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wcfieldsimpersonator · 1 month ago

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The movie that Gregg chose to set the movie house in is an odd pick for him. While The People Under the Stairs is not one of Wes Craven’s better known films, it’s not forgettable in the way that Gregg’s movie picks often are. It’s not exactly a comedy, though it has a lot of camp elements, and it doesn’t have a lot of big names to drop. So what is it about this movie that drew Gregg in?

I think the answer is in what Gregg leaves out of his discussions of the movie. He talks around a lot of the horror of it, calling it the most famous movie about stairs and comparing it Father of the Bride. He avoids discussing the main themes and events of the movie, only referring to them in detached ways like the “bath scene” and "the stairs scene".

“If you’ve seen the movie, you know what happens when you go down these stairs. In this case, it will be good because we will fill the under the stairs area with popcorn classics.” His stated purpose with this new popcorn classics segment is to rewrite what happens in that basement with something that makes him happy, something that comforts him. Like how people will try to return to places where trauma occurred and try to replace those memories with good memories of that place.

Except Gregg is misguided in this because the film was not set inside the movie house. It was filmed in a set that was probably torn down the second the production ended. He has no real access to the place where the trauma happened, it doesn’t exist anymore. And he seems unwilling to accept that. Is that because he is already using the movie house as a place to rewrite his own trauma? Deferring it to a movie he loves, one that reminds him of something in his own life.

We don’t know a lot about Gregg. We don’t have any direct references to his childhood, his family, anything like that. We know that he watches movies alone during the holidays. Everyone has their theories about what Gregg’s life was like before On Cinema, but I think most people can agree that it probably wasn’t great.

Gregg seems used to being homeless, in living situations with infestations, mold, and no access to bathrooms. I’m sure part of Gregg really does just like movies, but the way he molds his entire personality and life around it reeks of escapism.

He doesn’t talk about uncomfortable subjects or use profanity unless he is pushed, though the celebrities that he and Tim admire often bring up these uncomfortable subjects (Johnny Depp, Woody Allen, Dudley Moore, etc.). It seems like a huge blind spot for him. This is why it is so strange when, during season 5, Gregg immediately goes to “being part of a family doesn’t mean being raped by dad.”

(On Cinema and HEI Network are supposed to take the structure of a nuclear family, with Tim Heidecker as the father. You can see that in the way Tim wants everyone to refer to him as the father, in the language Timheads use. Tim has shown little regard for consent throughout On Cinema. In this instance (the 1st season of Decker), he feels that anyone would be happy to be on Decker because he loves Decker, so Gregg’s consent becomes irrelevant to him. The father of a nuclear family makes decisions for the family, without asking them, because he is supposed to know best. The choices and wants of the others in the family are less important than his. “As soon as you become part of the realm, become part of the On Cinema family, you become mine. Everything you do is mine.” In the same way that Tim feels ownership over women’s bodies, he feels ownership over Gregg Turkington and the rest of the cast. We see this with Final Conclusion which is even worse because of how many people he was keeping out of the know to make it happen. Like he knows Toni would not have wanted that movie to be made, but he wanted to make it so he disregards her feelings.)

It leaves me thinking that it's not ignorance with Gregg, it's avoidance. In the same way that he will railroad a conversation to be about whatever movie he feels like talking about, he will ignore something uncomfortable or traumatic and shut down completely. Tom Cruise Jr.'s death, the two cases of arson, even just Tim crying in season 1. He needs to view those uncomfortable events through the lens of movies: Murmuring "Kramer vs. Kramer" as Toni divorces Tim in front of him, treating the electric sun 20 trial like a movie (you can see the difference in his demeanor when he stops doing that during the 6th day), and notice how Decker vs. Dracula comes up like every time Tom Cruise Jr. is mentioned (though this is also because he’s just like an opportunistic shit). To me the most damning thing is that Gregg saw the dashcam footage and ignored it until it was accidentally released to the world.

So Gregg is trying to fix something that happened in his past, perhaps he's just trying to fix the On Cinema family itself. He and Tim both make big changes after the disaster that was Amatocon. Tim does what he always does: run in the opposite direction of wherever he was going. He goes from letting his hair go gray and somewhat accepting that he's aging, to dyeing it all black and using massage oil like lotion (to prevent aging). After the failed proposal with Kaili, Gregg goes back to movies. He goes to Father of the Bride and he sees a perfect family. And when he can't buy the Father of the Bride house, he decides that transforming a house from a horror movie into a movie house museum is more fitting. But, in trying to rewrite what happened in the movie house, Gregg actually helps Tim recreate the “family” in The People Under the Stairs.

The heads of the family in The People Under the Stairs are an incestuous couple with the names “Man” and “Woman” (Man is also referred to as “The Landlord”). There is a direct connection made between capitalism and white supremacy in this movie, and a push back on the insistence that the nuclear family model is the only natural family structure (the insistence upon the “tradition”). We are shown how rotten it all is.

Their children are treated like servants and shunned when they disobey the parents of the household. And we see this reflected in the character of Mark in On Cinema, especially in season 15. He is no longer credited as an actor or an impersonator, he is simply a repairman now. Gregg makes him do all of the construction work and Tim makes him greet the customers for the massage parlor. They scold him for not being able to do both jobs at the same time.

The way abuse happens in the movie is very calculated. Man and Woman keep the house locked down tight, they make sure not to shoot their gun outside, and they have a whole fake story for the children’s rooms when the cops eventually visit. In the same way, though to a lesser extent, Tim goes to great lengths to cover up his abuse of Mark. He has Mark send out that tweet before the 4th Oscar Special to make an excuse for his bandaged nose, he immediately goes to denying blame with the scuba outfit thing, and he insists that him pushing over a comatose Mark was intentional (that it was meant to knock him out of his coma).

Mark has a direct parallel in the movie with Alice. She is the last child in the house who hasn’t been put in the basement. She walks on thin ice, “I do not hear or see or speak evil. It’s the only way.” She has a lot of trouble leaving the house, even though she wants to. She doesn’t think that there’s anywhere else to go. But, later in the film, you find out that Man and Woman aren’t even her real parents.

Mark has become a pawn for Gregg and Tim, they only seem to care about the abuse done by the other when they can use it against one another (like they’re in divorce court or something). We see Mark get away from both of them for a bit, but that doesn’t last. In the same way that no one else will accept the Gregg being a film expert, no one else will pretend like Mark has any talent. And it seems like all Mark wants to do is act. So he feels like he can’t leave, even though he wants to.

And, finally, Alice is punished for having sympathy and caring for the “things in the walls”. The titular people under the stairs are compared to rats at the beginning. They are the people who have been abused and hidden away in the cellar. Mark is also punished for having sympathy for the rats. He says he doesn’t want to hurt them, and he doesn’t, knowing that it will most likely lead to more punishments from Tim.

In On Cinema, it seems like rats and rat infestations are also used as imagery for abuse and the hiding of abuse. In the same way that Gregg sees himself in discarded things, Mark and Toni see themselves in the rats that Tim wants to kill. They are innocent, plucked from their homes into a confusing, all-consuming world of pain.

There’s the rat who dies in the 8th Oscar Special that Toni projects onto, though it’s not much of a stretch because it dies in a recreation of her wedding with Tim. She says that the rat is “hiding from Tim” and she insists on adopting it instead of giving it away. When the rat dies, Tim does what he normally does. He avoids blame, saying that it “just passed” and then blaming La Rue when that doesn’t fly (just like he did with the pepper spray incident). And then there is Mark’s complete refusal to kill the rats in season 15, when he normally will do anything to avoid abuse from Tim.

There is Gregg’s avoidance of the whole subject, which often happens with Tim’s abuse when he feels like he can’t directly use it against him. All the evidence of the abuse (evidence of rat infestations) is ignored. Tim says he sees a rat scurrying across the bedroom and Gregg says it was just a shadow, rats are actively getting into the bags of popcorn and Gregg's solution is to just tape up the holes. Even when they bring in an expert on rat infestations who says that there is a rat infestation, Gregg will not acknowledge it.

When Gregg is talking about rat infestations he literally brings up The People Under the Stairs as an example of a rat infestation, but there are no actual rats in the movie. The “rats” are the people under the stairs. He ignores the abuse in the movie in the same way that he does in real life.

#honestly i have more to say but covid is zapping my brain rn #there are some good parallels between man and tim in the movie as well #and tim getting bitten by a rat and almost dying to rat poison also seem pretty important #i will stop using the on cinema pledge picture when it stops being relevant #the picture before that is supposedly a “timhead” meme though it was posted by tim so it might just be him lol #ALSO i forgot to mention but the dolls in those pictures are the dolls alice makes for the people under the stairs #on cinema #ocatc

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