Sticking it to the Walt Disney Military Intelligence Complex by inverting its 'Lächelnd macht frei' ethos, newbie writer-director Randy Moore's black and white chronicle of the last day and night of a family at Disney World, ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW, is the first sign the the apocalypse will involve enforced smiling and slowly nodding animatronic vampires from around the world. Beautiful to look at in 16mm handheld on-ride stolen shots, Moore's camera delivers surprisingly little whiplash jerky motion sickness and his script offers comedic cognizance, great AMERICAN BEAUTY / LOLITA obsessive midlife crisis-ing, David Lynch post-modern artifice-surrealism, and Guy Maddin black and white fuzzy basement expressionism in abundance as dad's (and eventually mom's as well) perceptions of reality, fantasy, and papier-mâché facsimile dissolve into one throbbing archetypal hydra.
As the dad, Roy Abramsohn is a perfect blend of guarded and agape; thrown for a loop by an early morning phone call (wherein he's fired) taken out on the hotel balcony to not wake the family, sets him off, especially once his little boy locks him out of the room where his family is snuggled up asleep together. Their day at Disney finds the dad haunted by a pair of nubile but clearly underage French girls (Annet Mahendru, Danielle Safady) who giggle amidst themselves, make flirty eye contact with his children, and express vibrancy in that perfectly self-contained way that heralds any sex-starved 40-something father breakdown, leaving him powerless to resist ogling like a school boy bewildered by his first hormone surge. And why shouldn't it? The mom (Elena Schuber) won't even accept the most rudimentary physical affection from him, for no reason she can really explain, other than perhaps sensing he's overcompensating, emasculated by his being fired.
Equating the eye of older men being drawn to younger women as analogous not to cougars but to older women being drawn to other people's very young children this is after all a reflection of the differing drives (one protective/nesting the other seed-sowing) yet one is considered holy and the other vile, and a reprisal against the other; so which came first, the vilifying of the man's attraction to younger women or his wife's treating him like a rotten kid rather than 'the father'? Shut out of the closed circuit of a child-mother pair bond and unable to raise so much as his voice against them, the man is sabotaged by negative portrayals in the media in his role as ultimate signifier. Instead, the father is himself put into the Oedipal exile originally reserved for his son, emasculated by the mother-son rejection and so both weakened and freed from the responsibility of his own actions. Why wouldn't he be drawn to a woman still young enough to think he's not a child, who is equally cast out of the closed circuit mother-son pair bond? The older man grants the younger woman a rare chance to try out her seductive powers on a 'safe' target (a wedding ring signifies both a dare and a freebie) and to feel like she's correcting the Elektra-exile she has herself suffered since she came of age to compete with the mom for status as the hottest bitch on the block (think Natalie Wood in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE). Rather than recognizing her role as its instigator, the mother sees their shared secrets as a priori justification for her coldness.
This post-70s change in husbandry occurred via Hollywood in films like THE EXORCIST and E.T. with dads not even present for the trials suffered by mother and children. Family men were and are depicted as either wimpy-voiced second class females or else gangsters, thugs, rapists, molesters, Satanists, sell-outs, pimps or psycho loners, OR simply not around at all (they only return --with their unique sets of skills--when their daughter's been abducted or killed by a man who IS around, thus negating the father function except en absentia); older daughters are Lolitas, jailbait, white trash short shorts eye candy straining at the confines of the shirt, ungrateful harlots out to tempt weak-willed husbands 'just because they can' or sexophobic virgins able to forge a sex-free friendship only with some similarly disabused and immanently dead older male, such as a sad-eyed cop, lawyer or mining engineer. Even then, the moms glower, as if the only role their man should have is as a devoted spectator to their perfect bond with their young son (ala Jennifer Connelly in LITTLE CHILDREN). Raising children on their own, these moms are elevated to saints with no time for smiles or joy, working two jobs to put food on the table and swatting away questions about why dad left with tearful displays of eternal devotion all but ensures the son never grows up, leaving the post-pubescent babysitters and any remaining fathers to drive back to her house alone together, with mom's curses and suspicions by way of adieu.C'est fou, eh, Pierrot?
But that presumes a certain midlife crisis-level case of bad judgment, the sort only spousal scorn/frigidity and no place or time to masturbate can bring. With that bad judgment comes an inability to correctly read a scene - to never know if the son has black alien eyes or if those teenage French chicks really like you or are just into your kids and by you creeped out. From there it's a short skip and a jump into the abyss of delusional paranoid schizophrenia AKA Imaginationland! Does Disney World's all-consuming devotion to fantasy encourage this escape, or actually enforce it?
Some critics complain that we never quite learn what the hell is really going on in ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW. By now you should know I am not one of them. I applaud any movie that dares blur the line between daydream, fantasy, hallucination, nightmare, and paranoid reality. Once some parameter is set up as to what's a dream or fantasy I lose interest, which is why I'm no fan of BILLY LIAR, for example.
Ambiguity might or might not rule!
Along his embryonic journey, ESCAPE's dad gets into a fight with his bitch wife runs into a sexy nurse whose tears and veiled worry about some contagious disease rocking the park make her seem both starved for attention and desperate to seem 'open' to seduction even as she's unable to warn him about some plague being ushered into the populace (as soon as she's waved them out of sight with she breaks down - it's okay since no one is watching. Dad also runs into a spooky Maleficient-style witch (Alison Lees-Taylor - the sexiest craziest witch since Deborah Reed in TROLL 2!) who hypnotizes dad with a sparkling jewel, luring him into a midday tryst at the Presidential suite while his daughter sleeps in the other room and the witch's son watches TV. The witch's post-orgasm sad eyes reflect sad desperation. She tells him that rich Japanese businessmen pay thousands of dollars to sleep with the Disney princesses - she knows as she was one of them, and that not being able to register a single negative emotion all day at work gradually drives every Disney employee insane.
If this all plays a bit like EYES WIDE SHUT, well, old Walt was a 33.3 degree Mason and the enforced smiling signifies tier two Monarch programming. Is the witch who hypnotizes him on the bench some kind of manipulator of his consciousness? Sent on by the forces of darkness upon sensing his vulnerability?You'd think getting his rocks off would lessen his frustrated weirdness, but even when the boyfriends, replete with obnoxious long curly hair, of the girls he can't get them out of his mind, or the camera's vision. From there, it just gets weirder, approaching flume chutes down which only the brave Cinemascope funeral snakes such as David Lynch or Bunuel dare plunge. When you can no longer tell what's real or illusion, you are finally free, finally getting your all-day pass's money's worth. Monsterdom begins at home and if you look farther than the mirror to find your mortal enemy, you never really had one to begin with.
If ESCAPE ends up being slightly less than the sum of its parts I for one shall not complain. I've always felt the French are far more clued-in about how to balance work and play (I loved getting the whole month of August off because my boss was French, but that's also what almost killed me.) If you go to the beach for a month you never feel the clock ticking on your space for enjoyment. You never feel the need to not waste time, to have 'more fun' than you are having now (the family rapt before some display of fireworks or whales, and mom or neutered father going "isn't that wonderful, Caitlin?!' or "isn't this fun, Caitlin?!" unable to shut off her motormouth thought babble even before a spectacle that overwhelms any rational need to comment). Instead of this (socialist) cognizance about the inability to have fun under a time clock, America surrenders to the idea of the one week vacation, the trip to Disney World as being some sacred vacation ideal, to aspire to and hold holy as you slog away the molasses hours at work waiting for that one week off in June, saving money and deferring all joy in life for this one expensive dream week, until it buckles under the pressure.
But old Walt is too canny to not understand this basic problem, hence the all-inclusive package stay, which makes the unlimited access to all rides and accommodations a liberating freedom from any imperative to enjoy, though some moms stick it in anyway (like the one in ESCAPE). Here's an example: My dad traveled all the time for work so hated going on vacation with us. He needed a break, so my mom took my brother and I by herself to Bermuda one year and then Disney World (and Epcot shortly after it opened) the next. Going to Bermuda without him ruined my ability to enjoy anything, as I felt I had to step in, even at 13 years-old, and be the man of the family which meant worrying about how much everything cost (I wouldn't go snorkeling since it was $23 an hour per person, so my mom and brother went and I sulked in the room) but at Disney my older brother status didn't compel me to take on responsibility. We had already paid so it was about getting as much as you could out of it.
I mention all this to draw the conclusion that fathers are superfluous at Disney World. Their dreams are never meant to come true, because their dreams involve being single, childless, and young. And since they can't go back in time they become boys to try and fit in, to discover what they really want out of a fantasy, to charge into it, get drunk, dance around, buy a motorcycle or a fez, and let themselves be seduced by other, younger, less bitchy women. But beware giving up your adult father power, Papa. The American Mom may not let you switch back. You may become just the oldest child, perpetually 'in trouble' with a wife who more and more surrenders to an inner animus-domination that has her convinced she's the sole voice of authority in the family. As a child chasing the freewheeling ideals of France and nubile French girls you may stay, while she glowers and nags and acts the buzzkill until your own kids are grown, the thrill is gone, the bloom is off the rose, the new flesh mouse ears grown so deep into your brain as to be irremovable. And when you finally look for the treasure map that leads to your buried balls you find it's been torn, frayed, and scattered Osiris-like to the far corners of the REKALL amusement park. Lucky for you then, there's a facsimile souvenir offering proof you ever had some, and photos galore.
