Red Wheelbarrow 2008 text FINAL REVISED.indd - De Anza College

our seats. Across the room, some grad students had the wrong color
bracelets and were compelled to see the second showing for dislike
of confrontation.
My feet stuck to the saccharine upholstery and I adjusted for
discomfort. Kate joined into the rhythm and I tried my best to recall
the context. Judging by her giggling, it must have been something
to do with a jingle she liked, but knowing her it was likely to be
the theme to a cartoon she liked. I looked it up, and apparently I
had tapped out the theme to “Thundercats.”
Thunder, thunder, Thundercats, ho!
Thundercats are on the move.
Thundercats are loose.
Feel the magic, feel the roar,
Thundercats are loose.
I found out weeks later via e-mail that Kate had always
hated me. She said that I was an uncaring, apathetic, indifferent,
insignificant, callow, cowardly, shallow, and ultimately totalitarian
kind of guy. She would say that, too. I mean, seriously, she likes
Silverchair (I fucking hate Silverchair). Consequently, Jess also has
to pretend to like Silverchair.
The movie itself was a disappointment. The premise was
lost at the get-go. Originally, the screenplay had been based on a
short story that a depressed student had written while in community
college decades earlier. Unfortunately for her, she committed suicide
decades before the story had gotten any recognition from the literary
establishment. She had written a story about a movie reviewer for
the sequel to a fictional movie. When I say fictional, I mean that the
movie didn’t exist except in the fictional world. The movie reviewer
gets trapped on the subway on account of a blackout and must then
miss the premier. She, the reviewer, then makes up a review for the
movie that wins the Pulitzer.
The screenplay had been all around Hollywood throughout
the days of the Clinton administration, when everybody tried to
copy the seventies and thought nobody would notice if they just
wrapped the quirky best friend in flannel. The references she made to
Libertarianism, however, proved too distasteful to studios. By the late
nineties, fellatio jokes were back in style and the short story, which
(I should have mentioned this earlier) was called “The Panel,” but
Phil Hartman then died and the studio shut down pre-production.
Mentions of terrorism in the Boston underground (or whatever they
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