Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Batman versus Spider-Man (dir. G. Gaines and E. Jackson, 2011). Batman loves bats; Spider-Man loves spiders. Batman is wearing a bunch of extra clothes under his suit so as to appear more muscular; Spider-Man is fast and wiry, or at least, more twitchy. The bat and the spider have never been enemies . . . until now!!! Actually, they’re still not enemies. A movie producer locked them in a room together and won’t let them out until one of them has been vanquished, but they don’t feel like fighting each other. Mostly they sit around having painful weapons malfunctions. ½

Critical response to Batman versus Spider-Man was positive, more so than we expected. Although, to be honest, the reviewer was a total pushover. She laughed pretty much nonstop throughout the entire thing, and wasn’t taking any notes. She probably didn’t notice the mediocre lighting and frequent shadow problems, for example. Or the numerous costuming inconsistencies, like how my copious sweating kept undoing the Batman horns that I made in my hair with mousse.

So, yeah. It was weird watching one of our films with someone else. For the first two or three minutes I was talking nonstop, explaining everything:

“OK, so this is just a shot of some cartoons that we drew, because we were trying to do that thing in comic-book movies where they—wait, it’ll come back into focus—yeah, so they start out by showing pictures from actual comic books—and now, yeah, Earl is chewing on it, because, I dunno. And now he’s freaking out. OK. So the stick figure on the left is Batman, and if you look closely, we sort of screwed it up, but if you look at the right moment you can kind of see that he has, um, stick junk. Uh, junk, like genitalia. OK, and on the right Spider-Man is eating a waffle, which later becomes important becaus—”

Then Earl told me to shut up.

So I was sitting there silently taking note of everything that was going wrong while Rachel emitted a constant stream of giggling and snorting, with occasional eruptions, like a human mud pot. It was a strange experience. I didn’t know what to make of it. I think mainly it confirmed my suspicion that if you’ve made a film, you can’t watch it with anyone you know, because their opinions are going to be biased and worthless. I mean, it was nice to make something that cracked someone else up. But would Rachel have thought the film was hilarious if Earl and I were total strangers? Doubtful.

So really this was just a confirmation that showing our films to people was a mistake. But we ended up paying a pretty heavy price for it.

EARL

You got them steak tips still?

ME

No, I ate those a couple days ago.

EARL

Dammit.