If Leo’s right that the original Gremlins is an allegory about Asian imports, then its belated sequel is an undisguised satire of homegrown American corporate culture: Mr. Wing’s mysterious Chinatown shop has been cleared to make way for Clamp Tower, “the world’s most automated building.” And if Chiranjit is right that Gremlins is about fear of immigration, then The New Batch, I would argue, is more about class anxiety per se: the Gremlins in this film are less invading aliens than the unwashed hordes in our own backyards, bent on exposing and dissolving America’s cosmopolitan pretensions even as their public face, the bespectacled Brain Gremlin (voiced by Tony Randall), claims that all they’re after is “civilization”:
The fine points: diplomacy, compassion, standards, manners, tradition… that’s what we’re reaching toward. Oh, we may stumble along the way, but civilization, yes. The Geneva Convention, chamber music, Susan Sontag. Everything your society has worked so hard to accomplish over the centuries, that’s what we aspire to.
Yeah right: they just want to destroy everything and kill each other. Immediately after giving this speech, Brain shoots a fellow Gremlin in the head, and goes on: “Now, was that civilized? No, clearly not. Fun, but in no sense civilized.”
So it’s lowbrow/highbrow rather than xenophobia this time around, and it’s no accident that The New Batch, rather than paying tribute to cheap horror as its precursor did, more often imitates old Warner Brothers cartoons, which played some of the same tricks with the chaotic appropriation of “legitimate” culture — think of the 1812 Overture scoring falling anvils, for instance. (Fittingly, Dante would go on to direct 2003’s Looney Tunes: Back In Action.) But the class dichotomy in Gremlins 2, significantly, is a false one: turns out the American human capitalists’ hearts were never in their newfangled modern skyscrapers anyway, which are dismissed with a speech that could serve as a pocket lecture on the Marxist concept of reification: “Maybe it wasn’t a place for people anyway. It was a place for things. You make a place for things… things come.” Almost making this strange reversal work is the redoubtable John Glover, who briefly specialized in the yuppie asshole roles which were de rigueur in 1980s comedies and action films (cf. Scrooged, RoboCop 2). As billionaire tycoon Daniel Clamp — shades of Donald Trump, of course, but also Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch — Glover is actually the most likable and charismatic person (or thing) in the movie, radiating charm and good nature and promoting everybody involved to top positions at the end of the film. He even agrees to build architect Tim Matheson’s vision of small town paradise instead of another steel and glass monstrosity: “People want the traditional community thing now. Quiet little towns, back to the earth.” Ergo, Gremlins 2, as cheeky and “subversive” as it is, ultimately accepts the Reaganomic premise so well described by Thomas Frank in his What’s The Matter With Kansas: we’ll tolerate domination by corporate giants, as long as they don’t pretend they’re better than us.
by Evan Kindley | Source: TV
04 Jan 2009 1:29 AM | Submit Comment