“First there was dust, then there was a squirrel, then there was a dog, then there was a cat”

Laura and I were flip­ping through chan­nels last night and came across the Big Bang. It was that or Puppy Bowl IV so we decided to watch it. I really enjoyed the movie. It was bizarre at times and it clearly was made in 1990. The lit­tle syn­op­sis pro­vided by Cox said: “Film­maker James Toback con­ducts rad­i­cal inter­views with var­i­ous peo­ple on sub­jects like sex, death, God.” Basi­cally the movie is the direc­tor James Toback inter­view­ing peo­ple, ask­ing all sorts of peo­ple the same ques­tions. There is the Girl, the Mother, the Boy, the Bas­ket­ball Star, the Vio­lin­ist, the Artiste, the Humorist, the Jazz Man, the Astronomer, the Restau­ran­teuse, the Model, the Philoso­pher, the Painter, the Med­ical Stu­dent, the Writer, the Film­maker, the Gang­ster, the Boxer, and the Survivor.

James Toback asked them how they thought the Uni­verse began, what they believed about God, about sex. It was great. It was amus­ing at times and it was really intense at other times. I was mes­mer­ized by Fred Hess, the Astronomer, because the way he spoke about the big bang, about the con­cep­tion of the uni­verse, about our star, the sun, was very much like a Bap­tist preacher. It seemed wrong. The con­tent of what he was say­ing vs. the way he was say­ing it. It was mov­ing and con­fus­ing. Appar­ently, that’s his thing. He is often called the Evan­ge­list for Astron­omy. Bar­bara Traub, the Sur­vivor, Holo­caust sur­vivor, Auschwitz sur­vivor, was quite intense. She talked about los­ing her sense of iden­tity. HEAVY. The Lit­tle Girl, Emma Ast­ner, says about the con­cep­tion of the uni­verse, “First there was dust, then there was a squir­rel, then there was a dog, then there was a cat.” It is inspired and bizarre, but it holds up just as soundly as the other responses. The Bas­ket­ball Star talked about hav­ing sex with so many women. The Mother talked about almost los­ing her mind when her daugh­ter was killed. Don Simp­son, pro­ducer of Top Gun, talked about his con­ser­v­a­tive upbring­ing in Alaska and how he became a humanist.

The Big Bang was an unex­pected gem. It was the ran­dom out­come of a night of chan­nel surf­ing. I’m a sucker for inter­views. It was exactly what I needed.

The New York Times hated it. “What kind of peo­ple want to reveal their most pro­found thoughts and fears on screen? As it turns out, peo­ple who ulti­mately say very lit­tle, who are at best amus­ing, occa­sion­ally affect­ing and more often sim­ply bland.” Well then.

Each per­son had their own envi­ron­ment that matched their con­text. The Evan­ge­list for Astron­omy was in a large dark room with a sin­gle light focused on him. The chil­dren were sit­ting on the car­pet in a liv­ing room. The Mother seemed to be in a dark closet with only half of her face lit. The Artist was in a loft. The Philoso­pher is sit­ting a table next to a bright open win­dow. The prob­lem with the envi­ron­ments was that they lacked an over­all cohe­sion. They almost seemed overly inten­tional and some­what annoying.