I Watch Dennis The Menace Every Day for a Week

this was a terrible idea

Day One

The TV was $5 from a lady in Belle, a dusty gray box, thicker in the back than the screen is wide. I picked it up in a Shoney’s parking lot and found that it had a built-in DVD player, though this wasn’t why I bought it. I bought it so I could watch the news, some measly effort to be a better employee. The antenna cost me twelve, and I quickly learn that the cable hook-up didn’t work, quickly gave up on the dream of flipping though the twelve free channels watching re-runs of Modern Family like the days of yore, but now here was this thing: this gray box from the early 90’s, sitting in my room. The fuzzy image runs a persistent and slow shutter from bottom to top. It’s an atrocious piece of technology, countless iterations behind the quality of its contemporaries, and for this reason I have fallen in love with it, feel rather protective of her.

At the Walmart in Cedar Creek there is a bin of $5 DVDs, and after browsing for a few minutes I pick out two sets for my collection: a group of four Adam Sandler films, and 80’s and 90’s family classics. The latter includes The Goonies, Willy Wonka, Space Jam, and a film I’d heard of countless times but knew nothing about, a film which implies everything in its title: Dennis The Menace. I can immediately guess 90% of the plot by this name, I can imagine the quality of jokes, the level of raunchiness, the ham-rating of the acting and I can close my eyes and predict, with eerie accuracy, exactly what the score will sound like.

Heading towards check-out I return again to a mental list of potential essays for the mouse-car moment. I try to conjure an idea which will launch me into the fast-paced world of A-list publishing, something which will place me amongst the literary-journalistic rushmore alongside Didion and Thompson. Where is my Fear and Loathing, my Slouching, my Miami and the Siege of Chicago? I look at the used case in my hand and chuckle. What if I just keep watching this one, shitty movie?

The Menace

Dennis is a child of about seven whose antics regularly terrorize the quiet neighborhood of [town name unclear]. He is undeniably cute, and this keeps him in a state of forgiveness of all those he wrongs. All except George Wilson, his neighbor and foil, who seems to go unappreciated for the amount of deviousness he puts up with, being Dennis’ neighbor. I was spot on about the score, and there are no surprises to be found in the milquetoast plot. My interest was briefly piqued during the the opening credits, when I learned that this was a John Hughes film. Maybe it won’t be so bad, I ponder. It will be.

My largest note upon first viewing is the strange structure of the film. It doesn’t seem to escalate, and while there are stakes, they constantly shift in importance, and certain sub-plots end up nowhere. A grimy robber, Switchblade Sam, stalks the village, but his presence isn’t important to the climactic scene, and he is an utterly flat character. George Wilson’s garden party promises a foreboding ending, but once again, there is no build to this moment, and when it arrives it plays out in a way that is entirely predictable by the first few beats of the film. Dennis’ parents threaten putting him in some sort of summer camp, but the idea is never brought up again, and its not clear what hell Dennis is teetering on. What is this character’s version of heaven and hell, what does it look like for him to achieve his goals, to fail? Nothing. The meat of the story is his antics, is “what will he do next.” And while some are sufficiently shocking, most are mildly amusing in a way which doesn’t move the needle.

The movie is boring, poorly written, and kitschy in a way which doesn’t attain camp-status.

—First rating: 1.5 stars—

Day Two

I arrive home from work and look at a shelf of un-read books, hover my thumb over my Netflix app where hundreds of Seinfeld episodes await a re-watch. I look outside at the softly blowing trees and contemplate texts from friends looking to hang. I consider essays which need to be written, applications to be sent, beauty to ponder. I sigh, sit down, and turn on the dusty box. A static pinch fills the air, it runs the channel set-up and finds a signal on zero of seventy channels, and I switch input until arriving at the home screen of Dennis the Menace. I press play.

Our introduction to Dennis is via his accoutrement. Tied to his bike are heaps of rusty cans and playing cards taped to the spokes of his wheels causing the ruckus which precedes his presence. In a wagon which trails him sits a heap of tools primed for destruction. I think back to my own industriousness at this age, the time I rigged a pulley system so I could open my bedroom door while lying on my mattress, the time I cut the rope from my blinds so I could control the speed of my fan without stepping on a chair, rendering the blinds, as well as the fan, inoperable. These things never quite worked out as I wasn’t particularly handy, and in the end I would use them for a day or two before having to stare at the wasteland of my creation for years. I’m jealous of the logic of Dennis’ world, of the ways he creates fun within the mundane. This is his only redeeming quality.

I realize, begrudgingly, that I’m far closer to the camp of George Wilson. All I ask for is peace & quiet, is to not be bothered. I sympathize with the man who watches his garden get destroyed, his mouth-wash replaced with nasal spray, his bathroom drowned in suds. When he makes his appeal to Dennis’ father, he speaks to the man’s sense of duty. He references his forty-three years with the post office, his appreciation of the community and the desire to not be seen as a child-hater, but to insist that Dennis is disproportionately destructive. It is peculiar monologue which says a lot about the small, pleasant town. “I’m not saying he can never come over, just that if he does, he needs to behave himself.” Why not say he can never come over? What is it about Dennis that makes him saunter into George Wilson’s un-locked doors every day, anyways?

Here is another aspect of the core-conflict which deserves investigation. Dennis is seemingly obsessed with Mr Wilson, seems to focus the bulk of his mayhem on the old man. Sure, every baby-sitter in town has his parents’ number blocked, but no one receives the brutal fall-out of the kid’s misadventures like George, and Dennis seems incapable of leaving him be. He dotes on the man, hangs around him despite his cold demeanor, takes any chance he can get to rest his head on George’s lap and listen to his bitter diatribes. Is George the most easily and entertainingly annoy-able person in town, or is there a missing grandfather presence in Dennis’ universe?

And why doesn’t anyone listen to George? Why is his moaning about the pest so dis-regarded about town? He is the conservative, familiar mail-man: a town staple, and a world-class gardener. Does this not earn him any merit when he loses his marbles complaining about a pesky 7-year-old? Why are his concerns so quickly minimized? Poor George.

—Second rating: 2 stars—

Day Three

I really can’t do this anymore. It’s boring, one. It’s time-consuming, two. It’s not a good movie, and I don’t even know what that means anymore. I decide to turn the volume down on this viewing and to watch with only subtitles, utterly annoyed as I am by that kid’s squealing wail, the poorly delivered lines, the way he screams “Mr. Wilson!”

The subtitles, unfortunately, provide more to be considered. Suddenly lines which I had missed or misheard are written out and illuminated. I begin to consider what this movie is about. I figure any artist, and John Hughes was certainly an artist, has an inherent intention. Intended or not, conscious or otherwise, there is some experience of being John Hughes, some head-canon working beneath the lines. When he writes he is playing against and with certain social floes and making some sort of commentary. Surface-level writers tend to turn these off, tend to avoid them, but they are still informed conceptions, still exist in a framework and still work within a perception of existence.

Take, for example, the feminist sub-plot which I hardly noticed on first viewing. Dennis’ mother has recently returned to work after taking time off to birth and raise the Menace. She enters an office dominated by men and has an immediate rival, the only other female employee at her level. In board meetings towards the top of the script she is met with leering glances from this rival, and the assumption goes that this other woman is resentful of Mrs. Menace. Resentful of her marriage, her beauty, and especially resentful that they have arrived at the same place in their career, but that she has forgone child-rearing and Mrs. Menace hasn’t. When Mrs. Menace needs to miss out on a corporate trip to look after Dennis, the other woman refuses to cover for her, insisting that “though I may not have children, I do have a life.” And why is she working, in the first place? Is it for fulfillment, or because, as Dennis says, “we’re poor and she has to.” Is it maybe both?

And then there is George and Martha Wilson (George and Martha Washington?). George seems happy with life. 43 years as the local mail-carrier followed by a retirement filled with gardening and peace, so long as he can get that Menace to leave him alone. I’m struck by a certain wan spirit to Martha, a certain malaise towards life which she buries in her warm demeanor, buries in cookies and comfort as women of that era were forced to do. When tasked with baby-sitting Dennis she comes to life, is finally excited to cook because she has a new audience. Delights in the mess in the bathroom because now she has a duty beyond looking after her curmudgeonly husband. She recites a poem to Dennis, one she learned from her own mother, who “would, in some small measure, be proud.” She wistfully sighs in bed that evening, says to a sleeping George, “I would have been a good mother.”

—Third rating: 3 stars—

Day Four

Dennis’ top 13 menaces:

13. Ding-dong ditching his babysitter, who is eschewing her duties as care-taker and attempting to woo the neighborhood hunk into some teen nooky, thereby thwarting her attempts at romance in a bold assertion of the innocence of childhood.

12. Coming upon a supposedly-asleep George Wilson and determining that the usually early riser must be ill, and in an attempt to heal his grandfather-figure fashioning a slingshot into which he places a handful of aspirin to launch the medication from an unnecessary distance into the pursed mouth.

11. Loosing his dog into George’s house, leading to some uncouth, though admittedly steamy, bestiality.

10. Having a ruckus in the bathtub and causing major spillage onto the bathroom floor, on which the elderly George, accustomed as he is to a life of sterile cleanliness, loses his footing in an extended display of acrobatics which thrusts him into a full split, putting his septuagenarian hip at risk of permanent paralyzation, and eliciting from the man a pain-laden howl and the covering of his stricken genitals with comically cupped hands.

9. Trying to teach Switchblade Sam how to properly tie him up and, thus, tying Switchblade Sam up.

8. In a moment of fascination with Bernoulli's principle of the static pressure of fluid, squeezing Mr. Wilson’s nasal spray empty while marveling “Old Faithful!", and in an attempt to shroud his subterfuge re-filling the desolated bottle with a mysterious liquid labeled Plak Attack, a fact lost on Dennis who is no doubt a truant student, both incapable of reading and unaware of the marketing-colloquialism “Plak” and it’s likely spice-ridden flavor palette and subsequent harsh effects on the nasal passageways; then realizing that the depleted mouthwash bottle must also be re-filled, choosing from the extensive collection of bathroom products a pine-sol cleaner meant for the toilet, thus causing Mr. Wilson to snort mouthwash and gargle with an acidic cleaning product in the low-regulatory landscape of 1980’s toxicity.

7. Flinging a flaming marshmallow onto George’s face.

6. Distracting everyone from watching George’s mythical 28-year orchid’s brief bloom, rendering the thin veneer of Mr. Wilson’s post-career passion moot and robbing a man who put his faith in capitalism of one of the few moments of ecstasy he would know before his time in this cruel realm expires and his soul returns to the ethereal goo of non-existence from which we were all forged.

5. Trying to teach Switchblade Sam how to properly tie him up and, thus, tying Switchblade Sam up.

4. Incidentally tying Switchblade Sam to a passing train and preventing himself from being stabbed, the mechanics here being unclear and supporting the strange sensation the viewer gets that the world inhabited by the Menace and the sleepy community on which he wreaks his mayhem exist in a sort of alternative physical reality and that Dennis, a cosmically ingenious child, has come from dimensions unknowable to spurn the clockwork reality of this world as an anti-christ figure, a mythoTrickster, entangling the confines of their logic-framework in a desperate attempt to dislodge the security which keeps the brainwashed citizens from questioning a universe beyond the void.

3. Smearing paint on George’s grill before a barbecue.

2. Replacing the teeth of George’s dentures with chiclets just before his photo is taken for the local paper, leading to a portraiture of pure lunacy, rendering the visage of poor George to resemble a demented rabbit, the rabbit that is, perhaps, the theoretical foil to the Trickster-ethos of Dennis, the omnipresent and dysfunctional “bureaucrat-bunny” of the Menace-verse whom Dennis-as-Hermes must thwart in order to free the Common from the mind-numbing forces of regulatory inanity which confine them to lives of indecisive, predictable Order that is directly opposed to the universe’s elegant endeavor towards entropy.

1. Slamming his mother’s bitter co-worker’s face into a copy-machine

—Fourth rating: .5 stars—

Day Five

I can’t. This is painful— I have a life to live. I put on the “movie,” this document of destruction, this broadcast from a realm unthinkably morose, and let it play into the void of my apartment which I am no longer certain exists when I do not inhabit it as I become increasingly uncertain that any reality outside of my hilariously diminutive perception exists, full-stop. I roam the streets un-tethered, exhaust myself to the point of collapse searching the empty cosmos for answers, drag myself through the Kanawha River Quay desperate for the blessed un-housed, those ethereal messengers cast out from their dimensional-origins to pierce my veins with their veil-lifting, Truth-revealing and unGodly syringes.

I contemplate the existence of a fascimilitic adornment of the Film itself etched into my increasingly deranged neural pathways, of the palimpsest of my thin conception-of-self being re-written in real time as Dennis Menaces across the cosmic fold, Menaces through Black holes from his false reality into mine, chased by the rabbit-George, the bureaucratic-bunny, the true anti-christ (??) in a perverse Tom & Jerry of hatred and love, enacting their ancient battle on the scarred slate of my Ego.

—Fifth rating: as Numbers begin to lose their rigid placement at the center of our constructed Universe, as the inhuman gaul to harness the power of Stars for the sake of imposing Taste and esthetic hierarchy I scream as I drown, air bubbles flowing somehow downward, deeper into the depths of the River Styx as I realize the Menace is leading me, of all No-bodies, down into the warm release of death which I now fear means placement into the Menace-verse itself; means entering the very realm which has dislodged my ideology so swiftly, as if it were propped on rotting tooth-picks; scream nobly, scream as my Bible taught me to: TWO AND A GOD-FUCKING-HALF STARS, PLEASE, OH PLEASE, DENNIS, DO NOT SUBDUE ME TO YOUR MISSION— JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT FREE DOES NOT MEAN I HAVE TO JOIN YOUR MISSION OF SALVATION—

Day Six

The poem which Martha Wilson recites from memory to a subdued Dennis, the poem which her own deceased mother once read to her and which has ingrained itself into her memory as a trauma-response to the undue pressure placed upon her to procreate; the memory-as-remnant of Martha’s essentially rebellious decision to not be a mother herself in order to curb the ancestral flow of tragedy and to not permit more suffering into the sterilized world of the Menace-verse; the poem which speaks to the madness of their world’s fragile, paradigmatic “Perfection” (read: dishonesty); the poem which has for seventy years painfully forced Martha to consider that despite her cruelty, her over-bearing mother was acting out of her own mother-learned and damaging perception not of Love but of Duty, though a love-informed-Duty, which she hoped would protect her daughter from the collapse of the veil between this world and the virgin universe and which inspired her daughter’s decision to wed the Bureaucrat-Bunny, the obedient Christ-figure of George Wilson, to take the corrupted Christ’s-soldier-figure’s name, the name of the man who, despite insisting on the sanctity of his universe’s Logic, was cursed by his own Father (none other than the bitter God of the Menace-verse Himself) with an impotent doubt in his own humanity since his white-picket-fence indoctrination of an attainable, not-quite-Lynchian, perfection; the poem which in some desperate way was the trickster-bereft Martha-mother’s attempt at speaking into her daughter’s psyche from Beyond the possibility that this faux-reality is in fact a dishonest shroud— the sanctioned embodiment of a Judeo-Christian, Dante-esque Hell:

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night

    Sailed off in a wooden shoe—

Sailed on a river of crystal light,

    Into a sea of dew.

"Where are you going, and what do you wish?"

    The old moon asked of the three.

"We have come to fish for the herring fish

That live in this beautiful sea;

Nets of silver and gold have we!"

                  Said Wynken,

                  Blynken,

                  And Nod.

Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,

   And Nod is a little head,

And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies

   Is a wee one's trundle-bed.

So shut your eyes while mother sings

   Of wonderful sights that be,

And you shall see the beautiful things

   As you rock in the misty sea,

  Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three:

                     Wynken,

                     Blynken,

                     And Nod.

Eugene Field, 1889

—Sixth rating: 5 glorious, simulated and Truth-piercing stars—

Day 7

There is a moment, a brief, almighty moment, when the Menacing of Dennis’ proto-mythic Destiny reveals itself in gracious clarity.

Dennis and his two friends, who will remain un-named in this essay, stumble upon an out-of-use tree house on the outskirts of their “town,” which is really the playground of their Gods’ primordial rivalry. The tree-house serves a perfect symbol of the world beyond their realm, of a return-to-nature, to true Reality, rather than the mythoTrickster Dennis’ version of Chaotic Salvation. One might imagine the forested abode as a resting spot for the Cosmic Watchmaker Himself, the hideout which was used as this anti-divinity crafted the madness of the Menace-verse.

Dennis and his friends scale the rickety ladder to where they are, for once, safe from the misguided Truth below— just out of reach of Switchblade Sam’s switchblade, secure from the anti-Christ, Bureacrat-Bunny George’s scourge of rigid worship of regulatory conformity. It is telling that Dennis leads these children here, like the Pied Piper who was, of course, a mythoTrickster sibling of Dennis himself. Dennis, for all his holy and timeless Menacing, insists with these actions on the purity of childhood, on the sanctity of pre-fall awareness, on the worthwhile endeavor of Saving the Children. We realize in this moment that he, truly, is here to save us.

The female friend, the Unrepentant Thief on the Cross to Dennis’ right, dreams of a tastefully decorated parlor, a world where they can “welcome company,” aka “protect the woe-begotten children from their cruel God.” She will not be saved. His male friend, the Good Thief on the Cross to Dennis’ left, has ascended into the tree-house alongside his savior, and holds for him a nail (!) which Dennis aims to pierce into the consecrated walls of their temporary hideaway. Dennis tells his Child to hold the nail until, on the count of three, the Menace will swing the hammer and claim for the sake of Humanity that salvation comes in the form of Belief in Him. The Good Thief closes his eyes, fears greatly the pain of this world’s nail, but decides, in his Liminal understanding of reality, to trust his Lord, to hold his nail in place until the final moment, to help Dennus bear his Cross for the promise of salvation in the Kingdom beyond this world. Dennis raises the hammer, counts to three, and swings with all his might. When the Good Thief opens his eyes, he sees the righteous nail firmly placed, sees that his Trust in the Lord has saved him, and realizes the Cosmic weight now on his shoulder. The mythoTrickster blesses his Child, decrees him St. Dismas, hands him another nail and says, “This time on the count of four.”

—Seventh Rating: 1.5 stars—