In 1969, young Alan Parrish has an argument with his father. He resolves to run away from home, but not before playing a boardgame with his friend Sarah. Unbeknownst to Alan, the game Jumanji releases wild creatures, and other dangers from its jungle world, into the world of the player with each roll of the dice. On Alan’s turn, he’s sucked into the boardgame. He can only be released when another player rolls a five or an eight. Unfortunately, Sarah is alarmed by the sight of her friend being vaporised into a boardgame, not to mention by a swarm of jungle-bats that attack her, and she runs away. The game lies unfinished, and Alan remains trapped inside it, for twenty-six years.

Jumanji (1995) will be twenty-six years old in 2021, and it’s well worth a rewatch. Beneath its surface, it’s a poignant allegory with real wisdom about the trauma of growing up, centring on broken families that need putting back together. In particular, Jumanji explores the need for boys and men to overcome the darkest sides of their masculinity.

It starts with Alan’s father. Sam Parrish is a very important man. He runs a shoe company, lives in a massive mansion, and every day his son rides his bicycle past a towering statue of his ancestor General Angus Parrish, a man so monumental he’s now an actual monument. The problem is, Alan’s father appears to model himself, and men generally, on a stone edifice: strong and powerful, cold and remote. We hear an excerpt of the speech he’s rehearsing to give as Guest of Honour at some fancy function that evening, in which he reels off: ‘attributes that have exemplified the Brantford spirit since our forefathers first settled this town: hard work, determination, and a cheerful outlook’. Oh Captain, my Captain.

Meanwhile, his son, having been violently assaulted by five boys earlier that day, eats one of the saddest-looking meals in cinematic history alone at the dining table. In an attempt to comfort the boy, Alan’s mother and father inform him that, since he took his beating ‘like a man’, he’s ready to go to the Cliffside School for Boys, where Parrishes have been going for generations, where the main dormitory’s named after Alan’s grandfather, and where the curriculum presumably includes Marching, History (written by the winners), and Taking A Good Thrashing.

Alan is understandably reluctant, even saying, ‘Maybe I don’t want to be a Parrish’. This would be hurtful for any father to hear, but we’d hope an important man like Sam Parrish could resolve the situation without escalating it. Not this guy! ‘You won’t be’, he snarls, ‘Not until you start acting like one’. He storms out, huffing and puffing that Alan’s going to Cliffside whether he likes it or not, ‘And I don’t want to hear another word about it!’. Out in the car, Alan’s mother attempts to intervene, but the agitated Sam swiftly silences her with a barked dismissal, and they drive off.

Faced with overbearing masculine anger, Alan responds the only way a child can, with the vow ‘I’m never talking to you again’. Later, when playing the boardgame with Sarah, Alan attempts to put the dice away, spooked by the ominous sound of approaching bats. He’s then startled into dropping them, which the game counts as a roll, and which leads to his imprisonment in the jungle for twenty-six years. What startled him? A Grandfather clock. A symbol of patriarchal mastery of the universe, roughly the height of an adult male, causes all of young Alan’s problems. Perhaps I’m reading a bit much into it, but the images don’t lie. A supernatural boardgame is one thing, but that much oppressive masculinity looming over you every day is quite another. Alan never had a chance.

The drama picks up in 1995, with a new family at its centre. After Alan ‘disappeared’ that night, rumours abounded that his father went one step further than being a bit of a jerk, and brutally murdered the boy. The town has degenerated into a grotty wasteland, littered with thrift stores and discount porn outlets. Aunt Nora decides it’s the ideal spot to raise two recently orphaned children, and moves into the Parrish house with Judy and Peter. These children have different coping strategies in the face of their parents’ death. Judy gains a measure of control making up incredible stories of glamorous, globe-trotting parents, while Peter hasn’t spoken a word since they died. Like Alan, Peter reacts to frightening emotions by not talking. This, the film suggests, is what boys do.

They find Jumanji and begin playing. Peter rolls a five, releasing Alan from the game after twenty-six years. He’s pushing forty, utterly bewildered, covered in hair, and portrayed quite brilliantly by Robin Williams.

Casting is interesting here. Robin Williams’ stardom was central to getting the film made, though other actors were considered. It’s easy to imagine the film working well enough with Tom Hanks or Harrison Ford in the role; Jumanji doesn’t make much use of Williams’s unique comic genius. But in its approach to masculinity, he brings a different quality to the material, one that’s perhaps in even shorter supply among cinematic leading men today. There’s nothing conventionally, rigidly macho about Robin Williams: his whole persona is more fluid. The fact that young Alan grows up to be him is all the information we need to sense that Alan is becoming a different kind of man to what his father is used to, comfortable with, and expects him to be. This conflict over what kind of man Alan will become plays out through one of the film’s weirdest, most brilliant ideas. Among the obstacles released from the game is Van Pelt: a psychotic hunter intent on adding Alan to his collection of trophy-kills, for some reason. He’s played by Jonathan Hyde, the very same actor who portrays Alan’s father.

The Wizard Of Oz gets a hat-tip in Jumanji, when the jungle-monkeys watch through a TV-store window, admiring the flying monkeys’ attack on the Tin Man. In both films, characters and actors from the ‘real world’ return with different identities in the ‘fantasy-land’, a device most effectively used in stage versions of Peter Pan, where traditionally the same actor portrays both Mr Darling and Captain Hook. So, in both Peter Pan and Jumanji, emotionally brittle fathers are punished by being reincarnated as violent monsters: Mr Darling and Sam Parrish become Captain Hook and Van Pelt. Van Pelt is the only thing to emerge from Jumanji which adult-Alan fears, and the message of warning the game reveals before the hunter’s arrival strikes a personal note, as if it’s intended for Alan alone: ‘A hunter from the darkest wild, makes you feel just like a child’.

In these stories, children have to confront frightening spectres of manhood, before they can face their real fathers, who, it turns out, need saving themselves from such rigid versions of masculinity. Alan will have to face Van Pelt if he has any chance of facing his father, and going home.

We see just how much the 1995 world is ‘no-place-like-home’ in a sequence where the grown-up Alan roams the town in search of his parents. Not even General Angus Parrish is unscathed: his statue is coated in graffiti, a monument to collapsed masculine authority. Unsold shoes litter the grounds at the abandoned factory, and a homeless man inhabiting Sam’s old office tells Alan the truth about his father: Sam poured every resource he had into finding his son after he disappeared, but when all proved fruitless, Sam collapsed, and the town collapsed with him. ‘I don’t think anyone loved his boy more than Sam did’, the homeless man tells the unrecognisable Alan, and the look of regret Williams captures is beautiful: Alan realises he was too scared of the dark side of his father to see how much he truly loved him.

Alan discovers that his parents are dead in this timeline, and Peter and Judy briefly take on parental roles for this newly orphaned lost boy. ‘Our dad was in advertising’, Peter confides, cutting off another of Judy’s fanciful stories. Peter leads by example here, encouraging Alan to see the truth. Peter and Judy’s parents weren’t that exciting; Alan’s father was flawed, but he wasn’t a murdering monster. If Alan hadn’t disappeared, perhaps the son could have released the father from behaviour that caused them both pain.

Alan’s relationship with Peter provides another illustration of the struggle between boy and man. The boardgame gets stolen by a pelican, and Peter saves the day with real daring. Again, Robin Williams captures a lot without dialogue. His first reaction is elation, his face showing childlike joy at Peter’s achievement.

This morphs into something dark, as he realises with shame that this boy looks up to him, and that he has no idea how to even congratulate him, let alone show him affection. His natural instinct is thwarted by the narrowly defined role he must perform as an ‘adult-male’, a role he is utterly ill-equipped to play.

Faced with this discomfort, Alan retreats to the only model of masculine authority he knows, and tries out some of his father’s old teachings on a distressed Peter:

‘You don’t cry alright? You keep your chin up … You have a problem: you face it like a man.’

Due to the boardgame’s mischief, Alan gives this little pep-talk while Peter is gradually transforming into a monkey. Perhaps the lad’s increasingly simian features remind Alan that this brand of masculinity is a backwards step down the evolutionary chain, perhaps he just has a change of heart. Either way, he apologises, and makes the subtextual conflict explicit with the line, ‘Twenty-six years buried in the deepest darkest jungle and I still became my father’. From this point, Alan rejects harsh masculinity. Having understood the pain his father felt, believing he’d caused his son’s disappearance, Alan is determined to avoid making the same mistakes. He becomes relentless as the guide, defender and comforter of Judy and Peter. He’s tactile and affectionate with them, learning to hold their hands and hug them when they’re scared. Alan finds a softer, kinder form of fatherhood that also includes being strong and protective, in the patched-together family he’s become one quarter of. He wouldn’t get far, however, without his other half; an unsung cinematic heroine: Sarah Whittle.

Sarah’s journey from traumatised neighbourhood-weirdo to fearless adventurer, and a kind of emotional compass for Alan, is a compelling character-arc of its own. As a child, no one believed her account of Alan’s disappearance, and now she’s a reclusive fortune-teller who’s spent thousands of hours in therapy. She’s the archetypal truth-telling woman cursed with a story no one believes. While the film never quite suggests Sarah is an actual prophetess, she does articulate some of the film’s key insights, including an almost throw-away, off-camera line in which she suggests one way Alan and Van Pelt might resolve their conflict: ‘Have you ever thought about just sitting down and talking about your differences?’. The line functions as little more than a set-up, and Alan dismisses her advice on the grounds that ‘the man has a gun’. Later on though, Alan will remember Sarah’s wisdom, when he returns to the ‘real’ world and his real father.

At the film’s climax, we see the extent of the division the row between father and son has caused, as an earthquake from Jumanji literally splits the house in two. Adult-Alan swings through the collapsing mansion to retrieve the game, landing on the floor in front of the fireplace — the exact position he was in when he started the game as a boy. With the thrill of being one roll away from winning, he picks up the dice, and then, right when we’d almost forgotten about him, Van Pelt arrives. He catches Alan on his knees, in front of the fire, playing the game. Alan looks and feels ‘just like a child’.

The frightening man has caught the boy. Playtime is over, it’s time for humiliation and punishment.

Van Pelt taunts Alan, forcing him at gunpoint to drop the dice, one of which rolls out of reach among the ruins of the home. It seems now there’s zero chance of finishing the game. ‘I’m terrified’, Alan admits, acknowledging fear but refusing to run because ‘my father always told me you should face what you’re afraid of’. In facing Van Pelt, a distorted reflection of his father, Alan goes some way to redeeming him: his father had his faults, but he was real. He wasn’t a cruel, violent, scarecrow-parody of a man, only able to exert authority over frightened children because he carries a comically oversized gun, and hides under the mask of Alan’s father’s face.

‘You’re finally acting like a man’, Van Pelt sneers, ‘Any last words?’. At that moment, the die rolls to a stop. Alan has done it: his piece slides magically into the winner’s position. To undo the damage of twenty-six years, he needs to utter one word: ‘Jumanji’. When he does, Van Pelt makes a fantastic face, and an even better noise. It’s not a ‘What?’, it’s not quite a ‘Huh?’; the best I can transcribe it is ‘Ung?’, which says it all really.

It’s the noise of toppled authority, impotent incomprehension, the sound of a hyper-aggressive buffoon faced with everything about the world he’d rather shoot than try to understand.

And shoot he does, firing one last bullet at Alan and Sarah, who stand united. It’s too late though: the bullet, the gun, and Van Pelt with them are all sucked back into the nightmare world of Jumanji. Van Pelt’s fate is as Sarah unwittingly prophesised earlier in the film, when she tried to explain Alan’s emotionally stunted behaviour to Judy and Peter:

‘When you carry around so much repressed anger it attracts a lot of negative energy, and … things happen, like ending up in the jungle’.

For Van Pelt, and anyone for whom anger is the only emotion they’re comfortable expressing, fate is sealed: things happen.

We return to 1969, and the child Alan baffles his father with a hug, repairing a conflict that has only lasted five minutes from the father’s point of view, but which Alan says ‘feels like a lot longer to me’. Alan apologises for promising never to talk to his dad; the wall of silence comes down, and Alan’s father admits, ‘I was angry. I’m sorry too’. They’re both rewarded for apologising: Sam instantly becomes more flexible, stating ‘You don’t have to go to Cliffside if you don’t want to’, before making the offer: ‘Let’s talk it over tomorrow: man to man’.

Sam’s on the right track: he’s offering his son a conversation with equal status. Gracious though this offer is, it’s a distortion of their relationship, and Alan recognises this. As Peter showed him in the future, the truth is what’s needed, even if it’s not as comfortable as the fantasy. In the face of a man not threatening you with a gun, ‘sitting down and talking about your differences’ is a pretty good idea, but it starts with acknowledging that those differences do exist. Alan doesn’t want to be equals, he wants the relationship to be what it truly is, so he asks for a different conversation: ‘How about father to son?’

Sam instantly agrees, with Jonathan Hyde conveying a beautiful warmth, as the man begins to be released by the boy from a distorted reality, and a distorted version of masculinity.

It ends at Christmas, as we go back to the future in the now-repaired timeline. Alan and Sarah are happy and expecting a baby. Alan’s father is alive; the town has continued to prosper, and after twenty-six years of waiting, Alan and Sarah meet Judy and Peter again, and slyly continue to protect them — not by becoming their parents, but by preventing their real parents from taking the skiing holiday that led to their deaths in the alternate timeline. Broken things are put back together: all is well.

Jumanji suggests, in a very entertaining way, that with patience and the right kind of conversations, lives can be saved if we broaden what it means to be ‘a man’. To be a man, or an adult of any gender, should include much more than strength, silence, and reliance on anger as the only emotion worth expressing. You need to be able to cry, to express joy, to hug, to play, be scared, be elated, and to know that all of these are OK. Above all, you need to be willing to stand up for, and value, those smaller and more vulnerable than you.

In the end, Van Pelt is a fantasy of masculinity that wants to silence women, and trap men and boys in cages. We can begin to set ourselves free by embracing the more vulnerable parts of our nature. If we do this, Jumanji suggests, however frightening it may be, we can change the game from one where so much is lost, to one where, if we just keep playing, everybody wins.

If you lived on Uranus, in theory, you would experience each of the four seasons only once. Uranus takes 84 years to orbit the Sun. The planet’s distance from the Sun means it has the coldest temperatures in the Solar System, so the variety of seasons would be a little different to on Earth, but go with me on this.

Imagine you could take the four seasons to Uranus with you, each of them lasting approximately 21 years, as the planet makes its orbit over the length of a lifetime.

Each season once in a lifetime. Which one would you pick to start with?

21 years of Winter, for instance, sounds like a difficult beginning to a life. On the other hand, kids love snow. Short days, long nights: a good time to be wrapped up warm. Then just as you start kicking off the blankets and getting restless, Spring arrives. For 21 years, you and the world go wild with possibilities. By the time you get to Summer on Uranus, you’re filled with life and energy, living out dreams and experiences that seemed impossible in the Winter years. Finally, the last stage of your orbit begins with 21 years of Autumn, and the most beautiful colours you’ve ever seen. In harmony with nature, you could bask in soft sunshine, celebrating all the things you and the world have done together, surrounded by ever more friends and family, as the nights begin to draw in.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so aware of the changing seasons as I have this year. Maybe I’ve run out of things to watch on Netflix. Like most people in 2020, l feel pretty stuck a lot of the time, trapped even. Coming in and out of lockdown brings all sorts of feelings of stagnation, and I’m not here to tell you that those feelings can be got rid of easily.

The possibility of progress feels pretty remote. There are days I feel stuck, isolated, frustrated, and alone. There are days when I frankly don’t know what I’m doing, what the point is, and I can’t imagine how to get from here all the way back to the simple things I evidently took for granted before the reality of a global pandemic. I go through all four seasons in mind and mood-swings several times daily, and at the end of it all I have the nagging fear that Winter is on its way and it’s not going to be easy.

But the seasons remind me that as interrupted as life is, there’s a regular rhythm. It’s working away, and even if it feels as though you’re trapped, you’re still in orbit. Nothing’s been paused; you’re still progressing, although much of it’s in a frustrating and painful way.

The seasons remind me that, by definition, the world is moving. Compared to Uranus, it’s moving so fast, and it’s not even completed an orbit since the pandemic first transformed things. More change is coming, but Spring will come back, and Summer, and Autumn, and Winter, and they’ll be back again after that.

If you’re reading this and you’ve been struggling, hang on. Look out the window. The world’s still moving, just as it should be. Give it time. There are so many people who’ll be glad to see you.

There have been times in lockdown when I’ve thought, provided there was reasonable Wi-Fi up there, I might as well be living on the moon. But the obvious fact is, despite everything, you’re extraordinarily and astronomically lucky to be living on Earth, where you get to experience all four seasons once a year every year, and where one way or another, things will change. Imagine life on Uranus. It’s always lockdown on Uranus.

To those of you giggling at the planet’s name, I sympathise, but see me afterwards.

If you’re concerned about yourself or a loved one, here is a list of UK mental health charities, support groups and organisations, including many with 24-hour expert advice available. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/mental-health-helplines/

It’s Always Lockdown On Uranus was originally published in Joe’s place on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

‘Well, Frodo did it’, said Gandalf, gazing across the arid fields of Mordor at the ruins of Sauron Tower.

‘And I suppose,’ said Sam, attempting to overcome the natural lack of self-esteem that his therapist said he really needed to work on, ‘I suppose even I helped a little bit.’

‘Frodo did it,’ repeated the wizard, his casual disdain for Sam’s working-class status unchanged by recent events. ‘The Dark Lord is defeated; his followers scattered. What now will become of this land?’

What indeed? A vicious despot had been expelled, but there was much work to be done.

For starters, many refused to believe the Dark Lord had been defeated at all. Rumour spread that the item of jewellery Frodo had cast into the fires of Mount Doom, attached to a convenient sinker, had not been destroyed. Many demanded that the remaining Rings Of Power be recounted, their anger fermenting into the passionate belief that Sauron would emerge with his strength redoubled in a few short years.

Meanwhile, the most litigiously inclined Orcs put together a series of legal actions against Frodo. These included charges of destruction of property, entering Mordor illegally as a foreign agent, and a variety of unpleasant accusations concerning how the ring came into his uncle’s possession in the first place. ‘The Baggins Crime Family is stealing our country!’ became a popular catchphrase at pro-Sauron rallies. Gandalf, cloaked from such trivialities by his expensive legal team’s threats of a countersuit, glossed over the financial and psychological ruin these legal battles would bring Frodo, saying only that there were some wounds the Hobbit would have to bear for the rest of his days. The wizard also swiftly contacted his publicist, ensuring his monopoly remained intact on the lucrative Middle-earth after-dinner-speaker circuit.

But what of Mordor itself? After such darkness and despair had dwelt in it, what hope could there be? Would anything grow in this barren wasteland riddled with fire and ash and discarded Make Mordor Great Again memorabilia?

Ever the optimist, it was Gimli who first saw Mordor for what it could be. He set up a popular tourist attraction, roping Orcs into service as ‘Guides’ for Walking Tours of Mount Doom. He even offered Sam a position, granting him the opportunity to tell his story as it happened, provided the Hobbit agreed ‘for old times’ sake’, as Gimli put it, to lug tourists’ baggage, and the occasional footsore slacker, up the side of the active volcano on his broad shoulders. Sam politely declined.

In a move met with unbridled enthusiasm by precisely no one, King Aragorn granted Legolas a lifetime-appointment as Secretary of Mordor Development. Bristling at this outside-interference, maladjusted Orcs unaccountably ran roughshod over all his attempts to civilise them, and the Elf was forced to bring in more and more workers from Rivendell and Lothlorien just to get anything done. Suddenly, jobs filled by Orcs for generations began to disappear, forcing them to retrain in humiliating Customer Service roles, as their once thriving industries of grog-brewing, metal-work and traffic wardenry were usurped by smug Elves who’d even work in daylight, at a fraction of the normal fee.

Aragorn himself took little interest in Mordor, spending his time endlessly re-reading a volume of dubious provenance from the Gondorian Library, the title of which is best translated as ‘How To Become Immortal’. His sole contribution was to establish Middle-earth’s first ever Vegan Venison Burger Bar on the Plains of Gorgoroth, a project dear to Aragorn’s heart from his years wandering the wilderness. It was noted by many how much it brought to Mordor’s cultural and culinary life. What was less widely acknowledged was that Aragorn only spearheaded this initiative after being repeatedly denied planning permission for his pet-project throughout Gondor, owing to the inconveniently large number of Listed Buildings.

And so, slowly but inevitably, progress happened. Where once the Black Gate had loomed, dark and sinister, there stood now a bustling industrial estate. Where once travellers had been driven away by the Dead Marshes, they were welcomed now by exciting Wharfside apartments, offering luxurious living and easy access to Minas Tirith for those looking to escape the chaos of the capital, and the rising rent-prices the return of the King had brought with it.

Mordor became a thriving commuter-town, and franchise eateries did spring up in great multitudes in the land. And their names did bring no end of delight unto the Orcs, who found the very concept of languages other than their own both irritating and extremely amusing. ‘Pret a mangaaaaaair!’ they cackled with xenophobic glee, ‘Oooo la-laaa! Looks like cress is back on the menu, boys!’

‘Mr. Gandalf sir’, said Sam, ‘there’s just one thing I was wondering.’

‘If I have to tell you one more time why we couldn’t have flown to Mordor on the eagles —’ , huffed the wizard in a threatening voice.

‘No it’s not that’, Sam assured him hastily. ‘I’m probably wrong, but I was thinking. If we’d all just ignored Sauron four years ago; if the media had denied him the oxygen of free publicity; if he hadn’t been able to exploit the justified discontent of so many for his own cynical gain, I’m wondering, Mr. Gandalf sir,’ the Hobbit whispered, ‘is there any chance all this could have been avoided?’

Gandalf became very still, and stared into the middle distance.

‘What’s this?’ he chuckled suddenly, a familiar twinkle returning to his eye, as he reached a gnarled hand into his battered hat. ‘Look Sam, a fluffy white rabbit! I think he likes you.’

‘Why so he does!’ cried Sam, as the bunny nuzzled against him, and he forgot his anxious reverie. ‘So he does, doesn’t he?’

Sauron Has Left The Building was originally published in Joe’s place on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Way out in the wilderness, or at least on Twitter, as the world dreamed fitful dreams with the pandemic-induced knowledge that leaving the house could turn you into a ticking time-bomb, a little after four o’clock in the morning on March 27th 2020, Bob Dylan made an announcement.

‘Murder Most Foul’ is Dylan’s first original song since 2012: a 17-minute masterpiece that would earn him his first US Billboard Number 1, six decades into his career. It was followed by Rough and Rowdy Ways: Dylan’s 39th studio album, which has been hailed among his very finest.

For a moment, in 2020, somehow everybody was talking about Bob Dylan. For fans, it felt triumphant.

Fans of Dylan have been through a lot. For the record, like most Dylan fans, I love the mixture, the contradictions. I’m happy to go where he takes me. The songwriter behind ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’, ‘Buckets Of Rain’ and ‘Mississippi’ also gave us ‘Wiggle Wiggle’, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I insist on playing Christmas In The Heart every year; my family usually insists on leaving the room. I delight in the strangeness of some of his adventures: the man who managed to send an audio recording of his Nobel Prize Lecture just in time to collect the prize money is the same man who showed up to appear in an impressively long list of commercials over the years, including advertisements for Apple, Chrysler, and of course, Victoria’s Secret.

Rough and Rowdy Ways treads familiar thematic ground. Death and mortality have been dominant themes in Dylan’s writing since at least 1997’s Time Out Of Mind. His last album of original songs, 2012’s Tempest, included two explorations of death through singular events that have taken on wider cultural significance: the sinking of the Titanic in the title track, and the murder of John Lennon in album-closer ‘Roll On, John’. But there’s something about ‘Murder Most Foul’, and the album as a whole, that just feels different.

‘Murder Most Foul’ begins with the shooting of JFK. The Narrator shape-shifts like Aladdin’s Genie: sometimes he’s the storyteller, sometimes he’s the President bleeding in his wife’s lap, sometimes he’s the killer or killers. He’s the crowd watching, then the lone voice of what ‘Someone said to me’ on the day it happened.

About halfway through the song, the President and the Narrator are speeding along in the car together, desperate for a salvation they both seem to know they won’t make it to:

Turn the radio on, don’t touch the dials,
Parkland Hospital only six more miles

Searching for some kind of comfort, they ask the DJ to play them a song. So begins a list of requests to ‘Play’ that lasts until the song’s conclusion.

I tried counting how many requests the Narrator makes, but I got lost after 53. Many are for specific musicians or songs: ‘Play John Lee Hooker, play ‘Scratch My Back’’; some are aimed at particular listeners: ‘Play ‘Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ / Play it for the First Lady, she ain’t feeling any good’. Some sound delirious, like the Narrator’s brain is firing signals in random directions: ‘Play the numbers, play the odds’. Some aren’t music requests at all, they’re nods to silent clowns and gangsters: ‘Play Buster Keaton, play Harry Lloyd / Play Bugsy Siegel, play Pretty Boy Floyd’.

The requests multiply and multiply as the band behind Dylan sound like they’re coming apart, the drums gliding in and out of focus, the piano never quite reaching the resolution we want it to. It’s beautiful, and it’s deeply harrowing. The majority of people Dylan mentions have died. Overwhelmed by loss, our Narrator sounds like he’s collapsing. It sounds like someone running out of time.

‘How much longer can it last?
How long can it go on?’

- ‘Crossing The Rubicon’, Rough And Rowdy Ways, 2020

Dylan’s lyrics are often questions. Perhaps the most famous is the opening line of the chorus of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’: ‘How does it feel?’. On Rough And Rowdy Ways, there are lots of questions, mostly about death.

Since David Bowie died on 10 January 2016, two days after the release of his album Blackstar, I’ve felt a morbid anxiety at the arrival of new material from musical heroes over a certain age, especially if the album explicitly deals with mortality. Could this be it? Are they saying goodbye? Of course it’s not my business: I’m unlikely to ever meet Bob Dylan. If I did, I doubt I’d be able to put into words how much his music means to me, or that he’d be interested in anything I had to say. But when someone’s creativity matters so much, when their music has been there for you in moments of vulnerability and joy, the fear of them being gone is painful.

Of course, I hope Rough And Rowdy Ways is not Dylan’s final album. There are no signs that it will be, but perhaps my anxiety has been stoked this year. COVID-19 has brought with it a reminder of just how vulnerable we are; how does an artist of Dylan’s stature respond, if Rough And Rowdy Ways is a response at all? Well, in one of the album’s most beautiful songs, Dylan sings about committing to a partner after a tumultuous struggle, confessing ‘I don’t think I can bear to live my life alone’. The song is called ‘I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You’, and the way Dylan sings stops you in your tracks. At the heart of Dylan’s persona is the mysterious trickster who can’t be pinned down, but there’s no shape-shifting here. The lyrics are as simple and vulnerable as it gets:

Lot of people gone, lot of people I knew.
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.

The album’s other treasures include the macabre ‘My Own Version Of You’, in which Dylan’s Narrator prowls around graveyards and mortuaries: ‘Looking for the necessary body parts / Limbs and livers and brains and hearts’, building a Creature, perhaps to save himself, possibly to wreak destruction. It’s melodramatic fun, with more than a dash of gallows-humour, and it includes a familiar reference.

Shakespeare has popped up in allusions throughout Dylan’s songwriting, and he takes a starring role in Rough And Rowdy Ways. Many of his plays are hinted at, but the entire record is stuffed full of Hamlet, from the title of ‘Murder Most Foul’ onwards. In ‘My Own Version Of You’, Dylan quotes the Prince of Denmark’s most famous line, when he asks:

Can you tell me what it means: To be or not to be?
You won’t get away with fooling me.

Who’s he talking to? Assuming he’s still rooting around among the corpses, perhaps the Narrator was inspired not only to quote Hamlet, but to adopt the famous theatrical pose: holding a skull, gazing into its eyes, asking it questions. This isn’t exactly parody: Hamlet was joking around too, holding the skull of the jester who made him laugh as a child, as he contemplated his and all of our inevitable fates. There’s a hair’s breadth between Shakespeare’s original, Dylan’s allusion, and the Morecambe and Wise ‘Shakesepeare’ routine, in which the comedians imagine an easier life performing ‘the serious stuff’, rather than having to write new jokes night after night. At the routine’s climax, Eric Morecambe, in full Hamlet-costume, asks his hand-held skull, ‘What do you think of it so far?’, before instantly turning the skull into a ventriloquist’s dummy, puppeteering its response: ‘Rubbish!’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMXz2SCqtfg

Dylan is talking to a skull, and perhaps he’s got his hand in its jaw to make it talk back. Behind one of our most archetypal images of mortality, there’s a dark, slapstick humour. Like Shakespeare’s Prince, Dylan may be overwhelmed by considerations of death, but he suggests you’d be a clown not to try and laugh back at the skull’s grinning.

‘How many deaths does it take till he knows
That too many people have died?’

- ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963

To say Dylan’s best lyrics are timeless is so obvious it’s almost meaningless: but for a song to capture the time it was written in so powerfully, and then to ask a question at the heart of the frightening situation the world is facing sixty years later, is fairly miraculous.

It’s 2020 and we’re in a speeding car. There may be help down the highway, but we may not make it in time. In any case, the journey will end one way. It’s terrifying.

In his last request on ‘Murder Most Foul’, the Narrator asks for a Bob Dylan song — the one we’ve just been listening to:

Play ‘Marching Through Georgia’ and ‘Dumbaroton’s Drums’,
Play darkness and death will come when it comes
Play ‘Love Me Or Leave Me’ by the great Bud Powell,
Play ‘The Blood-stained Banner’
Play ‘Murder Most Foul’

As the car speeds the President away, Dylan shyly wonders if his song will be counted with the greats. Of course, on November 22nd 1963, Dylan wasn’t in the car with the President. He was 23 years-old, a rising star but a long way from the towering figure he would become. He must have wondered how far he would go. 39 albums, concerts in the thousands, one Nobel Prize, one Billboard Number 1 (so far), a quite bizarre Victoria’s Secret advert, and 57 years later, he’s ready to sing about that day. Things have changed, but the question hasn’t. Dylan still dares us to ask: ‘How does it feel?’. How lucky we are to have his music in the car with us.

It sounds like someone running out of time was originally published in Joe’s place on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Toy Story is brilliant. As opinions go, this one more or less matches ‘Lennon and McCartney wrote some pretty good lyrics’ or ‘Cake tastes nice’ in its originality and insight, but I say again, the first Toy Story film is brilliant. I was six years old when the movie came out in 1995, and it captivated me, along with just about everyone who saw it.

Warning: minor spoilers for the first three Toy Story films.

Twenty-five years and three sequels later, love of the film has only grown with time. Toy Story is now a universally regarded movie, and a cinematic rite of passage, passed on from parents who fondly remember it from their childhood, with a hope that it will be loved by the next generation.

It’s easy to see the parallel between viewing the film this way, and the film’s content, particularly with regard to Toy Story 3 and its graceful handling of Andy’s transition to adulthood. But there’s a smaller moment from the first film that I think acts as a foundation for everything the later instalments gave us.

It’s the film’s climax, when Woody and Buzz escape Sid’s house, and use the rocket to catch up with the moving truck, and ultimately with Andy. Blasting into the sky, they free themselves from Sid’s rocket, only to plummet towards certain death. Then, defying all story-telling logic, Buzz flies, and we get this brief exchange of dialogue:

Woody: Hey Buzz, you’re flying!

Buzz: This isn’t flying, this is falling — with style.

Woody: To infinity and beyond!

It doesn’t have the poignancy of Jessie’s memories in Toy Story 2, or the peril of the incinerator-scene in Toy Story 3, but something about this moment leaves me a squashy, pulpy, emotional mess. It encapsulates something about why this film is special, and why certain films move us, why we pass them on, and why there are some stories that we don’t out-grow.

A small disclaimer: while I believe Toy Story to be a perfect film, it was made by human beings, who are decidedly imperfect. John Lasseter, the film’s director, left Pixar in 2018 amidst allegations of sexual harassment, and reports of presiding over a working environment where many female employees were prevented from doing their jobs, let alone rising within the company. There’s some excellent writing on this subject — I highly recommend Danielle Tcholakian’s 2019 piece — but this article isn’t about that. This article is about Toy Story and its sequels as pieces of art. References to Lasseter are intended only to describe his role in the film’s making.

The first Toy Story was a critical and commercial triumph. It changed the face of animation for ever, and established Pixar as the new leader in the field. But it all very nearly went very wrong.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, who ran Disney for the decade that saw many of its most successful films, including Beauty and The Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King, played a questionable role in Toy Story’s journey to the screen. He repeatedly pushed the team behind Toy Story to take the film in a darker direction than they’d intended, and having not made a feature film before, they bowed to his expertise. Katzenberg famously justified his firm hand on story-development, when he said, ‘I am a tyrant, but I’m usually right’. In the case of Toy Story, he was ‘usually right’ to such an extent that his interference led to the near-collapse of the project.

Two years into development, John Lasseter and the rest of the creative team showed a demo-reel of Toy Story to Disney Executives on Friday November 19, 1993: a day the makers of the film now refer to as ‘Black Friday’.

As you can see from a clip of the footage they showed, available on Youtube, it was a disaster. The most significant problem was that Woody, the loveable cowboy at the heart of the film’s appeal, was a maniacal and abusive monster who treated the other toys as dim-witted underlings.

Production was shut down, and countless Pixar animators’ jobs were threatened. Lasseter and his team worked flat-out to fix the script. They had input from Joss Whedon, who contributed the idea that Buzz doesn’t know he’s a toy, something it’s now impossible to imagine the film without. The Pixar team realised that they were making a buddy movie about Woody and Buzz, and that their conflict would drive the story. After having their idea nearly destroyed by outside interference, they gained real confidence in the movie they wanted to make. They went back to what Lasseter described as the foundation of Toy Story: the idea that toys want to be played with, and that all their actions are motivated by that desire. They emerged with the script of a story they wanted to tell, and got the green light from Disney.

Questioning their ideas, and risking losing them completely, led Pixar to make them real. The pressure they were under is reflected in the character of Woody, and the first step of his story: his fear of being ‘replaced’ by Buzz as Andy’s favourite toy.

Being ‘Andy’s favourite’ is a bit like being a monarch appointed by divine right. Power, and even identity can be conferred on someone by the choice of a higher being. Along with his relationship with Andy and his comfortable position on the bed, Woody’s status makes him the most popular among the toys, and he’s clearly their leader. He’s not the Katzenberg-influenced tyrant of the ‘Black Friday’ reel, and he’s not a military strong-man either — Woody’s control over the ‘Army Guys’ is patchy at best. Woody’s authority, and his identity with it, derives solely from being Andy’s favourite.

The problem is that Woody is benefitting from the status quo, he’s being entirely passive: not the behaviour of a proper hero. Obviously all the toys are ‘passive’ when Andy’s in the room, but this is more true for Woody than anyone else, as his first appearance flags up. With her sheep in peril, Bo Peep, given voice by Andy, calls for action: ‘Somebody do something!’. Our hero enters: floppy, inert, only able to do anything because he’s held in Andy’s hand. Woody is so passive that, without Andy, he can’t even stand up.

If Bo had only waited, she would have met the hero of anybody’s dreams, somebody who can do so much: the literal action figure Buzz Lightyear.

But Buzz has his issues: he doesn’t understand he’s a toy. Woody may not have actively earned his place in the world, but Buzz is downright delusional about his.

As soon as we’re introduced to Buzz, we get to see the world through his eyes in a point-of-view shot. He’s confronted by his own massive reflection on the inside of his helmet. No wonder he has an inflated view of himself. In Toy Story 2, Buzz no longer wears his helmet up: he’s stopped viewing the world through a distorted lens that magnifies his size, and therefore importance (he’s a guy after all), within it.

The problem is what Buzz sees, and what he chooses not to. Buzz’s most important belief about himself is that he can fly. Piqued by Woody pointing out the obvious — he can’t — Buzz volunteers to ‘fly around the room with my eyes closed’. He would rather not see the world at all than risk seeing a version of it that doesn’t match his false self-image. We all fantasise about what it would be like to fly, but Buzz’s fantasy is hollow to the core: what’s the point of flying if you can only do it with your eyes shut?

When Buzz finally sees the truth on a blaring TV screen, he collapses. He’s brought down to earth and literally broken by the knowledge: he fails to fly out of Sid’s window, and his arm falls off. The next time we see Buzz, the script, animation, and Tim Allen’s performance give us a brilliantly sped-up grieving process. After the denial that caused him to try and fly despite knowing he couldn’t, Buzz cycles through tea-induced despair, ‘Gone! All is gone!’; followed by total loss of masculine identity, ‘I am Mrs Nesbitt!’; followed by premature acceptance, ‘I am just a little depressed, I can get through this’; immediately followed by abject wallowing in self-pity: ‘I’m a sham! I can’t even fly out of the window!’.

Buzz then slumps into a near-catatonic state, presenting Woody with an immoveable obstacle to escaping Sid’s room. Buzz sees the truth, but only its worst side. The action figure becomes passive, his refusal to budge putting his and Woody’s lives in danger. His worldview shattered, Buzz sees no value in anything.

Of course, Toy Story’s plot doesn’t centre on Woody and Buzz working through their psychological issues. That would be terrible. They face a larger threat, embodied by Sid. In his skull t-shirt, Sid personifies death in the film. Woody and the gang watch him blow up a ‘Combat Carl’; the only time in the Toy Story series that we see a toy die.

Until the climax of Toy Story 3, the series doesn’t have another direct confrontation with death. Death has consequences in the Toy Story series, unlike in many franchises, but the films suggest there may be a worse fate. Combat Carl’s death is horrific, but it’s over in an instant. Being replaced, being forgotten by those we care about, is hard to live with. It can hurt us for longer. It could last for ever. The films dramatize this again and again, through Lotso in Toy Story 3, Jessie in Toy Story 2, right back to the toys in Sid’s room in the first film. They’re not dead; they’re trapped in mutilated, unloved states, and will be tormented further unless Sid learns his lesson.

Enduring separation from those we love, living on in sadness and pain, can feel like it will last for ever, as the toys fear being unloved for ever. The only way out of this dreadful passivity is to take action: somebody do something.

Back in Sid’s room, Woody has to get Buzz to see the upside of his place in the world:

‘Over in that house is a kid who thinks you are the greatest, and that’s not because you’re a space-ranger pal, it’s because you’re a toy! You are his toy!’

Woody reels off Buzz’s attributes, and acknowledges his own inadequacies. He admits that Andy may have outgrown him, he may have moved past nostalgic myths of the old frontier. Andy’s getting older, looking to the future, and who better to accompany him than a mythic figure from the ‘final frontier’?

When Woody says ‘I’m the one who should be strapped to that rocket’, he’s not being self-pitying. He’s stating a fact: Sid intended the rocket for ‘that wimpy cowboy doll’. This honest vulnerability galvanizes Buzz into seeing what he and Woody share. They’ve both meant the world to Andy: they both bear his name on the soles of their feet.

Buzz just needed to value something real. Not to save the galaxy, just to get himself and the sheriff safely home. Buzz has accepted his limitations, and now he’s focused on something that matters: ‘There’s a kid over in that house who needs us’. But Woody still has to earn his reward, so he hatches a plan to rescue Sid’s toys:

‘We’re going to have to break a few rules, but if it works, it’ll help everybody.’

What Woody has to break are, we assume, unspoken rules understood by all toys that you do not move when humans are looking. This rule sealed Combat Carl’s fate: he had to accept death rather than break it.

Woody used to benefit passively from a role he was lucky to have. Now he’s taking action and breaking the rules. The way to save Sid’s toys is to make their owner see that ‘the toys are alive’. Woody comes alive in a child’s hand again, but in Sid’s hand, it’s the terrifying warning: ‘play nice’.

Sid’s toys are safe, but our heroes still have to get home. They are tested on the way. Speeding cars, Sid’s dog, the truck, Andy’s other toys, everything conspires to stop them. But now, Woody and Buzz are a team, even sharing thoughts through the dialogue:

Buzz: Woody, the rocket!

Woody: The match! Yes!

They light the rocket and blast off, hurling RC safely back into the truck. Buzz’s wings free them from the rocket in the nick of time. But now they’re falling; we get the point-of-view shot of the hard tarmac as they hurtle downwards. Woody covers his eyes — the film has taught us that the fall will probably kill them — and Woody can’t bear to look. Then Pixar break the rules.

We’ve been repeatedly told that Buzz cannot fly. He was delusional to think he could; his wings are not ‘terillium-carbonic alloy’; they’re plastic. He is a toy: he can’t fly.

But then, suddenly, he can. Woody opens his eyes and exclaims, ‘Hey Buzz, you’re flying!’. He’s so proud of his friend, celebrating the best about Buzz without a trace of envy.

Buzz’s reply — ‘This isn’t flying, this is falling with style’, tells us he sees the truth now, and he cared what Woody had to say all along. Pixar allow us the benefit of the doubt: if we’re truly concerned about the laws of physics in a film where toys can speak, the character design of Buzz lets us accept that he’s just gliding, ‘falling with style’. Or we can share Woody’s delight, as he spreads his arms wide in tribute to Buzz’s wings, and the friends briefly experience what it feels like to have no limits, to be the real Buzz Lightyear. The music soars, and with diaphragm-heaving joy, Tom Hanks yells out Buzz’s greatest catchphrase.

Buzz never flies again. In the later films, his aerodynamic shape means he can make impressive leaps, but this particular rule never gets re-broken. Here though, it’s a transcendent moment for the characters and the audience: we feel Woody’s joy. We remember what it feels like to believe in the impossible.

Toy Story harks back to Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit, a touchstone of children’s literature. The book’s central idea is that if toys are loved for long enough, they become ‘real’. Woody and Buzz don’t transform into a real cowboy or an astronaut, but through acknowledging their weaknesses, they discover and affirm the value in what they really are. As a reward, they get to fly — all the way back to Andy.

Near the end of Toy Story 3, Andy describes the toys to another character. For Buzz, he simply lists things the space-ranger can do: ‘He can fly! And shoot lasers!’. When it’s Woody’s turn, Andy’s tone shifts:

‘He’s brave, like a cowboy should be. And kind and smart. But the thing that makes Woody special is he’ll never give up on you. Ever. He’ll be there for you, no matter what.’

Some people can do special things; others are special because of who they are. Toy Story doesn’t tell us whether Woody was made with these qualities, or whether they’re in him because Andy has imbued him with them, but Buzz’s delusions suggest that toys’ identities are not fixed at the moment they’re made. Andy never learns that his toys are ‘real’; he doesn’t need to. To him, Woody’s qualities are real already. He always believed in, and loved, Woody. That love may have made Woody the person he is, and it certainly made him risk everything to truly earn it. It made him real. Andy would enjoy watching Toy Story, but he didn’t need to see a cowboy doll animated onscreen to believe in Woody, he only needed to hold him in his hand.

Children can imbue inanimate things with life and meaning. Animators, writers, and anyone with a story to tell, can make drawings, words, and ideas come alive. All of us sometimes reaffirm things of value by questioning whether they are real, or by risking losing them. All of us need to remember that part of why we’re loved is for who we are to others. Remembering that can help give our lives value; in the right hands, love makes us real. It’s the same reason that we value some works of art beyond what we can explain: they mean something to us.

Having not even touched on so many of the things that make it brilliant, I say again: Toy Story is brilliant, because it means something. That something stays real, and it will be there for us, and for the children we pass it onto, to infinity and beyond.

Why I’m Still Banging On About Toy Story was originally published in Joe’s place on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.