Gremlins: A Weird, Anarcho-Nostalgic Critique of Western Values
With little green monsters!
Watching Gremlins (1984) is one of our family Christmas traditions, as I’m sure it is for many others, and every year we notice and comment on many of the same weird things. The characters have become familiar and hilarious in their quirks, the Easter eggs and references too well-known for my kids not to groan if I call them out, and certain scenes cannot pass without comment. And for a film that appears to be about a small town beset by vicious little monsters, it is surprisingly political in its messaging.
But alongside all that, we have some (spoilery) questions…
How exactly does the Peltzer family survive? Rand (Hoyt Axton), the father, is an inventor, but his inventions do not work longer than two weeks. This is WELL established through the first half of the film, during which we see the following malfunction: the multi-tool ‘bathroom buddy’ (toothbrush, razor, nail clippers and, bizarrely, dental mirror, all attached to a lump of plastic); a coffee machine which produces black sludge; the Peltzer peeler-juicer, which sprays the kitchen and Billy (Zach Galligan) with orange juice; the smokeless ashtray, which clearly does nothing to remove the smoke from cigarettes; a remote control to dim lights that are a foot away and one to answer the phone that is three feet away; and a card-shuffling machine under construction — we can forgive him for that one.
And bless his family, they keep supporting him by using these damn things, but the financial outlay for a failing inventor (who does things like go to conferences — more on that later) must be huge. And according to their landlady Mrs Deagle (Polly Holliday), the Scrooge figure of the piece, Rand is a ‘loser’ who has been making excuses for ten years, presumably about rent. His son Billy has an entry-level job at the local bank, so maybe he’s contributing to household finances, but it can’t be enough to afford even their rent, let alone bills. And as far as we can tell from the film, Billy’s mother Lynn (Frances Lee McCain) works as a home-maker. If Mrs Deagle is as mean as we are led to believe, why on earth hasn’t she thrown them out on their ears already?
Why is Billy’s mum, supreme queen of kitchen violence, so hopeless with making food? When we first see Lynn Peltzer, she is in the kitchen preparing food while watching It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) on a tiny TV, one of the main nostalgic references in Gremlins. She has chopped a mountain of onions in the process, which never goes by without comment from one of my children. My guess is she started on the onions at roughly the bit where there’s a run on the bank, and got so distracted that she didn’t stop, just kept chopping and chopping…
But that doesn’t explain the gingerbread people. Later in the film, at the point where the gremlins hatch out of their cocoons, we see that Mrs Peltzer has been making gingerbread figures and icing them to look slightly more like people — and I use the word ‘slightly’ very deliberately. Let’s just say Mrs Peltzer wouldn’t get very far on Bake Off with those icing skills. When one of the gremlins started eating them in our watch last night, my daughter commented, “Well, no-one else was going to eat those.”
Having said all that, I absolutely love the domestic vitriol with which Lynn dispenses with the gremlins in her kitchen. She will have absolutely none of their invasion of her space, and makes sublime use of a mixer, a sharp knife and, most memorably, a microwave to almost remove the gremlin threat before it spreads. She has a 60% kill rate in fact, in what is arguably the best and most fun scene in the film, so it is a shame that she is removed from the action straight afterwards. She should be Kingston Falls’ top strategist for the rest of the movie!
Why, in a film laced with nostalgic callbacks and fun references, does the script turn pitch black on a dime? As already mentioned, It’s A Wonderful Life is a key reference for this film, which evokes then undermines that movie’s perceived schmaltzy Christmas nostalgia (or maybe Chris Columbus and Joe Dante, Gremlins’ writer and director respectively, were reminding people that IAWL gets pretty dark before the upbeat ending). By 1984, It’s A Wonderful Life had become a staple of American Christmas TV schedules, and the Christmas-postcard small-town setting of Kingston Falls (the town in IAWL is called Bedford Falls) in Gremlins is very deliberately setting up audiences to expect one thing only to deliver another. But director Joe Dante weaves in many other film references too: Invasion of the Body Snatchers plays on Billy’s TV in one scene, foreshadowing the pods the gremlins will hatch out of; the time machine from The Time Machine (1960) can be seen in the background of Rand’s phone call from the inventor’s conference before it disappears in a puff of smoke; in the same phone call scene producer Steven Spielberg can be seen riding an odd vehicle around the phone booth; two of Spielberg’s biggest movies are playing at the local cinema, but under their working titles of ‘Watch The Skies’ (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977) and ‘A Boy’s Life’ (E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, 1982). Basically, if you’re a movie nerd, the first half of the film will have you constantly going, ‘Ooh, look at that! That’s fun!’
And then Billy’s love interest Kate (Phoebe Cates) speaks her immortal line about depression at Christmas: “While some people are opening their presents, others are opening their wrists.”
It’s a shocking line that feels out of kilter with the tone established at that point (the gremlins haven’t hatched yet), followed up later in the film by an alarmingly tragic story from Kate about her discovery of the lie of Santa which helps us understand her feelings about the season. It could be argued that all the best Christmas stories are tinged with darkness and tragedy — A Christmas Carol is a perfect example — but that line, if nothing else, is a massive clue that this story is not going to be all sweetness and light…
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Are the gremlins ludicrously intelligent or just really adaptive? And what’s with their unfailing commitment to the gag? Plenty of people have spotted the flaw in the Mogwai/Gremlin rules — it’s always after midnight somewhere in the world. But I have deeper questions about the species itself, specifically their levels of intelligence and their ability to adapt to the culture around them.
So, firstly, we know how they reproduce — contact with water — but as my daughter pointed out yesterday, why doesn’t the snow on the ground also have that effect? Anyway, when poor Gizmo gets wet thanks to clumsy-handed Pete (Corey Feldman), he makes more little Mogwais that eventually become the gremlins after their post-midnight chicken feast (there’s another kitchen-related gripe: why was that much chicken uncovered in the fridge, and surely it was intended for something specific — who just has a massive plate of chicken legs spare in the fridge?!). But the new ones are not clones: Stripe comes out as a leader while the others seem to be simple-minded chaos merchants, messing up Billy’s room and spitting at the dog. So is Stripe leading the rest of them on? Does Gizmo’s intellectual capacity get shared out among them, and it just so happened to occur unevenly, creating one clear leader and a bunch of gremlin-sheep? (Greep?)
The one that ends up at the middle school clearly has some intelligence, for it is able to murder the workaholic science teacher (he’s still there at 2:20am!?) using only a syringe to the butt, and get into cupboards without smashing them if he wants to — but getting out through vents is an animalistic smash & run job. Confusing.
The technical skills of the gremlins are proven time and again (a lovely counter-point to the Peltzer inventions, in fact), through their efficacy with: cutting off telephone connections, re-wiring traffic lights, cutting car brake fluid lines, and, most delightfully, adjusting Mrs Deagle’s stairlift to enable her glorious demise. (My daughter last night, referring to Scrooge and Deagle: “Some capitalists get to change their ways, some have to be thrown out the window.”) But their language skills leave a lot to be desired. “Yum, yum,” is the most coherent two-word phrase they can manage, and while it goes quite far in the movie, I feel like if they can perform electrical adjustments that I would struggle with, they maybe should be able to create a sentence or two.
But one thing we cannot fault the gremlins for is their absolute dedication to the aspects of human culture they have chosen to assimilate and spit back out at us. They are as committed to the gag as any comedian. I offer as evidence:
- the props acquired by the carol-singing gremlins. They have little song sheets, Christmas hats, ear muffs etc. to accompany the singing of their own theme tune (lyrics: “Ya ya ya ya, ya ya….”) which includes occasionally consulting their song sheets!
- the insanity at Dorry’s Tavern. There is a break-dancing gremlin who has sourced leg-warmers, a gremlin smoking three cigarettes at once, one who drinks beer direct from the tap, a jazz gremlin, and of course the delightful poker scene. Stripe — the gang boss, obviously — has a back room game going, with one gremlin on his arm made up as a moll and another across the table with aces stuck to the back of his ears, ready to cheat. That one doesn’t last long, but kudos to the whole group for their commitment to well-established gangster traditions.
- their ability to connect with the human world through music. Early in the film we see Gizmo teaching Billy how to play his little tune note by note on a keyboard, but the real kicker is how quickly they pick up the words and tune of “Hi, ho” from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. When they finally get a reel projecting in the cinema (another example of intelligence not being shared equally among them), they are entranced by the moving pictures and especially by the dwarves’ work song, picking it up within a note or two, which is very impressive. Clearly Mogwai culture in highly musical in origin.
Finally, I love the leftist, anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist nature of Gremlins that really must not be missed.
Almost every authority figure is terrible in some way, and gets their come-uppance, but I especially love the fate of the chief of police (Scott Brady). This is a man who expects the town Christmas tree merchant to give him one free (“I paid for my tree, Frank,” is one of my favourite lines) and who drinks openly while on duty. His deputy (Jonathan Banks) is no better, and when the gremlins cause their car to crash it feels fully justified.
Big money is openly and implicitly criticised. Of course you have Mrs Deagle, who functions as both Scrooge and Mr Potter from It’s A Wonderful Life, and to whom most of the townsfolk have to bow until the gremlins have their way. But there is also the bank manager Mr Corben (Edward Andrews) who breaks out in a cold sweat at the thought of speaking to Mrs Deagle about a customer’s financial troubles, and whose bank is totally wrecked by the force of nature unleashed on the town. Along with him you can count Billy’s sneering bank superior Gerald (Judge Reinhold), who believes that he will be a millionnaire before he is 30 and whose disdain for Billy’s artistic talent is mostly on financial grounds (despite approval from legendary cartoonist Chuck Jones who happens to be sat in the bar with Billy in an early scene — another reference to film history that tells you what kind of violence we’re going to get?). Billy pays no attention to Gerald, and as the hero of the film we’re on his side — the side that places more value on family and friendship than finances.
Racism and insularity are given a good mauling by the script too; Mr Futterman (Dick Miller) goes on several rants about foreign-made machinery and how products made in the US don’t go wrong simply because they’re not foreign. The poor guy does seem to be dealing with unresolved PTSD with alcohol, so it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for him, but he is also very quick to blame anything bad on non-specific foreigners. His punishment for this kind of thinking is to have literal gremlins hijack his beloved Kentucky harvester snow-plough and plough straight into his home with it.
But it is entrepreneur and haphazard inventor Rand Peltzer, the true agent of all the chaos suffered by Kingston Falls, who gets the biggest dressing-down of the film. In the opening scenes he uses the force of good old American dollars to get his own way and buy Gizmo as a pet for Billy, then abdicates his responsbilities while off at his inventors’ conference (not before suggesting that every home in America would love a ‘Peltzer pet’ — always the businessman). Every other character has to cope with the consequences of his white privilege and superiority complex, and some die as a result. On his return, Rand is flummoxed by what has happened in his town, and when the Chinese man (played by Keye Luke) from whom he acquired Gizmo shows up at his house to re-claim him, his guilt is undeniable. He is told, “You do with mogwai what your society has done with all of nature’s gifts. You do not understand. You are not ready.” This criticism of Western values around nature and the environment may not be what one instantly remembers about Gremlins, but it’s undeniably woven into the film.
So… Gremlins is brilliant, and a lot more confusing, silly and brilliant than it even seems at first glance. And I didn’t even talk about the puppeteering genius, the music or the mixture of visual effects that makes this great practical film-making that just doesn’t happen anymore. Well, you can watch it yourself just as well as I can.
