James Pope, the sweet but naïve only child played by “SNL”’s Kyle Mooney in Dave McCary’s directorial debut, Brigsby Bear, is a sheltered nerd in the most literal sense. At 25, he stills lives at home with his eccentric parents (Jane Adams and Mark Hamill), but unlike your average man-child, he’s got a decent excuse: He and his family are holed up in an underground bunker after an unidentified disaster has transformed the world into an unlivable wasteland. James’ biggest interest—indeed, his sole obsession—is “Brigsby Bear Adventures,” a distinctly ‘80s science fiction children’s show featuring a heroic anthropomorphic bear and his battles against cosmic evildoers. VHS tapes of the show, which James has been watching his entire life, arrive like clockwork each week, and he thoroughly dissects the plot of each episode, sharing his intensive theories with other fans online.
If you’re starting to wonder how the apocalypse features Wi-Fi and a VHS delivery service, the film quickly reveals the startling truth: James’ parents are in fact a pair of crazies who kidnapped him as a newborn and raised him in solitude, creating the illusion of a toxic wasteland and producing episodes of “Brigsby Bear Adventures” by themselves on a nearby soundstage. The show was custom-made to entertain and brainwash young James (the character’s didactic catchphrase is “Curiosity is an unnatural emotion!”), and the ruse paid off: When he’s finally reunited with his biological parents (Matt Walsh and Michaela Watkins) and teenage sister, Aubrey (Ryan Simpkins), all James wants to do is keep watching “Brigsby,” but now that his captors are imprisoned, there’s nobody around to make the show. James, living in a foreign environment and faced with a cultural landscape completely unfamiliar with his most beloved touchstone, attempts to move forward with a normal life.
The film’s premise suggests something akin to the dark psychology of Yorgos Lanthimos’ breakout film Dogtooth, but this comedy turns out to be a much lighter and far more heartfelt affair. While certainly not without its prickly undercurrents, the story emerges as a warm and likeable character portrait, although its quirkier affectations ultimately take away from some of its deeper and more provocative ideas. Mooney co-created the movie alongside his cohorts from his sketch comedy team Good Neighbor, a group known for their whimsical and absurd YouTube videos. (Good Neighbor was tapped by “Saturday Night Live” to effectively replace the likeminded Lonely Island gang, whose members are co-producers here.) Drawn as they are to goofy set pieces, the filmmakers struggle to connect theme and action, leaving a gap in the material surely as large as the Brigsby-sized hole left in James’s psyche.
It often feels like much of contemporary popular art is nothing more than a bunch of people helplessly clinging to nostalgia. Enabled by a film industry happy to trade youthful memories for box office bucks and an increasing number of media organizations that peddle wistful morsels of ephemera across all product channels, the eager masses consume repackaged offerings of beloved cartoons, superheroes and stories and, as a result, burrow deeper into a kind of self-imposed permanent childhood. The nerdy and obsessive James could easily fall into this group if his own permanent childhood was in fact self-imposed, or if he had even the slightest concept of nostalgia. His mind, having been closed off from the whole history of popular culture, exists in a sort of stasis. He’s free to fill it with whatever he pleases. His decision to make his own Brigsby movie, using the same props and equipment his faux parents utilized, becomes an act of catharsis. His artistic awakening is akin to a spiritual awakening. The same thing that kept him imprisoned now has the potential to free him.
The idea that a person’s mind could be almost completely devoid of all art and pop culture is indeed farfetched, but it’s also uniquely dystopian, and so is Brigsby Bear. The film suggests that the moving images we consume create an entire world in our mind, and James is presented with the opportunity to remake his own. But the filmmaking is too basic and straightforward to meet the impact of such an idea. The story leans heavily on sentiment and familiarity, and too many characters—including a psychologist played by Claire Danes and a nameless cop played by Mooney’s “SNL” castmate Beck Bennet, also a member of Good Neighbor—are left hanging on the periphery. The movie can’t mirror James’s own creative energy, suggesting that all great art might ultimately be an act of spiritual and personal desperation.
The post Brigsby Bear appeared first on Spectrum Culture.