by James Clark
During his Big Adventure of 1985, Pee-wee Herman would amusingly come close to collapsing from boredom as exposed to rote-embraced old-world “charm.” At the outset of a very different adventure (of 2001), a fat girl, “Anaïs,” sings a remarkable set of lyrics (never heard around a campfire), bringing to mind the Princess` invocation to a ‘True Spirit’ as things begin to happen in Terrence Malick`s, The New World (2000).
- I get so bored from 6 to 10, from 10 to 6
- Both day and night.
- All my life…
- If only I could find
- A man or a woman
- A body or a soul,
- A werewolf,
- I couldn`t care less.
- Just to dream.
Whereas the Princess needs a little help from a benign “Mother,” in order “to sing the song of our lives,” and Pee-wee needs his sublime red bike to feel on top of the world, Anaïs needs a loved one to get her rolling, even if it`s a beast, une bête, La Bête, with whom, against all the facts, she would be La Belle (Beauty), and as such subject to unfolding splendors, “singing the song of our lives” in the form of a “dream,” an uncanny flowering. Fat Girl takes the strangest of routes to the most improbable of werewolf-liberators.