Vacation

Vacationⁱ is very much an Americana product : salty, glutamate-rich, delicious pink goop covering some very dark, not all that deep secrets.

The humour's done right, after a fashion, in the sense that yes it's all coming out of left field. Like for instance that time when they found the "true" hot springs, and figured out hydrogen sulfide is very good for you and all those minerals suck teh toxins right out of one's body, right in an open air cesspool. Obviously this isn't how it actually works, none of it, but the shock was there, viscerally, and so we were amused and entertained. Can't say we weren't. Organically amused ; functionally entertained. As lifeless a mechanism as one could ever conceive - congrats, you've found America. It... worksⁱⁱ, after a fashion.

Yet under all this seemingly satisfactory packaging lurks the dark truth of the matter. The nominal hero of this movie is a deeply incompent male, exuberantly whiny, militantly ignorantⁱⁱⁱ and plenty stubborn. The woman even challenges him about it, in no uncertain terms : "you suck", she says, "you've got nothing", she says, "and you can't even admit it". She's right. He can't. This belated confrontation of his very narrow limits finally sends the hero (of a travel story!) on a venture to find himself, three quarters in. This is how long it took to finally get him to move his ass out of his wife's bed/mother's skirts. That trip comes to an abrupt end two minutes!!11 later. That's how long he has. After which it's all suddenly fixed and better and whatever.

The sad truth of the matter is that the ustard male inverses the story of his revered antecessors. If a century ago the youth, inept like all youths, stubborn like all youths, took a whole two minutes to start on his journey of exploration and then proceeded to actually journey for an hour and a half, the manchild of "modern democracy" takes about an hour to finally, grudgingly, angrily proceed to travel for a whole two minutes before the story rapidly folds as if this horror of horrors, the fucking trip, is so scary it can't even be contemplated, just a glimpse suffices and should be immediately forgotten.

Ironically enough, Christina Applegate is still living in Married With Children. There's even a "family fight" here, just like back in the good days, late 80s, before the Internet was a thing, back when America perhaps still had a chance. She is, just like her mother then, deeply devoted to a loser for no discernible reason, easygoing and free, altogether a rather pleasant sort^iv. She confronts her own history^v without much ado once one of them bitchez disrespects which ain't right, gets trampled by said history and that's that, moves on - for any definition of "moving on" that reduces to "comes to terms with her marriage captivity as well as the captor".

But at least we laughed, I guess.

1. 2015, by some TV derps, with Christina Applegate. [↩]
2. Used to, at any rate. [↩]
3. Kid asks him to explain what a rimjob is. This is obviously a trap - any teenager asking you to explain obscure sexual terminology is DEFINITELY in the know about it - that's what the Internet is for, after all.

   Nevertheless, the derp proceeds to... guess. That's right, on the strength of his confessed 3-person sexual experience (which he had to work hard for), he feels confident enough to venture a guess. What, would it be possible that the entire world doth not lie reflected in the best possible parochy of all parochies, where he happens to live ? He, much like a certain sort of imbecile that's pretty much all literate America these days, imagines himself equipped enough to do all the heavy lifting involved here.

   By way of verification, he proffers "what could it mean, right". That's what he's got. That's what it means to be militantly ignorant - he "figures it out". What could it possibly mean, after all! Is he not human ? Is not all humanity captured, captive inside his minor horizon ? Isn't he equal to each and all and pars pro toto as human as we could ever get ? So then! [↩]

4. Although laughing at how she does nothing useful around the house went out of fashion - doing nothing useful around the house did not. Because how would it. [↩]
5. Amusingly enough, the very scandalous "Debbie Do Anything", that (like any healthy, well bred European girl) would show her tits to anyone who asked, the fabled and famed sorority slut turns out to have had sex with... thirty people. That's the ustardian limit of "inconceivably many".

   It brought a chuckle, of course, given the abundance of girls with which we've had sex with that many girls as a pair, but no, the "what's the maximum number of simultaneous partners" isn't a conceivable point of consideration in ustarism ; nor is the simple judgement that if you're neither ugly nor annoying, and go out every Saturday night while in the age range (ie, 15 to 30 let's say for numeric simplicity) and then get picked up and laid you're looking at 15 * 52 = 780 partners before meeting Dante's own Silvia Selvaggia. And if you don't go out you're a bore, and if you do go out but don't get picked up you're either ugly, fat, obnoxious or all three together. Seriously, you spent three hours being hit on about once a minute and in those 180 come-ons you found nothing of interest ? Your filter works so well it rejects more than 99% of all proponents ? Just how well does this filter work then ?

   The absolute minimum for even county-level slut championship is three digits ; and we're not discussing state or college level here, let alone the all-time, record setting champ that seems to be intimated. Debbie Do Anything is required to fuck thirty people in one sitting as a qualifying warm-up, and before you ask yes I knew girls that did that sort of thing - the designated whore of a gaming coven or hunting party, as well as the official party favour is exactly this. And no, it leaves no traces. For all you know she could be your mother - and if you're from Europe and your mother's hot, she probably is!

   Speaking of which : how hot was your grandmother, back in the day ? [↩]