This week for Movie Night we saw Poltergeist, 1982. which I saw sometime in the 1990s, when you still rented movies at Blockbuster. After so many years, the plot was still familiar, although I forgot a few details, like the last 20 minutes.
You know the plot: the five-year old Carol Ann talks to "tv people," and one day they burst out of the tv set to the iconic line "They're he-ee-eere." After some relatively harmless poltergeist activity, she is swallowed into a vortex that opened in her bedroom closet, occupied by lost souls and a malevolent presence. The family brings in psychic investigators to help, but things only get worse. Finally they call in diminuitive firecracker psychic Zelda Rubenstein, who sends Mom into the vortex to get Carol Ann back.
Little does she know. Afterwards the stupid family plans to move, but they stick around for a few days so Mom can take a gratuitous-nudity bath, and move Carol Ann and her brother back into the room with the vortex-closet! It opens again, the malevolent force is stronger, and skeletons start popping up out of the ground.
Turns out that the evil corporate guy built the housing development on a cemetery. He moved the headstones, but not the bodies! The souls aren't lost, they're angry over being disturbed!
Finally the whole house implodes. The family escapes through a maze of coffins and skeletons, drives to a Holiday Inn, and in a kicker, ejects the television set from their room.
The gender-polarized, heterosexual nuclear family myth is pushed as blatantly as the roomful of Star Wars merch that executive producer Steven Spielberg ordered, or the book about Ronald Reagan that Dad reads in bed. And it only gets worse.
Dad Craig T. Nelson went on to star in Coach, which lasted for nine seasons. In a 1991 episode, Coach discovers that one of his football players is gay, and is shocked, dismayed, angry, and finally accepting, the standard "friend/brother/ coworker comes out" plotline of the era.
Oliver Robins, who plays the 10 year old son, went on to write and direct heterosexual sleaze such as Dumped and Wild Roommates.
But there is also a critique of the heterosexual nuclear family myth. The suburb, meant to be bucolic, actually looks awful, little houses "made of ticky-tacky," and it is literally built on the dead -- the bodies of the marginalized and oppressed, the racial minorities, the poor, the LGBT people who are excluded from "Paradise."
The housing development is named "Cuesta Verde," which sounds nice, but "cuesta" means "cost, price." The price you pay for your cushy suburban lifestyle.
And there are some gay connections.
1. Dirk Blocker, son of Bonanza famed Dan Blocker, plays a benevolent neighbor. He went on to star in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which has a gay character.
2. Max Casella plays Marty, in the first trio of paranormal investigators. He tries to enter the vortex room and gets bit -- rather a bad injury, but he sticks around through the night anyway. Hungry, he goes into the kitchen and lays a raw steak on the counter -- not even on a plate -- but it gets all maggoty, and his face comes off. It's just a vision, but he's heading for the door...
Poltergeist was the 22-year old Cal Arts grad's first on-screen role. During the 1980s, he had a few guest spots, playing a yuppie, a lawyer, and a cop, but he was mostly involved in a theater company that he started with some fellow CalArtians.
He notes that "we hung out, had fun. We all used to smile a lot more." West Hollywood in the 80s and 90s, when everything was bright and new, and magical. The best of times.
In 1993 Martin moved to New York to continue his playwright career. He and his brother Matt wrote the book on Paper Moon, starring hunk Gregory Harrison -- seen here nude in The Harrad Experiment
More after the break