i love my dead gay son (13. 312)

Courtesy of our faithful chronicler, we are treated to a coincidence of synchronicity with this day being the theatrical debut of Stanley Kubrick’s first film Fear and Desire (1953), an anti-war movie that earned praise from critics for the promising beginning director, he soon disowned it shortly after its release, displeased with his heavy exposition. Set in the midst of a war between two unidentified belligerents (though pointedly made at the height of the Korean conflict) with a troop transport plane crashing behind enemy lines in a forest prefaced as outside of time influenced by the angst and impulse the audience choses to project on it as the only factors driving the narrative, and the surviving manifest struggling to make their way back to their side of the front. Calling the production a “bumbling amateur exercise,” Kubrick sought to halt its distribution and requested reels be destroyed, though some were preserved and as it lapsed into the public domain, it can in its entirety be watched here. Another first feature also premiered on this day in 1989 with Daniel Waters’ Heathers (see previously here and here), originally pitched as a spec script for Kubrick to direct, the writer feeling that only the individual behind Dr Strangelove could do his coming-of-age black comedy justice. As a foil to the optimistic teen movies of John Hughes, Waters portrayed a dark character, Jason “JD” Dean, coming to a high school in the fictional town of Sherwood, Ohio intent on murdering the cliques of popular students and staging their deaths as suicides. Not only did Kubrick decline the invitation, Waters was furthermore unable to secure the rights from author JD Salinger to The Catcher in Rye as originally written for the screenplay—instead passages from Moby Dick (out of copyright) were highlighted as confessional red herrings to cover his crimes—and neither the Doris Day version of “Que Sera, Sera” out of not wanting to promote profanity. The latter starring Winona Rider, Shannen Doherty and Christian Slater, the former featured Virginia Leith, the girl lashed to a tree, who would later go on to star in the cult classic The Brain that Wouldn’t Die. Still the cafeteria scene from the beginning of Heathers was an homage to Full Metal Jacket.