You all know the comic strip Garfield. About this guy, Jon, and his cat—the cat eats lasagna and delivers snarky asides about Jon’s various romantic and professional shortcomings. There aren’t many other characters—Jon also owns a dog named Odie, and he used to have a roommate, and we sometimes see the women he’s dating. It’s been around forever, and isn’t great—a pleasant enough strip, but hardly groundbreaking or even all that funny consistently.
Anyway, some genius looked at Garfield, and had the brilliant idea of removing the cat. And it turns out, when you take Garfield the cat out of Garfield the comic strip, the result is nothing short of amazing. It becomes this strip about this desperate, pathetic, miserable, border-line crazy lonely guy. It becomes a comic strip about isolation, alienation, existential angst. It’s astonishingly sad, profound, and because it’s so painful, it’s also way way way funnier than the original. Here's the URL:
http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/So it got me to thinking, where else could we do this? I mean, if you take the central element out of Mormonism, which would be I suppose the atonement, what would be left would be a subset of Buddhism—eternal progression, but without a resurrection or mediator. Just pure karma. So what happens if you do this to art. Take the central element from any work of art, and see if the work improves.
So I thought of one example, actually quite similar to Garfield. What if you took the Halestorm comedies—Singles Ward, the RM, The home Teachers, Ward Ball, all of ‘em—and took out all the comedy. Took all the funny bits away. Remove the slapstick, the guys falling off ladders and into swimming pools and running through fields with deer antlers on their heads. Also remove all the plots—especially the love stories. What would be left?
In the RM, there’s this one completely amazing scene, which to me has a Garfield minus Garfield vibe. In this scene, a guy fresh off his mission—our old pal Kirby Heyborne--goes to see his girlfriend. She’s waited faithfully—now they can get married. He’s actually a bit confused—he expected that she’d be at the airport, but she wasn’t, so fine, he goes to see her. What he doesn’t know, because she didn’t write to tell him, was that she’s met and become engaged to someone else.
So they’re on the porch, Kirby and this girl. And in the background, we can see her family. They’re eagerly watching from inside the house—they’re crowded around the windows, grinning in anticipation. Boy, this is going to be great! What fun! Let’s all watch this kid get his heart broken! And when she breaks the news, they’re laughing silently from the house. Her family.
Wow. I mean wow. That’s just amazing. It’s one of the most horrifying film moments I know. Certainly, it marks the most devastating commentary on Mormon culture I’ve ever seen. Mormons as vicious sociopaths, Mormons as emotional vampires! Mormons who think the funniest thing they’ve ever seen in their lives is some poor kid getting his heart broken. And so this sort of lame movie about an RM, becomes this Swiftean satire on just how emotionally bleak Mormonism can be.
I don’t actually think Mormons are emotionally bleak, personally. I think we’re pretty decent folks most of the time. But, I mean, that porch scene had to come from somewhere. Kurt Hale had to base it on something—maybe some story he heard or even something he personally experienced. Anyway, those sorts of scenes happen all the time in Halestorm comedies. What if you cut everything that’s supposed to be funny or heartwarming, and just showed those scenes? The Home Teachers destroying the home of a family they home teach. The Rabelaisian comedy of a Singles dance. The multi-level marketing scene in the RM. Just keep the really savage satirical stuff, and cut all the rest. Cut the cat from Garfield, and you have a guy who talks to himself. And since the strip’s actually about a guy talking to a cat, and since cats can’t talk, taking the cat out’s not really a violation of the basic idea of the strip. Well, the Halestorm films are about making fun of Mormon culture. So keep those bits, and cut all the stuff they thought was funny, or heartwarming, or messagy. Just keep the satire. The result—much better movies. And funnier. Truer? Man, I sure hope not. But maybe.
Eric Samuelsen
