William Zabka, etc.

Category: Observations, Art In Progress


There's always a danger in using pop culture references. For a great number of people of roughly my generation, use of pop culture references can reduce to gesture, and not always particalarly admirable gesture at that. It is not exactly universal although nor is it at all uncommon to find that people roughly my age, people brought up like their parents in front of the television, use references to Goonies or Neverending Story or Thundercats or the like to generate nostalgia and to suck some sort of cool from these images.
Which is a way of introducing something I found while researching CS Lewis Jr., something that rather sophisticatedly combines pop culture reference and postmodern fiction technique. Oh, and it's also pretty hilarious.
Rather simply, Patton Oswalt (the writer, one of my favorite standup comedians) treats 4 characters across 4 different films (all but one played by William Zabka) as one coherent entity.
Which brought me to a certain concept, for my own artmaking.The costume is an element deployed frequently in films that talk about growing up. Whatever its intentions, and it's fair, I think, to gather that Scout's ham costume in To Kill a Mockingbird is used with far different intentions from those found in Karate Kid, the use of costume creates absurdities around the idea of identity, and well played absurdities are often memorable.
In The Karate Kid, a halloween party is the occasion for Daniel-san to attempt retribution toward Johnny Lawrence, to connect with Elizabeth Shue, to get his ass beat, and to be saved by Mister Miyagi. This is a critical part of the film, but whenever I watch it, all that I can see are those Cobra Kai bastards in their skeleton costumes. There is something simultaneously obvious and true about having Daniel's antagonists portrayed as a gang of fake dead bodies.
As I don't think I have disclosed, I have a currently fictional band called Owl. I was trying to think through costumes beside the obvious (ya know, owl costumes), and I was thinking that dressing the band as those skeletons would be really compelling. Skeleton costumes may speak directly to that pretty famous clip in a pretty famous film, but they don't speak exclusively to that. I was a skeleton for holloween when I was a youngster- it's an image that isn't necessarily specific, but is intensified through the specific.
Also, skeletons embody to the adolescent and heavy metal tendency to dwell on childish caricatures of death, on the grotesque and the implausibly gory. It's hard to pinpoint why this is, but there is a culture on display in Megadeth posters and Friday the 13th movies and perhaps even in Rob Zombie that desires to dwell on a cartoonish vision of violence and death, not exactly out of a nihilism, but because of a childish recognition/denial of one's own mortality. The skeleton costumes speak to this, but in an aggressively juvenile way I find fantastic.