A MUSICAL TONE, ANNOUNCING a new message, chimes, now seemingly inside my head.
“Slammy’s Employment Centers: Come join our team. From food service professionals to physicists, Slammy’s has the right career for you. No need to pound the pavement; the Slammy’s Hammer has pounded it for you! Pounded it to dust!”
Perhaps my friendship with Ingo is selfish, but perhaps it can also do the rest of the world a world of good. I believe I must continue the pursuit of my memory of the film as originally recalled. I look up local hypnotists on my Slammy’s Phone. There is only one in all of the cave, The Great Cavey, who seems to specialize in weight loss. I give him a call:
“The Great Cavey speaking.”
It is a woman, which surprises me. I assumed that anyone calling themselves “The Great” would be male. I am a monster.
“Uh, hello.”
“Yes.”
A musical tone. We both pause.
“Slammy’s University: Shaping the future, one mind at a time. With a hammer.”
“Um, yes, I am in need of a hypnotist.”
“How much do you need to lose?”
“Lose?”
“Weight.”
“OK.”
I wait.
“Hello?”
“Hi.”
“How much weight do you need to lose?”
“Oh! No, this isn’t a weight issue. I am, if you must know, at an optimum weight, my fighting weight.”
“What, then?”
“I have a memory lapse with which I need assistance.”
Musical tone: “Slammy’s Spaceships: Fly us to cave ceiling! See Gemini the Twins up close! Half price through March.”
“I mostly do weight loss.”
“Right. I got that.”
Musical tone: “Slammy’s Phones: At Slammy’s, we don’t make smart phones, we make very smart phones. Introducing the Slammy’s Genius: a phone so innovative, creative, and thought-provoking, you don’t have to be. It is the first phone to also be a fully functioning drone, to have been granted personhood by the United States Supreme Court, and to win a MacArthur grant for its groundbreaking study of the fascinating Kailpodh festival of the indigenous people of Kodagu.”
“If you take the weight-loss package, I can throw in some memory assist. But it will cost extra.”
“Can we just do the memory assist?”
“No substitutions.”
“What?”
“No substitutions.”
“I heard you. I’m just incredulous.”
“Most people want weight loss. Slammy’s is not exactly health food. Don’t tell them I said that.”
“Fine. Let’s do weight loss and memory assist.”
“Great. Please don’t tell Slammy’s I said that other thing. Seriously.”
“I won’t.”
“Thank you. I’m in the East Grotto Medical Building. You can’t miss it. It also has a big Slammy’s sign on top. Bring a list of your guilty pleasures.”
“Guilty food pleasures, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“OK.”
I don’t much trust Cavey, I think. I also think: Peanut cluster ice cream sundaes, the marinara marinated french fries at Orso, Crisco straight out of the can. Cavey is going to have a field day.
“YOU ARE NOT hungry,” she says in that hypnotist voice hypnotists use.
“Well, I did have a Slammurrito on the walk over here,” I say.
“But even if you hadn’t.”
“OK.”
“From here on out, you will never again use food as a substitute for love.”
“Is that a reference to my drilling a hole in a cantaloupe and having sex with it? Because I only did it once. And, anyway, how would you even know about that?”
“Produce-cameras produce well-behaved citizens. Slammy’s. We’re watching out for you in the fruit aisle!”
“Is that a real slogan?”
“It’s new; only in test markets still.”
“OK. So can we get to the memory part now?”
“OK.”
The Great Cavey pulls from her shelf a book entitled That Reminds Me: The Art of Remembering Forgotten Things Through the Implementation of Post-Hypnotic Suggestion. She thumbs through it for a bit. I check my watch.
“All right,” she says finally. “So the way this works, I think, is I’m going to create a post-hypnotic suggestion in you that will open up your receptivity to flashes of memory through interaction with your surroundings.”
“OK,” I say.
“Fibula, Tibula,” she says, reading some sort of incantation from the book. “Remember the Alamo, Remember the Maine / Remember to floss, Remember the pain / The world all around you, holds the answers you crave / Look both within you and without in the cave.”
“That’s it?”
She reads over the text to be sure.
“Oh, wait!” she says and performs a little flourish with her hands. “Yes, that should do it.”
I am dubious because this seems more like a spell than hypnosis, but our time is up, and after we settle the bill, she ushers me out.
HEY, I’M NOT JUST A TOWEL BOY, FELLAS
Director Judd Apatow takes the world as it is, not as he wants it to be. That’s why he remains among the most essential surviving voices in cinema. His flame-withered arm and stalactite-caved-in skull have done little to slow his prodigious output or dull his rapier yet gentle wit. The story here, although charming and inspirational, is somewhat beside the point (as it is in all Apatow joints). The real stuff on display here is humanity. When the Slammy’s team’s towel boy, who just happens to be mentally challenged and coincidentally hopes to someday be a mentally challenged comedian, tells his first joke to the team’s center, Jones (played by the inimitable African American actor Terence P. Sullivan P. Jackson P. Diddy), and Jones responds with such unchecked delight, the audience suddenly understands that our differences are truly only skin deep. We are, after all, all humans, all living in a cave, all looking for connection. The speech Jones delivers here shook me to my core: “Listen, Barry, you and me, we’re not that different. We both want to make our mark. Me with my hoops-playing, you with your mentally challenged comedy. But I can enjoy your jokes and you can enjoy my hoops throwing. And you know what? Together we can change the cave.” Or the moment when Coach Johnson (who charmingly enjoys the occasional secret doobie behind the stalagmite) learns that his wife of twenty years has a terminal illness and hides his grief because it’s Darryl the head basketball player’s birthday and he lives in a Jehovah’s Witness Orphanage (the Knorrphanage) that doesn’t celebrate birthdays, so the boys all chip in to buy him a birthday cake and take singing lessons and sing an extraordinary multipart version of “Happy Birthday to You.” Or when Skidmark, the class loser, finally gets up the courage to ask Melanie, the smartest girl in school, to the winter formal and she says no, then feels bad and says yes, then gets hit by a car. The despair on Skidmark’s face is worthy of Falconetti and results in what is arguably the greatest turnaround in cinematic history, when Skidmark realizes it is now up to him to complete Melanie’s research and cure AIDS. The scene in which Skidmark confronts his parents regarding his first name harkens back to the finest Bergman dialogue:
“Why did you even name me Skidmark for?”
“It was your grandfather’s name. And if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for you.”
“But it means—”
“We know what it means!”
“It’s caused me a lot of pain.”
“You think your Grandfather Skidmark liked it? But he carried on and became the president!”
“Still.”
That single, lonely “still” is perhaps the greatest utterance in the history of cinema, for it neatly sums up the entirety of human existence.
“To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.”—LAO TZU
“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”—MARTIN LUTHER
“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.” —DOROTHEA LANGE
“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.”—T. S. ELIOT
(boldface, italics, underlining, and much-too-large type mine)