miscellanium (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
miscellanium) wrote2022-11-03 09:30 am
miscellanium) wrote2022-11-03 09:30 am
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i've thought about this movie a lot, ok
and i'm bored during an online work meeting so here you go.
i don't remember how i came across this review for rituals but this person thinks that harry and mitzi knew each other since childhood. that doesn't seem right to me - hal holbrook was more than 10 years older than dane, and in the film harry seems to be the only one with any war experience and i think based on the age of the others they were too young for the korean war (obviously) or in school when the vietnam war was happening. canada didn't send troops to vietnam so the draft thing doesn't apply, but still.
the childhood misconception seems to be based on the scene(s) where harry and mitzi talk about their fathers, but it's not far-fetched to me at all that a group of middle-aged friends who went to college together would be aware of each other's families. i already gave their pre-film relationships a fair amount of thought for the fic so let me just lay some of that out here since i said i'd talk about the research background of my fic eventually anyway.
when mitzi says "Just because your old man was a juicer, Harry, doesn't make the rest of us candidates for skid row," this makes sounds as though harry has tried to intervene in his/their drinking before, not that they grew up together. in fact, mitzi even says later about harry's father: "He wasn't that different from my old man. You never met my old man, did you, Harry?" if they'd known each other since childhood then surely harry would have met mitzi's father at least once.
it's possible they both started at lakeview then mitzi left, since mitzi has strong words for it ("a well-known snake pit not fit for human habitation", lol) and harry mentions during that first campfire conversation that mitzi has "[given up] neurology" though it's apparent that he still works in medicine somehow.
i don't have a firm idea of the timeline, though i set my fic "roughly 5-7 years" before 1977. tbh idk how accurate that can be, but i was thinking about harry going back to school after the korean war (how else would they have met each other?) and then mitzi starting a bit late because he didn't go right into college after high school (which would still have been rather common at the time). i don't know how long it could take to become director somewhere; most likely it was with the lakeview neurology department mentioned at the beginning of the movie, since harry talks about running it his way, and if harry feels guilt over how he treated his father in the process of becoming director there then it makes sense for him to be resistant to mitzi's cajoling him to leave. with his age and vet status i could see him having a leg up on the competition, even if he was primarily a pilot during the war, and then there's this specific exchange that makes it sound as though harry isn't the moral paragon he holds himself out to be....
[Mitzi] I carried your old man when you were busy kissing ass, don't you forget it.
[Harry] I'm warning you. You don't know.
[Mitzi] You're a right son of a bitch, you were fast for director, old man dying of cancer.
(and then harry jumps on him and they both start fighting in the water lmfao)
man i think that's one of my favorite scenes. just the whole build-up to it and then the trainwreck of the fight and marty being lost to the rapids.... it's so good. but yeah this doesn't sound like a childhood connection, it sounds like mitzi doing harry a favor and harboring resentment because of it. hell, maybe they were both competing for the director position? that'd be an interesting conflict to explore.
the only character whose age we know for sure is marty, because he says he's 38* and that would make him a couple years younger than mitzi if we go with lawrence dane's actual age at the time. the average age of graduating med school even in the 1920s has ranged from 26 to 30, and with dj being the youngest (the actor was born in 1945, making him roughly 32 at the time of the camping trip) he couldn't have graduated that long ago. it was because of this math that i set the fic less than 10 years before the film.
now, it's possible that dj didn't go to med school with them and just got involved when it was marty's first turn at planning a trip, what with being the baby brother, but.... i like the idea of dj being there for more friction and because he was the easiest way to set up the premise of my fic lol. and also, he's the one who launches into the "put us back together again" ritual dance; the scene has the feeling of an in-joke started by a bunch of drunk guys in college and it doesn't make sense to me that he'd just piggyback onto that as an outsider.
this is a tangent but it's also theoretically possible that mitzi or any of them could have crossed paths with herbert west from re-animator if you accept any part of the re-animator novelization since it mentions that west was in ontario when he was a kid. the crossover potential.... you might have to fudge their ages some but marty is really the only one with a capital-c canon age so the rest are fair game >:3c
i want to write another fic for these guys eventually, so having a timeline is helpful for me even if it's not a granular one. thinking about crack crossovers helps me flesh things out a little more, and also it's just fun! all these doctors with dubious ethics.... let's put them through hell, lol. but herbert west clearly has no interest in learning from any of his mistakes, lmao, while mitzi's instinct seems to be more along the lines of cutting his losses and running. relentless pursuit versus self-defensive flight.... it's a dynamic i revisit a lot in fiction and for good reason.
anyway, ian sutherland really did a great job sketching out the characters and their relationships so i think if a person misunderstands something about the character dynamics they weren't paying enough attention, or jumped to a conclusion and didn't let later interactions change their understanding. and i'm not just saying that because i've watched it several times, i promise XD it's been a few months now since the last time i saw it, see, i can be normal about it! and besides i have to work on some other fics this weekend (ao3 exchange/zine deadlines) so a rituals rewatch will just have to wait.
*eta 12/1/22: gammell would have been around 40 or 41 when the movie was actually being filmed, since he's a few months older than dane (sept 1936 vs april 1937), but i feel like it's still reasonable to use the actors' ages for the other characters since we don't have anything else to go on. and also i don't think it makes a huge impact on my fic whether marty is older or younger than mitzi - they're very close in age and that's the main thing, imo.
i don't remember how i came across this review for rituals but this person thinks that harry and mitzi knew each other since childhood. that doesn't seem right to me - hal holbrook was more than 10 years older than dane, and in the film harry seems to be the only one with any war experience and i think based on the age of the others they were too young for the korean war (obviously) or in school when the vietnam war was happening. canada didn't send troops to vietnam so the draft thing doesn't apply, but still.
the childhood misconception seems to be based on the scene(s) where harry and mitzi talk about their fathers, but it's not far-fetched to me at all that a group of middle-aged friends who went to college together would be aware of each other's families. i already gave their pre-film relationships a fair amount of thought for the fic so let me just lay some of that out here since i said i'd talk about the research background of my fic eventually anyway.
when mitzi says "Just because your old man was a juicer, Harry, doesn't make the rest of us candidates for skid row," this makes sounds as though harry has tried to intervene in his/their drinking before, not that they grew up together. in fact, mitzi even says later about harry's father: "He wasn't that different from my old man. You never met my old man, did you, Harry?" if they'd known each other since childhood then surely harry would have met mitzi's father at least once.
it's possible they both started at lakeview then mitzi left, since mitzi has strong words for it ("a well-known snake pit not fit for human habitation", lol) and harry mentions during that first campfire conversation that mitzi has "[given up] neurology" though it's apparent that he still works in medicine somehow.
i don't have a firm idea of the timeline, though i set my fic "roughly 5-7 years" before 1977. tbh idk how accurate that can be, but i was thinking about harry going back to school after the korean war (how else would they have met each other?) and then mitzi starting a bit late because he didn't go right into college after high school (which would still have been rather common at the time). i don't know how long it could take to become director somewhere; most likely it was with the lakeview neurology department mentioned at the beginning of the movie, since harry talks about running it his way, and if harry feels guilt over how he treated his father in the process of becoming director there then it makes sense for him to be resistant to mitzi's cajoling him to leave. with his age and vet status i could see him having a leg up on the competition, even if he was primarily a pilot during the war, and then there's this specific exchange that makes it sound as though harry isn't the moral paragon he holds himself out to be....
[Mitzi] I carried your old man when you were busy kissing ass, don't you forget it.
[Harry] I'm warning you. You don't know.
[Mitzi] You're a right son of a bitch, you were fast for director, old man dying of cancer.
(and then harry jumps on him and they both start fighting in the water lmfao)
man i think that's one of my favorite scenes. just the whole build-up to it and then the trainwreck of the fight and marty being lost to the rapids.... it's so good. but yeah this doesn't sound like a childhood connection, it sounds like mitzi doing harry a favor and harboring resentment because of it. hell, maybe they were both competing for the director position? that'd be an interesting conflict to explore.
the only character whose age we know for sure is marty, because he says he's 38* and that would make him a couple years younger than mitzi if we go with lawrence dane's actual age at the time. the average age of graduating med school even in the 1920s has ranged from 26 to 30, and with dj being the youngest (the actor was born in 1945, making him roughly 32 at the time of the camping trip) he couldn't have graduated that long ago. it was because of this math that i set the fic less than 10 years before the film.
now, it's possible that dj didn't go to med school with them and just got involved when it was marty's first turn at planning a trip, what with being the baby brother, but.... i like the idea of dj being there for more friction and because he was the easiest way to set up the premise of my fic lol. and also, he's the one who launches into the "put us back together again" ritual dance; the scene has the feeling of an in-joke started by a bunch of drunk guys in college and it doesn't make sense to me that he'd just piggyback onto that as an outsider.
this is a tangent but it's also theoretically possible that mitzi or any of them could have crossed paths with herbert west from re-animator if you accept any part of the re-animator novelization since it mentions that west was in ontario when he was a kid. the crossover potential.... you might have to fudge their ages some but marty is really the only one with a capital-c canon age so the rest are fair game >:3c
i want to write another fic for these guys eventually, so having a timeline is helpful for me even if it's not a granular one. thinking about crack crossovers helps me flesh things out a little more, and also it's just fun! all these doctors with dubious ethics.... let's put them through hell, lol. but herbert west clearly has no interest in learning from any of his mistakes, lmao, while mitzi's instinct seems to be more along the lines of cutting his losses and running. relentless pursuit versus self-defensive flight.... it's a dynamic i revisit a lot in fiction and for good reason.
anyway, ian sutherland really did a great job sketching out the characters and their relationships so i think if a person misunderstands something about the character dynamics they weren't paying enough attention, or jumped to a conclusion and didn't let later interactions change their understanding. and i'm not just saying that because i've watched it several times, i promise XD it's been a few months now since the last time i saw it, see, i can be normal about it! and besides i have to work on some other fics this weekend (ao3 exchange/zine deadlines) so a rituals rewatch will just have to wait.
*eta 12/1/22: gammell would have been around 40 or 41 when the movie was actually being filmed, since he's a few months older than dane (sept 1936 vs april 1937), but i feel like it's still reasonable to use the actors' ages for the other characters since we don't have anything else to go on. and also i don't think it makes a huge impact on my fic whether marty is older or younger than mitzi - they're very close in age and that's the main thing, imo.