In Which I Had To Wait 300 Years For A Virgin To Light A Candle

Brothers and Sisters

by JESSICA FERRI

Binx is a young, sweaty boy living in Salem when his little sister is abducted by the Sanderson sisters, a group of witches living in the woods. Not only does he fail to save her but in the process he’s turned into a cat and forced to live forever with his guilt. The witches are hanged, but Winifred, the eldest, manages to cast in spell — that if a virgin lights the black flame candle they will be brought back from the dead. Fast forward 300 years. Much to the dismay of the 300 year old Binx, hot shot Max Dennison, whose family has just moved to Salem from Los Angeles, lights the candle to impress a girl named Allison (Vinessa Shaw), who has excellent “yaboos." The sisters return; chaos reigns.

When the movie begins, Max’s relationship with his younger sister Dani (Thora Birch) is on the rocks. He hates Salem — he misses his friends in L.A. and he’s become the victim of bullying. Now Dani wants him to take her trick-or-treating. "Take your candy and get out of my life," he tells her. But when they stumble upon Alison’s house (the girl from school who Max has a crush on) Max lights the candle to impress her, and now the three of them, joined by Binx the immortal cat, must bond together to defeat the Sisters.

Winifred, on the other hand, can’t get her sisters to do anything she wants. She’s cursed with them — Sarah Jessica Parker, the hopped up sex bimbo, and Kathy Najimy, the slapstick fat girl. Winifred is an excellent sorceress, and she’s only interested in how she can use her sisters to get what she wants. There’s no love lost here. She’s a witch but she’s also a bad big sister, making her undeniably evil. This is a Disney film.

Hocus Pocus deals very seriously with the trials and tribulations of sibling relationships. Binx embodies the white knight though he’s stuck in the body of the symbol of bad omens, the black cat. His guilt over losing Emily is overwhelming, and he sees Dani as a second chance. If he can help Max and Dani repair their relationship, then together they can defeat the Sanderson sisters, and Binx’s soul will finally be released. It’s easy for Binx to fall in love with Dani, the adorable Thora Birch, who reminds him of the sister he lost so long ago.

In a moment when Max thinks he’s defeated the Sisters, Binx tells him "Take good care of Dani, Max. You’ll never know how precious she is, until you lose her." Binx runs off, but Max tells him “Where do you think you’re going buddy? You’re a Dennison now. You're one of us." Even though Binx is glad the Sanderson sisters are gone, his sorrow over Emily remains. But Binx will have another chance to save Emily — this time, it’s Dani who’s been abducted by the sisters — and now Max and Binx will both have to fight to save her.

Of course Max’s crew is victorious — Winifed can’t get her book full of magic spells back in time (she has until sunrise) and the three sisters are turned to dust. But her real failing is her resentement of her sisters, who she sees as dead weight. She doesn’t love them like Binx and Max love Dani. And so, the good big siblings win. Thackery Binx is finally returned to his boy form, his pilgrim top fluttering in the breeze. Before he leaves, Binx tells Dani "I shall always be with you," and kisses her on the cheek. Emily appears, calling "Thackery, Thackery Binx! What took thee so long?" He famously replies, “Sorry Emily! I had to wait three hundred years for a virgin to light a candle." Max's virgin-status may change as he and Alison smile knowingly at each other. As Binx and Emily walk off into the sunset, Max and Dani’s relationship is also repaired: she tells him "I love you, jerkface." Dani is happy for Binx but sorry to lose him — her tearful smile says it all, as we close with Dani being embraced by her new protector — her big brother.

For all the big brothers and sisters out there who are taking their younger siblings trick or treating, or for those only children who have a Binx in their lives — a very Happy Halloween to you and yours.

Jessica Ferri is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She blogs here.

"El Scorcho" - Weezer (mp3)

"El Scorcho (live acoustic)" - Weezer (mp3)

"El Scorcho (live at y100 sonic session)" - Weezer (mp3)

In Which We Require A Larger Sea-Going Vessel

Bad Fish

by JESSICA FERRI

Released in June of 1975, Jaws is considered the first summer blockbuster. Terrified moviegoers refused to enter the ocean that summer, and tourism boards across the country complained of lower attendance at their beaches. In many ways, the movie is conventional horror film. The shark is a serial killer — "an eating machine," as Richard Dreyfuss' character, Hooper, explains. He picks a pretty naked girl as his first meal. Insatiable, he moves on to children, young men, old men, and weathered fishermen. He is indiscriminate. Like death itself he moves from victim to victim, staring with remorseless black eyes. All this from the man who would bring you E.T.

And yet — if you look closely, Jaws is definitely Spielberg movie — sans children. Though Chief Brody has two boys, they stay out of the picture for the most part, except to function as shark bait in the beach scene. The most Spielbergian moment, perhaps, of the entire movie is a scene in which Brody's youngest son mimics his movements at the dinner table. Stressed, he puts his hand over his forehead, grimaces, rubs his brow, to look down and see his son parroting him. Brody's wife stands in the door frame, eyes tearing up with joy.

What is a Spielberg movie, anyway? Critics have theorized: children run amok due to parental discord or absence, forced by supernatural events or beings (aliens, dinosaurs, Captain Hook) to come into their own — to function as mini-adults. In Jaws, then, the child is Brody. After moving to Amity (which apparently, is a real island) after working as a cop in New York, he thinks his new life is a piece of cake. His work now consists of parking disputes and fireworks control. His wife is a total babe. She fixes him a whiskey and asks "Wanna get drunk and fool around?"

The shark comes to represent the idea that life, with all of its upheaval and distress, is not something you can run from. Especially when life is a Great White Shark, lurking in the water, and you're the Police Chief on an island filled with walking happy meals.

Brody's wife mentions casually to Hooper, the marine biologist, that Brody's terrified of the water. We're not sure why — there's a vague implication that he may have almost drowned as a child. The shark forces him to deal with his fear—and here is the genesis of Spielberg's child, forming its belief system through trials and tribulations. Like Spielberg, Chief Brody is marooned — trying to make a name for himself on the island. Spielberg is trying to make an impossible film at 28 years old. He goes over budget and he goes 100 days over his shooting schedule.

It makes sense, then, that Spielberg both glorifies and deconstructs the character of Quint, the weathered fisherman who is on a journey to kill every single goddamn shark in the water as revenge for killing all his buddies who fell into the water when their boat was torpedoed by the Japanese in WWII. Quint represents the more traditional part of the story — the Moby Dickness — while we laugh at Quint but then we realize he's a total lunatic. Spielberg would later come to terms with being "established" and work with more respect for the expert character in his films with the Muldoon character in Jurassic Park. Still — assuredness meets a bad end. 

As time has gone on, Jaws has been overshadowed by Spielberg's other films. This is unfortunate because it is well-written, incredibly well-paced, deliciously scary, violent, and spectacular, like many of his more popular movies. Watching it in 2010, it offers surprises: Dreyfuss delivers an incredible performance in which he is completely committed to the character. He's also hilarious, and attractive in the way you imagine a young marine biologist clothed completely in denim would be. When he spouts lingo about the kind of the shark and the diameter of its bite, we giggle. When he goes through the autopsy of the first victim, we are outraged with him. 

Though the movie was made in 1975, the special effects are fantastic. The shark looks real in spite of its insane girth — which, terrifyingly, is scientifically accurate. The final battle takes place on Quint's boat. It is shot so we can see how big the shark is not only in comparison to our three heroes but to the boat itself. In the final thirty minutes of the film, Jaws has become a most formidable foe. With his teeth and his big black eyes he has us all on the run. This sequence is never boring. It doesn't go on too long. It's perfectly timed.

Brody remains stoic, but he's headed for a transition. He snaps his pistol on, as a totem, hoping to draw power back to his side. Suddenly the hardened New York cop comes back out — and he's not afraid. Really, what does he have to lose? He's stranded in the ocean on the mast of a sinking boat. This is Brody's moment to come into his own — it's ours, too. The child has conquered his fear. He is fighting with Neptune himself, but he looks him right in the eye and says, "Smile, you son of bitch!"

Jessica Ferri is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She last wrote in these pages about Sylvia Plath. Her website is here, and she blogs here.

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In Which We Flay Ourselves Into Poets

Sylvia Plath: Red and Blue

by JESSICA FERRI

Sylvia Plath’s favorite color was red. When Ted Hughes left her for another woman, Plath installed a red rug under her writing desk. But she also loved red’s opposite, blue — and other polarizations. Upon Ted’s abandonment, she wrote to her mother:

It’s as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative — which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it. I am now flooded with despair, almost hysteria, as if I were smothering. As if a great owl were sitting on my chest, its talons clenching and constricting my heart.

Plath’s duality — as a happy-go-lucky American girl and a deeply depressed, deathly ambitious writer — stirs up the darker parts of her audience. We either revile Plath for her cowardice or we celebrate her for her bravery. It depends on whether you look and see blue or red.

Born in Boston in 1932 to a German biology professor and his former student, Plath entered the school of hard-knocks at the young age of eight, when her father passed away. The day he died, she told her mother, “I’ll never speak to God again.” His absence would lead to poor choices in men and eventually to Ted Hughes. The disintegration of their marriage would confirm the first abandonment by her father. In “Daddy,” she writes, “Daddy, I have had to kill you . . . . If I’ve killed one man I’ve killed two / the vampire who said he was you / and drank my blood for a year / seven years, if you want to know.”

with her brother warren
Reading Plath is a bipolar experience. The Bell Jar’s depiction of Plath’s nervous breakdown in the summer of 1953 is certainly horrifying, but Plath’s observations on her peers both in and out of the mental institution are quite funny. The poems of The Colossus, her first collection, are traditional and revelatory. Her lyricism is beautiful but her diction is alien. Her personal writing seems like it was written by two distinct and separate women: the Plath that writes home to her mother that she’s doing fine and the real Plath — the blood red Plath of her journals. This is a woman who, after coming upon two teenage girls destroying a garden (the subject of her poem "The Fable of the Rhododendron Stealers”) she writes in her journal "I have violence in me that is hot as death-blood. I can kill myself or — I know it now — even kill another."

This is the Plath that will change you, the author of Ariel, and the author of these journals. In reading her journals there is no doubt of Plath’s talent, her ferocity and her courage. She is so close to the reader, you can hear her whispering and giggling in your ear, crying on your shoulder; you look behind you as you read the journals, sometimes in fear, sometimes in hope. There’s an ongoing struggle: Plath wants to be a mother-goddess, she wants to cook and clean and provide a safe-haven for her husband and her babies, but the poet in her can’t stand being in the shadows. Standing aside while Ted receives praise from T.S. Eliot and his ilk, being simply “the wife.” Meanwhile, Plath can’t find a publisher in the states for her novel, The Bell Jar. Her anguish in the journals is palpable.

The Lilly Library at Indiana University has about half of Plath’s materials—the other half belongs to Smith. If you are a student there, or a visiting academic, you can visit. Take a look at Plath’s manuscripts: fifteen drafts for one poem, “Wuthering Heights,” witty Valentine’s Day cards written to her mother when she was ten, letters and poems stained with coffee and spaghetti sauce. You’ll also find a box marked “HAIR.” In it, you will find about eight braids, thick and long, of Plath’s childhood hair. You can smell it. It smells like hair. The experience of opening this box must be similar to the experience of opening a tomb. 

Hughes’ last collection of poetry, Birthday Letters, is about his relationship with Plath. In the poem “Red” he describes his resentment of the ‘red’ side of Plath: ‘red was your color,’ and he tells us Plath insisted on decorating their bedroom ‘as red as a judgment chamber,’ or ‘a shut jewel case,’ with fabrics ‘ruby corduroy blood’ and curtains ‘sheer blood-falls from ceiling to floor.’ Red was the dangerous side of Plath, the powerful side Hughes could not control. “The blood jet is poetry,” she famously wrote, “there is no stopping it.”

her self-portrait Plath was torn between this side of her personality and the call to the calmer, domestic existence: the role of the wife and mother, Plath needed the right man to have both lives. She wanted the babies, the cooking. She wanted to be both muse and artist. Hughes prefers Plath’s blue side, her ‘guardian, thoughtful,’ and he ends this poem, the last in the collection, telling Plath ‘the jewel you lost was blue.’” It’s no surprise, then, that Plath wrote “Daddy,” her most recognizable poem, from her most celebrated collection, Ariel, when she was finally able to escape all the ties that bound her to her blue self: her mother, her bleach blonde hair, her husband.  

Plath terrifies many because, through her legacy, she remains very much alive. Thinking or speaking of Plath, relating to her, brings her immediately to life. Like many writers, she struggled, and like many of us, she wanted much out of life — so much that she found herself burning alive. In “Lady Lazarus,” she tells us “Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.” Her dramatic ending, if anything, is an honest answer to the promise and threat of power and violence throughout her work, the best of which was created in the struggle between two halves. Picture her, in the morning at 5 a.m., before her children were awake, floating on a concoction of ineffectual sleeping pills and coffee, bleary-eyed and exhausted; picture her typing away at the Ariel poems, watching the sun come up — watching the morning change from blue to red.

Jessica Ferri is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find more of her writing here. She last wrote in these pages about babysitting.

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