This is not an essay about The Da Vinci Code. I haven’t seen the movie; I haven’t read the book. But it’s not because I’m a snob! There are just so many other movies and books out there which I could be—

Okay. Maybe it’s because I’m a snob.

But I first learned about genetic isopoint in an article about The Da Vinci Code, so let’s start there.

Apparently, Jesus had a baby? And that baby had a baby? And today the direct descendent of that baby is out there causing trouble? For Tom Hanks? And I’m not sure exactly but it seems like maybe Tom Hanks doesn’t deserve all this secondhand Jesus-family trauma?^[1]Tweet corrections to me; not Jake Clayson or the other good folk of this site who, I am certain, know all about Tom Hanks and Jesus and all your other favorite celebrities.

Anyway, genetic isopoint basically comes down to this:

If Jesus has even one child upon the earth today, we are all the children of Jesus.

You don’t have to go back very many thousands of years to discover we all share the same ancestors. If one of the original Twelve Apostles is not my grandpa, behold, I say unto you, neither is he your grandpa.

Here’s a nice sentence from Wikipedia: “a modern-day Japanese person will get 88.4% of their ancestry from Japan, and most of the remainder from China or Korea, with only 0.00049% traced to Norway; conversely, a modern-day Norwegian will get over 92% of their ancestry from Norway (or over 96% from Scandinavia) and only 0.00044% from Japan.”

It’s not a close relationship, but Anja and Akira are still related.

___________________________________________________

If you want to annoy silent-film scholar Fritzi Kramer, suggest D.W. Griffith invented something. That he invented anything! Not only can she casually disprove claims that he invented stuff like closeups and tracking shots, she won’t even let him keep false eyelashes. And I’ve been claiming he invented false eyelashes for years!^[2]Only two years, but still. Embarrassing.

But all these nonGriffith inventions do have a filmic isopoint SOMEwhere. SOMEbody made the first gangster film. SOMEbody was the first to cut to closeup. But technique is like genes: It spreads wherever excited young people are “getting together” and “sharing ideas.”

And pretty soon everyone’s related.

___________________________________________________

A project I’ve been mulling for a couple years now is a booklength treatment of Napoleon Dynamite.^[3]Booklength, but shortbooklength. I feel qualified not just because I’ve seen the film more times than I’ve seen Jurassic Park but also because my high school appears in a poster aligning the walls of Napoleon’s high school.^[4]More accurately, it’s my mother’s high school that Napoleon’s schoolmates will be playing in the upcoming game. We moved to California before I could become a Bear Lake Bear myself. So 1) I grew up in the same corner of Idaho as director Jared Hess then 2) attended the same university as screenwriters Jared and Jerusha Hess while 3) being the same religion the entire time. We even have some friends in common! Surely I can unbury and reveal their secrets.

Not the sort of secrets Tom Hanks is trying to uncover^[5]Successful reference? but isopoint stuff. For instance, there is no doubt that Napoleon Dynamite takes cues from The Phone Call, a film made by students at our shared alma mater, Brigham Young University.^[6]You’ve heard of it. Starring Marc McClure between his almost-as-iconic roles in Freaky Friday and Superman, The Phone Call is the story of a high-school kid working up the courage to ask out the girl down the street. Over the course of twenty-four minutes, Scott learns to stand up for what’s right and for himself and for others as he and his curly hair experience some real growth via minimal plot. I love it. I saw it many times in childhood.^[7]Perhaps you too has a Sunday School teacher or three who would rather use the roll tv than talk about difficult doctrines such as us all being (or none of us being) the children of Jesus.

American Mormons of my generation who saw The Phone Call, which is a lot of us, love The Phone Call. And you can see those genes flowing directly into Napoleon Dynamite’s famous fro.

___________________________________________________

One fun thing YouTube has given us is the supercut. So, speaking of phones, here’s one on phones. No analysis. No high-minded commentary. Just three minutes of people on the phone.^[8]You will see Napoleon Dynamite, but neither The Phone Call (1977) nor The Phone Call (2013) which, other than approximate runtime and title and phone calls and general excellence, don’t have much … Continue reading

___________________________________________________

Going back to silent film for a bit, can we talk about Metropolis?^[9]Fritzi would be delighted. I watched it back in 2019 and was surprised to realize I had never seen it before. On the one hand, fun! On the other hand, how many classics that I think I have seen have I not seen? Unsettling.

Perhaps my mistake came from long-standing intention or from the thousands of posters and stills I’ve seen—or perhaps it’s just because Metropolis has been plundered over and over by its descendants. Everyone knows the robot looks like C-3PO and, before she wakes up, we see her in bands like we’ll see again in The Bride of Frankenstein, eight years later, and The Fifth Element, seventy years later.

But the meme that caught my attention most in 2019 was the mad scientist’s prosthetic hand.

The burgermeisters in both Son of and Young Frankenstein have prosthetic hands. Dr. Strangelove has one. I used to think Star Wars had a too-serious fascination with fake hands until the MCU arrived with a full-on fetish. And let’s not forget the villains of both Inspector Gadget and Pound Puppies.

I don’t know of an ancient, say, Olympian, source for the robotic hand, but it’s huge in film. And it’s been huge a long time. I might guess it started with Metropolis, but I haven’t checked with Fritzi, and I don’t want to embarrass myself.

___________________________________________________

As BYU students, my wife and I were eligible for a library card in the neighboring city of Orem. The Orem Library had local renown for the best film collection around. The entire basement was filled with VHS tapes of all the films we had wanted to watch but never been able to find. It’s how I first saw everything from Vampyre to Philadelphia Story to The Apartment to Bananas to Fried Green Tomatoes. It’s also where we found a shelf of BYU student films, including Peluca, a short made by a pre-Jerusha Jared Hess. Peluca is Napoleon Dynamite in embryo, and this film slew us. When we met new couples, one of the first things we would do is show them Peluca and watch them watching it. If they were amazed and delighted, we could be friends. If they were stymied, well, we should probably try hanging out with other couples.^[10]Or, in other words, Theric is both a snob and a hipster with sufficient qualities of each to be utterly despicable, even to himself, leaving him no option but the third person.

After Napoleon came out, I learned that at the end of shooting Peluca, Jon Heder had danced in his wig and his boots until the 16mm ran out. Someday, when Criterion makes a Napoleon Dynamite set, that footage had better be included.

___________________________________________________

But the title of this essay promises Gentleman Broncos, so let’s get to that, shall we?

Gentleman Broncos, the Hesses’ third feature, arrived in the Bay Area on one screen in San Francisco. An inconvenient part of San Francisco, I might add. Especially considering we had a new baby and two only slightly larger children.^[11]Which children’s genetic isopoint is us. Add that Hess movies are movies we watch together and of course did not see Broncos on a big screen.

Even if I’d had a plan to go into the City alone, it wouldn’t have mattered. The only movie I’ve seen vanish faster was Radioland Murders. I’d planned to watch that on Monday or Tuesday but it was yanked halfway through its first weekend.^[12]Not to worry. I rented it soon as it arrived at my local video store, then bought the tape and wore it out—notorious flop status be damned.

I picked up a Gentleman Broncos dvd as soon as possible—but I could have waited. It wasn’t long before I started picking up extra copies for a dollar at Grocery Outlet to give to friends.

The only positive notice I saw at the time was a single paragraph from Richard Brody in the opening pages of a New Yorker. Since then, Brody has defended the film many times. It may need the defense. Broncos sports a Tomato Rating of 20% (10% with top critics) and it has enough vomit and feces to prevent critical reassessment in our lifetimes.^[13]But please note that the notorious scene of a large snake pooping is not a special effect. That snake really did let it out midscene all over Mike White’s sweater. But let me ask you this: If … Continue reading

Brody’s main argument is that, when read accurately, the Hesses’ films are deeply religious. And not just when Jack Black is a monk or Sam Rockwell is a Bible archeologist, but also when Jermaine Clement plagiarizes a teenager.

___________________________________________________

Last weekend I took one of my no-longer-so-small kids to see Shang-Chi only to realize that, except for a couple comedies like Shaolin Soccer, I have not educated my kids in the ways of kung fu (let alone wuxia^[14]Admission: I had to look wuxia up. I can only ever remember it starts with a W. Which isn’t even true. It starts with a 武.). My son was having his Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon experience—discovering an entire world of film through a single movie whose referents (genetic/memetic heritage) are only invisible to the ignorant. Which I certainly was, back in 2000.

___________________________________________________

One of the lines in Gentlemen Broncos another critic likes is itself a piece of literary analysis.

The hero of our film, Benji, is on his way to a writers’ camp for the homeschooled. He brings with him his latest novel, which a girl on the trip convinces him to hand over so she can read.

At first, she is overwhelmed—perhaps by the alien setting or the nonconsuensual orchiectomy. Later, as they discuss the story and Benji’s inspirations, she cracks the code:

So Bronco is kind of like your dad,
and his gonads are his seed,
which means the gonads are you.
That’s why they’re so precious.

I’m not sure Benji buys this analysis, but who cares what he thinks? Brody’s convinced and, I don’t know if you’ve heard, the author is dead.

___________________________________________________

All those folks who provided us seed back at our genetic isopoint are dead, too. It doesn’t matter what they thought about their (our) eye color or tendon tightness. What matters is what we make of it now. I can’t ask Fritz Lang about robot hands or Griffith about oversized eyelashes but I can count on seeing both yet again before the year ends.

What will these new movies do with their inherited DNA?

Stories are always evolving and recombining and doing all those fun things biological critters also do. Sometimes the stealing is intentional, sometimes it’s subconscious, sometimes it’s kind of shady, and sometimes it is simply magical.

Which brings us back to the stolen gonad of Bronco.

I assume it’s a safe guess you haven’t seen Gentlemen Broncos but, as you now know, it’s the story of a kid who is homeschooled. Benji’s father died when he was young and his mother is an unusually unglamorous Jennifer Coolidge whose dream is to design modest yet alluring nightwear. But she hopes at least as much for her son, for whom she arranges a trip to Cletus Festival, “the best writers’ camp in the state” and a fellow from church to be his guardian angel.

At the camp, the man whose literary career serves as the model Benjamin imagines for himself gives a ludicrously egotistical keynote address and serves up terrible advice on naming fantasy characters. Benji has sufficient skill with words to see through his idol, which is crushing. But he still believes that the Ronald Chevalier he has worshipped from afar must still exist somewhere inside this crass exterior, a Jermaine Clement exuding “wealth” and “spirituality”^[15]scare quotes intentional through his Bluetooth earpiece and appropriated Native American garb.

So Benji enters his novel in a contest, knowing (hoping) Chevalier may read it. And may thus recognize in Benji a kindred spirit.

Chevalier does read the novel. And he does recognize greatness. But he doesn’t see in that greatness a kindred spirit but a rival. A virgin whose blood is delicious. So he plagiarizes Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years and with this infusion of young plasma his career is reborn.

Hijinks ensue.

For a movie with so much vomit and feces, this is a sad, sad movie. Michael Angarano^[16]who has his own connection to the world of quasi-LDS film—whether he is Ben, Benjamin, or Benji—is the James-Van-Der-Beek-is-crying gif disguised as a stonefaced Buster Keaton. His driving motivation is to make a dead father proud of him, and how do you do that?

Well. Why not cast your father as a mountain-man-on-Arrakis and thus show to the world how amazing he is (was)? Why not make the entire world admire the same man you admire? And from just as far away?

And so Bronco’s gonads aren’t just Benji and they aren’t just genetic material—they’re also his father’s memetic material. The idea of the man who was my father. The man I didn’t know, in the form of words on a page: the form of knowledge.

Whew. That’s a lot of weight for a stolen testis in a jar.

___________________________________________________

I’m not having an easy time parsing what lessons I, a writer, should learn from Benjamin’s travails.

Being plagiarized is bad. Selling movie rights is bad. But maybe only if you sell it to friends? Or maybe people who will screw up your work aren’t friends? And, come to think of it, isn’t it being plagiarized that leads to his happy-ending book contract?

It’s perplexing. Kind of like life. But you know that. We are cousins, after all. Maybe first cousins! (Albeit seventy times removed.)

___________________________________________________

The most striking conceit in Gentlemen Broncos is the multiple options we get for visualizing Broncos’ story.

The first is what the characters see as they read Benjamin’s actual words. The grotesque imaginative force of his work. A dirty, bearded Sam Rockwell with a man-of-the-earth accent who goes it alone and sews his own testicle back on. Like a man.

The second is Chevalier’s transmutation of Bronco into Brutus. Instead of an unkempt desert warrior, we get one who wears pink and white and speaks in a higher register and delights in giggles and good yeast and wears his hair like a blonde Cher, circa 1965.

Third, we see the terrible VHS movie his friends^[17]“Friends”? are shooting, of which the less said the better. Let’s keep Ben’s feelings in mind.

What we have here is the evolution of a story from source (more on that in a moment) to bastard. Benji wrote a book everyone seems to agree is great. And in no time there was a stolen version on bookshelves and corrupted one at the local theater. Stories move fast. Especially clones. But let’s not pretend that Benji’s work is wholly original. It’s pretty clear he’s taking inspiration from Chevalier and the pulp a generation before that. It’s not Star Wars because there are no surveillance does on Tatooine or Endor. But you take the science fiction Benji spent his childhood consuming and add to that the obsessions of rural Utah and divide by two, you roughly end up with surveillance does and battle stags and a magical spice-I-mean-yeast that looks like a cow patty and helps you fly like Charlie and his grandpa after some fuzzy lifting drink. As the preacher says, there is nothing new under the sun.

___________________________________________________

It’s a little humbling to discover all the most clever writers of the last twenty years are just repeating what was done in Tristam Shandy back in 1759. We, all of us, are made from the genes and memes that have been around for always. Maybe our next masterpiece won’t be influenced by your current favorite, but if we go back a few generations, we’re all the same eggs and sperm anyway.

This is Bronco’s concern, of course:

Daysius is gonna build himself
an army using my seed.
I can’t let that happen.
His power’s become unruly.
You know how weird that’d be,
a bunch of gorgeous yeast lords
with my face, running around,
making dang fools of themselves?

No, Bronco. If you look at us long enough, no matter which of us you choose, we’re all more similar than we are different. A bunch of gorgeous yeast lords with the same face. Not to say our differences don’t matter or aren’t swell—they do and they are! And when I watch the three versions of Yeast Wars, this is what I learn!

And although I might not love any version of Bronco’s story,^[18]I am indeed a horrible snob. I can see in it the traditions I am part of and adjacent to and deliberately rejecting.

In other words, I see my cousin. And I see myself.

And maybe it’s only a generation back before I connect to Gentlemen Broncos, and maybe film itself is only, what, six generations old?, and maybe you and I have not met and maybe we are no more related than Anja and Akira—but we can watch the films of Anja and Akira, or Jared and Jerusha, and no matter how weird or alien the film may seem, we will find our commonality.

Because it’s not that all far back to where we all share parents.^[19]One of whom either is or is not Jesus. Ask Tom Hanks.

We are brothers, sisters, siblings all. And if that’s a religious message (which it most certainly is—think about genetic isopoint next time you’re in the temple or reading your patriarchal blessing), it’s one I will happily adopt.

So let’s go make the next generation—of people, of movies, of art—together. And maybe, like Benji, Mom will secure our copyright. Then we’ll get her a fashion show. And we’ll all make VHS movies together.