AndrewBloom
CONTAINS SPOILERS7/10 4 years ago
[7.4/10] The laziest use of the term “Lynchian” is as a mere synonym for “a bunch of weird shit happened.” David Lynch certainly made a name for himself by deliberately courting the bizarre and seemingly random, but a film needs more than the strange to evoke that designation. There’s another layer to the *Twin Peaks* co-creator’s work that informs those weird happenings -- one that explores the dark heart beneath the seemingly pristine and idyllic, where unsettling sequences are made to expose those uncomfortable realities hiding behind the nostalgic images of Americana.
That’s why *Escape From Tomorrow* scans as genuinely Lynchian to me. Yes, it features plenty of weird shit. Animatronic ride mascots suddenly glare at passengers. Hallucinations start to slip into the main characters’ perspectives. Retro-futuristic scientists scan “imaginations,” try to fend off cat flu, and turn out to be androids themselves. There’s also an undercurrent of something off, a background hum of eeriness, that tracks with Lynch’s work.
But more to the point, the 2013 release invokes the sense of something bleak and unnerving festering beneath the picture-perfect world crafted and curated by the Disney corporation. The sanitized depictions of other countries, cheerful mascots, and friendly faces are, if not a cover, than certainly a half-truth that hides something more sinister. The traditional nuclear family is not a happy beacon of domestic tranquility, but instead a leering dad, a mother who suspects infidelity, and children who seem to suffer amid the discord. There’s power in peeling back those fantasies, just a little bit, and shining a light on the unspoken grime that you’ll find if you look hard enough.
Most of all, though, *Escape From Tomorrow* is focused on youth, its celebration, and the insidious efforts to both sell and hold onto it. That comes through most clearly in Jim, the film’s protagonist, a middle-aged father of two in an unhappy marriage who spends most of the movie leering at teenage girls and fantasizing about flirtations and romantic conquests. No longer a handsome young gentleman, and instead a paunchy pop, his ogling of young patrons, nurses, and fellow parents is creepy and cringe-y throughout.
There’s even a weird, quasi-Oedipal vibe within the film. Jim’s son, Elliott, locks his father out on the balcony of their hotel room so that he can curl up with his mom. Jim appears vaguely jealous of the attention his son receives from both the young french teenager Jim’s been lusting after and even the costumed princesses Jim has to be practically dragged away from. Jim’s wife, Emily, is protective of and affectionate with her son (as she should be), but rebuffs Jim’s frequent attempts at a kiss or other amorous displays.
It ties into an overall theme of emasculation. There’s a loss of virility, the sense of one waning as a sexual being, at the center of this weird little movie about horrors in a theme park. That doesn’t stop at Jim. A mysterious park guest credited only as “The Other Woman” is a foil and enabler for Jim here, showing amorous attention to him in a way no one else in his orbit does. She calls to mind Ursula of *The Little Mermaid* -- a witch with a magical amulet, using it to lure hapless young girls into her purposes, in a bid to make herself young and beautiful again, and mesmerize a would-be “prince” in the process.
The film eventually reveals that The Other Woman was once herself a princess. She not only exposes the dark secrets behind that role -- a hidden prostitution ring where men can pay for the privilege of receiving affection from women who embody their youthful movie crushes. But she too gives a backstory where her breaking point was seeing someone young and flawless, feeling the same sort of anger as the Evil Queen in Snow White, another film evoked through her schemes and hang-ups here.
It’s not hard to see the film’s gestures toward folks straining to regain that youth and vigor, and resenting the younger generation, even their own children, for having it when they don’t. (It isn’t exactly subtle when Jim tries to lubricate his way out of some restraints and ends up spurting a tube of white lotion all over a photo of a nude woman.) But it’s also deeply embedded in what the film’s trying to convey in each frame.
Granted, *Escape From Tomorrow* arguably spends too much time on underscoring the bad marriage and the leering. At some point, we get the message loud and clear and it feels like writer-director Randy Moore is just rubbing the audience’s nose in it. Still, at the same time, it presses on a nerve and doesn't stop until the audience is as uncomfortable as onlookers are. Some of those moments go a bit too broad (Emily in particular is written as a season 1 Skyler White-style nag, even when she’s absolutely right), but they also hit on truths of bad behavior elided when possible in the name of maintaining that veneer of a happy family and keeping the peace in a place that’s supposed to be free from anything that isn’t positive and bright.
Those attempts just make *Escape From Tomorrow* that much more unsettling in places. Beyond the real discomfort of a father acting unbelievably badly in the midst of a family trip from which there is no escape for anyone, there’s also an atmospheric horror that creeps in on the margins. Between seeming hallucinations, hints at contagious illnesses and conspiracies, and suggestions of something nefarious afoot that neither Jim nor the audience can put a finger on, the sense of something unsettling permeates the film.
That’s aided by the superb black and white cinematography of the piece. While at times, some obvious uses of green screen and chintzy effects stand out (something else that aligns the film with Lynch), there’s a strange beauty to the film’s deliberately off-putting vision of Disney World. Everything from a splatter of expectorate, to a paranoid sequence of losing your child in a fabricated cave, to discomfiting moments inside dark rides, the film’s shots and compositions serve its more chilling elements. The approach also subtly conveys that sense of the idyllic past in its lack of color. Beyond the obvious Lynch influence, there’s also a Tim Burton-like vibe to some of these moments, another auteur who’s no stranger to exploring the odder corners of suburban family life.
The difference here is that rather than celebrating the oddities, *Escape From Tomorrow* centers on corruption, on breaking everything down and smoothing it over until it looks and sounds like we want it to, regardless of what masks or implies. The Other Woman seems to be trying some ritual (or worse) with Jim’s daughter, Sara, dressing her in Snow White looking much as she did after consuming the Evil Queen’s poison apple (or, in this case, sparkling apple juice), projecting the image of unspoiled youth she’s so desperately trying to hold onto.
When Jim is trapped in a lab by some mysterious scientists, one tells Jim that his father took him here when he was a child, laying the groundwork for whatever’s happening to Jim now. His son has his bleak memories wiped away by Disney’s fixers and replaced with fond ones of the Buzz Lightyear ride he was so desperate to experience. Even in death, Jim has a cheshire cat-like grin, a symbol of the enforced veil of happiness draped over the dark underbelly of all of this.
All of these experiences not only speak to that sense of youth, but the way that idea is polished, indoctrinated, and marketed to where grown-ups can’t stop acting like children as it slips away. There’s certainly a circus of the bizarre here, with disquieting hints at abuses both fantastical and uncomfortably real. I’d be lying if I said I understood all of the plot details or could tell you with firm confidence what’s going on at every moment.
And yet, what aligns *Escape From Tomorrow* with Lynch is not merely that chilling and at times bewildering strangeness. It’s the way it chooses another piece of idealized Americana, the nostalgic and white-washed world that the “Happiest Place on Earth” represents, and cracks it open. It’s the way it uses that setting to suggest there’s something insidious and wrong about what’s being hidden by the literal and figurative scrubbing things clean that happens inside the park. It’s the way it denudes the destructive consequences of the vision Disney beams out into young minds, of a particular ideal of youth and even sexuality, that they keep chasing long into adulthood.
That curdled truth beneath the ideal, exposed through the surreal and the liminal, puts *Escape From Tomorrow* in good, albeit off-putting company.
