Sometimes dreams do come true, even dreams you didn’t know you had. Which is to say: they’re making a movie out of Sweeney Todd!
Sweeney Toddy: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is the story of a London barber who, wrongly exiled by a judge who sought to steal away his wife, returns to exact his bloody revenge. It is also, in my humble opinion, the best musical ever written. My certitude in this matter is not in any way compromised by the fact that I’ve never actually seen the play — I’ve listened to the soundtrack about a billion times, enough to wear little digital holes in the mp3s, so I’m pretty sure about this. The music, the lyrics, the story, the twisted, macabre humor: it really doesn’t get much better.
And the movie seems to have a lot going for it. Johnny Depp as Sweeney is an inspired choice, Helena Bonham Carter is a really fantastic, versatile actress who’ll do wonders with Mrs Lovett — and I can’t think of a better director than Tim Burton for this play’s mixture of whimsy and menace.1
I am, of course, setting myself up for a crushing disappointment. I can only remember three times in the past decade where I’ve been this excited about a movie: (1) The Fellowship of the Ring, (2) The Matrix: Reloaded, and (3) Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace. Fellowship more than lived up to my expectations — but the second Matrix and the fourth Star Wars damaged me in ways from which I will not soon recover.
So I’m keenly aware of the danger here. But, seriously, the previews look great, and Depp’s singing voice — while not the deep baritone I’m used to in a Sweeney — seems more than adequate. I’m hopeful. I’m confident.
But please don’t suck, Sweeney Todd. I beg of you.
It seems like everybody has a touchdown dance these days. I just watched Willis McGahee of the Baltimore Ravens barrel into the end zone, spin the ball away, crouch over his haunches and do this sort of rhythmic walk-like-an-egyptian two-handed dog-patting routine. Now, I don’t play football, but I am a programmer, which means I live kind of the same life: every morning, I don my mental pads and charge headlong into a wall of murderous design challenges, using wits and instinct to type my fleet-fingered way around a host of bugs intent on taking me down. It’s very, very similar.
And yet: I have no dance.
Nor do any of my colleagues. Just the other day, I personally witnessed my officemate, a brilliant and first-rate engineer, single handedly wrestle a pesky SQL Server deadlock to the ground. How did he respond? Did he jump out of his seat and execute a shimmy-shouldered moonwalk down the hall? No. Did he electric slide through the lobby? No. Did he jitterbug into the men’s room and drum a sousa march on the stall doors? No. He just sort of sat there, a slow grin on his face, then locked his screen and went to lunch.
It’s tragic. An engineer’s day is simply littered with triumphs like these, large and small, and the most we allow ourselves in the way of reward is a sardonic smile, maybe an extra twinkie, sometimes a bit of sarcasm-laden half-boasting in the fallow slacktimes between builds.
We need to dance, engineers. We need to clamber onto our twinkie-wrapper-littered desks, raise our arms to the fluorescent fixtures that bathe us daily in their deeply unnatural light, bend our knees and stick out our asses — and dance.
I’ve been having a really hard time thinking of anything to write here lately, so I’ve decided to give the reigns to some guest bloggers. First up: God. Let’s all give him a warm welcome.
I was down in purgatory practice-smiting some fake cardboard sinners when one of the Purgatoricals (I call them schmucks, for short) swaggered up to Me and asked if I was God. I said yeah. He said prove it. Normally, I would have just ignored him — schmucks are cranky bastards, as a rule — but I smiled and told him that I don’t traffic in proof. Proof is for young gods who haven’t figured out that faith and doubt are a lot more powerful that miracles. But he just sort of snorted. “I’m not asking you to heal anyone,” he said. “I know you’re way to busy blowing stuff up for that. Just turn some water into wine, ok? I’ve got some water right here.” I didn’t answer. “Ok, how about beer. Turn it into beer.” I turned away. “Ok, Kool-Aid. Can you do Kool-Aid?”
And he went on this vein, more or less, for a very long time. I stopped listening after a while. But the guy kept going, babbling on in this really needling annoying voice. I think anyone else would have turned around and punched him, but I try not to get angry, as a rule. Universes tend to explode when I get angry, and you wouldn’t believe how long it takes to clean that kind of thing up.
But then more schmucks started gathering, and pretty soon there was a little crowd of them, shuffling around and glaring at me. “Hey God,” said a snotty little teenager schmuck with a pierced nose. “Nice dress.” I looked down at my robes, back up at him. I was too shocked to say anything, frankly. I could have turned all of them into flaming cockroaches without even thinking about it. They had to know that.
And then they spread out in a ragged circle, and three of them stepped into the middle and started doing the Garden of Eden skit. I groaned. I’d seen the skit before, of course — I can see everything, for one thing, and it’s pretty popular in purgatory — but no one had ever dared to actually do it in front of Me before.
It seemed like it was going to be a pretty standard performance: there was a girl schmuck holding an apple, and a guy schmuck looking sort of stricken, and another guy schmuck dressed in a sheet — who was supposed to be Me, I guess.
“Eat it,” said the girl schmuck, shaking the apple in the guy schmuck’s face.
“No!” said the guy schmuck. “God told us not to!”
“Think about it,” said the girl schmuck. “He created this whole place, right? He made the ground you’re standing on, the trees, the air, the animals. He made this apple. He made you. Am I wrong?”
Guy schmuck shrugged.
“So why would he make you, and then make this tree, which we’re not supposed to eat from, and then tell us about it?”
“He’s God.”
“That’s not an answer. That’s a statement. A non-germane statement.”
“I don’t know why, ok? We’re not supposed to know why.”
“Because it’s a test, dolt. He could have made us completely incurious, but he didn’t. He made us want to eat the apple. Ok? He wants us to eat the apple.”
“Then why’d He tell us not to?”
“To see if we had any actual initiative. To see if we’re worth keeping around. Besides, it tastes good. Just eat it.”
The guy schmuck took a bite. “Mmmm,” he said. “Knowledge.”
And then the Me schmuck made his entrance, clomping into the scene with his chest puffed out and his elbows swinging, which isn’t how I walk at all. “How dare you!” he said. “How dare you eat this apple I gave you and made you want to eat and then told you not to eat! You’re doomed, and so are all your children!”
“What’s children?” said the girl schmuck.
“Oh, you’ll find out,” said the Me schmuck, and rubbed his hands together and sort of cackled.
I’d had enough. “Stop!” I boomed, in the big God voice, and they stopped, and tried not to look scared. They didn’t quite pull it off. “Do you people have something you want to say?”
“I think we just said it,” said the girl schmuck, sheepishly.
I should probably have been angry at that point. But I wasn’t. I was just tired. “Look,” I said. “I made some mistakes early on. I think that’s pretty clear. But I’ve done so much since then — I made rainbows, fjords. I made love and sunsets. I made Shakespeare and Jesus.”
“And death, and pain, and evil.”
“I stand by death,” I said. “I tried immortality early on, but it didn’t work out. You took everything for granted. Pain I’ll own up to. I can’t figure out how to make it all work without pain. But evil — evil is your doing.”
“Us?” said the girl schmuck. “How could we possibly create evil? We just figured out how to make ziploc bags.”
“And that’s another thing — this idea that evil is a sort of gas that floats around and attaches itself to things. Evil is what people do.”
“You made Hitler,” said one of them. “You made Stalin.”
“I made them, but you filled them up with their hatred, and then you let them get away with it. Did I also make the people who looked the other way when the trains to Aushcwitz rolled by? Did I make the people who ran the gulags?”
They looked up at me, cow-eyed. They weren’t getting it.
“You people got a bum rap. I’ll admit it. I thought I could give you free will and shield you from its consequences. I was wrong. Maybe I should have ended the whole thing right then and there. I could have reached down and pinched off Adam’s head, and — blam! — no more humanity. Would that have been better?”
They didn’t have an answer to that. Or not an answer they were willing to own up to.
“I’m really tired of being blamed me for your bloodlust, ok? It’s just cowardly. You put words in my mouth to justify the violence you approve of, and invent devils to explain the violence you don’t. Take some responsibility for yourselves.”
They mumbled at each other. A few of them seemed abashed, but the rest just looked annoyed.
I sighed, and turned away. It was all so pointless. Maybe I should just wipe all of you out, start over. But I made a promise, a long time ago, and I try not to break my promises. Besides — chances are, you’ll do the job for Me, sooner or later.
I thought about doing a little bit more practice smiting, but My heart wasn’t in it anymore. So I went back to heaven and lay down for a while.
You people give me a headache.