…Right or left at Oak Street, that’s the choice I make every day
And I don’t know which takes more courage,
The staying, or the running away…
1969 song by Roy Clark
I saw a darn good feature film.
I remember when girls wore cloth friendship bracelets, boys had long hair, and they all rode those new fangled small mustang bikes, like in the movie ET. And now I remember 1982 when, abruptly, there was a void at The End of Oak Street. Viewers my age will remember an episode of that “monster of the week” show, The Outer Limits, where an entire town is removed, with fog around the margins.
Oak Street has no big single monster roaming around. Rather, there’s critters of all shapes and sizes, some flying on leather wings. At least Stephen King’s town was protected by a dome. Not this one. It is a foggy night when the event happens, so the folks in a very affluent suburb, one with lots of fenced alleys, grand yards and cul-de-sacs, don’t immediately know their world has changed. The animals diffuse in slowly, silently, insidiously.
Is it a dinosaur movie? Not quite. No pretty colours or cutesy vegetarians. No awe. One moment a dull-black ankylosaurus is staidly chomping grass, next—flip-CHOMP. As easily as a cougar flipping over a porcupine. And you hold your breath because the next prey could be a neighbour.
My biologist friend told me about a science magazine that published a series of photographs of (I think a snake eating birds in a nest). He said readers complained about seeing the reality of nature. He and I shared amusement at such readers, readers who might not like this movie where we view living creatures getting limbs chomped off; getting —as revealed in the trailer— eaten from the head down; bodies pulled about like a dead deer beside the highway… I appreciated viewing pets and people as part of nature. An unseemly, red-stained part. Strange how a movie with more monster-gore than last century’s Jaws or Jurassic Park will, for our jaded century, be less popular.
An adventure movie? Not quite that heroic. I appreciated the realistic fear among civilians who might normally experience a pervasive fear only at exam time. No one is John Wayne; no police were around when the event happened; almost no yuppies own any long guns—most of them think a gun is a pistol is good enough… Not for dinosaurs.
A post-apocalypse movie? Somewhat. In our daily life, experience shows that if a sudden event happens, whether it’s a bomb-sized noise or a thundering accusation in a town hall meeting, then human nature, even for peace officers, is to crouch inward, “everyman for himself,” if only for some microseconds, until the frontal cortex powers back up. Perhaps the survival brain is symbolized by the townsfolk looking for private candles, nailing boards across windows in their private detached houses, to the sound of people nailing elsewhere—or is it private gunfire?
A horror movie? In part, but not in whole. I don’t know anything about camera angles and composition, but the same part of me that appreciates brush strokes in oil paintings also enjoyed the comfort of seeing familiar actors. Ann Hathaway! Last time I saw her she had short hair for a space helmet. Ewan McGregor! Nice to see him in modern clothing, short hair, and a down home American accent. Amidst the horror, I take what comforts I can.
Action? Yes!
A drama? Yes!… There’s a reason Judgement Day (T2) was back at Canyon Meadows Cinema this week. The shows that survive don’t merely have nice-to-look-at puppets running in circles among figurative-or-literal demons, but also have a core of judgemental conflict. For Oak Street, it is entirely realistic to have the married couple talking about their issues… issues relevant even when—or especially when—there is danger about.
In our everyday lives, thank God, we can push away thoughts of danger; we don’t need to think that for our electricity, when that big dam was to be built, estimates included tonnage of sand, angle iron—and deaths. For our food, we conveniently forget that casualties among crop duster planes is a minimum of 60 per year. (Link)
Some horrible questions we seldom face: May we consider farm animals and pets equal to humans? May we wear a red MAGA hat and also treat a Black teenage girl as our equal, enough to sacrifice for her? Does women’s liberation mean a couple should jump, as Amy Pond said, “together or not at all”?
Love is the greatest mystery, the biggest drama. I loved seeing Ann and Ewan finally surfacing their shared values, and I loved seeing them work out an “order of death.”
My own father, when the monsters came, did the right thing. I hope I would too.
… …
… …
Sean Crawford
Calgary
August
2026
Footnotes:
~As for my dear dad, ask me over beer and I may tell you.
~”Order of death,” is foggy in folk wisdom, (women and children first); is clearly shown in fiction with the field agents in The Puppet Masters; is shown through a smudged lens into history when a Canadian patrol during their raid at Dieppe strove for a look at a new RADAR station and took a scientist with them.
As for Judgement Day, (Terminator 2) when I had to do a film lecture for my writing class I chose that movie over some “high falutin’ literature thingy,” because I was excited by the various moral issues in the show. Morality counts, I told my peers, if a writer wants his movie to be more than a brief firework, forgotten in a year.
Russian dissident hero Navalny chose to have the T2 theme played at his funeral;
an American used the movie to explain Navalny being a “bad ass.”
Everybody likes Amy Pond. I’ve had clips of her…
—(But I can’t show the clip’s ULR without big squares cluttering up my page)—
…twice in footnotes on my blogs.
In one, posted to symbolize students changing at college, Amy is a ghost of a small girl and a grown woman: the brief look at her wedding ring on the bannister shows that she had a life before she passed on. (Link to blog)
In the other clip, she and her husband receive a long-lost Christmas visitor. (Link to blog)
Well, no big Youtube squares but… I’m still learning computers.
