2025-10-08 01:00:00
Last week, the new album from a super-huge pop star was released, and I saw tons of messages from people getting super-hyped. Most of them came with a preemptive admonition warning the rest of us not to ruin it for anybody with our wise-cracking comments and criticisms.
I thought that was a little weird, but hey, whatever. I’m not a fan and in fact have zero opinion about any of it beyond “let people enjoy things.” You kids go off and have your fun; you won’t hear anything from me.
But then it started coming in online, a slow trickle at first before becoming a mighty wave crashing down o’er me. Reviews that seemed to be of the consensus “it’s fine” (okay, fine), comments about how it’s a momentous pop culture event for The Gays (one of my pet peeves, but whatever), and then way way too many people reacting to one of the tracks, which apparently is about the singer’s relationship to her famous football star fiancé’s penis.
Now when I agreed to be on my best behavior, that was based on the assumption that I wouldn’t have some rich straight woman waving her man’s junk in my face. I can’t stress enough how much I don’t care about any of it1 but all the commentary and oh my god can you even believe it? reactions are goading me into having an opinion.
And that opinion is: it’s kinda basic, isn’t it? I haven’t yet heard the song. I’ve read that “it slaps,” but I’m still not sure if that’s about the song itself, or its subject. But I did read the lyrics,2 and it just seems like someone trying to be insightfully poetic while unaware that people have been singing about dongs for almost as long as people have had dongs. Like I’m happy for you, but you’re not breaking new ground.
Take for instance “The Lemon Song” by Led Zeppelin. When I first heard it as an early teenager, I didn’t like it. It was too long to only have one really good part, and once you’d used up all the novelty of going “tee hee” over the lyrics, there wasn’t much reason not to just keep playing “Ramble On” on repeat.
But as I got older and learned more about music history, I grew to appreciate it for calling back to the centuries-old blues tradition of using citrus as a metaphor for genitalia.
And of course, there’s what is undoubtedly my favorite song about a dude’s package, which is “Gigantic” by the Pixies. To me it never felt like they were winking about getting away with being naughty, but more like an earnest appreciation for something of majesty. “With her lips she said, hey Paul let’s have a ball” is an all-time great lyric even if you don’t read it as double entendre.
So I’m not trying to bring bad vibes by pointing out that this has been done so much better. And usually I’m a huge supporter of shameless over-sharing. But I think that once you become so entrenched in pop culture that you’ve become inescapable, it’s a little garish to be telling people who are completely uninterested about how much you enjoy doin’ it.
2025-10-07 12:34:13
Good Boy is a haunted house movie told almost entirely from the perspective1 of a dog. It seems like a can’t fail premise. Even the most callous and jaded horror movie-goers are likely to feel more empathy for a pet as the main character than they would for a human that’s responsible for making dumb decisions.
Dumb decisions like moving into an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere, once occupied by your creepy grandfather who died after going kind of crazy and cutting himself off from everyone. That’s what the main human in this movie does, dragging his dog Indy with him, and I never forgave him for it.
The movie is a small, independent production, shot mostly by a man and his wife using their real-life house as the setting and their real-life dog as the star. After the credits finish, there’s a good behind-the-scenes bit where the director explains how they made the movie, explaining that the shoot took over three years because they only worked with Indy for a few hours each day. He stresses repeatedly that Indy had no idea he was in a horror movie, and that any shots of him looking scared or stressed out were the result of careful editing.
I suspect that was less intended as “lessons of the magic of film” than “no honest we didn’t do anything that could harm or even worry this very good dog.” And that’s good, but I’m not so sure about the “he’s not acting” part. That dog can emote and I would swear that he looked genuinely scared in places.
As much as I appreciate everything that went into the making of the movie, it turned out to be really difficult for me to watch. I was nervously checking my watch and even tempted to walk out. I don’t know if other people, even animal lovers, will be that upset about it, but I felt like it was specifically hitting all of my triggers.
I’m still not sure why I didn’t trust my gut, since when I first saw the trailer, my immediate reaction was “hell no there’s no way I’m seeing that, why would anyone even make that?” But I figured that feeling upset and uneasy is what horror movies are all about. I think I underestimated just how much I get upset not just at medical issues, but at seeing a dog frightened, upset, or reacting to being (pretty mildly) mistreated.
And honestly, that’s entirely on me, because Good Boy is exactly what it says in the trailer: a scary haunted house movie where a dog is the main character.
I have to say I was a little confused for much of it, not sure if it was trying to put me in the mindset of a dog who couldn’t figure out what was going on, or if it was just confusing in its imagery. I spent much of the movie trying to figure out if the ghosts were just a metaphor for illness, or if they caused the illness in the first place, never quite sure if the movie was trying to be symbolic on top of having a gimmick at its core. I kind of wish they hadn’t bothered with that ambiguity, to be honest, and had just made it a more straightforward haunted house story.
In any case, it was one of those movies that I think I respected more than I enjoyed, and I’d still recommend it to anybody other than the extremely sensitive. And if you’re wondering whether you’re too sensitive to enjoy the movie, I’ve got some explicit spoilers about what happens below:
(Spoilers for Good Boy to give an idea of possible triggers)
Indy makes it through the movie fine, but then, doing otherwise would’ve been inexcusable, and I wouldn’t be writing this. I don’t believe he’s even injured. He does get mistreated by his owner by getting left alone for a day, yelled at, and left out in the rain. He does get caught in a trap but seems unharmed. And he spends a lot of the movie frightened.
A different dog does die, but it’s offscreen in the past and isn’t shown explicitly. There is a suggestion of violence towards that dog near the beginning, but by the end, that seems to be more of a vision than the reality of what happened.
And for the human: he has some sort of consumptive disease that seems like it might be lung cancer.
2025-10-06 14:52:53
Inscription from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi borrowed indirectly from a post on the University of Connecticut’s UConn Today
In case it weren’t obvious from the fact that I wrote an entire essay about my struggle to figure out when it was appropriate to not wear a shirt, I tend to overthink things to an obscene degree. But occasionally I devote some of that overthinking energy to subjects that actually matter, like the question of how to be a good person.
One thing that I haven’t spent much time thinking about until recently is the maxim “Know Thyself.”
I’ve long heard of it as a reminder about being true to your own principles, but always dismissed it as being too vague and easily-manipulatable to be useful. At best, it seems to be just a trivial reminder to have integrity and always act according to your best judgment. At worst, it has a solipsistic, Ayn Randian, moral-relativistic connotation to it. “No, I am right. It’s the rest of the world that’s wrong.”
Which is never a good idea, but especially not when we’re in a world of billionaires trying to out-do the robber barons of the previous Gilded Age, casting themselves as messiahs who are exceptional and uniquely capable of solving the world’s problems, the main one being the problem that they don’t have nearly enough money.
I have less than zero interest in considering whether people like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Thiel, or Andreessen are genuine believers in their own hype and actually believe they’re working in the world’s best interest. Every second spent thinking about their motivations just feeds into that hype, furthering the idea that they are so exceptional that millions of people need to be thinking about who these white men are and what they really want. Our energy would be better spent thinking about the toxic effects of their actions and how to free ourselves of them and minimize their damage.
So I’m more interested in the question of how “Know thyself” applies to people who still have functioning moral compasses, which aren’t constantly pointing at the pole of “I am Uber-man.” In other words: the vast majority of people on the planet.
It was Michael Schur’s casual overview of moral philosophy, How to Be Perfect, that first gave me a clear understanding of what “Know thyself” really means and how it can be applied. It’s not as simple as “if you truly believe you’re doing the right thing, then you’re doing the right thing.” It’s more of a demand that you constantly interrogate your own beliefs and assumptions, to get at the core of what you absolutely know to be true.
At least, that’s my interpretation. I should make it clear that I’m very ignorant of the history of moral philosophy. For all I know, the slave-owners of ancient Greece really were all-in on the idea that some people were exceptional and uniquely able to determine for themselves what was moral.
But I believe that the most useful aspect of “Know thyself” is how it requires a kind of humility, a willingness to abandon ego instead of doubling down on it. We need to shed the lifetimes’ worth of assumptions, prejudices, anecdotal evidence, victories, defeats, compromises, all of the stuff that we’ve built around ourselves just to be able to function day-to-day in society, and get down to the core of what we really believe. The things that we know to be true, and that we can never be talked out of.
It requires humility because it means we have to accept that none of us are really all that deep. We all (or again, most of us) have a core set of beliefs about what’s right and wrong, and everything is built on top of that. We might like to think that we have rich inner worlds that would require a lifetime of introspection to truly understand, but all of that is between you and your therapist.1
The core ideas that drive us really aren’t that complicated. And we know in our gut when we’re in violation of them, even if everything else is telling us it’s fine, or it doesn’t really matter.
And I think that’s extremely relevant now. Because more than at any other point in my lifetime, I feel like there’s constant pressure from every direction to define who I am, what I should believe, what I consider righteous, and what I consider intolerable. Even more than the pressure I felt from the church, and even more than the pressure I felt to stay in the closet, because those could be more easily compartmentalized.
Now, we’re constantly being confronted not just with absolutely repugnant ideas that we feel obliged to speak out against, but ideas that we might agree with on principle but object to the presentation or execution. It’s been established that the internet is a polarizing force, pushing people to have more extreme opinions about things than they would have otherwise. A side effect of that is that we’re constantly being barraged with a kind of “ethical noise,” the accusation that not speaking out about any particular injustice is equivalent to being complicit in it. Or that our indignation over this issue should be instead directed towards that more important issue, because what kind of monster are you, don’t you even care? Must be nice.
It can feel like the ultimate selfishness to shut all of that out, or even to think of it as “noise” in the first place. It can be useful to recognize a few things:
We’ve seen plenty of examples of celebrities having very prolonged, very public meltdowns and destroying whatever good will they once had. The combination of rich people who can’t take criticism, plus hundreds of people eager to call them out, plus groups of bigots eager to find high-profile people to pull into their cause, is why I can no longer go to parts of Universal parks, or watch The IT Crowd and Father Ted. And again: it’s not that the harassment transformed them into bigots, but that it made them feel justified in giving full voice to their already-existing bigotry.
A mis-application of “know thyself” would be “all these transgender people are being so mean to me, but I know that I’m a good person, so their harassment means that they’re bad people and I’m justified in my colossal assholery.” It’s hard to believe that any functional adult wouldn’t be able to recognize the flaw and lack of self-awareness in that.
But again, I’m really not interested in examining the motivations and inner minds of rich adults who have every opportunity to do the right thing and be helpful people instead of worthless shitbags. I’m more interested in the rest of us.
Simply put: we’ve got the more difficult task of staying true to ourselves while having to live in a world with extremely vocal, worthless shitbags. We have to constantly ask ourselves, why am I doing this? What am I putting into the world? When am I choosing to react, and when am I choosing to show grace? When am I choosing to remain silent? And in particular: if I ever find myself justifying something as “punching up,” am I asking myself why I’m even punching at all?
There’s all kinds of pressure to make sure that we’re not actually being complicit, or diminishing the severity of injustices by not acting or speaking out against them. Marginalized people are not obligated to show grace or to tolerate the intolerable. People are not obligated to be polite or show respect to those who refuse to show them any respect. The idea here isn’t to “accept the things I cannot accept,” to misquote the serenity prayer.
Instead, it’s simply to remain mindful that we don’t lose ourselves, and that we don’t lose sight of the things that we actually value. That we’re not pulled into dogpiles even if they seem to be justified. That we’re not ever finding ourselves saying that the ends justify the means, if the means are repulsive. That we’re always acting on our beliefs, and not on the things we think we’re supposed to believe.
I think it’s difficult because I mess it up frequently. I lose my temper and get pulled into arguments that I know I shouldn’t. I sometimes can’t resist throwing in my opinion on some repulsive idea that other people can respond to more eloquently, meaning I’m actually doing nothing more than spreading around that repulsive idea. I get caught up in the heat of the moment and casually attack someone who’s said or done something offensive, because it feels justified to call it out as offensive.
Most of the time, asking for nuance or grace, trying to de-escalate a situation, or simply ignoring the Discourse, isn’t a case of trying to defend someone who’s said or done something intolerable. It’s not really about them about all. It’s more about the danger of losing ourselves and the things we really value.
2025-10-05 08:23:32
The cold open of Bone Lake succinctly tells you pretty much exactly what you’re going to get for the entire movie. A tense chase through the woods culminates in an extreme close-up of a naked man receiving an extremely personal injury. Then we cut to a couple driving in the car, where a different man is narrating the scene that just happened. When asked for her opinion, the woman he’s with eventually observes, “It seems gratuitous.”
The premise of the story is similar to Barbarian: our protagonists have somehow booked a weekend stay at an implausibly huge mansion on the edge of Bone Lake. (I didn’t quite catch their names; maybe if the movie had had a character say the names ten thousand and one times, they would’ve stuck). After they’ve settled in and made themselves at home, a second couple arrives and unlocks the door — they’ve also reserved the place for the same weekend.
The couples somewhat reluctantly agree to share the place. Since they’re both going to get refunded anyway, it’s a free stay in an impossibly nice mansion. And they can leave any time they want. What’s the worst that could happen?
It’s worth pointing out that the premise works better than it might seem from a brief synopsis. In the moment, you can see why people not aware that they’re in a horror movie might play along with this scenario. Each of the couples had been looking forward to the trip, there’s a sunk cost fallacy going on, and most prominently: social anxiety. Everybody seems nice enough, there are plenty of ways to back out, and nobody wants to be rude.
For that matter, the idea of a financially-stressed couple being able to afford to rent a place this huge might initially feel like something that the movie just expects you to accept and move on. But they give Sage and Diego dialogue explaining why they’re making the splurge. And by the end of the movie, of course, you understand why these couples can really afford to stay in such a nice place.
Similarly: the second couple Will and Cin are preternaturally good-looking and charming. But Sage and Diego are also preternaturally good-looking; they’re just presented in a way that Hollywood believes is an average level of attractiveness. And there’s a bit of dialogue addressing that, too, with Will coming up with a more tactful but horny way of saying that they’re 10s hanging out with 7s. (But still, nobody in the movie makes it explicit that Diego is the hottest person to a distracting degree, so I can’t tell if we were supposed to believe he’s an average guy?)
They even play into the double entendre of the title — this is very much pitched as a sexy horror movie — by having the guys acknowledge it and the girls roll their eyes at how juvenile it is.
Bone Lake is full of stuff like that — things that you accept because it’s a movie, but the filmmakers still insist on showing their work and letting you know they’re on top of things. It’s self-aware, but neither in the desperate to be in on the joke nor the overly-arch sense. It’s more like a voice popping in periodically to remind us that this is designed to be gratuitous. It’s supposed to be fun and sexy and violent, and you really shouldn’t take it that seriously.
It’s frequently funny, especially in the final act, but it’s not what I’d call a horror comedy, because it isn’t always juggling extremes in tone. It has relatable characters having realistic conversations about relationship problems, but it doesn’t turn into a drama because they’re never allowed to overshadow the plot. And it spends most of its first couple of acts getting the couples into increasingly awkward social situations, but they feel more like the early beats of a slasher movie: short bursts that make you cringe on the way to what you’re sure is going to be explosive violence later on.
I figured out everything that was going on pretty early in the proceedings. But I didn’t feel let down, nor did I feel overly clever for being smarter than the movie, because I’m not even sure that the “twists” were intended to be all that surprising. I got the sense that the filmmakers assumed that the audience was familiar enough with how these movies work that it was building suspense. We spend most of the movie just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Overall, I think Bone Lake works exactly as it was designed to work. It was all fun, appealing, and well-executed (although there was one fight scene set to an “ironic” song that I could’ve done without). Even if there wasn’t anything that felt shockingly original, it did feel like smart people respecting my intelligence and wanting me to have some fun with a horror movie. The ending was gruesome and satisfying, and I thought the final shots were outstanding. It’s exactly the kind of low-to-mid-budget, fun-but-not-stupid horror movie that’s perfect for October.
2025-10-04 08:01:27
Still from Jaws taken from the BAMF Style blog
As I’ve gotten older, it’s become increasingly undeniable that I’m at least a little bit neurodivergent. Probably not in a debilitating or even interesting way, but enough that I’m often left feeling like an alien observing how strange it must be to feel like the hu-mans do.
One inconsequential but long-simmering example: it’s getting to where an average guy can’t take his shirt off anymore. The thing that first tipped me off is when several years ago I posted a photo to Instagram of myself at a water park.
That was during a period when I was spending a lot of time on site at theme parks, with my smart phone as my only social outlet. For the first time, I had unfettered access to some pretty great water parks, which I’d never visited, in large part because I was mortified at the thought of going out in public in a bathing suit. To be clear: not a speedo or anything, but your standard not-that-far-above-the-knee bathing suit.
But at the time I was working on building up my confidence, being less insecure and self-deprecating, and generally becoming more comfortable in my own schlubby body. I started to think of this as an essential experience, a chance to level-up in self-confidence. I did a practice run at a hotel pool — even going down the water slide that I’d spent years watching from a safe distance! — and after not dying from that experience, decided it was time. I went to Typhoon Lagoon and spent an entire afternoon baring my shockingly pale, hairy body to the unforgiving Florida sun.
It was a blast. So much fun that I actually got pretty angry with myself for being too insecure to go for so many years. It really did feel like a small personal victory. And I posted a selfie to Instagram to commemorate the day that I’d finally braved a water park in public.
The responses weren’t what I’d expected. I had been steeling myself to try and not care about any comments that saw me as I saw myself, i.e. pale, overweight, and under-muscled. But I wasn’t prepared for people to react as if I’d posted a thirst trap. (At the time, I wasn’t even fully aware of what a “thirst trap” was). It was as if I’d posted something so scandalous that I had to triple-check the photo to make sure I wasn’t accidentally flashing hog or something.
It would be disingenuous to make it sound like I was completely naive. This was also the time when I was getting comfortable being fully-100%-out-of-the-closet-no-take-backs, and seeing a lot of guys around my age online who seemed to be much more comfortable with themselves, so I was hoping I’d be getting a little bit of attention.
But I did genuinely think it was an almost entirely innocuous photo. The kind that might get one or two flirty comments because internet’s gonna internet, and hey that’s fun and flattering, but not the kind that would have anybody reacting like I was suddenly posting soft core. And the reactions weren’t on the scale of “how dare you post such offensive trash?!” but more “oh look somebody’s thirsty!”
Obviously, it stuck with me. It taught me that the line between “tastefully normal” and “scandalously thirsty” wasn’t where I’d thought it was. And more significantly: that the line had moved since the time I was growing up, and nobody had bothered to tell me.
I would’ve sworn that all through the 1970s and 80s, and from older photos I’d seen, that people regularly took and shared snapshots from pools or water parks or just generally living their lives, and it was never treated like anything at all remarkable.
But then I started wondering if I’d simply misread it all these years. The more essays that I read or watched about cinema studies and media literacy, the more they made it sound like everything was subtext. Practically every image that had ever been put before me had some kind of sexual connotation to it, whether explicit, codified, or suggested. And I had simply been too naive and not media-savvy enough to recognize it.
As society got more liberal, more people started rejecting shame, and there was an increased emphasis on body positivity — as well as the inescapably long-running truth that Sex Sells — then “normal” sites like Instagram became outlets for people to fearlessly get it all out there. Hell yes I’m sexy and I want people to know it, and by the way I also happen to be collaborating with this line of products, link in bio.
Which led to what’s long felt like a paradox. Here we are in an environment of liberation that would’ve blown the mind (and elsewhere) of emerging adolescent me, and yet it also feels even more prudish than it did when I was growing up. While it was gratifying to finally be made aware that even someone who looks like me could have a small but extremely vocal audience — as Lore Sjöberg said, “I’m somebody’s fetish” — it was also a drag to see that there was practically nothing you could share that the internet wouldn’t try and interpret as sexy. Stuff that would’ve been considered completely unremarkable back then was now treated with a back-handed kind of acceptance: good for you, you naughty, naughty dog!
I’m aware that most women still reading this are probably rolling their eyes at a man struggling to come to terms with the concept of the male gaze. I’m not trying to make it out to be some huge crisis, and I’m definitely not suggesting Oh I totally get it now, my sisters, and I have become one with your experience. I’m just saying it’s a drag is all.
It’s just meant that at a time in my life when it seems like I should be more free and liberated and open than I’ve ever been, because I’m no longer feeling any insecurity or the need to compete with hot guys who’ve seen the inside of a gym before, I’m instead even more super-conscious of what I’m wearing and how I look.
Unlike the other middle-aged men in my neighborhood, who evidently don’t spend such an unhealthy amount of time on social media, I avoid going around with no shirt on, even when I’m inside the house, because what if someone might see? And even though my work towards self-confidence backfired and turned me into a narcissist who takes way too many selfies, even by 21st century gay man standards, I still treat anything not cropped at the shoulders as if it were sensitive material that must not escape containment.
For a long time, I was content albeit disappointed to believe that That’s Just The Way It’s Always Been. That any time you’re in public, you’re presenting yourself and your body for attention. And my memories that it was ever any different were just false memories of a naive boy, in much the same way that I used to assume that when a movie showed a man and woman and faded to black, they were probably just kissing.
So funnily enough, it was re-watching Jaws in IMAX for its 50th anniversary that let me know it wasn’t just the Mandela Effect, and things did used to be different. That movie has plenty of scenes set on a beach, and seeing bare-chested middle-aged men having long conversations on a three-story-high screen reminded me that it really was treated as a complete non-issue. There are plenty of behind-the-scenes photos showing the crew and the director wearing nothing but cut-off jeans, and everybody understood that yeah, that’s what happens when you’re making a movie mostly set in the water. Roy Scheider seemingly ad-libs a joke about how hairy Richard Dreyfuss’s chest is!
Even the traditionally-attractive young people in Jaws aren’t treated as sex objects. I think the young woman at the beginning who’s the victim of the first boating accident is supposed to be at least a little bit late-70s titillating, which is part of what makes that scene so horrific. But the young man she intended to go skinny-dipping with is stripping on the beach before passing out, and I thought the vibe was very much “fun stuff that kids in the prime of their lives do” instead of overtly sexual.
A lot of the TV I grew up watching was absolutely intended to be as sexy as they could manage with network standards and practices in full effect. The super-tight pants that Ponch and Jon always wore. That weird basketball game on Battlestar Galactica. Pretty much every single thing on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Even at the time, it was obvious that they were all about suggesting the things that they couldn’t show outright on broadcast TV.
But now thanks to the internet, you’re never more than a few seconds away from seeing everything that was suggested, streaming in clear 4K video. So why does everybody still act like we’re all late-20th-century repressed, and everything has to be a naughty suggestion of something else?
Which means I’m back on my bullshit, insisting that the rise of the free and open internet hasn’t actually resulted in people being more free and open. It’s just made average people even more prudish and self-conscious, while the “I’m sexy and I know it” types get to go around with the same careless abandon they’ve always had. At least in the US; maybe it’s better in Europe, where people don’t tend to get so hung up about it?
Whatever the case, if we treat everything as an attempt to be sexy, then nothing really is. I feel like I should be in my prime years of not giving a damn, letting it all hang out without being paranoid it’s going to end up on some site for Hot Gay Grandpa Bears or something. Basically, when I’m looking for attention, you’ll know it. Otherwise, let’s all try to recreate the vibe of the 1970s instead of the 1870s.
And finally: even after all that preamble, I’m reluctant to post it, but it also feels like a cheat to mention a photo and leave it entirely up to the imagination. Besides, it feels like I should put my money where my mouth is and become the completely non-erotic change I want to see in the world. So here’s the photo that was apparently Too Hot For Instagram, of your author after enjoying a day at a water park, finally at 42 years old getting comfortable in his own imperfect body. Or posting an embarrassingly shameless thirst trap, I don’t know, it’s small, leave me alone.
2025-10-03 13:45:21
I’ve seen the first A Nightmare on Elm Street (the “good” one), and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 (the gay one), and that was always as far as I’d been willing to go with the series. I think I like the idea of 1980s slashers more than the reality of them, and the first few Friday the 13th movies were more satisfying, to me.
Sure, even before they started resurrecting and re-resurrecting Jason and having him basically fight Carrie White1, he was basically a supernatural super-villain. But at least he had to stay a little more grounded with his tools and the basic laws of physics. The Elm Street series, on the other knife-hand, used “dream logic” to justify whatever nonsense they wanted to throw onto the screen, leaving me with nothing to get even a little bit invested in.
That might be why I kind of almost liked A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. It sets some basic ground rules and mostly sticks to them: Freddy can only kill people in dreams, except of course unless he wants to possess cars and reanimate his own bones in the real world. And it gives the hapless teens a way to fight back, by having a girl who can pull others into her own dreams.
There’s a scene where the kids all first get together in a shared dream, and each of them gives an explanation of their special dream powers they’ve always imagined having. It’s so charming and so inherently 1980s that you can almost ignore the fact that all of their special dream powers are hell of lame.
Patricia Arquette can do sick kick flips! The young woman in addiction recovery dreams of being one of the punks from Return of the Living Dead, with exactly two tiny switch blades! The tough black guy who don’t take no shit from nobody has the strength to bend prop chairs that already have bent legs at the start of the shot! And the wheelchair-bound nerd can both walk and be a non-copyright-infringing RPG wizard, complete with unspecified particle effect powers! It’s not immediately clear how any of this is going to help them against a knife-wielding dream demon, but it’s fun anyway!
In addition to Presto’s Amblin-esque sparkle powers, the scene starts with the balls from a Newton’s cradle magically hovering around the room, and it really is charming in the way that the best 1980s fantasies were. You can really tell it’s the 80s because the TV remotes are huge and chunky, Laurence Fishburne is still being credited as “Larry,” there are a couple of genuinely cool stop-motion animation sequences with Freddy as a puppet and as a Jason and the Argonauts skeleton, a traumatized mute kid gets seduced by a nude sexy nurse2, and the whole thing is kind of offensive even by trash horror standards.
The movie casually tosses around elements of mental illness, disabilities, self harm, drug addiction, alcoholism, sexual harassment, and violent sexual assault, with a sloppiness that both reminds you of how backwards the 80s were and also seems incongruous with something that’s trying to play as fun, campy horror. Having a drug addict in recovery see her needle marks scream at her and then be stabbed with a bunch of syringes — that feels like the kind of image that was intended to fit with a fun, over-the-top horror tone of “murdering hapless victims in ironic ways,” but in reality was just bad taste.
It’s a fine line to walk, and maybe a movie with more nuance might’ve been able to show Freddy being the Ultimate Asshole by turning kids’ addictions or disabilities against them without its feeling like careless tastelessness on the filmmaker’s part.
This isn’t a movie that works on nuance, though. It’s a movie with trained medical professionals finding the body of a young woman a few feet off the ground with her head smashed through a wall-mounted CRT TV screen and declaring it a suicide. And it’s a movie that tries to add a layer of horror to Freddy’s backstory with a lurid story about a young woman being locked into a psych ward and assaulted to the point of death.
Which feels like gross and sophomoric upping-the-stakes instead of playing into the fun fantasy horror vibe that everything else has. But also: I don’t want anyone to think that I’ve gotten so “woke” that I can’t still appreciate a scene where a ghost nun describes Freddy as “the bastard son of a hundred maniacs.”
It’s a shame, because while this isn’t what I’d call a good movie, and a lot of the performances hover somewhere between porn and soap opera in quality, there are long stretches that feel more fun and imaginative than anything else in the series. And there are homages to better movies that are evident throughout — in addition to the Ray Harryhausen-inspired stop motion mentioned earlier, there’s a scene that is not-at-all-subtly referencing both Vertigo and The Birds, and a car junkyard that might be referencing Christine. It feels like there were people involved in this movie who cared about making something good, or at least were well aware that they were making highly skilled trash.
I wonder if Dream Warriors would’ve been much better if it hadn’t been part of a franchise, and had just been released on its own as a late-1980s fantasy horror. The concept of using dreams to fight against a bad guy is undeniably pretty cool, and I was much more invested in how it all “works” than I was in either of the two earlier movies.
My alternate-universe version has it never getting attached to the Elm Street franchise, so it’s just a kind of whodunnit horror movie where someone in the hospital (obviously either the head doctor or, in a surprise twist, the firm but kindly orderly Max) is picking off people in their dreams, one by one, until a troubled young woman is admitted with the power to let the kids band together and fight back.
As I understand it, Freddy only gets goofier from this point on in the franchise, so if the first three movies are him at his peak, I’m going to have to call it: Freddy Kreuger just isn’t cool, guys. Maybe nobody in the Voorhies family could swallow a teen whole, but I’m still 100% Team Jason all the way.3
