I’ve re-watched some of the wisecracking antihero comedies of the 70s and very early 1980s: “Stripes” and “Ghostbusters,” for example. When I was in my 20s, I thought Bill Murray was totally cool in those movies. Now I think he’s just a jerk. In the case of “Ghostbusters,” he seems to have Tourette’s, his comedy seems to consist of saying random, inappropriate things.

I watched the first few minutes of the movie “M*A*S*H” this morning and commented on Facebook that Hawkeye and his main sidekick (Duke Forrest in the movie rather than Trapper John) just seem like (pardon my strong language here) assholes. I wondered if they seemed that way to the audience when the movie came out, in 1970. A friend said they probably did, that they were the “House” of their era.

Frank Burns in the movie seems sympathetic. He’s in over his head, but he’s trying.

Loved the Elvis clip. Just have to say, though, that if anybody else had used that body language (especially the dangling hand), he would have been called gay, gay, gay. Just goes to show, eh?

And The Care Bears! And The Smurfs! Captain Planet! Sadly to me, they have not held up to the test of time.

I haven’t had this experience exactly, but I have had the experience of reading *name of book withheld*, getting made fun of by someone for reading it, protesting “But it’s actually really good writing!” and then going back and realizing, um, no it isn’t. Oops.

You totally should.

Not many people ever watch it with that viewing in mind, but when you do it becomes incredibly obvious. There’s even a scene where Michael J Fox is turned down for a part in the school play in his regular human form, but gets the part right away once he turns into a “werewolf.”

When I saw that I said: Well now that’s just lazy and stereotypical.

When I was a kid it seemed like a very exciting story of “What if I just woke up one day and was a werewolf?”

Now it seems like a really anti-gay allegory about how you should suppress you differences in order to conform to the model behavior of society.

Think about it: its the story of a kid feels weird his whole life, then wakes up one day and discovers that the reason he felt weird was because he was actually a werewolf.

THEN his father (who is also a werewolf) immediately tells his son to hide the fact that he is a werewolf for his own good. The whole movie repeats the message over and over again that werewolves lead a dangerous lifestyle and are better off trying to pass as human.

At the end of the movie, everyone has turned against the werewolf, and he has to change back into human form, so he can play basketball with his human teammates who are ironically named “The Beavers.”

It goes on and on, but I’ll stop there for the sake of trying to sound somewhat sane.

Don’t get me wrong self-involved is pretty much compulsory for most first person narratives. I have nothing against it. The protags of my last two books (HTDYF & Liar) are plenty self-involved. But Holden is self-involved beyond mere self-involved.