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Director: Randy Moore
Screenplay: Randy Moore
Cast: Roy Abramsohn as Jim White; Elena Schuber as Emily;
Katelynn Rodriguez as Sara; Jack Dalton as Elliott; Danielle Safady as Sophie; Annet
Mahendru as Isabelle; Alison Lees-Taylor as the Other Woman
In terms of
prodding Mickey Mouse square between the eyes, I'd argue Escape from Tomorrow, "illegally" shot in Walt Disney
World and Disneyland with an incredible amount of planning and tactics, is far
more morally good and artistically interesting than in comparison to Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010),
where one of the major scenes is where artist Banksy actually left a dummy dressed as a Guantanamo Bay detainee under
a ride. Revisiting Exit Through the Gift
Shop, I found the Guantanamo Bay dummy stunt to be deeply problematic and
obvious as a political statement, like a lot of Banksy's work skirting merely surface imagery with little else.
That's before we look to the greater concern that, before we started having public
places like Disneyland to train stations warn patrons of packages and odd
abandoned object, not only did the stunt
stop a ride but would've left innocent tourists distressed for an idea that
barely made a public resonance after the initial news on the incident.
Arguably Escape from Tomorrow skirts an issue
with filmic patrons without their permission, but this is an ideological issue
with all art from documentaries to photography, and rather than a cheap shock
tactic it at least takes a far more interesting route - the grotesque but
sincere mid life crisis of Jim White (Roy Abramsohn),
a mild mannered husband whose break down, and the weirdness he encounters, just
happens to be at Disneyland with his wife and young children, adding to the
tension. In a tale where the central cast posed as regular tourists and the
crew walked around with film cameras that looked like tourist cameras and
scripts on iPhones, director Randy Moore
is not exactly exploiting actual Disney tourists either; hilariously the one
mention of "Disney" in the dialogue is bleeped out yet no one at Siemens complained they were depicted as
a cabal behind shady experiments Patrick
McGoohan might worry about.
Fears were
understandably brought up that Disney
might sue, yet history itself shows where that lead when they targeted Air
Pirates Funnies by Dan O'Neill with
other artists, an underground parody comic who kept drawing the comic
regardless of how much Disney sued
him. He lost, a lot, but history has made Disney
look monstrous to people like me when O'Neill,
as the underdog, is stubborn upon the subject to this day. Whether this had any
subconscious influence with Escape from
Tomorrow, or if the Disney of now
would rather ignore the film, is an interesting thought theory. Hilariously
they even acknowledged the film in their historical canon as part of the online
supplement of Disney A to Z: The
Official Encyclopedia.
First let's get
to the obvious - that, whilst an innovative and controversial production, it's
still about a male midlife crisis, which I point out as this has been used as
an accusation against Escape from
Tomorrow, likely because of all the bad (and numerous) films about male
midlife crisis that indulge in the worst attitudes particularly when it comes
to being an older man and sexual desire. Not necessarily the idea that it
shouldn't be dealt with, but needing examples like the film that at least
dissect it. Starting with our protagonist losing his job over the phone on his
family vacation, the film never tries to be on his side as, in one of the more
uncomfortable if sickly humorous tangents caused by the anxiety of his age and
disconnect from his wife Emily (Elena
Schuber), he starts ogling and following two teen Parisian tourists, all
whilst in general the world starts to become odder and he starts to collapse. I
don't believe protagonists are meant
to be inherently sympathetic, actually a problematic ideology for me that is
blameable on us viewers, as we've trained ourselves to innately be in our lead
character's shoes rather than non-partisan onlookers. Instead, characters
should be like in literature, meant to be subjective figures we are meant to
watch from afar, even both good and bad as this film demonstrates. Here, Jim
White is ordinary and this is capable of both being sympathetic (loss of
livelihood, disconnect from all his family) but also absolutely misguided in
his behaviour (being a perv over young girls still wearing braces; taking his
young son on an adult ride like Space Mountain despite the fact it'll make him
throw up). It's more artistically rewarding than if he was entirely sympathetic
or just a bastard.
Even before
things escalate, when he starts drinking and loses large quantities of blood
from a foot injury, there are already figures on attractions suddenly glaring
at him with malice and fears of "cat flu" contaminating the park. Escape from Tomorrow plays with both
the ideas of urban legends and Disney itself. Accidental decapitations on
rides, emu secretly being used on the menu and prostitution of the actresses
playing the Disney Princesses, to motifs from Disney's storytelling itself
being reinterpreted, from one of those actresses (Alison Lees-Taylor) as an older woman now becoming a Disney
villainess, right down to a hypnotising necklace, to the entire weird aspects
of Disney's animation being subconsciously drawn from. Disney, despite being the more wholesome company back in the early
20th century when it came to animation, was still producing strange stuff like
the Skeleton Dance (1929) to the
Night on Bald Mountain sequence from Fantasia
(1940) that belong to a different era when family entertainment could still
be creepy. Stuff that I haven't seen since I was a toddler on their VHS still
lingers like the Pink Elephants sequence in Dumbo (1941) or the transformation of the evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937),
the later references in Escape from Tomorrow.
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Even if Escape from Tomorrow is more adult than the Skeleton Dance (1929) - with its nudity, gore, Siemens' Spaceship Earth building (dubbed a giant testicle) being a secret conspiracy base - there's innately something eerie for me as well about carnival rides and animatronic figures. They fascinate me, are even charming, and show incredible artistic craft, but I can also see how menacing they can be which this film taps into as well. As much an additional layer is found for me as a viewer as, born with autism, I once found incredible discomfort with large crowded areas and loud sounds; even now, whilst more comfortable in public environments, a place as shown here where there's little space to breath and rides you can't hear yourself on would still unnerves me and is something that Escape from Tomorrow does play on for terror. The only better example of this idea would be Damon Parkard's Reflections of Evil (2002) where, shot "illegally" in an E.T. ride at the Universal Studios theme park, he turned an attraction into a noisy hellscape1.
Technically,
circumstances naturally dictate how this film was put together, but it's
amazing how coordinated director Randy
Moore and his crew were in making the film. Arguably, their circumstances
helped as, forced to plan shots and scenes ahead of time, they made a much more
precise and stylish film as a result than if they had time to improvise. The
monochrome look itself was as much a practically, to control the light on
camera better, but itself is far more effective than if the film was shot in
colour. Barring some CGI and black demon eyes on characters to dictate menace,
a lot of Escape from Tomorrow's
weirdness is to be found using the environments or ridiculous plot points they
can show with use such as what exactly happens (fatally) when someone gets cat
flu. As a result, barring those few heavy handed attempts at being eerie, where
inexplicably the film was compared to David
Lynch, Moore's film instead is
much more its own curious beast that spins the worst holiday possible as its
horror, and takes advantage of this idea.
In terms of a
message from this, two anecdotes from Randy Moore really spell out a
subconscious significance2. The first is that Disneyland was once a
place he and his father used to go to a lot, only for their estrangement due to
his parents' divorcing creating a phantom layer to those memories. Second was
when his wife, from the former Soviet Union occupied country Kyrgyzstan and a
nurse of a hospital, once upon being in Disneyland commented that it was worse
than being at the "psych world at the hospital". Rather than making
it a political jab at Disney itself, Escape
from Tomorrow is far more interesting as a result when it's about how a
place of magic and imagination, yet the people within it, the tourists,
nonetheless bring their own anxieties there. Rather than a condemnation of
Disney, it imagines that Walt Disney's
desires of enrapture people at his theme park may not necessarily go that way
when the burdens of life and a general murk of existence complicates the clean,
incredibly rigid ideology of Disney
as a company. The only real sense of politics, the one that is to target and
became part of the background of the film production, is that Disney's extraneous
history of enforcing this clean wholesomeness (from how difficult it apparently
is to get a job at Disneyland to keeping Song
of the South (1946) off shelves) is completely alien to how complicated human
beings are.
This is poignant
as, whilst the ending does get into a vague and curious little suggestion of
multiple realities, which is really the one major flaw of the film, there's a
nice sense of layering and metaphor (even as the man who'd prefer being
explicitly fantastical in his stories) that the conspiracy that eventually
comes in, suggesting that our protagonist may be required as a person of great
imagination like Uncle Walt, is brought on by his subconscious anxieties and
desires to wish for a better life. Even then, the multiple realities layer does
have in itself a nice touch that, if there are more nuisances in the plotting
to build to it, it still evokes the message at hand that the idealised world
desired is still awkwardly against the reality.
Shot within the
confining spaces of real tourist environments, a drama is built upon that would
be rewarding as it is without the weird additions, like a mumblecore drama with
a higher production value in the location shooting; that Emily, whilst painted
more as the stereotypical distant wife, has become bored and is embarrassed
more than offended by her husband lusting after teens, and that in a nicely nuisance
detail there's a schism between the daughter loving her father more whilst the
son is deliberately antagonistic to him at points but loves the mother, one
that comes ahead in the most disturbing scene which involves hitting a child at
a breaking point and the fallout from it. Escape
from Tomorrow may not be perfect, but considering what the film came from
and how it even got to be, I have to admire any sense of complexity and
creativity from such a potentially risky endeavour. The one single aspect of
the stunt pulled off by Banksy,
according to Exit Through the Gift Shop
filmed by artist Mr. Brainwash (Thierry Guetta), which was of interest in spite
of the cheap shock of the stunt, was the intense and disturbing level the interrogation
of Brainwash by Disney and FBI agents went up to afterwards when he got caught.
God only knows what stern words Randy Moore
would get if he or any of the crew and actors were actually caught; maybe just
banned permanently, but as these films intertwine, it offers an alternative
reality in itself to consider.
Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Weird
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None):
None
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1) Damon Packard was also permanently banned
from there as a result, adding a nice synchronicity to today's topic.
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