The Fabulous Destiny of Marked Accordingly

Every single time I am listing my favourite movies there comes, shuffling along in line like a reality TV star trying to blag his way into the post-Oscar party, The Inspector General, an inordinately silly kind of Danny Kaye pantomime of which there is not much to be said except that I thought it would be absolutely dire and it actually turned out to be rather good, with a gypsy chorus scene which has somehow locked itself in as one of my little treasures and refuses to be shifted. Time will come, time has almost been, when I won’t remember anything of The Inspector General but that one scene, which will trick me, in my dotage, into thinking that it was the best film I’d ever seen ever. If Heaven is, as I wholly expect it to be, an endless loop of your favourite film, it’s probably just as well I’m going to the bad fire.

Direct-to-video Disney sequels work like this. They are desperately poorly conceived crapola fests with corner-cutting animation straight from Dogtanian, EXCEPT! That they almost always have some song or another worthy of the original, and after several months of humming “Titanic Tip and Daring Dash” you sort of realise that that bundle of bullshit has ultimately brought you more in the way of happiness than the unmemorable, inoffensive humdrum you’ve been watching ever since, like getting punched by a smelly old tramp and finding it’s knocked your sore tooth out. So no childless person in the UK has seen more Disney sequels than me. They could’ve had me on You Bet! and no-one would’ve blinked an eye.

There is a twee Scottish comic strip called The Broons which, famously, has sustained itself for several decades on only four storylines. These are:

1) Paw’s DIY schemes.
2) The Bairn’s Granpaw-based misunderstandings.
3) Daphne/Maggie/Hen/Joe’s romantic capers.
4) The But ‘n’ Ben.

I have repeatedly moved that “Maw is black affronted” be added to this list, but popular opinion is that this was only ever a subplot loosely related to the main storyline. Anyway, Disney sequels are like this too. They have a very small number of trite stories to tell, and by and large restrict themselves to a subplot-shorn Diet version of the original’s. Fine by me, I’m only watching it for “My Lullaby”. Fuck story.

Pocahontas II is to me as the existence of Evil is to godbods. It is a chainsaw-wielding maniac let loose upon my fragile worldview; the very thought of it leaves my mind in a state similar to that of Gotham Art Gallery after the Joker has finished with it, an array of spray-painted portraits with gaping, Stanley-knifed grins and torn purple curtains fluttering in tatters over the broken window. I want to howl, I want to weep, I want to run down the streets in vain pursuit of my lost innocence, skywardly screaming “THEY’RE ALREADY HERE!”

Because, you see, Pocahontas II is not about Love Conquering All. It is not about Coming of Age, it is not about Facing Up To Responsibility, it is not even about Believing In Yourself, for chrissake! No, it is about Falling Out Of Love; it is about Pocahontas and John Smith realising that they don’t really love each other any more and she’d be better off with this other guy instead. I wish I had not hitherto in life adopted such a flippant attitude to everything so that you would now instantaneously realise how deadly serious this is. It is a Disney movie. About how people fall out of love with each other. Forever. Think about that.

Now, I am nobody’s sap. I am well aware that people do, in fact, fall out of love with each other. That is reality. I also know that Pocahontas really did marry John Rolfe, not John Smith. That is history. What business does Disney have meddling with either of these things? When I watch a movie whose supporting cast include a turquoise hummingbird and a whimsical raccoon, it is not because I feel insufficiently appraised regarding how fucking shit life is. But the worst thing about Pocahontas II is that, like a blubbering child of divorce, we are made to feel that this is somehow all our fault. As we sit there listening to Pocahontas’ and John Smith’s sad, loveless speeches, it is like the whole thing is some kind of dramatic payback, a fantastic nightmare of It’s a Wonderful Life wish-fulfilment in which all those times we laughed at Hollywood blockbusters for being such formulaic, genre-driven drivel comes back to bite us in the ass. “So all that Colors of the Wind stuff, with the running about the forest, that was just lies, then?” I petulantly demand; but inside, inside, I am already halfway up the stairs, throwing myself to the bedroom floor like Willem Dafoe on the cover of Platoon with pillow-pounding sobs of “WhywhywhywhyWHY?!”

And yet, nobody says anything. I suppose it’s a bit much, in this day and age, with tweenage kids watching Saw and stuff, to expect anyone to rise up and take umbrage at a kids’ movie about how love doesn’t always last forever. I dunno, though. I didn’t find out about that until I was in my early twenties, and I still haven’t gotten over it. I’ll remember Pocahontas II long after I’ve forgotten The Exorcist.