"Move to Heaven": No One Really Moves to Heaven

 

Move to Heaven: "Unmet hopes. Undelivered truths. Untimely deaths.  Trauma cleaners piece together odes to loved ones from the departed."  So  they're basically spiritualists conducting high-tech seances to tell people "Your father loved you."  

But the trailer is quite different:  Cute Guy #1 (Tang Joon-Sang, below)  in a haz-mat suit cleans a run-down apartment, while a voice over says that he has to "Move to heaven for three months" before he can get his guardianship (become a guardian angel?).  Cute Guy #2 (Lee Je-hoon) climbs out of a tent in the living room, shocked -- no doubt he fell asleep in the wilderness, and died.  Cute Guy #1 tells him the rules: "Wash the dishes after you use them. Take out the trash."  A comedy about Oscar-Felix mismatched dead guys?  But it's 4:00 am, so I'm in.

Prologue: Cute Guy #3. Kim Seon-u (Lee Jae-wook), walks through a vast factory and peers into some sort of conveyor.  Uh-oh, it accidentally rolls over his foot!  He hobbles out of the factory into the night, returns to his tiny one-room apartment, and collapses onto the bed.

Scene 1: Cute Guy #1, Geu-Ru, at an aquarium, naming all the fish.  A girl picks him up ("my best friend for ten years"), and drops him off at the Chicken Bowl restaurant.  She waves; he bows awkwardly, not socially adept.  Maybe autistic?

Home, a house labeled "Move to Heaven."  Dad (Ji Jin-hee) serves dinner: two identical plates of eggs, toast, and apples.  Geu-Ru gets upset when it's slightly off.  Definitely autistic.  

Phone call: they have a job.  They load heavy chemical equipment into their van and set out.

Scene 2:  Kim Seon-u's apartment.  He died of sepsis from his untreated injury. and wasn't discovered for a week.  They go through his stuff and deduce facts about him, like "He was sensitive to smells."  Then they pack up everything and carry it out.  So they're house cleaners?  I thought they talked to the dead.

Scene 3: On the way out, Geu-Ru notices the convenience store where the dead guy bought gimbap (Korean sushi) every day.  He recites the flavors from receipts they found in the apartment: anchovy, tuna, pollack roe.  They see him going in and flirting with the clerk. When will we get to the ghost whispering?

Scene 4:  Sleazy Guy telling Seon-u's parents that since he died at home, the company is not responsible. They're deaf, and speak through an interpreter. Dad and Geu-Ru arrive and give them Seon-u's stuff.  Mom goes through his phone messages, and find that he was forbidden from seeing a doctor and calling it a "workplace accident."  Shouldn't Seon-u tell her that from beyond the grave?  What's the point of being able to talk to dead people, if you can solve the mystery by going through the dead guy's phone messages?   

Dad overhears the evil corporate suits chortling over getting off and insulting Seon-u's parents, and intervenes.  So this is the plot, taking down the evil corporation?  What about Geu-Ru having to spend time in the afterlife with a slob?  When are we going to get to the paranormal?

Scene 5:  Meanwhile, Geu-Ru sees a girl wearing a medallion that he thinks Seon-u would like, so he accosts her: "There's something I want.  I really want to have it."  Naturally, she assumes that he wants sex, and screams.  Security calls Dad, who comes to pick him up.  

Scene 6:  Dad drops Geu-Ru off at the aquarium, and goes off to visit his lawyer.  But crossing a street, he collapse.  He has just enough time to call Geu-Ru and say "I'm sorry."  The paramedics arrive.

Geu-Ru waits and waits, and then decides to drive home, but it's too much for him.   He gets stuck on a bridge.  So here's where he dies, and has to spend 3 months in heaven with a slob to become a guardian angel?

Dad dies in the ambulance.

Best friend arrives to get Geu-Ru out of the car and tell him what happened.  How did she know where he was?  Why did they inform her that Dad died like ten minutes ago? Why did they drop the plot about taking down the evil corporation?  Where's the paranormal?

Scene 7:  Geu-Ru in a suit with Dad's ashes.  He wants to take them home instead of scattering them.  I assume that he's going to live with Best Friend's family now?  Or is Best Friend going to become his guardian?

Scene 8: At home, Geu-Ru looks at Dad's memorial. 

Scene 9:  Cho Sang-gu, Cute Guy #2 from the trailer, shows up at Geu-Reu's house.  Best Friend answers the door.  He makes himself at home, explaining that the house now belongs to him.   For some inexplicable reason, before he died Dad designated ex-con prize fighter Cho Sang-gu as Geu-Reu's legal guardian.  The end.

So Geu-Reu never goes to the afterlife.  Cho Sang-gu has to live with him in  "Move to Heaven" in order to claim guardianship.  The hazmat suit is just because Cho Sang-gu made a mess in the house.  The tent in the living room -- he can't use one of the bedrooms?  No afterlife, no talking to dead people, no nothing. 

Beefcake:  Several cute guys. The prizefighter will probably take his shirt off.

Other Sights: Some very nice exterior shots.

Gay Characters: No one expresses heterosexual interest.

Paranormal:  Lots of promises, but no.  The "Trauma Cleaners" are house cleaners.  They don't even conduct Korean Shamanic rituals.

Setting Up the Premise: A full 50-minute episode.  How about 5-6 minutes? 

My Grade: I feel cheated after waiting 50 minutes for someone to go to heaven or talk to dead people.  Other than the annoying misdirection in the trailer, not bad. B.

I Dream of Jeannie

When Larry Hagman died, his obituaries praised his conniving Texas oil magnate J.R. Ewing of Dallas (1978-1991, plus a 2012 remake).  But I rarely watched Dallas.  I remembered him from one of the "I've got a secret" sitcoms of the 1960s, I Dream of Jeannie (1967-70).

I didn't watch that a lot, either.  Most gay kids preferred Bewitched.  The premise seemed too much like a Playboy fantasy: astronaut Tony Nelson (Larry Hagman) finds a bottle washed up on a beach, opens it, and out pops a genie -- nameless, so he calls her Jeannie (Barbara Eden).  She calls him Master.  She wears a belly-dancing costume that leaves little to the imagination, and is willing to do anything he wants. Anything.

To his credit, Tony doesn't take advantage of the situation.  Like Darren of Bewitched, he wants to take care of himself, and he forbids Jeannie from using her magic (she, of course, disobeys him). His best friend Roger (Bill Daily) is less scrupulous -- he can think of lots of things to wish for.

Neither makes the slightest attempt to compromise the lady's virtue, but no doubt that is exactly what was on the minds of millions of straight male viewers.

Every "I've got a secret" sitcom has a Gladys Kravitz to suspect the secret, peer through windows,  and snoop around.  On Jeannie, it was base psychiatrist Dr. Bellows (Hayden Rorke), who was gay-vague: no wife, and no reason for his obsession with the strange goings-ons in the Nelson household, except for a desire to see more of the hunky astronaut.

According to Barbara Eden's autobiography, Rorke (here with gay icon Judy Garland) was "unashamedly gay" in real life, and "a prince" who often invited cast members to dinner parties at his home.

After Jeannie, Larry Hagman went on to Dallas, of course, and Barbara Eden chose roles involving gutsy, go-getting women to prove that she wasn't just a belly-dancing sex object.

 She reprised her Jeannie character twice:

I Dream of Jeannie: 15 Years Later (1985) substituted Wayne Rogers of M*A*S*H for Larry Hagman, who was busy with Dallas.   In order to save Tony's life, Jeannie has to sacrifice her relationship with him -- and he must forget that he ever knew her.

In I Still Dream of Jeannie (1991), the events of the previous movie never occurred, but Tony was absent (Larry Hagman was still busy).  Jeannie has to find a new temporary master, and meanwhile saves her kidnapped son, Anthony Jr. 

Los Angeles as Home: "The Lucy Show"

The Lucy Show (1962-68) was a fixture of my childhood.  I wasn't exactly entranced by the show -- no cute boys, no exciting outer-space adventures -- but it wasn't designed for kids.  Lucy had boring, mundane adult problems like sticking to a budget and worrying about her job, and she all but ignored the swirling social unrest in the world outside.  But my parents liked it, so it became a warm, comforting presence on Monday nights.

Apparently there were two versions.  The first (1962-65) was an early Kate and Allie:  Widowed Lucy Carmichael (Lucille Ball) and her divorced friend Viv (Vivian Vance) live in Danville, New York, with their children (Jimmy Garrett, Candy Moore, Ralph Hart).  Before my time.

I just remember the second version (1965-68), with Lucy Carmichael living in Los Angeles, where she worked for blustering bank president Mr. Mooney (Gale Gordon) and got into crazy predicaments.  

In spite of the lack of beefcake and space adventures, there were five points of interest:

1. Some of the guest stars were cute, like Frankie Avalon, Ken Berry, and Clint Walker (left). Not her son, Desi Arnaz Jr., though.

2. Years later, when I began watching classic movies and tv shows, I realized that many of the stars were familiar from guest appearances on The Lucy Show: Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, George Burns, Paul Winchell, John Wayne, Jack Benny, Sid Caesar.

3.  In later seasons, Lucy gets a sidekick, the hip, sprightly Mary Jane (Mary Jane Croft, right), who seems to "like" Lucy, and continues to hang around in spite of the constant scrapes and catastrophes.

4. Lucy and Mr. Mooney were two grown-ups, a man and a woman, but not married to each other.  In fact, they weren't married to anyone, nor did they express any interest in getting married (actually Mr. Mooney had a rarely-mentioneed wife off camera).   Maybe Los Angeles offered an escape from the endless man-woman couples that I saw in real life, that the adults insisted was my destiny.

5. Episodes involving movie stars, references to Graumann's Chinese Theater and the Brown Derby, even throwaway lines like "I was stuck on Santa Monica Boulevard" helped define Los Angeles as an Arcadia or Oz, a place that is intimately familiar, that you constantly long for, even though you have never actually been there.

Maybe Los Angeles was a "good place."

What Kind of Flower are You: Queer Boys of the 1920s

Before World War II, teenage boys were not expected to like girls.  At Everett High School in Washington, most of the boys in the graduating class in 1925 are memorialized in their yearbook with manly "woman-hating mottos": "Tall, dashing, quick and fair, spurns all girls with vigilant care!"

In movies and literature, the teenage boy who liked girls was labeled gay, an effeminate contrast to the real, red-blooded, masculine boy who “spurned all girls with vigilant care.”   He was jeered, blackmailed, and ostracized. He was asked “What kind of flower are you?” and “Can I borrow your lipstick, dearie?”  His peers called him “honey-boy,” “panty-waist,” “mollycoddle,” and “Percy,” and the adults, “sensitive,” “gentle,” “artistic,” and “sweet.”

Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922), though hetero-horny himself, worries when his son Ted, “a decorative boy of seventeen,” offers to give two girls from his high school rides to a chorus rehearsal.  “I hope they're decent girls,” he muses. “I wouldn't want him to, uh, get mixed up and everything.”  (Ted was played by Raymond McKee in 1924 and Glen Boles in the 1934 movie version.)

His wife suggests that he take Ted aside and give him a little talk about “Things,” but he rejects the proposal: “no sense suggesting a lot of Things to a boy’s mind.”  He assumes that no seventeen-year old boy could possibly experience heterosexual desire unless he is manipulated from outside.

The next summer, Babbit discovers Ted kissing a girl, but he blames her for "enticing him," refusing to believe that any eighteen-year old could want to kiss girls of his own accord.

Richard, a boy just short of his seventeenth birthday, falls for a girl in Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! (1933), but he is coded as gay.  There is “something of extreme sensitiveness. . .a restless, apprehensive, defiant, shy, dreamy, self-conscious intelligence about him.”  He reads too much poetry, especially sexual anarchist Swinburne and gay icon Oscar Wilde, whose trial and incarceration for “the love that dare not speak its name” was still freshly scandalous in 1904 (the date of the plot).

“He’s a queer boy,” his mother muses. “Sometimes I can’t make head or tail of him.”

Richard has been played in movies by Eric Linden (1935), Simon Lack (1938), and Lee Kinsolving (1959), and in the theater by many actors, including Luke Halpin (of Flipper), left and T.R. Knight (of Grey's Anatomy), top photo.

In the first movies of his series (1937-1939), Andy Hardy (played by Mickey Rooney, left) had an effeminate girl-craziness and was  psychoanalyzed as "queer," suffering from a “unconscious fixation on youth.”

Henry Aldrich, gay girl-crazy star of his own movie series (1939-1944) (played by Jimmy Lydon of Tom Brown's School Days) was subject to pummeling by bullies and tense heart-to-hearts with his parents.  His buddy Dizzy usually tolerated his eccentricity,  but sometimes even he couldn’t take it anymore, and yelled “What the heck’s the matter with you, anyway?”