Insidious Lassitude

Ray Tintori’s film ‘Jettison your Loved Ones’ makes me think of Hanna-Barbera animated sitcom ‘The Jetson’s’. For no other reason than ’jettison’ is a near homophone of ‘Jetson’s’. Ok, so not very near; probably not near at all. But a bit similar, perhaps. Similar enough to give rise to the following musing: Imagine that Joan Jett had a son and upon his birth she left him on a street corner, in a basket, and, unbeknownst to Joan, it was, say, Jane Jetson who found him. Imagine that Jane took him home in her aerocar, and raised him in the Jetson’s space-caboose until one day he discovered his real mother wasn’t Jane Jetson at all, but mezzo-soprano-voiced, 80s vegan-rocker Joan Jett. Say he then sold his story to the Sun or some similarly low-rent, racist, xenophobic, everything-phobic, neo-fascist rag (The Daily Mail, perhaps) then the story could be headlined: ‘Joan Jettisoned!’. Joan would’ve jettisoned her loved one.

Are The Jetson’s and Ray Tintori really that different? My evincing of the similarities will be compromised because I’ve not seen a full episode of The Jetson’s since I bacame a grown up. And also because it’ll be based on only one of Tintori’s films. I’ve not seen the film he made after ‘Jettisoned’ because the only place it can be found on t’interweb (’tin’ suffix: clever, huh?) is iTunes, which is presided over by Americans. I’m not one of those, ergo they don’t like me and won’t let me in. I know he’s recently also made a readily available music video for inexplicably acclaimed musically-and-artistically-brassic New York dunderheads MGMT, but that’s, frankly, as risibly derivative as the band themselves. Incidentally, the film Tintori made after ‘Jettison’ is called ‘Death to the Tinman’, so Ray is clearly fond of linguistic play. If it was any cop (no, I know he’s not made of copper, it’s tin: the man’s made of tin) then a reviewer, who like me had a penchant for impish punnery and jocose wordplay, could perhaps be moved to lead with a headline like ‘Tintorious!’. Or ‘Tinspired!’. Or even, ‘Ray Illuminates Man Exhumed from an Abandoned Mine’; something catchy like that… 

But I digress, the real watercooler in the middle of the room at the Tintori/Jetson’s shindig is a Rube Goldberg machine. The future portrayed in The Jetson’s is full of complicated labour-saving devices for everyday tasks; the regular malfunction of these often leads to a string of comic ramifications that are mined (oh dear) as a narrative device (as it were). The identity of the Jetson’s and that of their society is founded on the whizz-bang technologies of ‘the future’; technologies that are deleterious to identity. Depending on these inventions has estranged people from their self-identity and society. George Jetson sits bored in his office with no work to do; Jane Jetson sits bored at home with no housework to do; their kids travel around alone in panoptic-bubble spacecraft. In ‘Jettisoned’ the boy from the future invents a perpetual motion machine that causes a ’chain reaction’ of events that lead to the breakdown of society. Indeed, the story of the film is based on an absurdist rendering of a kind of perpetual motion/chain reaction analogy to the question of identity, and the satisfying of the search for meaning through identity. (Which is also, lest anyone doubt the validity of my off-the-cuff musings, the tin of chain reaction-intiating worms which I earlier suggested that Joan Jett could open in my not-as-spurious-as-you-(or I)-first-thought imagining.)

So there it is: man-of-the-moment New York filmist Ray Tintori clearly in thrall to 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon The Jetson’s. I’d guess that that’s an Insidious Lassitude exclusive.