Film

Sunday mornings offer the best hope for a standard routine at La Casa Big Dope. (How do you like that dear readers? I’m learning to write in what my GUT calls, “your idioms.”) Anyway, it is comforting to know that we will watch a film on a show about a movement called “Film Noir.” I think that means “dark films,” literally “black films.”

Odd, there’s few black actors in any of these films. The only ones play maids, servants, or eternally comedic characters afraid of everything from ghosts to their masters. I had assumed that the style featured the so-called “race films” produced between 1910 and 1950. Some of those avoided the stereotypes. I don’t think white Americans liked them very much.

But no. These films, from what my GUT tells me, represent a a style or genre of cinematographic film marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace. See? Dark, like I said. I don’t think Falloonians would like them very much. I like them better when I assume the shape of some cowboy actor or other. Hopalong Cassidy works well.

Next question: why does your species like them so much? Is darkness of spirit appealing to your species?

In the real “black films,” there is music, laughter, and dancing, lots and lots of dancing.

I like dancing. Music too. I even like black people.

I’m not sure I would make a good American, no matter what shape I chose.

Behavior

Sometimes I don’t understand how Mr. and Mrs. Big Dope have stayed married for so long. Take television for example. He mostly, as I've written, likes old movies, documentaries about descent through natural selection, and stories proving what a bad man Adolph Hitler was. You know, doing things like lying to his people, surrounding himself with the worst Germany had to offer, destroying the free press, and turning people’s wrath against those he didn’t like. Somehow, he got away with it.

She, on the other hand, likes movies where men get what’s coming to them. Where men don't get away with it. She especially likes films where scoundrels who have devastated the Universe for years encounter a band of brave heroes who bring peace to whatever galaxy or time-warp they are operating in. The exception is, when Big Dope pulls one of his stupid stunts, she watches films about wives who chop up their husbands with axes. That usually exacts a redemptive influence on him. She also maintains a small shrine to someone I’ve not heard of before … a certain Lorena Bobbitt. Perhaps some reader can help me determine who she was. Big Dope knows, but he won't say.

This morning he and I are watching something he likes called Film Noir. The name, my Galactic Universal Translator tells me, means “film black” or “black film.” I don’t understand because the actors are all white. Anyway, I’ve shifted into Sidney Greenstreet, the heavily overweight actor who appears in this week’s film, The Mask of Dimitrios. Big Dope provided chips and soda for the occasion.

Just as the plot unfolded, Mrs. Big Dope walked through and warned me not to break the couch down or get crumbs on it or there will be, as she put it, beaucoup de destruction. Big Dope ignored her, but my GUT tells me that I’d better start reducing.