When DC Comics decided to reboot Superman in the mid-’80s—the first of many reboots to come—editor Julius Schwartz agreed to let an eager Alan Moore write the last adventure of the “old” Superman, in a story called “Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?” As a way of hedging their bets, Moore and DC dubbed it “an imaginary story,” reviving a concept DC writers often used in the ’50s and ’60s when they wanted to play around with the Superman mythology without wrecking continuity. But Moore threw a curveball in his opening caption, writing, “This is an Imaginary Story… aren’t they all?” This has become a well-quoted line, cited by anyone easily irritated by the way science-fiction/fantasy/adventure fans become preoccupied over what’s “real” or what isn’t in their favorite fictional universes. For some, though, when Alan Moore wrote that line, he committed a crime against fiction.
Do storytellers have an obligation to maintain suspension of disbelief? Some people love it when a creator reminds the audience that what they’re reading or watching is nothing more than an elaborate fake, while others feel betrayed by that kind of willful goofery, wondering why they should invest time and interest in characters and situations that even the authors don’t take seriously. Being flip is risky.
That probably explains why Joe Dante has had such a rocky career. Weaned on wiseass Warner Bros. cartoons and endearingly fakey B-movies, Dante has always been a proponent of gags over realism, pushing his tongue deeply into his cheek in movies like Piranha, Small Soldiers, and the Gremlins series. Check the credits of any TV anthology series produced after 1980, and chances are Dante directed an episode or two, usually taking on scripts with quirky or mind-bending aspects, such as the Amazing Stories episode “The Greibble,” in which a voracious Seussian children’s-book character comes to life and terrorizes a suburban home, or the Night Visions episode “The Occupant,” about a woman who thinks an intruder has been rearranging the furniture in her house, until she learns that it isn’t her house, and she’s the intruder.
In 1991, José Rivera and Karl Schaefer co-created Eerie, Indiana, a kid-friendly spin on Twin Peaks and The Twilight Zone about a boy named Marshall Teller (played by Omri Katz) who lives with his family in a small town infested with monsters and unexplained phenomena. Joe Dante was brought in as a creative consultant and frequent director, since this kind of premise—wholesome Americana undercut by the bizarre—is Dante’s stock in trade. In the 18th episode of Eerie, Indiana’s lone 19-episode season, Dante also makes an appearance, playing himself: the harried director of an episode of Eerie, Indiana.
“Reality Takes A Holiday” was written by Vance DeGeneres (Ellen DeGeneres’ brother, and later a Daily Show correspondent) and directed by Ken Kwapis (who went on to make significant contributions to The Larry Sanders Show, Malcolm In The Middle, and the American version of The Office). The episode opens with Marshall at the breakfast table with his family, dodging their invitation to go to a monster movie because he’s more committed to combating the real monsters right there in Eerie. Then Marshall walks out to his mailbox and finds a script, which opens with a scene exactly like the one he just lived. He walks back inside the house and finds his family still there at the breakfast table, ready to engage him in the same conversation. But Marshall doesn’t know what to say, so someone off-screen—Dante, as it turns out—yells, “Cut!” And then he calls Marshall “Omri.”
The premise of life as a performance and the protagonist as an unprepared actor is fairly common in science-fiction/fantasy/horror anthologies, likely because it’s a fairly common nightmare. (I endure the “test I didn’t study for” dream more often, but every now and then I do have one where I’m back in high school drama class, desperately trying to memorize lines for a play that starts in minutes.) “Reality Takes A Holiday” gives the premise a different spin, pulling back to show what’s just beyond the stage. Marshall/Omri’s confusion irritates his fellow cast members, who are presented in the episode as shallow Hollywood types—each the inverse of their characters on the show—eager to get their jobs done so they can go home. When our hero wanders out of his kitchen, he finds a maze of disconnected sets and dressing rooms, with crewmembers busy carrying scenery back and forth. The life he knows—crazy enough already—is now literally breaking into pieces.
There are different ways to handle the “character realizes he’s a fictional construct” plot. Writers can get metaphysical with it, letting the character meet his creator and have a conversation about the meaning of existence. (See Grant Morrison’s early-’90s run on the comic book Animal Man for the best example of that.) Or they can “Duck Amuck” it, using the premise as an excuse to play around.
Eerie, Indiana goes a different route, building a quasi-suspense plot out of all the freakiness. Marshall’s persistent gray-haired nemesis Dash X (played by Jason Marsden, one of the only characters in the episode who gets called by his character name throughout, not his actor name) is in cahoots with The Writer in a plan to kill off Marshall at the end of the episode so Dash can be the new star of Eerie, Indiana. If Marshall/Omri finally makes it through the breakfast-nook scene he flubbed, he’ll step outside and get “accidentally” shot by a Bigfoot-hunting Dash. There’s a monster at the end of this book, and if Marshall keeps turning pages, he’ll meet it.