Ope Pardon, No. 10: Casper the Angsty Ghost

Hi, hello!

I will be honest, as you perhaps have noticed, it is proving harder than anticipated to find a nice niche in the schedule for personal writing now that I am back on the M-F, 9-5 grind, but I have received enough gentle nudges/affirmations of interest that I will aspire to do better. (This isn't a request for advice on time management, just a declaration of intent.)

A couple weeks ago, I took a screenshot of a tweet (this is my #process) from some account called DiscussingFilm announcing a live-action Casper the Friendly Ghost series "in the works" at Peacock that would be a "darker take that reimagines the origin of Casper in a coming-of-age story that explores what it means to be alive."

Now. I have done little to no research to fact-check either the announcement of this series or look into the creative minds behind it. And it was, without question, a tweet designed to elicit this exact kind of fist-shaking-at-the-sun, get-off-my-lawn reaction vis-a-vis there are no original ideas anymore and why are there so many reboots and why must it always be "dark takes" and "origin stories" etc. etc. etc. Yet I am going to take the bait anyways.

My bone to pick with the dark origin story trend, specifically with respect to IP that originated as children's content, is that it both misses the point of these stories — they are for children — but also that it ignores the obvious fact that you don't need to change these stories to make them "dark" and that, often, whatever darkness you come up with pales in comparison to the darkness in the original text, if you're so inclined to see it.

When I was young, I went through a period where I thought liking dark and twisty things was a personality. This was a quite long phase, I'm embarrassed to admit, marked most profoundly by a teenage obsession with Criminal Minds, serial killers and the Saw franchise. It ended, more or less, with getting way too into, and then deeply put off by, true crime docuseries. (To be clear, I still like dark and twisty things and have a high tolerance for violence and despair and I will watch that trending documentary and send you 100 texts about it, I just no longer think such things are the most interesting thing about me.)

In any case, in the early days of this phase, I read a metric ton of fairy tales in their original tellings, which were dark as hell, even if I almost certainly did not fully grasp the gravity of the crimes I was reading about at the tender age of 12. And I don’t mean "ah, the prince kissed Sleeping Beauty without her consent, you can't give consent if you are asleep!" I mean the prince raped Sleeping Beauty multiple times and she gave birth to several babies whilst in a coma. This isn't even subtext — it's just the story as written! All due respect to Hans, Charles and the Grimms, but what the fuck.

Approaching these tales in their Disney forms, often all you need to do to make a children's movie dark and twisty is simply change the score and maybe futz with saturation and color scale. But even pointing this out is a bit blasé. A dark and twisty personality cottage industry.

What really bothers me about the desire to adapt children's stories into dark series for adults is that it seems part and parcel of what I see as a growing lack of faith in audiences' basic televisual comprehension. (My biggest and longest-standing pet peeve in this regard is the unnecessary flash-forward opening scene — please make your story good enough to engage the audience without a (usually anticlimatic) tease of where it is going.)

Allow me to explain how I got here from "dark and gritty Casper."

Fairy tales did not originate as a specifically child-oriented form of entertainment and even when they began to be adapted for children, they maintained references that resonated or relayed different meanings for different audiences, namely adults. Yes, they were/are often simplistic and moralistic and whether you agree with the messages being pushed (probably not) is not really the point, they nonetheless functioned on multiple levels. As, to be clear, most good stories do. It's one of the hallmarks of good storytelling.

In any case, one of the highest praises children's animation can receive is that it's also entertaining for parents. (It is, of course, a problem when critics or Twitter pundits put an adult's amusement and/or rigorous mental engagement as more important than that of the experience of the target, i.e., child, audience.) But the reason that the best Disney and Pixar films are successful with adults is not that they hide dicks in the animation or show graphic and/or traumatic sex and violence, it's that they touch on the resonant themes of such adult plots through the lens of their own genre(s). Turning Red is a great recent example of this, or for an older reference, Inside Out: Children's stories can tackle adult themes (which are more often than not universal themes, or themes children should be introduced to through storytelling they understand) through their own genre, they don't need to be remade to get the message across to adults. Trust — and here I must admit Turning Red discourse is evidence maybe our media literacy is worse than I want to believe — that adults can follow the messages of a children's movie.

I am off track now, of course. Casper is being remade not because NBC Universal thinks there are important messages in Casper to be shared with the world and the only way to do so is to package it in dark and gritty miniseries form. It's being remade because Casper is a name the people who pay for streaming services recognize and remember and nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

Still, why must everything be made in one genre, with one tone, and/or remade and rebooted to fit that one tone, which is always "dark and serious"? Why has "dark and serious" been the dominant aesthetic for my entire adult life? Do we not think audiences can understand serious subject matter unless it's actively hard to see what's happening in a scene? Yes, there is an unfounded but unshakeable association between dark (tonally and literally) and quality, despite the fact the best "serious" shows are that good because they balance tones. As someone recently and rightly pointed out, one of the reasons subsequent "prestige TV" has failed to live up to Mad Men's standard is that they do not understand Mad Men is also funny and fun. (I would, in turn, argue that's also why Succession is, in fact, that good.) And I couldn't tell you percentages, but both Mad Men and Breaking Bad are incredibly well-light. Don is having a never-ending existential crisis in a well-lit office; Walter is devolving into an all-time psychopath in the blinding light of the New Mexico desert sun. I know it's not new or cute to complain about lighting but here I am.

Listen, this is going to sound dramatic, but I don't want a "dark origin story" for Casper because I genuinely believe the dark origin story is there in the original if you are the kind of viewer who wants to see it! I mean, it's the story of a ghost who is a child (who may or may not be Richie Rich?) — in what world is that not bleak as fuck? If you're so inclined, and I'm sure there is a corner of the internet that is, go wild with a deep-read on that. It is our right as the audience to go nuts with banana pants fan theories about the texts presented to us. Even when it truly is not that deep, even if the director neither knows or cares what the ending means, as long as you are not hurting anyone (looking at you, Star Wars fans!), dive in.

I love that about TV and I love that about literature and I love that about stories in general. And if you're not the kind of viewer who wants to think about child mortality, Casper is still a perfectly delightful movie. Good and skillful storytelling allows a breadth of experiences, engagement and reads without the need to reboot or remake for every aesthetic or demographic group.

There is also something disappointing about the subject matter being chosen for adaptation too. It's not only the fact that Batman* hasn't been fun in 25 years, it's this specific interest in darkening the stories that were designed for joy. Every single lighthearted children's story is fucked up if you want it to be (see also: rom-coms, action movies), but those genres exist for pleasure and request certain suspensions of disbelief to function. There's nothing wrong with that. Stories are, fundamentally, not only ways to understand the world but to escape it. Why must we take every story written to elicit pleasure and to turn it textually into something written to elicit ... depression? Introspection? I could not even say what the specific emotional gratification is that we're meant to get out of the dark and gritty genre.

(*Batman may not be having fun anymore, but there is actually a lot of fun Gotham content out there: Can't stress enough how much Harley Quinn the animated series makes me laugh and Birds of Prey makes me want to run through a wall — both moods I highly recommend.)

To some extent, this is all neither here nor there. The key caveat of all IP complaining is that all is forgiven if the reboot/remake/whatever is good, which is apparently the case with Peacock's Bel-Air drama series, i.e., the dark and gritty Fresh Prince reboot. Creative bankruptcy in concept is easy enough to clear off the ledger if you make up for it in execution.

Anyways, this has been, I will admit, a disparate collection of loose threads (what happens when you write without an editor), which I will attempt to summarize here:

• I don't like dark, serious origin stories because they feel lazy with respect to the original text

• I don't like dark, serious origin stories because they feel cynical with respect to genre

• I worry about the lack of faith storytellers (or rather, producers) have in audiences

• I worry about audiences' (lack of) media comprehension warranting that (lack of) faith

• I am easily appeased if the end result is good and if people could figure out a way to announce IP content without making me want to step in front of a bus, that would be aces

• (Sidebar: Greta Gerwig's Barbie is looking ... promising?)

• Let animated stories be animated stories

• Let romance stories be romance stories

• Respect genre!

• Watch Harley Quinn: The Animated Series

• Watch Everything Everywhere All at Once or The Northman or the Nicolas Cage movie where he cries watching Paddington 2, which actually supports my half-baked argument about children's movies being powerful and moving in their own genres — I haven't seen any of them yet, but I think it's important to plug oRiGiNaL movies when you are complaining about the Hollywood IP complex

• I swear to God if they announce a dark, serious Paddington origin story I will personally burn the studio to the ground

‎Now for a little bit of art-art...

As I mentioned in a previous post, I currently have no art in my apartment in Paris, unless you count the Post-It notes adorning my windows. But I do enjoy art, in a mostly vibes-appreciation way. I know what I like and what I don't but couldn't possibly begin to articulate either and I enjoy enjoying it, which is to say, I like being moved by art even if I don't fully understand how or why I am moved. (For the record, I also do own art, it just hasn't made the transatlantic trip yet.)

But this isn't about me! This is about Testudo, a new art ecosystem designed to create a more inclusive and secure art marketplace for artists and collectors that my good pal Kirby just launched with his husband John. I don't know a ton about the art world, but the fact the artists get a resale royalty every time their work gets resold seems extremely rad to my untrained brain. More importantly, their apartment is immaculately decorated with impeccably curated pieces so I promise you can expect a higher class of art on the platform than Post-Its.

I await my invitation to sell the appallingly unrecognizable "Van" "Gogh" that I made at my friend Ellinor's birthday sip-and-paint the other weekend.

➡️ Here's the Testudo Instagram

➡️ Here's where you can learn more or create an account to scope out the art

More soon.*

*A relative term, as I hope you've gathered.