Over the Hedge, and Through the Woods ...

One could simply boycott Da Vinci Code by sitting on one's couch at home and muttering things to oneself about the degradation of our culture on opening night. As an alternative, some Christians have arranged something--I don't know what to call it, a "girlcott?"--where you go out and see a different movie on the night Da Vinci Code opened, a sort of battle cry, "I have money, and I'm not afraid to spend it on something that's not evil!" It would have been nice if something like Gibson's Passion was coming out the same day, but hey, you take what you can get, and the girlcott we participated in was a viewing of Over the Hedge. It wasn't a bad choice--while I can't get excited about a squirrel who can burp his ABCs, I can't really claim that his burping undermines the core tenets of Christendom. And there was a lot of good stuff in there about the importance of family and keeping alive old traditions, like eating bark, especially if you are a turtle. Eating bark poses a daring challenge to the consumerist/suburban lifestyle that involves drinking a lot of soda and sitting on a couch. So, you can register your dislike of Da Vinci Code and affirm the traditional bark-eating family at the same time.

When I was in Wal-Mart the other day, I couldn't help feeling rather bemused by the advertisement flyer, "Walmart summer starts here!" which includes pictures of not only food, but also many of the characters from Over the Hedge. As I mentioned, the movie itself attacks American consumerism, especially via a turtle whose name I cannot remember, so I will call him, "Family Values Turtle." Now, in the movie, out of all of the animals, FVT hated the consumerist way of life that the racoon, whom I shall call "Assault on the Family Racoon," advocated. So what do we see in the Walmart flyer? We see FVT helping AFR standing on a wickedly huge outside barbeque set in order to scout for more yummies. In another panel, we see Family Values Turtle looking at the Coleman oversized armchair, smiling, and giving a thumbs up (do turtles even have thumbs?). On another page, we have Skunk girl advertising a digital camera (I would have thought she would have been advertising air freshners, but ah well). Ironically, we have characters in a movie about the evils of consumerism advocating consumerism. Now, I do remember an episode of The Simpsons where Lisa Simpson bewails modern commercialism and how horrible it is to put television characters on t-shirts (which, of course, The Simpsons marketing does); howeve, I find The Simpsons form of self-conscious hypocrisy somewhat amusing--the "I've been a bad widdle boy" type as opposed to the "I am a blissfully self-unaware" Over the Hedge type.

One of the things that most struck me about the film while watching it was that it was consistently mediocre. I don't mean that negatively: I mean that it followed a conventional story arc (the wicked racoon learns consumerism is bad and is "converted" at the end), it had mildly amusing characters, etc. It flows smoothly and evenly with no knee-slapping moments with "ha ha" or of head-slapping moments with "Please God let this end!" It is mildly entertaining and inoffensive.

Since I've recently seen Hoodwinked, I couldn't help but compare the two movies: Hoodwinked is a movie about a frog police inspector who interviews Little Red Riding Hood, Granny, et al. to discover what villain has been stealing the secret recipe of the best cooks in the forest. The movies does not flow smoothly, and I suspect the choppiness is part of why reviews weren't that positive. (Rotten Tomatos gave Hoodwinked only 47% approval, but gave 76% approval of Over the Hedge. Some of the critical dislike of Hoodwinked may be due to the animation, which they claim was inferior. I'm not competent to comment on the animation, but I do want to say something about "the story," which I think is the more important part anyway.) Yet Hoodwinked had some positively brilliant moments: it had a yodelling mountain goat that played the banjo. It had a woodsman actor who sold schnitzel on a stick. Set up as a police interrogation of four different characters, Hoodwinked has tight, incredibly intricate plotting (as each perspective fills in gaps left in the other narrative). As Over the Hedge was about the danger of monolithic consumerism, Hoodwinked is about big business crowding out small business (someone is stealin recipes in order to create a huge baked goods empire). Without a doubt, Hoodwinked is the more memorable: Over the Hedge gives you the dangers of Doritos, Hoodwinked gives you schnitzel on a stick. Over the Hedge gives you a squirrel whose annoyance meter rivals Jar Jar Binks, and Hoodwinked gives you a squirrel who is incredibly endearing. Which type of movie is actually "better": a movie that is evenly mediocre, or a movie that seems to oscillate between the brilliant and clunky?

To complicate this choice further: what if I'm wrongly judging Hoodwinked as occasionally "clunky?" This assessment stems especially from the very beginning of the movie, when I had trouble getting into the movie because it was hard to tell what the heck was going on: the movie begins with Little Red Riding Hood being attacked by the Big Bad Wolf, her Granny mysteriously falling out of a closet, and a crazy lumberjack crashing through the window screaming, all without any context or introduction. In retrospect, it strikes me that the movie may have been intended to alienate and/or confuse the viewer at the beginning--to convey a sense of chaos and confusion, and then to show the frog policeman establish order and coherence from conflicting narratives. That is, what had seemed the "weakest link" in Hoodwinked was in fact due to its failure to conform to standard movie conventions. However, what if it wasn't a "failure to conform" to conventions at all, but a conscious refusal to conform? The "postmodern novel" isn't exactly trying to be modern and failing miserably. French New Wave filming was purposefully choppy and deviated from earlier conventions of filmmaking. If we entertain for just a moment the idea that the "Hollywood style" is not the objective God-given standard for film quality, why is being "choppy" and "uneasy" assumed to be a bad thing? The apostle Peter noted that the apostle Paul was not amongst the easiest of reads.

Further, I wonder to what extent the easy hollywood style of movie-making is tied to the values of consumerism. Consumerism and convenience often go hand in hand; consumers don't typically want things that make their lives harder or seek out things that are hard to understand, unless they are geeky computer wizards. So here's my idea: even if the content of Over the Hedge is in opposition to consumerism, its very form is very amenable to consumerism. From the very beginning of the movie, it's easy to tell what's going on (unlike Hoodwinked). Even if the movie pokes fun at the suburban and consumerist life-style, it lacks actual bite (it takes more after Horace than Juvenal). There is one clear suburban villain woman, but she is such a caricature that about the only moral I got from her is that you should not treasure property value so much that you hire exterminators to kill turtles. It's easy to go to the movie and shop at Wal-Mart the next day and buy useless junk food, which is what I did. Heck, during the credits, the animals are even watching television!

I don't mean to sound as if I disliked the movie or sound like an old crotchety academic in a rest home complaining, "This movie hopelessly capitulates to culture! I don't like consumerism! where's my bedpan?" Every artistic product has to be concerned with its reception (just as a dissertation-writer has to be concerned with whether or not his thesis is accepted), and Over the Hedge is not an enemy. I just want to say, hey, maybe you should give Hoodwinked another think.

P.S.-thanks to my wife for discussing the movie with me; after discussing it, we both wanted to blog about it, but discovered our thoughts overlapped so much she just left the topic to me.