#i will be inviting an equal misfortune because i was 'selfish' enough to accept a gratuity offered specifically to me

[july-19th-club]

honestly the whole blood donation hundred and forty eight slash potential thousands balancing the books of life and death thing is not that crazy. average catholic salvation-math logic

[mst3kproject]

609: The Skydivers

I kind of wanted to start out by saying something about how this is the long-awaited third installment in the Coleman Francis Trilogy of Tedium, but that doesn't work.  First of all, The Skydivers is actually Francis' middle movie, made in 1963 (The Beast of Yucca Flats was first, in 1961, and Red Zone Cuba third, in 1966).  Second, that would make me sound like an Argento fan waiting twenty-seven years for The Third Mother, when actually my reaction to seeing The Skydivers pop up in my randomizer was “oh, right.  There's another fucking Coleman Francis movie.”

Like its two sisters, The Skydivers is a bleak and disjointed experience.  A married couple, Harry and Beth, run a skydiving school.  Harry is having an affair with a woman named Suzy (if the name of her boat is anything to go by, the 'z' is supposed to be backwards).  Beth retaliates by almost having an affair with Joe, the airfield's new mechanic.  Joe was hired to replace Franky, who was fired for being drunk and now wants revenge on his former employer.  When Harry spurns Suzy, she and Franky sabotage his parachute, and Harry goes splat.  Suzy and Franky are gunned down by the FAA(?!).  Beth feels guilty and breaks up with Joe before leaving the skydiving school to do something else that probably won't involve airplanes.  Crow gets destroyed a lot, and I conclude that people whose names end in 'y' probably shouldn't get involved with skydiving.

If anyone's interested, there is at least one recorded case of a skydiver being murdered by sabotaging his parachute, that of Steve Hilder in 2003.  The saboteur was never found and the case remains unsolved.

As for the movie itself, there's very little in The Skydivers that would be of interest to... anybody, really.  The movie is dull and badly-lit, featuring boring people in awkward situations.  About the only thing that really caught my attention at any point was the fact that there is some actual footage of skydiving, although you can never see the jumpers' faces up close and I suspect Coleman Francis borrowed it from some other film ('parachuting' footage featuring recognizable characters appears to involve actors hanging from the rafters by a backpack, which I can only imagine as being terribly uncomfortable).  The closest thing to a theme I can find in this celluloid coma is the idea of thrill-seeking. Various characters search for a way to brighten up their colourless lives, and end up suffering for it.

The character Pete seeks thrills by skydiving – he claims it's the only thing that makes him feel alive and free, and he tries ever more dangerous stunts until finally he is unable to pull his parachute cord and falls to his death.  In terms of the actual plot, however, Pete's fate serves no purpose except to ensure the FAA are on hand to witness Harry's murder later.  It seems to have inspired Suzy's revenge plot, but sabotaging a skydiver's parachute is such an obvious idea that this wouldn't be necessary.  His death feels ultimately pointless, not even Grist for the Wheels of Progress.

Harry and Beth each seek a thrill in the form of an illicit affair, but the results are very different because their partners respond differently to their ultimate rejections.  Joe respects Beth enough to accept her rejection, not once but twice: when she initially tells him this can go no further and they must be content to be friends, he accepts it with grace.  At the end, when she tells him she can't stay at the skydiving school, he accepts that too, even though it means he will probably never see her again.

Suzy, on the other hand, has no respect for anybody, even as she expects other people to respect her – witness how she attacks Harry when he calls her a 'broad'.  She was spoiled as a child, and never learned to see other people as anything but a way to get what she wants.  When she can no longer get the sexual excitement she wants from Harry, she kills him.  Franky is nothing but a tool she uses to exact this revenge.  Beth, who has nothing to offer, means nothing to her.

I guess it's mildly noteworthy that The Skydivers is the only Coleman Francis movie in which more than one woman has lines.  In The Beast of Yucca Flats the only woman who talked was the mother of the vacation family, and she didn't have a whole lot to say.  In Red Zone Cuba I think Chastain's wife had a line or two, but I can't remember a word of them.  In The Skydivers, both Beth and Suzy have a fair amount of actual dialogue, and manifest distinctly different personalities.  They are stereotypes, being the 'femmy fattily' and the long-suffering wife, but they make decisions as individuals rather than as 'women', with comprehensible reasons for doing so.  So, uh, that makes Coleman Francis better at writing women than Tommy Wiseau, I guess.

I feel like the universe owes me a cookie for putting me in a position to write that sentence.

I really don't think the consequences of thrill-seeking are the point of the movie, though – the fates of Harry and Beth have more to do with their partners than with the actual illicit sex, and Pete's death seems far too pointless.  The whole movie seems pointless, really – as Beth leaves the airfield at the end, we have no idea why we were just told that story, and what, if anything, we were supposed to take from it.  That seems to be a theme of Coleman Francis movies in general: nobody gets a happy ending and when all's said and done there's no point to any of it.

Consider The Beast of Yucca Flats.  At the end the monster is dead, but a family has perhaps been destroyed.  Or Red Zone Cuba. The villains don't get what they want, but neither do the good guys, and a half dozen other lives have been ruined along the way.  Life is nothing but a series of misfortunes.  Happiness is fleeting when it appears at all, and death is neither release nor justice, it is merely death.  The bare, inhospitable landscapes of the American southwest where Francis filmed seem to underscore the idea: the world is not an inviting place, and does not differentiate between the guilty and the innocent.  All of us, sinners and saints, are equally likely to be gunned down by a guy in a plane for no goddamn reason.

This is where we start to see glimmers of a personal philosophy through the cracks of these movies.  Coleman Francis' work suggests he believed that humans and our institutions are all basically chaotic neutral, doing whatever will benefit us at the moment without much thought for how it affects those around us.  Even Beth, when she rejects Joe's advances, does so for selfish reasons: she believes she will be happier as Harry's wife than Joe's mistress.  'Justice' is arbitrary and cruel.  Doing evil rarely avails us anything, but neither does doing good, and at the end of the day we're all just brief candles in the void.  This is a really depressing way to live your life and makes for some really depressing movies, and I doubt Francis actually thought like this.  Rather, I think he made this kind of movie because he thought that's what important movies should be.

Our entertainment culture seems to believe that tragedy is somehow 'more important' than comedy.  Quick, name three Shakespeare plays! I bet two of them were Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, right?  Even if those aren't the ones you came up with, I bet at least two, if not all three, were tragedies.  Shakespeare wrote nearly twice as many comedies as he did tragedies (eighteen to ten, by most scholars' counts), but it's his tragedies that are endlessly studied and analyzed, that attract big-name actors and win awards to this day, because they're considered more meaningful than the lighthearted comedies.

This is strange, because comedy is important, too.  I think Dustin Hoffman's character in Stranger than Fiction had the best explanation of why: it is by affirming the continuance of life (comedy) that we deal with the unavoidable certainty of death (tragedy).  The ancient Greeks knew this, and would finish up an afternoon of tragedies with a comedic performance called a Satyr Play, so that the audience wouldn't leave the theatre depressed.  Shakespeare knew it, too.  Even Hamlet has jokes, and Horatio is left at the end (continuance of life) to pass on the moral of the story (don't wander around making long-winded speeches like Hamlet – get off your butt and overthrow your evil uncle the way your father's ghost told you to... like Simba!)

Stories can accomplish a lot of things.  They teach us to deal with hypothetical situations and our own emotions, give us information about places we've never been and people we've never met.  One thing that they really shouldn't do, however, is make us feel terrible for no reason, but that's exactly what Coleman Francis' movies do.  That's what you get when people are taught that tragedy is somehow meaningful just because it's tragic.  It might be sad, but unless it has characters we identify with and situations that are somehow significant, it's still not good.

If you haven't seen Stranger than Fiction, you're missing out.  It's a very funny movie about coping with one's own mortality and might just make you cry over the death of Will Ferrell.  If you haven't seen The Skydivers... you're good.  Don't bother.