by Joe Buffaloe
Daily Lobo
Marcella's favorite movie sucks.
She assigned me to write a column on "Adventures in Babysitting," a forgettable movie from the "Uncle Buck" era of late-'80s, family-friendly comedies.
"I won't do it," I told her. "And you're stupid and a bad editor. Elizabeth Shue isn't really that hot, either."
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Her novel concept for the column intrigued me, though.
"You get $17," she said.
Later that night, I watched the movie.
Unlike David Bowie's "Labyrinth," which gets better only with time, "Adventures in Babysitting" is terrible when you're older. And it's not just that the movie is bad. You see, Marcella is a bad person for liking it.
An attitude of intolerance and prejudice shows up in it quickly enough. When a 17-year-old gets stood up for a fancy date, she agrees to babysit two kids from the suburbs. "Homo" is used as a derogatory term within the first five minutes, in a fight between a brother and sister, and taken as an insult.
A dilemma soon emerges as the babysitter's friend calls to say she's stuck at a bus station in the middle of the city with no money, and she needs to be picked up. The mission is to get downtown, but the two kids - an insanely stupid 10-year-old girl and an overly emotional 15-year-old boy - have to ride with her. Plus, a really annoying friend of the brother connives his way into the ride.
Once they get a flat tire, and the babysitter figures out she forgot her purse, the city becomes the central enemy in the movie. A friendly trucker, because he's from the city, has a hook for a hand and crashes through a fence to run after a stranger with a gun. The suburbs, the movie tells us, are safe because the people are better - the city is filled with crazy weirdos, and all the problems you hear about urban strife should be ignored because it's their own fault. What a progressive message.
When the suburbanites end up hiding from gunshots in a car, it is immediately stolen - by the first African-American to appear in the film. Every African-American character, by the way, is a criminal or a blues musician. Also, the "good" criminal, who protects the babysitter and maniacally annoying kids, is the African-American who, for lack of a better term, speaks white. If he didn't sound like Joey Lawrence, the filmmakers figured he would have been too threatening for a white audience at the time.
As the characters get in more trouble, they approach the middle of the city, marked by a tall, well-lit skyscraper, where the children's parents are attending a tuxedo party. It's the ivory tower rising out of urban squalor - the implication being that our problems are all the minorities' and homeless' fault, and that ignoring it in decadence is perfectly natural.
The friend who got stuck at the bus station, by the way, has had her glasses stolen by a homeless African-American woman at this point. When she uses a public phone and takes an obnoxious amount of time, a homeless man bangs on the door and yells, "You're in my house." Looking back on it, it's a tragic portrayal of homelessness. But the movie turns it into a joke.
I think movies have come a little way since "Adventures in Babysitting." Hopefully, they're a little more culturally sensitive. Or maybe we as a culture are more sensitive to bigoted assumptions in movies, whether they be racist, sexist, homophobic or classist.
To Marcella, I'll say this: I hope a fresh perspective has opened your eyes, and I hope you'll pay more attention to what you watch in the future.
Who knows what damage it could do to your fragile mind?
