Vacation Barbie

   For movie night one evening last week, my family voted to “rent” National Lampoon’s Vacation. The original one from 1983. It set us back a whopping $1.74 on Amazon Prime. How can you beat that?
 
   Renting a movie these days ain’t what it used to be. There’s no physical exchange of anything in the whole process. It’s just some clicking around with the remote control, and then – presto – you’re suddenly watching your movie.

   I used to enjoy going to video stores to browse around for movies to rent. It was a pleasant ritual. I liked the feeling of plucking a VHS box off a shelf and discovering whether or not my selection was in the store and available to rent. Ah, the bliss when it was there! Oh, the disappointment when it was not!
 
   I don’t miss the late fees, though.
 
   I remember amassing a ridiculously huge late fee at my local video store back in the late 90s. The clerk at Blockbuster must have fat-fingered my return, so the blasted computer said I never returned it. But I just knew that I had. Alas, there was no arguing with the computer. I couldn’t rent any more movies there until I paid my fine. It was a standoff.
 
   I never rented another video from them. And I never paid their bogus late fee. That Blockbuster store eventually went belly up. Along with all the other Blockbusters, in every other town across the USA. I counted it as a win at the time. David beating Goliath.

*          *          *

   Watching Vacation as an adult is way different than watching it as a kid. From a kid’s perspective, it’s a barrel of laughs, an endless string of funny gags, like a long-play SNL skit. As an adult – watching Vacation with my own kid sitting next to me – there are some other thoughts that sneak in.
 
   If you’re familiar with Vacation – which I’m assuming to be a pretty safe bet for the population at large – you might remember the scene early in the movie where Clark Griswald accidently pilots the Family Truckster into a St. Louis ghetto. The gag here is to do with a square, white guy trying to get directions back to the highway from street-wise black people – most notably, a pimp and some other dangerous-looking thugs. Although Clark gets fleeced a bit, has his hubcaps stolen, and gets “Honky Lips” spray-painted on the Truckster’s rear quarter panel, he somehow manages to escape the ghetto and get safely back on the open road.
 
    While watching this scene, my wife turned to me and said, “That’s classic Hollywood stereotyping.”
 
   “What do you mean?” I asked.
 
   “You know. Portraying black people as living in squalor and being criminals and whatnot.”
 
   “Hmmm,” I said.
 
   It made me stop and think. My wife’s definitely onto something.
 
   Hollywood does that sort of thing a lot, I think. They’re sneaky, and you have to watch ‘em like a hawk. A gag – or any movie scene, for that matter – can easily be a container for some spiteful messaging. That’s no fun.
 
   I looked over at my son to see what he was thinking. I wondered if him listening to what my wife and I were discussing was sort of spoiling the ride for him. I certainly had no such ideas in my head when I watched Vacation as a kid.
 
   Is calling out weird messaging or potential racism in a comedy movie a good thing? Or does it ruin the fun?
 
   I felt sort of uneasy about it. Confused.
 
   Luckily, in the case of Vacation, I didn’t have to wait long to mend my muddled psyche. Just a few minutes later the Griswald family arrives at their relatives’ house in Kansas. The gag here is to do with a square, white guy (yes, Clark again) trying to get along with downtrodden, ignorant, middle-American white people. For some reason, this made me feel better.
 
   “There goes Hollywood again,” I announced.
 
   “What do you mean?” my wife asked.
 
   “They’re portraying midwestern white people as if they’re all a bunch of dumb hillbillies,” I answered.
 
   “Oh yeah. They really are, aren’t they?” my wife asked rhetorically.
 
   I felt compelled to point out the hillbilly bit because I wanted to restore some order to the comedy universe. And, I guess, I wanted to help preserve the reputation of Vacation in the eyes of my son. I wanted him to get the sense that a comedy classic like Vacation is masterful because it pokes fun at everything with equal zest. Black people, white people, dads, moms, kids, dogs – the works. It’s what you might call an equal-opportunity gag reel.
  
   I hope he understands this, and can carry it forward into his movie watching career. I hope he can be savvy enough to spot the targeted, politicized gags in modern comedies – such as the new Barbie movie – and realize that machine-made movies are not destined to become classics because they fail to spread the love.

*          *          *

   Shortly before my old local Blockbuster closed its doors forever, I went there with a buddy of mine. We were on the hunt for a few comedy classics for a weekend binge. Unlike me, he was a Blockbuster member in good standing, with no outstanding late fees. As his incognito sidekick, I could experience the joy of renting some movies by proxy.
 
   I remember asking the girl at the counter about Blazing Saddles. I was genuinely on the hunt for it. But I’ll confess that I was also using it an as excuse to talk to her. She was cute. I liked how her blue eyes matched her Blockbuster shirt.
 
   “Oh, we don’t carry that anymore,” she informed me.
 
   “What do you mean? Why not?” I asked.
 
   “Because it’s racist,” was her matter-of-fact reply.
 
   “Blazing Saddles?” I asked incredulously. “The Mel Brooks movie?”
 
   “Yep. It’s on our black list.”
 
   “That’s a shame,” I said. “It’s a classic. And it’s an overtly anti-racist movie, if you ask me.”
 
   “It sounds like you’re a racist. You might want to check yourself. I mean, if you call an awful movie like that a classic.” She looked at me in a certain way, as if I’d just caught my ankle in a muskrat trap. Her blue eyes turn gray. Maybe she recognized me, knew about my late fees. Maybe worse.
 
   The thought crossed my mind to just let it go. But I had to say something. A trapped muskrat doesn’t give up without a fight.
 
   “I’m sorry you think that,” I said. “And I’m sorry you don’t see the irony.”
 
   “Huh?” she asked.
 
   “You said you have a black list,” I answered.
 
   “Huh?” she asked again.
 
   That’s when my buddy walked up to the counter with a few movies in hand. One of them was Vacation.
 
– O.M. Kelsey