem a fair assessment, and aligns with my own response to the movie. The magazine terms Heartbeeps “likable and sentimental,” with some moments of “indisputable charm.”

This strikes me as an accurate sentiment. Because of Kaufman’s presence, I believe, critics were expecting some kind of anarchic, edgy, adult entertainment.  

Instead, Heartbeeps is a gentle, even sweet, science fiction movie aimed squarely at kids. That's the basis, it seems to me, upon which to review it, or assess its merits as a work of art.

On those grounds, the film is indeed occasionally charming, and at the very least, far less offensive than some of the poisonous reviews indicate. 

Why?

Well, Heartbeeps features a very human heart in terms of its central characters, and their quest to understand why they are “alive” is affecting on some level.  The purpose of science fiction, especially in terms of the cinema, is to somehow reflect or comment on human existence. 

Heartbeeps reaches that benchmark, though not always elegantly, and not always humorously.  The film’s make-up and robot designs, however, nicely gloss over many of the movie’s notable deficits.

“What is the definition of God?”

Three robots -- inexperienced in the nature of humanity -- escape from a repair factory and go on a “fact-finding mission.”

Pursued by a relentless robot called Crimebuster Deluxe, two of the escapees, Val Com (Andy Kaufman) and Aqua (Bernadette Peters,) fall in love and construct a robot, Philco (Jerry Garcia).  

They soon realize that Philco has no self-protection mechanism, and begin to develop “the concept of family.”  They realize they must care for him. They must act as his parents.

But Crimebuster, who is equipped with dangerous weapons, including a flame-thrower, is closing in on them.

“There’s so much information I want you to have.”

Andy Kaufman boasts such a powerful reputation as a comedic force of chaos and non-conventionality that to this day -- 30-some years after his demise -- some people insist his death was actually a joke, a con. 

These people believe Kaufman is actually still alive, and that -- at any moment -- he will re-appear to deliver the joke’s punch-line.  They see him as a figure of almost God-like comedic instincts, not to mention patience.

With that kind of reputation, it is easy indeed to understand why Kaufman fans -- and critics familiar with his work too -- feel absolutely underwhelmed by Heartbeeps. The film is not at all of this nature. 

It is neither anarchic, nor cynical.  It is not shocking, surprising, or all that sharp, either.

Heartbeeps is not unconventional at all in its approach, and quite conventionally uses the science fiction format to ask questions about human existence.  The film is sincere, in other words, not seeking to be taken as a “big joke.”  

Nor is it a set-up for edgy, envelope-pushing comedy.

Instead, Heartbeeps is plainly and simply about two machines who wake up one day to realize that they are alive, and that they want the freedom of self-determination.  These robots, Val and Aqua, question the nature of life, even asking questions about God. 

They construct a son, and soon -- despite their mechanical nature -- find themselves acting as protective parents. In becoming a family, they became more alive than before, and the film emotionally speaks about the sacrifices parents make for their children.  Val and Aqua do that too. 

The jokes here are not revolutionary, and not hard-edged, for certain. Instead, the filmmakers have the robots joke about the way that men and women relate…even though Val and Aqua are machines.  Aqua is unsatisfied with Val’s level of communication, for instance, reporting that she requires “maximum input” in terms of his output. In other words, he just doesn't relate enough.

These gentle, amusing, but not particularly funny or sly jibes, are aimed at making the audience understand humanity better.  

Consider: the robots desire the same things we all do. They wish to know why they are here, and what their purpose in life is. When they have that child, like so many of us, they feel that their sense of purpose is renewed.  Val seems to come to life, realizing that as a father, he has an obligation to show his son the world.  Aqua makes the sacrifices a mother would make her for baby, almost literally running out of power -- and dying -- to nourish him.

The Crimebuster-related material in the film is a bit more fun. 

This malevolent robot, which looks like a dalek-mounted on a tank (and is constructed, actually, from the Six Million Dollar Man’s “death probe”) goes all ED-209 on his prey, before ED-209 was a glimmer in RoboCop’s eye. 

Specifically, the pursuit robot goes on a relentless, destructive hunt in search of its quarry, the escaped robots. One moment sees the machine singing America the Beautiful while shooting at wild-life in a forest. 

Not all robots, we come to understand from his example, cherish life, or family.  Some robots -- like some people -- are committed not to love and family, but to a savage curtailment of the freedom of others.

Yes, Heartbeeps miraculously finds ways to waste Christopher Guest and Melanie Mayron. 

Yes, the film fails to really make the best or cleverest use of Andy Kaufman's comedic gifts, strait-jacketing him in a sincere, fish-out-of-water role.

And yes, the film’s pleasures are relatively minor, even modest. There are no tremendous threats in the film for the robots to face, and no scenes that really stand out in the memory, either. Heartbeeps is a simple journey about two robots that awaken to consciousness, but told in a distinctly minor key.

And yet I can’t really find it in my heart to “hate” the film as so many critics seem to do. 

I like the weird robot costumes/devices and performances, and figure that if a gentle kid’s comedy can find the time and energy to discuss the mysteries of human life and free will, as a reviewer I can at least give Heartbeeps credit for attempting to be about something more than dumb jokes. 

I would agree that earnestness, gentleness and sincerity may not be the best foundations upon which to build a rollicking comedy. 

Point ceded. 

Yet while this film’s funny bone may be broken -- or at least fractured -- Heartbeeps still has a pulse; a heartbeat.

Below, you can see Siskel and Ebert savaging Heartbeeps for its use of elements from other pictures (Star Wars and the Wizard of Oz, for example).  

In other words, they are actually criticizing the picture for being a pastiche.  Ironically, that's the very grounds by which they both, on other occasions, lauded Star Wars, Predator and other films.

Movie trailer: Heartbeeps (1981)

A Crisis in Confidence: The Economic Underpinnings of Time Bandits (1981)

"In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose…”

-President Jimmy Carter, July 15, 1979.

“God isn’t interested in technology.”

-Evil Genius (David Warner), Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981)

One of my favorite genre movies from childhood is Time Bandits (1981), which I saw with my father, Ken Muir, at the Royal Theater in Bloomfield, New Jersey when I was just eleven years old. 

The Terry Gilliam film is a rip-roaring, time-hopping comedy fantasy, and a story dramatized from a child’s perspective. The movie is droll, naughty, and like no other time travel film in sci-fi history. 

Why?

Well, for a film that so meticulously diagrams a hierarchy or order to the universe, Time Bandits is, actually relentlessly chaotic. In short, it's about destroying or overturning systems of order, not merely mapping them.

But the irreverent Time Bandits is more than that description suggests, as well.

Above, I quoted President Carter’s famous “malaise” speech of 1979, and in many ways, Time Bandits absolutely feels apiece with that historical context.

Gilliam’s film concerns a child of great imagination and dreams -- Kevin (Craig Warnock) -- who lives with parents that are enthralled with -- nay enslaved to -- “things,” like new appliances.

Where Kevin’s bedroom is filled with objects that spark his unbound imagination, like toys and books, his “zombie” parents simply tune out before the TV set watching brain-cell destroying programming such as “Your Money or Your Life.”

Kevin’s parents you see, must possess the latest tech toys so as to keep up with some external yardstick of success. That's the only way they can feel okay about themselves.

Like President Carter suggested, however, this obsession with things doesn’t seem to make them happy, or even fully alive.

If you’ve seen the film, you’ll remember well what comes next.

Kevin takes a rollicking trip through the space-time continuum with a group of renegade dwarves. 

Their physical dimensions conveniently permit the audience to “see” the world at approximately eye level with Kevin, and therefore to experience the adventure not as a jaded, consumption-concerned adult, but as an imaginative child who questions the way things are. 

To Kevin, life is wondrous, baffling, occasionally terrifying…but never dull. He is all about "tuning in," not tuning out, like his parents do.

Importantly, the film’s (anti)-heroic dwarfs, much like Kevin in his particular domestic situation, are also rebelling against a parental figure or societal structure: The Supreme Being (Ralph Richardson), or God, and his imperfect realm of Existence; the universe itself.

In some ways, the film even seems to suggest, rather boldly, that Authority is always the same, regardless of specific ideology. 

God and Evil (David Warner), are, in a way, one-in-the-same. They are both part of the same (corrupt?) system. Why? They both exist within the boundaries of a corrupt, unequal economic system.

Kevin travels with the bandits, and the film finally involves his reckoning, perhaps, that a rebellious, imaginative and independent mind-set is a quality that one should never surrender, or allow to be chipped away at; one appliance, one game show, one paycheck at a time.

“Dead? No Excuse for laying off work…”

Young, middle class Kevin (Warnock) is surprised when adventure comes to his humdrum middle-class life.

A group of renegade dwarfs in defiance of the Supreme Being (Richardson), have stolen a map to all the “time holes” in creation.  The time bandits travel from time period to time period not to learn or grow, but to loot and pillage, partly out of feelings of resentment towards their Maker, who has not given them proper credit for their contributions to Existence.

Kevin travels with the Time Bandits and is drawn into a remarkable adventure. He visits the deck of the Titanic at sea, France of Napoleon (Ian Holm), the Sherwood Forest of Robin Hood (John Cleese), and meets King Agememnon (Sean Connery) of Ancient Greece.

Unfortunately, Evil (Warner) also desires to possess the Map of Creation, so he can use the time holes for his own, malicious purposes. Kevin and the Time Bandits must there confront the madman in His Fortress of Ultimate Evil…

“The fabric of the universe is far from perfect.”

The crux of Time Bandits seems to be mankind’s uneasy relationship with material things, and therefore, by implicit logic, wealth.  

It’s a story, in some manner, obsessed with economics. Economics, after all, is defined as the study concerned “with the production, consumption, and transfer of material prosperity.”

Kevin’s parents are hyper-focused on the things they can own in the technological 20^th century. They covet things, like a two-speed hedge cutter, or a brand new toaster.

Ultimately, those things, symbolized by the toaster, literally kill them.

From the beginning, they are held rapt by the idea of owning new things; things that their neighbors (The Morrisons) do not. 

On TV, an announcer talks about “Moderna Designs and the latest in Kitchen Luxury: The Moderna Wonder Major All Automatic Convenience Center-ette” which “gives you all the time in the world to do the things you really want to do.”  

What do they want to do?  Watch more TV…

The Bandits themselves seek to rob and steal from all of Creation. Why? They are God’s workers, and he has not treated them well, or fairly. The bandits work long, unfulfilling hours, and get no credit for what they create.

To the Supreme Being goes all the glory.

So whether the bandits actually loot time and space to be rich, or to thumb their noses at God and his unequal realm is ultimately immaterial. Their status as unhappy workers is the thing which motivates their rebellion. 

At the film’s conclusion, their transgression is also punished, on explicitly economic terms.  The Supreme Being threatens them with “a 19% cut in salary…backdated to the beginning of time.”

The Establishment always wins, right?

This idea of inequality plays out in the film in a wicked visual fashion too.  Behind reality itself is the realm of Evil (and by extension, Good). This realm is hidden behind an "invisible barrier," or, to coin a term, a "glass ceiling." In other words, it is an unseen barrier that prevents those outside the Establishment from entering the Establishment.  You don't know it's there, but it's omnipresent.

"So that's what an invisible barrier looks like," one character quips.

Robin Hood too is contextualized, amusingly, in Time Bandits as a figure associated with economics. Traditionally, we note that this hero steals from the rich and gives to the poor.  The film describes his action differently.

Robin Hood is a man who believes “there is still so much wealth to re-distribute.” 

And the Evil Genius, of course, is obsessed with material things like lasers and tanks. He champions technology, specifically, and believes that his understanding of it will make him a master of the universe. 

He understands, for example “digital watches,” and claims to have growing knowledge of “video-cassette recorders and car telephones.” 

Ultimately, and prophetically, he wants to understand computers. “when I have an understanding of computers,” he dreams, “I shall be the Supreme Being.”

In short, the control of  the production of material things that people desire transform a captain of industry into…God. At least in the Evil Genius’s eyes.

Each one of these characters sees ownership of things, control of things, as the reason to exist.  They are all flawed characters in some ways, and they echo the line of dialogue that the fabric of the universe is far from perfect.

Kevin is an exception, of course.

He is loyal and loving, imaginative and curious. He doesn’t see life as an opportunity to accumulate wealth, or to possess things.  Kevin's bedroom exemplifies the fact that he lives in an economy of ideas.  

Toy soldiers, books, posters and other things are all around him there. They are not products, however, for consumption, in the strictest sense.  They are avatars, instead, for imagination itself. They help Kevin seek not things, but knowledge.

Most of all, Kevin seeks a place of belonging, and an opportunity to encounter someone who really loves him. When Agemenon, a father figure, asks Kevin “Who sent you? The Gods?” Kevin may be asking himself he same question.  

Finally, someone who seems to love life and experience and adventure, and is interested in the things Kevin is. Most importantly, as Kevin notes, money is “not important” to Agememnon.

At the end of the film, when technology destroys Kevin’s parents, Agememon re-appears, but as a modern fireman. 

This development seems to suggest that even in our technological epoch, we can still find kindred spirits who don’t see wealth as being more important than “hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God.”

What’s so daring and indeed anarchic about Time Bandits is the idea that revolution and rebellion are good things.  

The notion seems to be that the existing order -- epitomized by the TV show title “Your Money or Your Life” -- isn’t worth fighting for or improving.  Instead, it actually needs to be blown up. Kevin becomes an orphan when his parents die, and yet the movie has a happy ending, doesn’t it? 

Kevin leaves behind his parents and their obsession with things for a relationship about life, not consumption, with that firemen as father-figre. 

Personally speaking, this idea is not appealing to me.  Contrarily, I believe that incremental change, over time, can improve human life significantly. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will a 21^st century utopia. 

So I don’t believe you need to destroy a village in order to save it. But I absolutely credit with Time Bandits of courageous ambition and follow-through. It doesn't chicken out.

Consider, Kevin has seen that the “fabric of the universe” is not perfect.  

Not only is the Supreme Being fallible/duplicitous (in regards to ownership of the map), but egotistical. 

The Evil Genius even calls him a lunatic. 

But more to the point, the Supreme Being and Evil are two sides of the same coin, just as ‘ownership’ of things has two faces: the face of those who have things, and those who want things. There are those who want to keep what they have (and make policy to keep it), and those who want to take what others own, and re-distribute it.

Kevin learns in his travels to be wary of those on both sides of the equation; that Evil itself dwells in the wealth that is to be protected, or re-distributed. Specifically, a piece of ‘evil’ finds a home in his parents’ toaster.  

The way to succeed and find happiness in life, says Time Bandits, is to rebel against and destroy the established order. Kevin’s parents are destroyed (truthfully, they were already dead...) and the Time Bandits have rebelled against God himself.

In real life, I hope we don’t destroy all that we have constructed because we believe that Good and Evil are two sides of the same corrupt Establishment, but I credit Time Bandits, as I credit President Carter, with forecasting the dangers of a system wherein “human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.”

That’s no place to raise Kevin, or any other child.

Time Bandits is fast and furious, fantastic and funny, but most importantly it reminds us that life is a one-of-a-kind experience and a miraculous opportunity not just to “own” things, but to see sights of unusual beauty, mystery, and even terror. 

It's a journey that should be shared with those you love, and who love you, not a race spent keeping up with the Jones, or Morrisons, as the case may be.