Кино и кое-что еще. Неизвестные истории об известных фильмах

SUPPOSE THAT WE TOOK ALL OF THE CHARACTERS who have ever appeared in a high school movie and enrolled them all at the same school. I’m talking everyone from House Party, Rushmore, Superbad, Booksmart, The Breakfast Club, Dazed and Confused, Napoleon Dynamite, Easy A, Election, Stand and Deliver, Clueless, 10 Things I Hate About You, Freedom Writers, Dangerous Minds, Carrie, Bring It On, Cooley High, Heathers, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in Pink, on and on and on, until you’ve gotten every person from every high school movie that’s ever been.

Suppose they all now attend a school called Movie High School. Suppose that they all have classes together and eat together and exist together, meaning they all have the opportunity now to begin to form new social circles in this new social setting. Suppose, for example, that Taylor Vaughan from 1999’s She’s All That could become friends with Malcolm from 2015’s Dope,[129] or that Johnny Lawrence from 1984’s The Karate Kid could become friends with Lara Jean from 2018’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.[130] And suppose that after a few months of all of the characters from all of the high school movies being around each other, Regina George, the big bad at the center of 2004’s Mean Girls, climbed her way up to the top of social hierarchy where she belongs. Suppose that all of those things are true, and suppose that none of the logistical problems you might be imagining for such a campus are relevant.

That being the case, I ask this question: Who’s in the Regina George circle of friends? There were six seats at each cafeteria table in Mean Girls. If we delete the friends that she had in that movie and start populating them with kids from Movie High School, who gets to sit with her? Who takes up those five extremely valuable seats?

The «circle of friends» notion here is something that, in other situations, I might assume should not be explained. But given that this is a book, and given that explanations are, in one form or another, either directly or indirectly, in some instances overt and other instances discreet and more brilliant instances symbolic or allegorical, inseparable from the very nature of (most) books, here is one: The phrase «circle of friends» is used to mean «a group of people that a person hangs out with regularly.»

The group of people I regularly hung out with in high school was as follows:

There was Johnny. He was handsome and charming and occasionally angry. (I liked him because he seemed unafraid of every person and every situation.) I remember one time when we were trying out for the basketball team in middle school he said he could tell I could run fast because my forehead was too big for my body, which is a very funny joke that I refused to acknowledge was very funny.

There was Eddie. Eddie was a big-time dork in middle school but sometime between eleventh and twelfth grade he grew into himself and somehow, inexplicably, unpredictably, undeniably became almost cool. I feel like he maybe started trying to get people to call him Edward, but I can’t say for certain. What I can say for certain, though, is that if he did, we did not oblige him.

There was Brian. He was the one white kid in our group, and one of the very few in our neighborhood. A lot of girls liked him because, per the girls, he kind of looked like a tougher version of Jonathan Taylor Thomas from Home Improvement, which at the time was just about the nicest specific compliment I’d ever heard anyone say about anyone.

11. У какого фильма самая душераздирающая завязка — «Без лица» или «В поисках Немо»?

Несколько лет назад, году, наверное, в 2014-м, я ходил в кино с женой и сыновьями. Мы смотрели «Город героев» — мультфильм о мальчике, который дружит с надувным роботом и организует команду супергероев. Это очень забавный мультик (львиную долю юмора привносит сам робот[131]), но его открывает невероятно грустная история (путь к славе главного героя Хиро, четырнадцатилетнего вундеркинда, начинается с того, что вся его семья — мама, папа и брат — умирает примерно в течение первых десяти минут). Помню, я смотрел «Город героев», осмысливал его и вдруг осознал, что многие персонажи анимационных фильмов переносят аналогичную душевную травму, которая влияет на все их дальнейшее существование[132].