Being Out of Place and Seeing "The World's End"

Back in the fall of 1986, a tumultuous time in my life, a student I'd had the year before invited me to a Halloween costume party.  The party's theme was something like "Song Titles" -- in other words, we were invited to dress up as the title of a song.

I have little interest in costume parties and, as a result, my imagination is dull when it comes to costuming myself.  Somehow, by wearing my letterman's sweater from Kellogg High School and with some kind of lame button I made, I portrayed myself as "Private Idaho".

I arrived at the party and immediately saw that I was totally out of place.  Others at the party appeared to have spent weeks dreaming up costumes and hours shopping for them and putting on make-up -- they might have been vying for awards given at the party for best costume.  In particular, I remember one guy dressed in a slick suit of some kind and had rigged up a fancy pair of shoes to portray "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes".

I had that sinking feeling that everyone at the party had a history with each other, knew the conventions of their annual costume party, and went to extravagant ends to meet or exceed one another's masquerading expectations.

I had that same sinking feeling today as I watched the movie "The World's End".

This time, rather than walking into a party, I found myself entering into a movie where I was as ignorant of the conventions in it as I had been at the costume party.

I do not watch zombie movies.  I've never seen one.  I haven't seen "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" -- either one.

I hadn't seen "Shaun of the Dead".  I never saw "Hot Fuzz".

I've been in the company of scores of people who love zombie and other related genre movies and who love Edgar Wright's movies and many of my friends on Facebook have been eagerly anticipating this third Edgar Wright movie.

As with that Halloween party nearly thirty years ago, where I didn't get any of the inside jokes, where I was ignorant of running gags that had been going on for years, where I had no familiarity with anyone at the party, as I watched "The World's End", I realized that it was making fun of things I knew nothing about, was building on past jokes I had never heard, and was a parody of a kind of movie I had never seen.

I was out of place, out of my element, out of my depth, a babe in the woods, however you want to put it.

So what could I do?

Well, at the Halloween party, I retreated to the hot tub.  I removed my lame costume and soaked.

To my knowledge, the Regal Cinemas at Valley River Center do not have a public hot tub, so I found myself experiencing the movie on my own terms.

It's all I could do.

So, for much of the movie, I experienced it as a story about a character afflicted with my least favorite affliction in life and in the movies, arrested development.

Gary King (Simon Pegg) is a man-adolescent and it's his drive to relive a night from his teenage years that drives the entire plot.

This was painful for me.  Two documentary movies focused on arrested development popped to mind:  "Anvil" and "American Movie", two movies that made me cringe throughout as I watched adult men living in a state of adolescence, whether in a rock band or as an aspiring movie maker, adult men unable to live up to the responsibilities of adult life.

So, being so out of place with the genre/Edgar Wright stuff, I kept wondering if Gary King would grow up, would he become a man.  I don't really have an answer to that question.

The other way I experienced the movie was as social commentary upon the soul sucking impact of standardized, conventional living and the dehumanizing impact of collectivism.

I think both of these ideas, along with exploring arrested development, were at work in the movie.  I don't think I imposed them upon it.

But, I think it meant that I experienced this movie for its lesser pleasures.  My guess is that the greater pleasures were reserved for my friends who have followed Edgar Wright, who watch movies about  the apocalypse and body snatching and conforming human appearing beings with blue blood.

I'm out of that loop.

But, I'm not out of the "Blade Runner" loop.  At times, I thought maybe the movie was going to be a more extended parody of the idea of replicants.  I think a trace of that idea was in this movie, but loving "Blade Runner" wasn't much help.

After the movie, I told Mark I was glad we went.  I told him that I think it does me good to take a break from the kinds of movies I always go to and to experience something way out of what I know anything about.

I doubt "The World's End" will live with me very long and if you see me and ask me about the movie, I'm sorry, but I won't be able to talk about how it stacks up to "Shaun of the Dead" or "Hot Fuzz" and I won't be able to tell you if I thought its parodic aspirations succeeded.

I will tell you, though, that I've done all I can in my life to distance myself from all the Gary Kings I've ever known.