Popeye: Finding a Non-Traditional Family

Critics panned the 1980 movie musical Popeye, starring Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall, but I loved it.

I loved the world of Sweethaven, a tiny, cramped, desolate seaport, cut off from the rest of the world, where everyone is trapped, like the castaways in Lost or Gilligan's Island:

Sweet Sweethaven
God must love us
Why else would He have stranded us here.

It's the heart of the Depression.  People have no jobs; they must wear second-hand clothes and live in decrepit houses.  They spend their days drinking bootleg liquor, boxing, "horse racing" (without horses), and philosophizing on the futility of life: one day you're alive, full of hope for the future, and the next, you're food.

Everything is food, food, food

To make matters worse, the town is ruled by a Big Man (literally), Bluto (Paul L. Smith, top photo, bear-hugging Bruce Lee).  He levies arbitrary taxes, forecloses on houses, and beats up people at random.

He is engaged to Olive Oyl (Shelley Duval), whose parents run the local boarding house, but she really had no choice in the matter.  She tries in vain to think of a reason to like him:

He's tall...goodlooking...and large....so large...so large.

"Large" would actually be a plus for me.  Extra-large, even moreso.

Into this lost, shipwrecked world comes the one-eyed sailor Popeye (Robin Williams), not the sophomoric star of 1960s cartoons, but the ultimate individualist from the E.C. Seegar comics of the 1930s, whose mantra was remixed by Gloria Gaynor and became a gay anthem:

What am I?
I am what I am!

At first reluctant to get emotionally involved, Popeye befriends Olive Oyl and her family and decides to help out.

 He wins a boxing tournament to forestall foreclosure, and trounces both Bluto and a giant octopus.  On the way he adopts a founding child and re-unites with his long-lost father.

And there's a gay connection: there's no indication, anywhere in the movie, that Popeye and Olive Oyl have fallen in love.  Olive Oyl is ecstatic to finally find someone who "needs me," but Popeye, similarly, sings "Everybody needs somebodys," to his son Swee'Pea.

They work together to raise a child that neither has had a biological role in producing.  They are a non-traditional family.

 The movie is about finding a family, finding a home, not necessarily in a heterosexual embrace, but among people who care about you.

Stealing Sinatra

Stealing Sinatra (2003) is a caper movie about the real-life kidnapping of 19-year old Frank Sinatra, Jr., son of the famous singer, in December, 1963.  The kidnappers were down-and-out entrepreneur Barry Keenan and down-and-out fisherman Joe Amsler, both 23, plus Joe's father, Johnny Irwin.  Barry and Joe had attended University High School in Los Angeles, where they knew many celebrity children, and thus got the idea of kidnapping one of them (their first choice was Bob Hope's son, Tony).

Barry Keenan, Joe Amsler, and Frank Sinatra Jr. were all heterosexual.

 So why does the DVD of Stealing Sinatra contain previews for only gay-themed movies, Jack and Manhood, and the gay-themed tv series The L Word?

Because in the Showtime version, Frank (Thomas Ian Nicholas) is plainly gay, with feminine mannerisms and an effeminate pinky ring, singing about girls only because his career requires it, but otherwise spending all of his time with men.  He is kidnapped while he and a buddy, drummer John Foss (Colin Cunningham) are sitting around in their hotel room in their underwear.  

Barry (David Arquette) and Joe (Ryan Browning, left) kidnap Frank  for the money, of course, but also for. . .something else.   Joe big brothers him, and Mr. Irwin (William H. Macy) gives him speeches about self-confidence and being your own man.  Barry keeps staring at him with soul-searching passion.  They are a lot alike, both outsiders, both lonely, both waiting for someone.

Frank uses the kidnapping to open up, seek advice, explore how to establish his own identity in his father's shadow, and start looking for real emotional connections: "I've never loved anybody!" he  moans.  He doesn't actually fall in love with Barry or Joe -- the kidnapping remains a harrowing ordeal -- but now at least he knows where to begin. 

"Boss Baby": "Rugrats" Meets "Dilbert"

 I've been seeing ads for a Boss Baby tv series on Nickelodeon for a long time, maybe years, and I always think "A paeon to capitalist excess!  Disgusting!"  But then this photo icon appeared.

Tell me that doesn't look like two boy babies about to kiss.

Could there possibly be gay representation in a tv series about babies?  

So I turned on the first "new episode," which turned out to be in Season 4.

Four years of this already!

Scene 1:  The Boss Baby  is sending out several teams to do some sort of spy work in the supermarket; they substitute baby magazines for general interest magazines,; they get a dirty diaper disposed of; an operative plays the "peek-a-boo" game with random passersby.  Sometimes they are stymied by adult conventions: they can't use a telephone, since they don't know numbers, and when a passerby plays the "got your nose" game, the operative believes that his nose has actually been stolen.

What is this all for?  How does this make money for Boss Baby's corporation?

Scene 2: The Big Boss invites Boss Baby to lunch in the executive dining room (where they are fed by a French waiter who says "Monsieur, here comes l'avion").  We get an explanation: the corporation is sellng "baby love," trying to get adults to love babies more than other people and things.  Boss Baby wants to control the entire love market: "They can like whatever they want, but when it comes to that bone-deep love, they should only be thinking of one thing: babies."

Hopefully you don't mean making more babies. 

The Big Boss says that Boss Baby is doing everything right, except running a well-organized office.  He disapproves of the "renters": puppies with their own puppy-love business.

Scene 3: Back at the office, Boss Baby explains to his hanger-on older brother, Tim, that he can't just evict the puppies: they have an iron-clad contract and good puppy lawyers.  He has to get creative.

But there's no time: he is scheduled to appear at Tim's Do-Good Trooper Safety Showcase. 

Scene 4: Boss Baby delegates the puppy problem to his employees, and heads for the safety showcase. 

It's older kids on a stage, talking ad infinitum about safety (what to do if you step in poison ivy, drink poison, catch fire, and so on), with the parents in the audience, Boss Baby acting like a real non-sentient baby on his father's lap.  Everyone gets bored and falls asleep.

Scene 5: The family drives home, but Tim "wanted to walk home with Petrovsky."  A buddy-bond homoromance?

Cut to the two walking home, complementing each other's performance.  

Suddenly a tree crashes onto a parked car, and they rush to the rescue of Frankie, the baby inside.  Why was she in the car alone?  She was on a mission, trying to install a baby love air freshener. 

The adults arrive and praise the boys as heroes, whch angers Frankie: "you swoop in and steal all the love for yourselves!"  Now boy-love is competing with baby-love (maybe "boy love" isn't the best term for it.)

Scene 6: Back at work. (How do the babies get away from supervising adults long enough to go to work?).  The employees explain that they tried to get rid of the puppies by raising the rent so they couldn't afford to stay there, but the puppies just sublet out their space to a third company, "preeks" (pre-kindergarten kids).

Boss Baby is inundated by work, but Tim calls and invites him to the ceremony where he and Petrovsky will be lauded for saving the baby (right now?  not in a few days?).

He quickly comes up with a solution to the puppy-and-preak problem: open office floor plan, no privacy, so they will drive each other crazy and leave).

Scene 7: At the ceremony, the boys start their interminable safety scenario bit, while the adults all groan.  

Boss Baby runs into Frankie,  who reveals her revenge plan: she has applied lard to the floor, so when the adults try to stand, they will slip and fall, and blame the boys; thus the love will revert back to babies.

Boss Baby wants to save his brother from humiliation, so he calls the head puppy and offers to let his company stay, if they all come to the museum in 15 seconds (seems impossible, but then, this office might not be in our world).

The adults try to stand, slip and fall, and start to blame the boys.  Then the puppies arrive, and the adults blame them, assuming that they were eating chicken and left grease on the floor.  Love for puppies goes down, love for boys remains the same.  No win for babies, but family has to come before business.  The end. 

Beefcake: No.  Some of the adults are cute, in a computer-animated way.

Heterosexism: No one expresses any heterosexual interest.

Gay Characters: Buddy-bonding subtext between Tim and Petrovsky but only for a few seconds, not even enough for a subplot.  We never see the black-haired baby that Boss Bay is almost kissing in the icon.

The grown-up Tim, who narrates the original movie (there was a movie?),  has a wife and daughter, so we may assume heterosexual identity.   The grown-up Boss Baby, now named Ted, does not, so maybe we can assume gay identity.  Some reddits ask "Is Boss Baby GAY?"  

My Verdict: The babies-as-businesspeople  jokes are clever, but there is not enough satire of the corporate world -- everyone seems perfectly nice.  And the premise is inconsistent.  Maybe in other episodes we find out exactly how the adult world-baby world interacts. 

Update:  The black-haired baby is a rival.  It's hard to distingiush between romantic interest and threat.  

See also: Boss Baby: Back in the Crib.

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959-63) was about a teenager (Dwayne Hickman of Love That Bob) so immensely girl-crazy that in the first season he announced it in every episode: "I'm Dobie Gillis, and I like girls.  What am I saying?  I love girls!  Beautiful, gorgeous, soft, round, creamy girls!"

Other people in Dobie's world are peculiarly low on straightness, however.  His proto-hippie buddy Maynard G. Krebs (Bob Denver, right, later of Gilligan's Island) shrinks away from the word "girl" as timidly as the word "work," both symbols of heterosexist destiny.

He expressed heterosexual interest only a few times, and usually in the first season.  In "The Gigolo," he is sought after for dates because his lack of heterosexual interest makes him safe.

Scripts sometimes "explain" this lack of interest as shyness, but in his autobiography, Bob Denver insists that Maynard "isn't afraid of girls; he just wants to pursue his own life."

Tomboy Zelda Gilroy (Sheila Kuehl) has a crush on Dobie, but withdraws in horror when he pretends to acquiesce; maybe she is using the crush to avoid any realistic attachments to boys (in 1994, Sheila Kuehl became the first open lesbian elected to the California state legislature).

Even the foppish Milton Armitage (Warren Beatty) seems uninterested in girls for their own sake, merely using them as tools to one-up Dobie.  After the first season, Warren Beatty left the series, replaced by the gay-coded cousin Chatsworth (Steve Franken), a mother-obsessed milquetoast who doesn't even bother with the pretense of liking girls.  Instead, he openly competes with Maynard for Dobie's affection.

Even the intensity of Dobie's attraction to girls is open to dispute.  The "I love girls" speech was dropped after the first season, and most episodes were about groups of friends rather than crushes and dates.

In one episode, Dobie is even suspected of being gay.  He dates a girl who belongs to a family of trapeze artists (Francis X. Bushman, Jud Beaumont, Tip McClure), who wander around the house in togas, discussing the benefits of "the Greek way," an obvious double entendre.

  To demonstrate their enthusiasm for Dobie, they mob him, rip his clothes off, and give him a toga of his own.  Dobie's Dad arrives, mistakes the togas for dresses, and concludes that Dobie has "gone funny" in a household of drag queens.

Dwayne Hickman went on to star in the buddy-bonding Cat Ballou, with Michael Callan.