In loco parentis

Dear friends,

Sometimes I put obscure references in my films, with no hope that anyone will understand them, but with real hope that they inflict no damage upon the films themselves. I cannot explain with great precision why I do this, but it’s not unrelated to the fact that invariably I have to watch these films more than anyone else does, so why not treat myself.

I was thinking about this the other day while my 9-year-old was listening (again) to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, which contains some pleasant callbacks to the early hip-hop of The Sugarhill Gang and others. When my wife and I first met, she was curating an exhibit for the Smithsonian on the invention of hip-hop, taking the train up to New York to interview all these curious old fellows. I was unfamiliar with this era of hip-hop, nursed as I was on Nirvana, and in that way that you do when you’re falling in love, I immersed myself as best I could. And so 14 years later, hundreds of miles to the north, I grok the allusions.

One lyric puzzled us, and eventually I looked up the lyrics online. Hercules Mulligan, the Irish roommate of Alexander Hamilton at King’s College, finds himself in the 21st century Broadway show stating: “Yo I’m a tailor’s apprentice, and I got y’all knuckleheads in loco parentis.” What an unbelievable sentence. This is evidently his way of saying that Hamilton, Lafayette and Laurens are stand-ins for his parents. (Or perhaps, it’s unclear, Mulligan plays a fatherly role to Hamilton?) Either way this strikes me as absolute bananas. Would a single person in the audience parse that zippy Latin? Or was this included for the fanatics?

I’m not an acquaintance of Lin-Manuel Miranda or I would ask him. A friend of mine from college, Arthur Lewis, performed for years with Miranda, but the last time I saw Arthur was our senior year, when I took him to the ER because he’d slashed the webbing between his fingers while trying to recycling a can of crushed tomatoes. As the public face of Yale’s recycling program, and the only fellow in the house at the time, it was my solemn duty to see that he could get his fingers fixed up. And good thing, because he’s a masterful keyboardist. I still think of him every time I rinse out a 28 ounce can.

Anyway, John McPhee, in one of his lovely books, recounts a quarrel with his editor at The New Yorker. McPhee wanted to use the phrase “starboard out, starboard home,” alluding to the perhaps apocryphal origin of the word “posh,” since the wealthy would get the best views heading out and returning home on a ship: port out, starboard home. The editor pointed out that only one of his thousands of readers might catch this allusion, and McPhee successfully argued that this one reader was worth the trouble.

For me, this distills a persistent and mostly unanswerable aspect of the film editing process: who is our audience? What do they know? What will they feel? What will they get? Obscure references are the tip of the expository iceberg, since getting any message across is also essentially guesswork. Sure, we conduct test screenings and try to gauge where we’re truly astray, but I follow neither an exhaustive scientific process nor a true focus group approach in figuring out what’s working in a film. It’s haphazard.

And thank heavens it is. The guesswork is the humanity of the work. That’s the deal, in my view: what you’re getting in one of these films is a humble attempt to communicate something, without knowing exactly to whom I’m communicating. It’s one thing to tell a story to your college pals, about the time Arthur sliced his finger webbing and the wound looked like a gaping fish mouth, and thank God the old Volvo started, all those one-way streets, etc etc, but most of our films go out into the world without our knowing where they’ll end up.

from The Arc of Oblivion (2023)

Numbskulls in the distribution world often insist we define our audience: oh, this is for 40-something college-educated white men who also like watching Cinderella. The absurdity of these generalizations borders on the outrageous, and explains a lot of milquetoast television. It’s wild and wondrous to not have any idea what goes on in the minds of others, and equally wild and wondrous to imagine what goes on. That’s the deal, that’s the point. If films don’t have a voice - and more importantly a voice that reaches out into the unknown - they are not art, they are soulless industrial products. I wager we need those too, but the distinction matters. What a person might feel or think or do after seeing one of our films is a great unknown, and may it ever be so.

One of my most unspectacular Easter eggs is actually a sound that I insisted on using in The Arc of Oblivion (2023). It’s a somewhat unnecessary shot of a tractor rolling out into a field to dig some foundation holes, but the sound is identical to the sound of the tractor rolling out early in King Corn (2007). In one film I build an ark, in the earlier film I plant an acre of corn with my best friend Curt, but in both instances the sound, for me, connotes the launch of an anxious journey into the unknown. In that field in Iowa years ago, I had no way of knowing whether we’d even finish our film, let alone whether anyone would ever see it. Similarly, I had no idea whether I could successfully build an ark in a field in Maine using the small props budget in our documentary film. It’s a sound, in this sense, infused with utter terror. But I think only Curt, or maybe our King Corn editor Jeff Miller (who, by the way, was the other public face of our college recycling program) would get the reference. And even that’s a stretch; it’s a pleasant tractor sound, not a scream. Maybe I’m the knucklehead here. Port out, starboard home. Worth it?