Welcome. It's the Niles Files third April Fool's blog. Hi! Again, hi! If you're really bored and life is still pointless, like it was last year, check out last year's entry on Young Einstein, or the selection from the year before that, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Have a good day! Wheeeee!
“Inner life manifests itself in various elements and conglomerations of external life,” writes Siegfried Kracauer in From Caligari to Hitler,
“especially in those almost imperceptible surface data which form an
essential part of screen treatment. In recording the visible world –
whether current reality or an imaginary universe – films therefore
provide clues to hidden mental processes.”
I don’t know what the fuck that’s all about. I suppose it has
something to do with Kracauer surveying German cinema through
Expressionism and the Weimar Republic and tying it to how all that
morbid stuff anticipated things in the German unconscious that blossomed
into National Socialism or something, but I don’t fucking know. I
haven’t read the book. I bought a used copy on Amazon a while back and
it’s just *there*, collecting dust. Sometimes when I’m drunk I’ll pick
it up and skim it looking for my name. But the passage sounds like it
could probably pertain to the focus of this week’s discussion, “Weird
Al” Yankovic and Jay Levey’s motion picture masterpiece from 1989, UHF,
a comedy all about the inner life of a single man made manifest in his
fortuitous occupation as programmer for a neglected UHF television
station out of Tulsa. The imagination of George Newman (played by
co-writer Yankovic, who also wrote much of the film’s music) is at last
able to leap from its boundless interiorization, where it had disrupted
the workings of his day-to-day life, spoiling a string of day jobs and
injuring a romantic relationship with a patient girlfriend, Terri
(Victoria Jackson). But by bridging the inner workings of his mind to
the screen, and so to the community (and with the aid of another
dreamer, the innocent, Parsifal-life janitor Stanley Spudowski, played
by Michael Richards), George Newman at last achieves fulfilling
individuation. Instead of being crushed by his dreams, like the boulder
that squishes the dreaming George into burger meat during the picture’s Raiders of the Lost Ark-inspired
prologue, with U62 everybody has bought a share of stock into George’s
mind, the communicative, fully fermented body of proliferation and
imagination, and the worlds of screen iconography and reality have
achieved harmony. The representative “New Man,” George is no longer the
onanistic, isolated dreamer, and Terri will now be a fixture in “all”
of George’s dreams, as he tells her in the film’s Gone With the Wind finale.
But Yankovic’s intimate, psychological journey of this “New Man”
existing through an increasingly videoscopic age of ubiquitous camera
eyes and image reception is onto the irony of how the audience is also
“watching” a “film,” a story that bears its own lofty quotation “marks,”
UHF (or “UHF”), and indeed we are provoked into
wondering how we interpret its signs, taking its resonances of
technologically constructed fantasy and ethereal imagination out of the
theater with us as we exit and plan to make our own twinkie wiener
sammiches. UHF’s prologue is filled with such signs warning of a
wrong direction, beginning with the alleged (though still earnestly
deliberate) flub of a mercenary having his left arm whipped off by the
silent, Indiana Jones-styled Newman, when a close-up of the arm on the
ground shows us what is clearly the right arm, pistol in hand.
From there we see the “Sacred Hovitas symbol,” sticking its tongue out
at us and “certain death for anyone who enters” the dark cave, where the
prize for image creation and manufacturing waits within the deep
bowels: the Oscar, coveted by George Newman as it was coveted by Al
Yankovic (and who was glaringly overlooked, so predictably, by the
Academy in favor of inferior films like Driving Miss Daisy and Born on the Fourth of July).
George’s guide turns back in alarm, but outside he’s killed by a train
that’s found it’s way through the Amazon rainforest. The guide heeds
the warnings, but this is the terrain of George’s head. He’s no safer in
the pit of the temple than he is outside. Indeed, UHF anticipates Inception by decades.
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