CULTURAVORE

With the recent flood of live-action remakes of Disney classics, it feels like there has been a Disney nostalgia in the air. I have cried actual tears in those velvet theatre seats as I watch my childhood princesses and heroes play out in spectacular full-screen glory and listen as the songs that soundtrack my childhood are brought to life again on the big screen.

My parents recently moved to Orlando, and on a recent visit to their new house, I went to Disney World with two friends who had never been before. We went to Magic Kingdom on the Fourth of July, when everybody else in the world decides it's a good idea to celebrate our freedom in a place that is acutely American: overpriced fast food, tempting and repulsive at the same time; assaulting displays of plush dolls and apparel screaming for purchase on every corner; and the subtle yet powerful message that you are the hero of the story (I’m a princess too!)

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A few weeks ago I saw a headline that made me laugh: "Woman Wears 9 lbs of Baggage to Avoid Baggage Fee." I'm a sucker for these kind of viral news clickbait articles, and this one described a woman who was about to depart on an all-inclusive trip and didn't have barely a dollar to spend on a tacky souvenir, let alone a baggage fee.

I relate to this woman. I have done my share of traveling, and you can often find me the night before a trip packing and repacking just to get the zipper to close. I've made a habit of avoiding the check-in desk and all the shame of putting my bag on a scale and seeing the number creep up dangerously close to the maximum. How can such a little bag hold so much stuff? And how do clothes weigh so much? I don't get it.

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Warning: this post contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse

I am a passionate moviegoer all times of the year, but with the Oscars fast approaching, my inner Roger-and-Ebert quickly bursts forth with amazing ferocity as I consume every film I can get my hands on. You’d be amazed (or perhaps annoyed) at how frequently the words “brilliant cinematography” and “captivating storytelling” occur in my conversations around the end of Advent season each year.

For me, going to the movies has become somewhat of a weekly practice in low anthropology. On Sundays, I attend a worship gathering and partake of the Holy Communion, praising God for inviting me to His table through grace; and then I head to the local movie theater, serviced by acne-ridden teens and cursed with charmingly sticky floors, where I buy myself a ticket for Vice, and am reminded again why humanity is desperately in need of the saving grace of Jesus Christ.

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I wake up early this Saturday morning and drive over to the tiny strip center where my day’s worth of self-imposed detention awaits me. When I walk into the office, a home-makeover show is playing on the tiny TV screen. A stocky man at the front desk asks me if I've filled out my paperwork. He hands me a form, and I look around at my fellow students. We're all here at the DUI/Defensive Driving School of Midtown, paying our $95 penance for a defensive driving course. Our reward is six hours in a classroom with peeling linoleum floors and a DVD player from the 1990s. The classroom is commanded by a deep-voiced retiree with a sweater vest who starts off telling us the most recent annual statistics of traffic fatalities. He promises kindly not to berate us or condemn us, but it feels somewhat ironic: we're here because we've already been condemned.

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