‘Stay Inside’ - A Kurt Russell Quarantine Double Feature
A meme-inspired double bill of Disney’s The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and John Carpenter’s The Thing
Damn, I don’t know about you guys, but lately I’ve been going straight from waking up to scrolling through my phone in record time. I guess social distancing will do that to you.
Whatever. I mean, hell, other than my half-assed attempts to curb my COVID-19 anxiety by limiting my daily news intake, I haven’t been fighting too hard with my Twitter addiction as of late. Desperate times, desperate measures and all that.
But at least, for the last few days, I’ve had the fortune of waking up to a funny, if not darkly topical meme dominating my Twitter feed. Yea, I’m talking about those ‘March 1st-vs-April 1st’ tweets:
As you can see, the premise of this evolving meme plays on the fact that we’ve just been through the longest month of our lives by contrasting a chosen “me on March 1st” image with an equally absurd “me on April 1st” image:
The “March 1st / April 1st” gag has gone especially viral on Film Twitter (which is perhaps why it’s dominated my own feed as of late).
That last one, from Brian Saur, co-host of the New Beverly's Pure Cinema Podcast, served as the inspo for today's recommendation: a Kurt Russell Quarantine Double Feature of The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and The Thing.
The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes
The first film on our double bill is a goofy 1969 screwball comedy from Disney, featuring Kurt Russell in his debut starring role — Dexter Riley, a college hunk who accidentally mind-melds with a fancy new supercomputer that endows him with the super-brain he needs to lead his school to victory in a national quiz tournament, all while local gangster Cesar Romero (most famous as the Joker from the Adam West Batman series) and his mob are trying to kill Dexter and his merry band of meddling kids for, like, fucking up an underground gambling ring or some shit?
Point is, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes is a silly, breezy time capsule with plenty of eye-popping swinging-60s fashion and humorously cheap characterizations of the era’s youth culture (a staple of Disney movies at the time). Once Upon a Time… In Hollwyood fans are likely to get a kick out of seeing a young, doe-eyed Russell inhabiting the caricatured world of 1969 Hollywood, the same world he would pop in on as stunt coordinator/narrator Randy 50 years later.
The Thing
If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies, nobody left to kill it. Then it’s won.
-R.J. MacReady
Once you’ve had your fill of odd-yet-wholesome family escapism to ease your quarantine blues, maybe you could use a healthy dose of horror to bring you back to earth, with just enough genre trappings to make you feel like you’re processing the COVID pandemic with a modicum of safe emotional distance. Enter John Carpenter’s The Thing;a movie that is, despite its steady, decades-long rise in popularity and acclaim over the years, somehow still underrated as fuck.
There’s not a lot I can say about The Thing that hasn’t already been said (confession: I’m pretty sure I’ve already tweeted “The Thing > Alien” on more than one occasion). It might be the contemporary sci-fi/horror classic — serving up an intimate and eerily relevant boiler-room story of isolation, viral invasion, and societal collapse. As Noel Murray pointed out in the LA Times, “It’s [...] been hard lately not to think about John Carpenter’s 1982 version of ‘The Thing,’ about an extraterrestrial parasite that tricks humans into becoming a host, and is thus all but unstoppable unless people go into complete isolation — radical ‘social distancing,’ as it were.”
It’s no wonder The Thing has inspired several of its own coronavirus memes.
Relevance aside, The Thing is literally one of the best genre films ever made, and it always will be. John Carpenter is so fucking good that the last ten years of horror movies have aggressively mimicked his aesthetic, almost to the point of making it kitsch (not that I’m complaining). And The Thing is most certainly his magnum opus. If you haven’t seen it, there’s never been a better time to dig in. If The Thing is already a favorite of yours, there’s never been a better time to rewatch.
To paraphrase Kurt Russell’s MacReady, if the coronavirus takes over, then it has no more enemies, nobody left to kill it. Then it’s won. So sit back, enjoy The Thing; and above all else …
You can rent The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes on Amazon or watch it on Disney +