What Hot Tub Time Machine does, of course, is take you back, not to the actual 1986, but to the 1986 that existed in the movies. If you mentioned that you saw it at some kind of hoity toity cocktail party, and you aren’t willing to sound your primal bad-movie going YAWP to the world, you can save some face by calling HTTM a post-Hangover meta-80’s narrative – and while they’re trying to piece that together, get out of there, grab a 40, and watch Back to the Future again.
The day before I saw Avatar, I was stuck at a brunch with some NYU professors who were holding forth on the death of cinema, and I made the mistake of telling them that I write about old movies for Hollywood.com. As I set about defending digital moviemaking as legitimate cinema against a parade of badly used Jean-Luc Goddard quotes, something occurred to me, and that same thing occurred to me again as I cradled my 40 while watching Hot Tub Time Machine.
The history of movies is short -- about a hundred years - that paces the 20th Century perfectly. So perfectly in fact, that if you stick to the great ones, the game-changers, the movies that change the course of movie history, the movies that stuck the most deeply in the consciousness of the world, then you’ll have a genuine understanding of what the human psyche went through during the 1900s.
Case in point: 1942’s Sullivan’sTravels.
Yes, it’s about the depression. Yes, it’s one of the funniest, most entertaining movies ever made. Yes, Veronica Lake is hot, even at 8 months pregnant. (Maybe especially at 8 months pregnant.)
But the real deal about Sullivan’s Travels is that it marks a great moment in human history: when movies about movies could be used as popular entertainment. That is to say, when self-awareness of form became normal. NYU professors call this sort of thing a meta-narrative, and it’s a calling card for that dusty old thing people used to call “French critical theory,” and then called “post-modernism,” and then called “that annoying thing Hipsters do,” and they now call “reality.”
Sullivan’s Travels, through the razor-sharp satire of writer-director Preston Sturges, made movies look at themselves. Sturges took the Frank Capra American feel-good movie and turned it inside-out, effectively destroying that innocent escape hatch Capra and James Stewart developed in the 30s.
Sullivan’s Travels is about John L. Sullivan, a successful director of schlocky box office smashes, who wants to make O Brother, Where Art Thou, a socially significant movie about real people and real issue, “like Capra.” As the studio heads point out, Sullivan doesn’t know the first thing about real people and real issues, having been born rich and gotten richer.
Sullivan sets out to learn all about real life by dressing like a tramp and hitting the road with “only 10 cents” in his pocket.
But if Jarvis Cocker taught us anything, it’s that you’ll never live like common people, John L. Sullivan, not as long as you can call your valet and stop it all. Even with Veronica Lake’s jaded never-was actress as a guide, and a never-say-die drive, Sullivan couldn’t possibly lean what trouble means.
Or can he? Preston Sturges had the singular ability to infuse his characters with such vitality that they often emerge on the other side of his scathing satire with an even deeper humanity than when they started. I’ll leave it to you to decide how Sullivan performs, but either way, the journey’s entertaining enough to warrant a look.
Sullivan’s Travels, like Hot Tube Time Machine, walks through movies rather than real life, commenting as much on the form of entertainment itself as on anything else. Nowadays, we look at that sort of thing and we don’t bat an eye. But in the pop culture environment of 1941, it was all new.
Next week: I’ll walk you through my first psychedelic experience -- and it didn’t happen during those two years at UCSC. Disney did it.