Review
Culture
Film & TV
7 min read

Help for the Heelers

The benevolent butterfly effect in Bluey’s season finale.

Mockingbird is an organization devoted to “connecting the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life."

A cartoon dog family stand in their kitchen
Bluey and family.
Ludo Studio.

Written by Bryan J. This article first appeared in Mockingbird, 23 April 2024. By kind permission.

“Daddy, there’s no God in Bluey’s world, is there?” No joke, my precocious four-year-old PK [Pastor’s Kid] son asked me this question after watching the new Bluey season finale, titled “The Sign.” It’s a deep question, one that comes from a place of honest curiosity — “The Sign” is, without a doubt, one of the most spiritually significant episodes of a series that is known to offer big questions to little kids. The Heeler family is presented with a life-changing decision with no guarantee of a happy ending, and the whole of the episode features the family wrestling the unknown of the future. The fact that my son could pick up on the high stakes of the episode, the philosophical questions about the goodness of providence, and the impossibility of knowing whether the future was bright or not … let’s just say it justifies the tears that come every time I watch the episode with him. 

Which is five times now. I have watched the finale five times and wept every time. Isn’t this show made for preschoolers? 

“The Sign” reveals a family in transition. After offering a number of hints earlier in the season, we discover that the Heeler family dad, Bandit, has accepted a job offer that pays a lot more money, but will require him to move. Chili (aka Mum) agrees with the choice to move and take the new job, but she has sincere concerns about leaving family, friends, neighbors, city, and a beloved house behind. Bluey, of course, has trouble coming to terms with the idea, as any preschooler would, and Bingo remains blissfully ignorant of the big changes coming her way. The preparations to move coincide with preparations for Uncle Rad’s marriage to family friend (and Bluey’s godmother) Frisky, with the family’s four preschool girls joining in as flower girls. 

Big changes bring big questions, of course. Nowhere is this more evident than in Bluey’s preschool classroom. Calypso, the teacher, models a zen-like spirituality for Bluey and her friends. At the end of story time, Bluey asks her teacher “Why do stories always have happy endings?” Her teacher responds, “Well, I guess ’cause life will give us enough sad ones.” (Is this a kid’s show?) This inspires a host of sad stories from Bluey’s peers: a guinea pig that ran away, a divorce, a lonely dad. It’s now that Bluey announces her not-so-happy ending, telling her friends that she is moving. To help the class cope with their sadness, Calypso reads her students a parable of a farmer, who approaches all of life’s good luck and bad luck moments with the simple attitude of “we’ll see.” It’s a story without a happy ending (or without any ending, really), and the kids don’t buy it. “Is that it?” asks one, disappointed. “What happens next?” asks another. “Everything will work out the way it’s supposed to, Bluey” says Calypso with kindness, which Bluey takes to mean that their family house won’t sell (which it does, in the next scene). 

Big questions also mean big feelings. An enraged and fearful Frisky, dismayed to discover her fiancé expects her to move out west where he works, runs away the morning of the wedding. Chili hops in the car, with four preschoolers in tow, to track her down. A series of events, which can be only described as providential, take place along the way. Chili, Bluey, Bingo, and cousins run into just the right person, spill juice cups at just the right moment, and make pit stops at the precisely needed spot, to find Frisky in quiet reflection at a local hilltop park. Groom-to-be Rad shows up, too. Frisky and Rad talk through their concerns and move on with the wedding, announcing there that they’ve chosen not to move west as planned. It’s a lovely wedding, with dancing and family and fun and a host of easter eggs for eagle-eyed viewers to enjoy. “You’re having a happy ending!” announces Bluey to her godmother, before turning to her mother and asking “Do you think we’ll have a happy ending too?” “I don’t know,” replies Chili, “But I’m done trying to figure it out. I just wanna dance.” Queue the happy dance montage. 

Still, providence has not finished working with the Heelers. On moving day, a whole host of minor events from previous episodes collide to cancel the sale of the Heeler’s beloved house. It’s hard to describe every little flap of the butterfly’s wing that impacted this outcome — a combination of stuck coins, romantic encounters at the drugstore, inchworms saved from being squished on the slip-and-slide, and overzealous real estate agents all played their part. In a moving montage, Bandit takes the call about the canceled sale of the home, changes his mind about the new job, symbolically rips the for-sale sign out of his front yard, and is tackled by a loving family who realize they don’t have to move anymore. The family sits on boxes in their empty kitchen floor eating takeout cheeseburgers, relieved of the anxiety of moving, while the show rolls to credits. The song playing in the background is called “Lazarus Drug,” sung by the same voice actor who plays preschool teacher Calypso. It’s a song about love drawing someone back to life, perhaps a nod to the love of Bandit’s family drawing him back to the reality that they may already have a great life, and money wouldn’t make it any better. The Heelers get their happy ending, too. 

The Greeks were the first to use the storytelling tool we know by its Latin name: deus ex machina, God from the machine. In Greek drama, at the climax of a seemingly unsolvable problem, a machine (usually a trap door or crane) would lift or lower an actor onto the stage portraying one of the gods of the Greek pantheon. These gods would step in and provide a solution to a drama’s seemingly unsolvable and complex problem. Nowadays, the term is derisive, an insult that implies lazy writing or poor storytelling. At the time, however, the audience loved these deus ex machina solutions. At the risk of psychoanalyzing the past, one imagines they would have been quite happy to imagine that the Gods cared enough in the affairs of humans to intervene for a happy ending. 

Deus ex machina is a criticism that can be leveled at this season finale. After all the adults tell the precocious preschooler that life gives out happy and sad endings, we are not given any sad endings. The only way to navigate change, according to the wisdom of the world, is sit back, embrace a sort of desireless “zen” regarding the future, and say “we’ll see,” but everyone nonetheless gets a happy ending. After bending over backwards to lay out how the future is fickle and unknowable, the show still insists on showing how everything lined up just perfectly for Bluey’s “prayers” to be answered. It’s not just her either. Aunt Brandy’s desire for a child comes to fulfillment, after we are told numerous times that it is not meant to be (S3E31). Winton’s divorced and depressed father meets the mother of the terrier triplets (S3E45), and the two come together and form a new family. The shaggy hair dogs get their house with a pool. Everything works out just fine. Despite the look of a Greek tragedy, in which everything ends poorly for the protagonists, things end up turning out fine, just like every Greek comedy. Or, to put it in Elizabethan terms, what starts out like Hamlet becomes A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream. 

In Bluey’s world, the happy endings are real. The parents always muster enough energy to play with their kids. The right parenting lesson is always on hand, and handed down with pithy aphorisms. Hurt feelings are acknowledged and reconciled with emotionally intelligent strategies. The love shown between friendships and family members is realistic and optimistic. Moreover, in this square dog world of Brisbane, Australia, when parents and grandparents are at the end of their ropes, providence steps in to help guide the way. Happy endings are not so much earned in Bluey’s world as they are a given, or perhaps gifted, sometimes by tired and exhausted parents, but also, by an unseen benevolence watching over them. What is grace, after all, if not an unexpected happy ending? 

So how did I respond to my son’s question? “Yes,” I told him, “there is a God in Bluey’s world. Who do you think made all those happy endings come true?” It’s not an answer I should have come up with so quickly. I’m not usually one to offer a succinct one-liner that sums up decades of media study and theology in a bite sized nugget for my four-year-old. Perhaps, instead, it was providence that gave the answer for me. 

Review
America
Culture
Film & TV
Politics
5 min read

Trump: from apprentice to master of contempt

The Trump biopic is a morality tale for our times
An 1980s business man looks contemptuously at the camera.
Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump.
Scythia Films.

He won. Donald Trump is, once again, the President of the United States. The controversial property tycoon, controversial ‘billionaire’, controversial reality TV star, and highly controversial one-term (or so it seemed) President, has done it again! Sweeping not only the Electoral College but also the popular vote, Trump will have another four years to ‘Make America Great Again’…whatever that means. The question on most pundits’ lips today is: how? The man who was written off from the first moments he descended into his campaign on that golden escalator; the man who was guaranteed to lose his first (let alone his third!) Presidential bid; the man who has been mired in sexual, financial, constitutional, and legal scandal…how could he win again!? 

Rather than seek answers in the election coverage of last night I went to an alternative source of information. I popped down to my local cinema to watch The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi’s biopic of Trump’s rise to power and prominence, focusing on his ‘apprenticeship’ under pugnacious, pugilistic, flamboyant, and flamingly foul-mouthed lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn. Whether consciously or not – and believe me, it’s so consciously on the nose as to feel like a punch to the nose – the film draws a ruler-straight line from Trump’s early days as Cohn’s disciple to his electoral success in 2016…and now in 2024. 

How did Trump win, not once but twice…? 

…by selling his soul to the Devil. 

We meet Trump and Cohn in an exclusive New York Members Club. Trump is shy and awkward – none of the bombast we know him for – clumsily trying to impress his date by mentioning how he is the youngest member to ever be admitted. Cohn is holding court with some mob-coded friends. Cohn stares at the handsome, golden-haired ingénue (Trump, not his date) across the room through sunken domes. He invites Trump to join him for dinner. The date has gone to ‘powder my nose’ and seemingly has made a lucky escape through the lavatory window. Trump joins Cohn. Cohn bloviates, always with his hand firmly gripping Trump’s thigh. Trump is enamoured…smitten…in love. Cohn becomes his lawyer and Trump his protégé. 

The film goes on to chronicle how, under Cohn’s tutelage, Trump becomes the man we now know. Cohn is committed to winning – under the guise of being committed to America. He teaches Trump his three rules for success:  

  1. Attack, attack, attack. 
  2. Admit nothing. Deny everything. 
  3. Even in defeat, claim victory.  

There is a nice bit of mirroring in the final scene as we see Trump regurgitate these rules, introduced pithily and wittily in the first 30 minutes of the film, in his final exaggerated and bloviated style to a ghost-writer employed to write The Art of the Deal. This is how Trump wins. Throughout the film we watch Trump evolve from the nervous young man, protective of his alcoholic brother and under-the-thumb of his overbearing father, into a monstrous, ad absurdum form of Cohn…a man who will demand absolute submission to his will. 

The film, I wager, is partly a morality tale. It gives us a (slightly) sympathetic young Faustus, and chronicles his descent into Hell, but without a hint of real redemption or pity.

The film is sickeningly enjoyable. Sebastian Stan gently invites us to root for Trump in his timidity, and transforms with a subtlety which leaves the audience questioning their own culpability. Maria Bakalova brings a good-natured innocence to Ivana Trump (née Zelníčková) which steals the few scenes she’s afforded. Jeremy Strong – always watchable – brings his magnetic charisma to the screen. His Cohn is akin to Pacino’s John Milton in The Devil’s Advocate: delightfully chewing the scenery and ingratiating himself to the viewer while being hateful. The film is just over two hours long but doesn’t feel it. Never dragging, never boring. The soundtrack revels in the period, and the needle-drops are near perfect. It’s a really rather fun watch. 

However. 

The film is not nourishing. It is the cinematic equivalent of the junk food that leads to Trump’s expanding waistline (and the liposuction scene that is so difficult to watch). The film painstakingly draws parallels between Trump’s early success and his later political career. Cohn’s rules, Reagan’s campaigning slogans, the arrogance, the (sexual!) violence…everything we associate with Trump today is found in its nascent form in his 1980s career. Yet, none of it really matters because we have no character we want to attach ourselves to. No one, except perhaps Trump’s mother and his first wife, neither of whom have the chance to make enough of an impact, is likable or redeemable. Cohn is slime personified, until a sudden AIDS related conversion to conscience, and we don’t see nearly enough of the pathetic and put-upon Trump to care about his descent into the demonic realm of absolute self-absorption. The script is razor-sharp, but not incisive. The characters are riotously funny, but nowhere near emotionally engaging enough. 

The film, I wager, is partly a morality tale. It gives us a (slightly) sympathetic young Faustus, and chronicles his descent into Hell, but without a hint of real redemption or pity. Mortality makes Cohn recognise the monster he has been the Dr Frankenstein to, but in about ten minutes. We see a relative innocent made villain, but barely having had the chance to care for him in his infancy. No amount of slick script or genuinely bravura performance (Jeremy Strong deserves an Oscar) can make up for the cold and emotionless lens that the film has. In a sense, this gives us a more realistic explanation of Trump’s victory than the film seeks to muster…disdain. 

Like Trump, I deployed ‘alternative facts’. 

I lied. 

I did watch some of the election coverage in the early hours of the morning. As the Trump victory became inexorable, I watched pundit after pundit – who had been excoriating Trump supporters as either stupid or malign only 24 hours before – earnestly explain that it was a lack of engagement with middle-America which had lost it for the Democrats. Tony Hinchcliffe may have made a predictably unpleasant joke about Puerto Rico being a ‘garbage island’, but it was Biden calling even reluctant Trump voters ‘garbage’ which swung the election. We live in a new polarised age where the genuine concerns of the ordinary man or woman, if they can be associated with someone as aesthetically and morally compromised as Trump, make them functionally fascist.  

The Apprentice, simply by being unable to empathise with anyone not in favour, gives us the secret to Trump’s victory. It wasn’t Cohn’s rules. It was his overactive ability to demonstrate his contempt for everyone, and therefore seem to have contempt for no one. His detractors demonstrated the reverse. In the end Trump hasn’t needed to attack, or deny, or claim illegitimate victory. He simply has had to be himself. 

Saaaad. 

 

**** Stars