"The Middle" by Maren Morris is Secretly About Domestic Violence

Conclusive proof the pop hit of the year is actually a paean to intimate partner abuse and alcoholism ...

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

@JimboX

Unless you've been held against your will at a top secret black ops site since January, you've probably heard "The Middle," as an approximate count, 456,437 times over the last five months. 

The song is a top 40 pop staple, still getting regular rotation on most of America's pop stations. And, of course, it's also used as the soundtrack for those omnipresent Target commercials ... indeed, the same way 2012 was the year that gave us Sandy Hook and "Call Me Maybe," it's pretty much a given that we'll ultimately recall 2018 as "the one with the Florida high school shooting and that 'meet me in the middle' song."

It's no doubt a catchy little jingle. The byproduct of ex-country crooner Maren Morris (obviously trying to become the next Tay-Tay, even though she obviously doesn't have the chops/aesthetic appeal to aspire for such lofty heights) Zedd and Grey (I still don't know what those last two do, or even if they're singular or plural artists), I initially thought the track was just another, harmless, radio-friendly ode to how much a woman wants to fuck some dude's brains out (which, by the way, is about 90 percent of the stuff you hear on the radio nowadays ... what's that about the objectifying male gaze again?) Alas, after enough listens of the song, I've discovered two fairly shocking things about "The Middle." 

No. 1 — the song has the EXACT same "ticking clock" sound from "Stay"; and ...

No. 2 — it's not a randy hymn about the female libido whatsoever ... in fact, it's secretly a song about intimate partner violence.

You scoff? Well, popular music (hence, the term "pop music," in case you've ever wondered) has a LONG track record of befuddling people with sugar-coated but subversive messages. For example, people thought "Born in the U.S.A." was a loving homage to America, even though it was actually a song about how poorly Vietnam veterans were treated during the Reagan administration. Same thing with "The Freshman" and "Brick" — at the time, we all though they were heartfelt songs about breakups, when abstractly (and even more shockingly, withing the contextual confines of the lyrics themselves) they were actually about abortions.

The same way some insightful souls deduced "Complicated" by Avril Lavigne was actually about date rape, I've decided to go public with my revelations about the not-so-veiled deeper subtext of "The Middle." Let's cut away the happy, upbeat tempo and dissect the lyrics all by their lonesome, why don't we?

Take a seat

Right over there, sat on the stairs

Stay or leave

The cabinets are bare, and I'm unaware

Of just how we got into this mess, got so aggressive 

I know we meant all good intentions

So right off the bat we know what's really going on here. Obviously, we've got one domestic partner offering an ultimatum to the other one. When Maren says "the cabinets are bare," that allows us to deduce a focal point to their relationship woes. Her man works all day, and it's her job to take care of the house, which apparently, she's been neglecting to the point where she stopped buying groceries for the family. But that also offers a secondary meaning: that the cabinets are bare because they engaged in mutual combat and one of them got slung into the china cabinet, where ceramic plates and perhaps even a box of chocolate Lucky Charms were used as weaponry. The singer literally has no clue how such a minor squabble turned into an act of family violence, hence, the line about "good intentions." But as we will soon see, it's not like the singer is the most reliable of narrators here ... 

So pull me closer

Why don't you pull me close?

Why don't you come on over?

I can't just let you go

Oh baby, why don't you just meet me in the middle? 

I'm losing my mind just a little 

So why don't you just meet me in the middle? 

In the middle 

Baby, why don't you just meet me in the middle? 

I'm losing my mind just a little 

So why don't you just meet me in the middle? 

In the middle 

Now, the first time I heard this song, my thought was the same as yours. "Well, duh, it's another broad singing about how much she wants to fuck somebody." But the more I've listened to the song, I realize the singer isn't trying to seduce somebody, she's trying to bait him into a fucking fist fight. When she says "pull me close" and "meet me in the middle," she's not talking about making up or working out a compromise, she means she wants to throw elbows with some motherfucker. The singer even admits this want of domestic violence is irrational, hence the line "I'm losing my mind just a little." But that leaves a burning question: just why is Miss Morris so psychopathically enraged? Well, let's examine the lyrics a little deeper.

Ohh, take a step

Back for a minute, into the kitchen

Floors are wet

And taps are still running, dishes are broken

How did we get into this mess? Got so aggressive 

I know we meant all good intentions

So, why is the floor wet? Note, she never explicitly states what the floor is wet with, either. Now, we could attribute those broken dishes to the physical altercation from earlier, but why are the water taps still running? Well, it's a bit of a stretch, but here's my hypothesis: the floor is wet from the hard liquor the narrator spilled, who was attempting to clean out the evidence of her furtive alcoholism when her boyfriend/husband showed up and caught her in the act. This is something that's actually strongly implied in the next stanza:

Looking at you, I can't lie

Just pouring out admission

Regardless of my objection, oh, oh

And it's not about my pride

I need you on my skin 

Just come over, pull me in, just 

"Pouring out admission?" "It's not about my pride?" I mean, goddamn, she pretty much makes it textual right there. The singer is an alcoholic bitch whose addiction is ruining the family, and now she wants to engage in drunken fisticuffs with her significant other instead of come to terms with the fact she's a stinkin' drunk, deadbeat mom and piss poor spouse/girlfriend. Which, of course, leads back into one more go-through of the main chorus, which insinuates this kind of violent behavior is cyclical. By the end of the track , there is no resolution, just the recognition that the couple is stuck, perpetually, in the ... ahem ... Middle ... of a violent, alcohol-ravaged co-dependent situation.

Forget it, boys — this is about as far down the rabbit hole we can go with product placement.

Yeah, it's kind of hard to go back to bopping your head and tapping your toes to the rhythm after learning the song is really about an alcoholic domestic abuser, no? What's really amazing to me, though, is how seemingly nobody else has picked up on this, despite the lyrics themselves pretty much making it clear as day.

Which I suppose is just more proof that you can say anything in a song, and just as long as the chorus is catchy and the beat is groovy, nobody will even give a fuck what you're really singing about. I mean, shit, Jethro Tull wrote a song that was explicitly about a pedo creeping on young children at the park, and classic rock stations still play it a good 30 times a day. 

So yeah, I guess if nobody gives a damn about a Stone Temple Pilots song encouraging date rape a good 25 years down the road, I reckon no one will bat an eyelash about 2018's defining pop anthem being a ditty about spouse abuse and alcoholism. 

What a time to be alive — when the most popular track of the year makes both its superficial and contextual meaning about substance abuse and intimate partner violence apparent to anybody with a working hippocampus, but they have to subliminally sneak in a furtive department store ad at the ass-end of the official video.

And to think; there are some people out there who actually argue that ours isn't the greatest epoch in human history ...

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My Five Favorite Things About Taylor Swift's "Look What You Made Me Do" Music Video (in GIF form!)

Dissecting and deconstructing the latest music video from the undisputed Queen of Pop ... in fully animated pictorial form!

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

August 27, 2017 - a date that will live in eternal infamy. For those of you somehow out of the loop, that was when Taylor Swift debuted the spooky, cryptic video for "Look What You Made Me Do," the first single off her upcoming album Reputation. And to say that it was a watershed moment for contemporary pop culture is a gross understatement. I mean, shit, when was the last time you remember the unveiling of a music video being such a big deal? You'd have to go back to 1991 when Michael Jackson debuted the video for "Black or White" - you know, the one where Macaulay Culkin is the kid and George Wendt's his dad and there's that entire six minute breakdown where MJ bashes a car with a crowbar and keeps grabbing his balls before turning into a panther, for some reason - on Fox to find a music video reveal as heavily hyped as Swift's latest. And needless to say, it did not disappoint. 

The media frenzy started a couple of days before MTV's annual Video Music Awards (i.e., literally the only time all year the station actually plays music videos) when Tay Tay released a typographical, animated video on the YouTubes that just featured the song's lyrics laid over a bunch of crappy looking Clip Art montages. Naturally, it broke page view records and every radio station in the country was spinning the damn song on the hour. But what really made this one something culturally transcendent was the mystery surrounding the meaning and intent of the lyrics. Within minutes of the preview video going live scores of people were already online trying to decrypt the song like it was The Da Vinci Code or something. Was it a thinly veiled jab at arch rival Katy Perry? An oblique "fuck you" to Kanye West and the Kardashians? Some sort of Illuminati mind control claptrap tied to PizzaGate? EVERYBODY had their own theory on what "Look What You Made Me Do" was really about (complete with some wayward individuals accusing the laconic chorus of ripping off Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy," when anyone with a working set of cochleas can yell you it's clearly ripping off 2 Live Crew's "Me So Horny" instead) and it made even the most jaded and apathetic media consumer at least somewhat curious as to what the full music video would reveal. In short, it was one of the most brilliant marketing ploys the music industry has pulled in a LONG time. This was no longer just another video being released; it had become a bona fide transcendent cultural experience, like the Mayweather/McGregor boxing bout or Starbucks' limited time only Unicorn Frapuccino.

To be fair, I haven't really been following all the Taylor drama over the last year or so, but one 20-minute dissertation from my GF filled me in on all the details of the whole "phone-gate" controversy with Kim K and Kanye - a pivotal piece of intel that makes the conclusion of the video (in which multiple incarnations of Taylor bicker back and forth about all the other Taylors being fake, manipulative and shallow) so much cattier and sassier. While there's a lot of stuff to digest and over-analyze, there were five things about the music video for "Look What You Made Me Do" that I found particularly interesting, and as a public service to the denizens of Internet-land, I've decided to isolate 'em in easily redistributable animated GIF form for more pageviews  - I mean, to give you a better comprehension of the audiovisual subtleties of the short-form film ...

Zombie Taylor!

And just like that, my opinion on necrophilia did a total 180...

Right off the bat the video hits a high note, with the sudden emergence of Taylor Swift's "reputation" crawling out of the grave in full Evil Dead makeup. It's a really deft directorial decision and gets about as far away from the goofy, wholesomeness of "Shake It Off" as they could have without stocking the video with ACTUAL Faces of Death footage and the whole thing is just tremendous pro wrestling booking 101. You want to recast yourself as something dark, ominous, edgy and pointedly threatening? Shit, you might as well go all in and transform yourself from something that looks like this to something that resembles the goddamn Castle Freak. We're barely 20 seconds in and we just KNOW this new incarnation of Taylor ain't taking shit from nobody no more; WWE executives, take note - THIS is how you frame the initial setup for an effective heel turn in the post-Facebook era. And yes, I will just come out and say it - even as a desiccated, reanimated corpse with black ooze foaming out of her mouth, I'd still tap it.

The Diamond Bath!

Yeah, it looks all fun and hedonistic - up until the first gemstone gets stuck in your cooter.

Well, if you need a good visual metaphor for opulent indulgence, I guess taking a page out of Scrooge McDuck's playbook and literally bathing in precious jewels is a pretty good way to get the point across. I like how her appearance here kinda' sorta harks back to the video for "Blank Space," making for a nice touch of continuity. She just looks so psycho bitchy and seductive at the same time, like you KNOW she'd kill you mid-coitus like Doogie Howser at the end of Gone Girl, but damn it, you'd beckon her sultry siren song regardless. Also, I dig how her makeup toes a 50/50 line between classic and trashy. I mean, just look at those razor sharp, blood red finger nails - those things aren't for showing off at ritzy galas, they're for manually milking prostates behind dumpsters and we all know it. Then there's that brief clip at the very end of the sequence, where she takes a bite into a big diamond necklace, which you just know had to taste pretty gross. I don't care HOW many times they wash that shit, there ain't no way you're getting the smell of African dirt miner off those things; I really hope Tay Tay is up to date on her shots after pulling such a biologically perilous stunt.

Tea Snakes!

Yeah, they probably should've spent a little less money on the wardrobe budget and just a wee bit more on the snake CGI ...

Don't ever say Taylor can't act. Her mannerisms in this video are fucking Lillian Gish-like, conveying so much emotion (primarily, cerebral ill intent) with just the slightest of facial twinges. With her leggy red dress and hair pulled back behind her ears she almost seems to radiate a semblance of coyness, perhaps even submissiveness. But like that one serial killer from that old ass HBO special that used to squeeze-spray poison into people's faces, that reserved demeanor belies absolutely sociopathic rage. It's just so incredibly subtle, but you can tell she's thinking downright evil thoughts. And what better way to make that blunt as a sledgehammer than by putting her on a royal throne, covered in snakes that feed her tea and start jiving whenever she punctuates her sentences with exclamation marks? Yes, it is incredibly on the nose, but you know what? Sometimes, you just gotta say "fuck you, subtlety, fuck you right in the ass," and I, for one, am glad Tay Tay and company took the very low road on this one.

An Homage to The Silence of the Lambs? 

In the original video, I hear she ate Katy Perry's liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

With everybody on the Internet analyzing and interpreting the video for hidden messages and clues into Taylor's psyche, I'm really surprised no one has picked up on this possible allusion yet. So there's this part in the video where Tay-Tay is inside what appears to be a giant golden birdcage. It seems innocuous enough, but at the very end of the clip we get the quick zoom-in above. Does this particular sight remind you of anything? Watching Swift nom-nom on champagne and lobster inside a circular panopticon while flanked by seven armed guards, I can't help but be reminded of the sequence in The Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lector has din-din inside a similarly shaped cell, also surrounded by police personnel. Does this mean there's a deleted scene somewhere where Taylor bites off a dude's tongue, pepper sprays another dude and wears his chewed off face to facilitate a getaway? My, we can only hope.

Be Still My Heart - GOTH TAY-TAY!

Sorry - I'm too busy fapping to come up with a pithy caption.

All guys have their specific aesthetic quirks regarding the female form (read: unapologetic fetishes) and my stylistic weakness has always been goth chicks. So imagine my sheer jubilance when halfway through the video Tay-Tay abandoned the bright red lips and flowing evening gowns for first-suicide-attempt black lipstick, clinically-depressed-high-schooler onyx nail polish and full body fishnet stockings! Even better, her gyrations and kinda-sorta Aquanet-overkill coif are eerily, eerily similar to the interpretive dance moves and ozone-depleting hairdo of Angela in the first Night of the Demons movie. Unfortunately, it looks like they cut out the part where she chewed off a fat dude's tongue or sucked face with a blonde bimbo wearing too much pink lipstick - but hey, she has to leave something for the next single, don't she?

I don't care if she's wearing lipstick made out of AIDS blood - I'd still snog her.

Of course, there a lot of other highlights from the video that are probably worth symbolically examining, but I'll let you draw your own illusions to what Taylor really means when she positions herself in front of a giant, crucifix-like "T" and starts kicking earlier iterations of herself into the hypothetical abyss, or the real message behind the part where the paparazzi snap photos of her behind the wheel of a crashed car while she's holding a Grammy and looking suspiciously like Katy Perry. Those thinly veiled messianic delusions and fuck yous to competing pop princesses aside, I think "Look What You Made Me Do" is just a flatout tremendous video and the perfect pop cultural burnt offering to officially kickoff the Halloween season. I absolutely LOVE how Taylor is embracing the heel role in the video - personally, I haven't seen someone do such a fanciful job of playing up their pseudo-megalomania since Hulk Hogan joined the N.W.O. back at Bash at the Beach '96.

Indeed, there is a very weird totalitarian vibe I get from the video, almost as if Tay Tay is channeling her inner Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S. Seeing as how Swift is the kind of gal who likes to shitpost on 4Chan and hang out with dudes who wear swastikas on their shirts, it wouldn't surprise me one iota if she was secretly a total nihilist or maybe even a proponent of The Dark Enlightenment (do note that she was pretty much the only major female singer who DIDN'T spend all of last fall deriding Trump and figuratively fellating Clinton on the campaign trail ... how interesting.) Don't let her (relatively) desexualized, family-friendly appearance fool you, her pop songs are anything but lighthearted "take thats" to her romantic rivals - indeed, they are actually Iliads dedicated to her own cerebral barbarism. In a way, I almost feel as if Taylor is secretly embarking upon the plot of God Bless America in real life, only instead of shooting up the live finale of American Idol herself, she's slowly but surely molding an entire generation of 14-year-old girls to utterly despise liberal pop culture icons like Katy Perry and Kim K. Like Ah-nold in Pumping Iron, she's an absolute master of psychological warfare; shit, just by standing next to Lena Dunham in a posed photo, she literally makes her (possible) ideological rivals look like literal retards. Like The Joker in The Dark Knight, maybe the past ten years have been carefully plotted out as part of some impossibly grandiose scheme to decimate the pop music landscape, and this darker, edgier Tay-Tay is just the first metamorphosis before she turns into a full fledged anarchic powerhouse. From some jailbait country cutie that wore too much lipgloss and always said thank you to a red-lipped crossover pop-tart to a futuristic militarized music video vixen in fetish gear to a vindictive mass media empress, there's really nowhere else she can go that doesn't involve overthrowing entire conglomerates or throwing genre adversaries out of helicopters.

If Red represented Taylor's transition from country to pop and 1989 represented her ascension from pop novice to pop queenpin, the next logical step is that Reputation will represent her full-blown immersion into cult of personality politics. In that, the music video for "Look What You Made Me Do" could indeed foretell a major, MAJOR shift in the causa sui of Swift's career.

While other pop stars want to be bigger than Madonna, Tay-Tay wants to be bigger than Mussolini. And hey - if her critics are going to call her an "obnoxious Nazi Barbie," what better way to get 'em back than by transforming herself into an actual fascist? Forget bubblegum pop - if the darker, more sinister tone of "Look What You Made Me Do" is any indication as to what the rest of Reputation resembles, methinks Tay-Tay's about to drop the world's first Buchenwald pop album. Hey, don't say I didn't warn you, either - I KNEW that girl was trouble when she walked in.

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B-MOVIE REVIEW: “The Pope Must Die” (1991)

It’s a low-budget comedy from the early 1990s starring Hagrid as a rock and rolling priest accidentally named the head honcho of a major world religion. It’s not really that good, but it has its moments. 

These days, the Weinstein brothers are among the most powerful men in Hollywood. Before they achieved their breakout success with the one-two combination of “Pulp Fiction” and “Scream,” however, Bob and Harvey cut their teeth on some pretty admirable b-movie fare -- lest we forget, these ARE the men whose film career’s practically started with “The Burning,” which as we all know by now, is easily one of the greatest unsung summer camp slasher flicks ever made.

Alas, the Weinsteins did wind up hitting some bumps along the road to movie moguldom, however. Their slate of mainstream-but-not-really-that-mainstream flicks throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s were very much hit and miss, and “The Pope Must Die” really demonstrates the overall “meh-ness” of their productions from the period.

All in all, “The Pope Must Die” is a pretty forgettable film, and as a comedy, it’s pretty forced and hokey. In fact, the only thing anyone really remembers about it, honestly, is that it was renamed in some theaters to “The Pope Must Diet” so as to not offend Catholic patrons. It’s not a truly terrible movie, but it never really goes anywhere with its promising premise -- really, all this is is a watered-down version of “King Ralph,” saved only by some out-there sight gags and a few surprising appearances by some familiar faces and voices.

As you would expect, the film begins with the papal council standing around the outgoing Pope on his deathbed. After he croaks, we cut to a small Italian village, where the local priest (played by Robbie Coltrane, aka Hagrid from the “Harry Potter” movies) is working on a car and explaining to local children why his religion forbids him from marrying. Meanwhile, CNN assembles outside the cardinal conference, while schemer Rocco (voiced by the dude who played Roger Meyers, Jr. on “The Simpsons”) makes a pitch for Cardinal Albini (effectively, a puppet for the mafia) to become Catholicism’s new big cheese. As fate would have it, the data entry specialists in Vatican City make a typographical error, and instead of listing Albini as the new pope, they accidentally appoint Coltrane’s rural priest, Albinizi, as the religion’s new leader.

So yeah, it's basically "King Ralph," only worse ... somehow.

To demonstrate Albinizi’s kookiness, we immediately cut back to the Italian village, where he is shredding a guitar at an orphanage fundraising concert. Of course, all of the nuns think rock and roll is the tool of the devil, so they ask Albinizi to exit the priory … only to catch word that he’s been given a big promotion right before he steps on the Italian equivalent of a Greyhound out of town.

Obviously, Rocco is none too pleased that his hand-picked successor was screwed out of the position by a clerical error. At a meeting with some mafia big wigs, he starts work on a plan to oust Albinizi, and since this is a screwball comedy, the segment concludes with one of the mob’s more incompetent goon’s getting his noggin set ablaze … because “physical” is the only kind of comedy that exists, you know?

After Albinizi gets bonked on the head (again, with the low-hanging physical comedy fruit), he meets with the cardinals, who tell him he better do exactly as they tell him or else he’s a goner. For insurance, Rocco arranges a deal with two bumbling hitmen (whose calling card is literally leaving a dead fish alongside their victims) to get Albinizi out of the picture for good.

Albinizi then is shown the lavish papal suites, complete with a full bar and a sweet (for 1991, anyway) entertainment center. At his coronation, he keeps being denied access to the snack platter, because he’s fat and fat people being deprived of their unhealthy addictions to superfluous consumption is also funny. From there, we are introduced to a seemingly irrelevant subplot about a mafia big wig’s daughter sleeping with an entire heavy metal band, and Albinizi does a poor job of handling tough questions at a media presser. Following a hit attempt on the Pope Mobile, Albinizi starts reading some fan mail and slowly but surely begins to unravel a huge conspiracy inside the Catholic Church’s banking system -- he responds by ordering a full investigation of the Church’s books and turns over some of his cash to start a global orphan relief fund program.

So, the Pope, the music teacher from "Rock N Roll High School"
and the son of the dude who made Itchy and Scratchy walk into a
 bar... and also, the Pope is Hagrid from "Harry Potter."

OK, those bumbling hitmen from earlier … remember them? Well, they’ve been ordered to put a hit on
the heavy metal band the mafia kingpin’s daughter has been sleeping with, but OOPS! They accidentally blow up an RV with the daughter inside of it, and wouldn’t you know, the lone survivor of the explosion is the lead singer … whose mom is Beverly D’Angelo … and whose father is … wait for it … Pope Albinizi! Yeah, I know it’s a really hard to swallow plot mechanic, but we’ve had to suspend our disbelief even higher for other movies, like ones about JFK Jr. using military weapons to fight a one-man war against militant 99 percenters after they take over New York City and the federal government doesn’t even do anything about it.

After finding out about some arms dealing, Albinizi defrocks Rocco, and posing as a nun, D’Angelo slowly slinks her way into the papal suite to inform him of his long-lost son … who then promptly dies right in front of him. This leads to a great “Jesus vs. the money changers” allusion in which Albinizi walks into the Catholic bank and just starts wreaking shit; alas, his Buford Pusser days are short-lived, as the scandal about his bastard child makes the media rounds and costs him his crown … err, Pope hat, I guess?

And so, Rocco re-enters the church and his made-man Albini becomes the new pope. Albinizi finds himself reduced to playing guitar on the streets of Rome for extra change, and encounters a street urchin who, as fate would have it, just so happens to be the exact same orphan from the village he used to work at! Once again, I know it’s a difficult plot twist to take seriously, but as before, we have forced ourselves to embrace even more absurd things at the cineplex, like movies about the Koch Brothers turning themselves into android vigilantes to fight Silicon Valley venture capitalists who want to take over the world using impossible nanotechnology and Ben Kingsley pretending to be Chinese in YouTube videos.

So, Albinizi and his baby’s momma make out in a one-room shack while the orphan just stares at her chest, which isn’t creepy or anything. This leads to Albinizi going all John McClane for the grand finale, where he does the absolution for Rocco after he’s gunned down in a mafia double cross and literally brings down the new pope by getting him to admit he’s an arms dealer on live TV and shooting a ceiling down on top of him. Now, even though Albinizi just murdered the head of a religion with one billion plus followers, he surprisingly doesn’t wind up behind bars for the rest of his life. Instead, he gets to return to the orphanage from earlier, where he presumably spends the remainder of his days playing “Speedy Gonzalez” for parentless children and boning Beverly D’Angelo nonstop. So, uh, I take it that means he’s not a priest anymore? Oddly enough, the film’s dénouement never explicitly spells that out for us.

As I was saying at the top of the post, this really isn’t a great movie by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a one-joke premise through and through, and unfortunately, it was not even that good of a joke to begin with. Granted, there are a few (regrettably) humorous moments, but for the most part, the film is relegated to goofy sight gags and clumsy anti-Catholicism jokes that are just too weak-kneed to be considered subversive or even sarcastic. This is the kind of movie whose idea of cutting-edge, taking-it-to-the-man humor is for a character to whip out a cellular phone shaped like a crucifix -- heretical, it may be, but hilarious? Hardly.

Despite a pretty decent cast -- including Balthazar Getty as the rock and rolling bastard Pope son and Paul Bartel of “Eating Raoul” fame as a subservient mob priest -- nobody really turns in anything remotely resembling a solid performance here. Sure, Beverly D’Angelo looks hot as always, but beyond that? Everybody seems to be on cruise control, and if there’s one thing you definitely don’t want in a balls-out comedy critical of religion, it’s staid acting jobs. I’m not really sure what director and writer Peter Richardson had to work with, but it’s clear that a much, much better film could have arose from such an interesting concept; this ain’t no “Wise Blood,” I am afraid, and it’s certainly no “Four Lions,” either.

And so, “The Pope Must Die” falls into that most tragic of commons -- it’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s just mediocre. You won’t hate yourself for squandering an hour and a half on it, but frankly, there are a whole lot more productive things you could be doing with your life as well -- like spending an hour and a half of writing a blog post on why others probably shouldn’t spend an hour and a half of their lives watching an obscure, crappy comedy from the 1990s that nobody’s ever heard of before.

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Three Things I Will Remember Leonard Nimoy For...

…and “Star Trek” isn’t any of them. 

If you every wondered whether or not nerd culture has become the true 21st century zeitgeist, we all got executive clarification when President Barack Hussein Obama released an official statement on the death of Leonard Nimoy.

Think about that shit for a minute. The same day a prominent, freedom of expression champion from the States got macheted to death by Moslem extremists in Bangladesh, the leader of the motherfuckin’ free world chose to take time out of his schedule to pen a few flowery thoughts on the life and times of a C-grade actor whose only claim to fame is speaking in a monotone voice and wearing pointy ears on TV. That tells you everything you need to know about contemporary American society and its values; if you literally sacrifice your life in overseas battle or defending the public in crime-ravaged streets, nobody cares, but if you just so happened to portray a make-believe space elf on god-awful children’s cinema, you might just find yourself a future recipient of the congressional medal of honor.

I suppose I can at least grasp the parasocial connection some folks had with the Spock character. Of course, none of the geek mourners across the globe are bemoaning the loss of an actual human being, either. To the horn-rimmed, acne-speckled masses, the death of Leonard Nimoy is more of a symbolic loss, the metaphorical demise of a part of their fantastical, abstract-alternate reality that means more to them than god, country or family combined.

I’ve never watched a single episode of “Star Trek,” or seen any of the movies. I did rent that one game on the NES, though, even though it pretty much sucked and I should have rented “Tecmo Super Bowl” for the three-millionth time instead. So yeah, I can’t really speak for any of the super-fan clinical-undiagnosed-psychopaths out there who are shedding tears for a person they never actually met nor ever knew they ever existed as individual human beings. I mean, shit, for all we know, Nimoy could have been a really terrible human being behind closed doors who beat up his wife like John Lennon or had gang-rape parties like Jimmy Page or had obscene trysts with his relatives like Gandhi -- frankly, these people have no clue what they’re ACTUALLY celebrating, which terrifies the ever-loving shit out of me.

Alas, as a pop-culture weaned parasite, I suppose it’s difficult to deny that Mr. Nimoy has had at least some tangential impact on my life, albeit in really reduced domains of my entertainment selections. While everybody else mourns the passing of Mr. Spock, here are the three things I will personally recollect about Leonard Nimoy …

“In Search Of…!”

In the late 1970s, there was this show called “In Search Of…” It was basically “Sightings” a good fifteen years in advance, a weekly slog through all sorts of supernatural and paranormal bullshit. It was originally hosted by Rod Serling, but he unceremoniously died halfway through the series, so they had to replace him with a different narrator. And who did the producers select to fill the void created by the passing of the “Twilight Zone” curator? Why, none other than Leonard Nimoy himself!

The same way we will no doubt endlessly mourn Morgan Freeman and James Earl Jones a few years from now, it’s kind of come to my attention that the only thing Nimoy really had to offer as an actor was his booming voice. I mean, goddamn, with an intonation like that, he could sell snow to an Eskimo. While the show itself was pretty routine, Nimoy’s tar-slicked, chimney-throated inflection made even the stupidest excursions into mumbo jumbo about Sasquatch and Egpytian curses at least a smidge respectable.

According to the Wikipedia, Nimoy had a hand and in writing at least one or two episodes of the show, which fantastically, somehow led to a series of semi-nonfiction books, all of which featured preambles penned by Spock hisself.  Watching the series on a second-run on A&E back in the day, I really don’t recall the episodes themselves all that well, but you better believe I remember the sound of Nimoy’s narration, as he mused such direly important topics as reincarnation and the mysterious death of Glenn Miller. Man, the early ‘80s were a lot more fucked up than I remember.

“The Y2K Family Survival Guide!”

Picture it: the year of our Lord, 1999. We were a culture knee deep in “The Matrix” and Columbine, a nation slowly coming to grips with the reality of hard-on-pills for the elderly, the World Wide Web, and president who really enjoyed blowjobs from chunky chicks. Aye, they were roaring times indeed, although a sinister cloud hung overhead all year-round: the dark, deathly auger of Y2K.

All you coddled and overprotected Millennial twerps don’t know nothing about no Y2K, do you? For the Poke-Generation that’s never known of an existence sans Wi-Fi and totalitarian systematic decrees against even the subtlest forms of bullying, the Y2K bug was this mathematical glitch inside EACH AND EVERY FUCKING COMPUTER SYSTEM IN THE WORLD that was going to send us hurdling ass-backwards into the Paleolithic era. Bank accounts would vanish, planes were going to fall out of the sky and toasters were probably going to become sentient and start strangling us like in “Maximum Overdrive.” Indeed, such was the Mayan 2012 Apocalypse frenzy of its day, only intensified a million percent because this was before Wikipedia and we really couldn’t fact-check a damn thing on our own.

To be forthright, I never actually watched the “Y2K Family Survival Guide” VHS cassette, although the thing is available in its entirety on the ‘Tube and I should probably review it for this here blog at some point. That said, I vividly recall that warm orange and yellow box-art screaming at me, with Leonard Nimoy’s stern-but-believable-face staring at me like some sort of Nostradamus for the “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer” generation. Of course, after humanity safely rolled over to 2-0-0-0 without the slightest of hiccups, this video became instant discount bin fodder; needless to say, for whatever indiscernible reason, that image is still the first thing that comes to mind whenever I hear Lenny’s name get dropped.

“Seaman” on the Sega Dreamcast!

Although I run a website dedicated primarily to stupid nostalgic pop culture bullshit from the Clinton years, I really don’t have an actual longing for most of the stuff I cover. I mean, yeah, it was cool and all that I had a Muckman action figure and an LCD handheld version of “Altered Beast” when I was a kid, but as a 30-year-old man, I really can’t say I have any strong emotions about losing them fifteen or twenty-some-odd years ago.

Now, my personal copy of “Seaman” on the Sega Dreamcast, however, is something altogether different. For those not in the know, “Seaman” was really out-there video game that came with a little microphone attachment for your controller. If you ever played “Hey You, Pikachu!” on the N64, it’s pretty much the same gimmick. However, Sega decided to go way above and beyond the call of duty with their game, creating an absolutely unparalleled psychological-gaming experience where you raised, nurtured and had existential discussions with fish people with Japanese faces. The term “indescribable” gets tossed around way too frequently, but if there was ever a video game worthy of such an oxymoronic label, surely, “Seaman” was it.

Every time you booted up the game, you were greeted by Leonard Nimoy, who proceeded to give you an update on the state of your fish people. With his matter-of-factly presentation, he may have been short on memorable lines, but he at least brought an air of sophistication to the title. It takes a real pro, after all, to discuss the mating habits of smart-aleck chimeras, and clearly, Nimoy was among the best in the biz when it came to giving such performances.

Yeah, I could probably say some shit about his appearances on “The Simpsons,” as well, but I figure that’s one of those things that really doesn’t bare much mentioning. I mean, every Gen X and Gen Y kid on planet Earth knows about the Monorail episode, but I’m guessing a considerably smaller proportion of humanity recalls his stints as hysterical computer crash propaganda narrator, or voiceover artist for abstract bestiality video games and TV shows about the Loch Ness monster.

To most folks, he will always be Spock, but to me, he’s that one guy that did a lot of really out-there weird shit that only about 12 or so people on the planet recall. And on the day Sir William Shatner gets called to that great jubilee in the sky, rest assured that I will pen another heartfelt memorial, recalling his immortal performances as “TJ Hooker” and the host of “Rescue 9/11.”

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