Parents

As made quite clear in Neal Gabler’s book An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1988) and the fairly stale doc based on it Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream (1998) aka Hollywood: An Empire of Their Own, Tinseltown was mostly founded by Eastern European and Austrian Jews who ultimately created a fake America and American dream via their movies that is quite different from the American of the white Christian majority. Quite unlike many of the Judaic culture-distorters that run Hollywood nowadays, these early pioneers were, relatively speaking, very adamant about assimilating and were very sensitive about their Jewishness, which they attempted to obscure with new goyish names and hot blonde shiksa wives, among other things. In fact, even Charles Blühdorn—a Vienna-born Jewish industrialist that did not get involved with the film industry until 1966 when his conglomerate Gulf+Western Industries purchased Paramount Pictures—was quite shy about his Hebraic background and, despite being connected to the Yiddish mob and Zionist warmongers like Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, he more or less incessantly denied his Jewishness and even curiously received a private Christian burial when he died. In fact, as described in Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America (2010) by Peter Biskind, Hollywood alpha-leftist and all-around-shithead Warren Beatty once bragged in regard to getting the Jewish industrialist to fund his singularly plodding commie epic Reds (1981), “One of the things that gives me the biggest kick about making this movie about an American Communist is that I got the money to do it from one of the most right-wing fascist people in Hollywood, Charlie Bluhdorn!” Of course, it was not really until the rise of the ‘New Left’ and birth of New Hollywood during the late-1960s that Jewish filmmakers and their shabbos goy white liberal comrades like Beatty finally felt safe enough to begin producing far-left anti-American movies that openly mocked America’s white majority and its culture, religion, and traditions. Undoubtedly the most obvious example of these subversive Semites was rampant womanizer and Judaic dope fiend Bert Schneider who, despite being born into an extremely wealthy Jewish family, made it his business to promote communist movements and to fund the Black Panther Party (in fact, he even developed a sick friendship with Huey P. Newton that involved harboring the violent black nationalist in his mansion when he was a fugitive killer) when he was not producing movies. 

 Of course, horror cinema eventually received the cultural Marxist makeover as well, though one could certainly argue that the anti-white agenda began in the genre long before the rise of New Hollywood with the superlatively sleazy and wholly aesthetically worthless exploitation films of kosher comrades Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman, especially the anti-Confederate piece of uniquely unrefined and fiercely farshtunken schlock Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), which portrays Southerners as disingenuously hospitable cannibalistic subhuman yokels with a perennial bloodthirsty legacy of singular murderous hatred. Indeed, thanks to goy-hating Hebrew Lewis—a man that dubiously bragged in the hagiographic doc Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore (2010) that he once beat up a man because the fellow supposedly called him a “kike”—the evil ‘redneck’ caricature has become a major staple of horror as demonstrated by works ranging from Tobe Hooper’s classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) to even somewhat contemporary artsy fartsy European films like Fabrice Du Welz’s Calvaire (2004) aka The Ordeal.  If Lewis is keen on cinematically crapping on crackers in an uniquely uncultivated fashion where he dubiously fetishistically sensationalizes that savage sadism that he ostensibly condemns, unnervingly beady-eyed Ashkenazi actor turned director Bob Balaban demonstrated with his somewhat quixotic debut feature Parents (1989) that he was fond of shitting on clean-cut white suburbanites from the 1950s. Admittedly, I decided to watch Balaban’s film after reading English auteur Ken Russell’s highly complimentary remarks regarding it in his autobiography Altered States: The Autobiography of Ken Russell (1991). Notably, Balaban previously starred in Russell’s sci-fi cult classic Altered States (1980), so I wonder if the filmmaker was succumbing to partiality and committing puffery when he wrote in regard to his favorite contemporary films, “…But for me the two most outstanding new talents are Bob Balaban, whose PARENTS made David Lynch’s BLUE VELVET look like CARE BEARS, and Bruce Robinson with WITHNAIL AND I—about two out-of-work actors in the Sixties. Both these directors have a frighteningly perceptive vision and the unique ability to capture a particular moment in time as well as the heart and soul of the characters under observation. They have humour, imagination, style and flair. I have high hopes for their future.” Of course, Balaban never became the great auteur that Russell hoped he would be, as he more or less degenerated into a TV hack cum perennial character actor, with his directorial debut assuredly being his magnum opus. 

 For better or worse, Parents is undoubtedly one of the greatest and most preternatural black horror-comedies ever made, though for reasons that the director at least partly did not intend. Featuring lovable whack-job Randy Quaid and Paul Schrader’s wifey Mary Beth Hurt as the eponymous crypto-cannibal parents of a keenly kosher kid named Bryan Madorsky that clearly could not be their biological child (notably, Madorsky never starred in another film and went on to take up the stereotypical Judaic trade of accounting), Balaban’s debut feature is a quite strange film in that the boy lead seems to be a stand-in for the director himself. Indeed, more than anything, the film seems to be the absurdly autistic yet nonetheless fairly consistently entertaining result of a Jew imagining the horrors of being raised by pathologically passive-aggressive and anally retentive white bread WASP suburbanites from the 1950s. Somewhat seeming like the patently absurd and inexplicable result of the aesthetically-challenged bastard brood of Herschell Gordon Lewis and Paul Bartel somehow suffering the grand delusion that he is a real artist and attempting to direct a satirical gore flick with the cultivation of a Jean Renoir social satire like La règle du jeu (1939) aka The Rules Of The Game, albeit in the style of a David Lynch flick, Balaban’s film is ultimately a rare and unintended example of the sort of atavistic ethnocentric paranoia that has inspired so many Jews in Hollywood, the mainstream media, and politics to wage a cultural war against the very people that built America. To H.G. Lewis’ very, very minor credit, his anti-suburbia flick Suburban Roulette (1968) is nowhere near as venomous and anti-Anglo-American as the fierce filmic fart of a farce that is Parents where a cannibalistic ‘fascist’ father that suffers from a sort of perniciously passive-aggressive form of what Jewish Marxists and psychoanalysts call an ‘Authoritarian Personality’ becomes increasingly hostile with his son for refusing to eat human meat.  On a slightly less serious note, the film also can be seen as a sort of allegory for post-JFK youth rebellion and the birth of the counterculture (de)generation due to its depiction of a troubled and somewhat socially ostracized young boy who learns to both hate and distrust his parents and reject his heritage.

 Not unlike Norman Mailer with his shockingly delightful pseudo-Lynchian celluloid disaster Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987), Balaban opted to hire Angelo Badalamenti to compose music for his film so that no one would be confused by the fact that he was attempting to make a poor man’s Blue Velvet. Of course, like his fellow Judaic Mailer, Balaban unwittingly attempted the innately impossible by contriving a film in the spirit of the work of one of American’s most organically poetic and preternaturally instinctual filmmakers, for Lynch’s talent does not come from a dry and calculating intellect but the soul. Indeed, as the great ¾ Hebrew Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote in regard to the lack of originality of the Jewish mind and the tendency of Jews to merely copy others instead of pioneering, “Amongst Jews ‘genius’ is found only in the holy man. Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. (Myself for instance.) I think there is some truth in my idea that I really only think reproductively. I don’t believe I have ever invented a line of thinking. I have always taken one over from someone else […] It might be said (rightly or wrongly) that the Jewish mind does not have the power to produce even the tiniest flower or blade of grass; its way is rather to make a drawing of the flower or blade of grass that has grown in the soil of another’s mind and to put it into a comprehensive picture […] It is typical for a Jewish mind to understand someone else’s work better than he understands it himself.”  In other words, Balaban has a superficial understanding of some of the material ingredients that go into a Lynch flick, but he lacks the innate understanding and soul to sire such a film, for only Lynch can direct a Lynch film.  Thankfully, quite unlike Lynch, Balaban has nil love for the people or place he depicts and has used the traditional Hebraic weapon of humor as a means to express his undying hatred for the evil WASPs that would not allow his parents and grandparents to play golf at their posh country club.

 In a sort of cold, detached, and wholly materialistic fashion, Balaban might be able to explain the mechanics and superficial peculiarities of Lynch’s films better than Mr. Eraserhead ever could (after all, Lynch is notorious for being ludicrously sentimental and superficial when explaining his work), but as the great German-American sage H.L. Mencken once noted regarding Jewry, they have “learning without wisdom.” Indeed, where a great Lynch film has a deep, dark, and foreboding metaphysical presence that that engulfs the viewer’s entire soul, Parents thrives on sterile domestic absurdism and a sort of nefariously neurotic spirit, but of course that is not why it is a somewhat worthwhile cinematic work. While the film was not actually penned by the director but a fairly unknown fellow named Christopher Hawthorne—an assumed goy that Balaban randomly met on a plane who worked in a cubicle at pay-cable TV network Showtime's marketing dept—it is immediately apparent while watching Parents that it was created by a racial/cultural outsider who sees 1950s WASP suburbia as a sort of sinister Aryan American utopia that breeds mindless conformism, racial purity, and bizarre pathologies. In other words, there is no doubt that Balaban sees 1950s America as the worst thing since the Third Reich, so naturally it is only fitting that he cast an extremely Hebraic looking little boy that looks like he could be the son of Rick Moranis to play the child protagonist. Somewhat ironically, the film concludes with the boy causing his totally unkosher parent to be burned up in a sort of explosive suburban holocaust that feels like a sick fantasy on the director's part.  It should also be noted that the cannibalism is ultimately revealed to be inter-generational, thus underscoring the irreparably tainted heritage of these extra evil Aryan flesh-eaters.

 Notably, French erotic novelist and unconventional Nietzschean Georges Bataille once wrote, “This [cannibalism] is a desire no longer active in us, one we never feel now.  Archaic societies, however, do show the taboo as alternatively in force and suspended.  Man is never looked upon as butchers' meat, but he is frequently eaten ritually.  The man who eats human flesh knows full well that this is a forbidden act; knowing this taboo to be fundamental he will religiously violate it nevertheless [...] The object some undiscriminating animal is after is not what is desired; the object is ‘forbidden,’ sacred, and the very prohibition attached to it is what arouses the desire.”  Keeping Bataille's words in mind, one could argue that the cannibalism depicted in Parents is merely the therapeutic means by which the all-too-normal titular characters in the film deal with their seemingly emotionally and spiritually draining lives of pathological conformity.  Indeed, it is no simple task acting like a fake bourgeois sociopath all the time, thus cannibalism—the ultimate forbidden taboo—acts as the ultimate orgasmic release from a sham life of self-basing and self-denying suburban conformity.

If Wiggenstein was right when he wrote, “The face is the soul of the body,” then 10-year-old protagonist Michael Laemle (Bryan Madorsky) must be the most patently soulless little boy in the entire world yet, despite his highly debilitating social retardation, he somehow learns to deeply loathe his parents, especially his father, due to their taboo eating habits. Indeed, if there is anything constantly captivating about Parents, it is Michael's brutally flat affect, which is apparent to both his parents Nick (Randy Quaid) and Lily (Mary Beth Hurt) and everyone he encounters, though he seems to be completely oblivious to his glaring social inadequacies. On top of his absurdly autistic essence and seemingly complete and utter incapacity to experience simple human emotions like happiness and joy, Michael tends to say inordinately random and inappropriate things and to ask extremely redundant questions that especially annoy the hell out of his father, who is a peculiarly private man that is obsessed with appearing completely normal.

Michael and his family have just moved to a new undisclosed suburb from Massachusetts and on the first day of school, the protagonist makes quite the first impression when he states to his entire class after his teacher Miss Baxter (Kathryn Grody) asks him to name one new thing he learned over the summer, “Um, if you take a black cat and broil it on the oven…and you peel off the skin of the bones and take it off…and you check on the bone, you’ll be invisible.” While his teacher treats him like a foolish retard and his classmates laugh at him for his nonsensical black cat spiel, he impresses a tall blonde girl named Sheila Zellner (Juno Mills-Cockell), who was held back a grade because she may or may have not done sexually inappropriate things with male classmates and who tells the rather gullible protagonist that she is originally from the moon. While she is a good foot taller than him, sassy Sheila wastes no time in aggressively flirting with Michael by stating, “You ask a lot of question. I like that in a man.”  In other words, Sheila likes the fact that she is the one that gets to wear the pants in their budding relationship. Additionally, Michael takes a likening to her because he genuinely believes she is a space alien. In fact, when Michael informs his parents that he has made a new friend and that she is an extraterrestrial of sorts, his father Nick gets angry and states, “We can’t make friends by telling lies, Michael.” In fact, virtually anytime they interact, Nick gets mad at his son because he says weird things and especially because he refuses to eat. After all, it must be a hard thing for a cannibal to have a son that refuses to eat human flesh that he went to relatively dangerous lengths to procure.  While Michael might be quasi-autistic dunce that seems to be pretty much oblivious to everything, it is only a matter of time before he finally realizes the source of his subconscious dread towards his parents' hermetic home cooking habits.

 As demonstrated by the fact that he routinely refuses to eat and incessantly has horrendous nightmares involving tons of blood and dismembered body parts, Michael seems to subconsciously realize that his ostensibly clean-cut and wholesome progenitors are actually savagely sadistic cannibals with a kinky blood fetish. Indeed, one night after suffering an extra bloody nightmare, Michael goes downstairs and is shocked to find that his half-naked parents are doing some ‘erotic wrestling’ while partly soaked in blood. While he is not beneath killing to acquire corpses, Nick , who is conveniently employed as a scientist at a lab in the Division of Human Testing of a seemingly evil corporation called Toxico, mainly gets his man meat from work where he has a witless nerd underling specially prepare the bodies for him. As for mommy Lily, she does most of the good clean cannibal cooking, though Nick tends to do the grill cooking. Undoubtedly, Michael has a much better relationship with his mother, who, unlike Nick, does not yell at him when he says rather insane things to her like, “[I] found a way where we never have to buy gas anymore. You find some people but they have to be hanged. And you. . .And you chop off their hands and you throw them in the fire and they burn forever.” As a little lad with a fiercely flat affect, Michael naturally makes himself seem all the more creepy by incessantly blankly staring at people as if he is trying to smother their soul. In fact, when Nick catches Michael staring at him one day, he remarks to his son during an extra akward moment of father-son anti-bonding, “You watching me? That’s smart. It’s good to watch. But you know what? Other people are watching you [laughs] At school, at home. . .maybe even in the bathroom. Don’t let them. First law of survival. Do you understand? It’s the next best thing to being invisible.” Of course, considering his increasingly antisocial behavior and reluctance to eat meat, Nick keeps a special eye on Michael, who does just the same exact thing, albeit in a more uniquely unnerving way. 

 When Michael is forced to draw a picture of himself and his family for class and decides to add tons of blood to the sketch as if he were a serial killer-in-training, his worried teacher seeks a social worker named Millie Dew (Sandy Dennis) for help. Miss Dew is somewhat neurotic and when Michael first sees her, he says rather rude things to her like “You’re not a real doctor” and “You’re not a real grown-up. Real grown-ups don’t get upset.” Somewhat predictably, when Michael’s mother comes in to meet with Millie in regard to his aberrant artsy, she lies her ass off and claims that her husband and son have a great relationship. In reality, Nick is perpetually pissed at Michael for refusing to eat meat and usually only spends time with him during dinner time. When Michael dares to ask his father, “We’ve had leftovers every day since we moved here. I’d like to know what they were before they were leftovers,” Nick absurdly replies, “Well, before that, they were leftovers-to-be.” Indeed, it seems that Nick believes that all humans are potential leftovers-to-be. While no one is allowed at his house, Michael simply cannot hold back his little girlfriend Sheila when she runs inside and begins wrecking havoc around the entire place. Naturally, daddy Nick is more than a little bit annoyed when he catches Sheila pouring the patriarch's prized Château Margaux wine on Michael's unclad torso while the two both sit inside a meat freezer in the basement, which is where all the human flesh is kept. Aside from banning Michael from ever playing with Sheila again even though the bad little girl is the daughter of his boss, Nick tells him the following creepy  pseudo-fairytale while tucking him in the for night, “This is a story about a boy…a very naughty little boy about your age, who thought he was better than everyone else. So he played where he wasn’t supposed to play and he destroyed other people’s private property. Do you know why this little boy was this way? He only cared about himself. And in the end, he grew up to be a very lonely, unhappy, self-centered little man.” When Michael’s mother tells Nick to stop telling the story since it is clearly scaring him, the flesh-eating family man expresses his seething hatred for his prodigal son by stating, “Oh, well, mister, you scare me too. You don’t look like me. You don’t act like me. You hate me. Well, you know what? I’m not so crazy about you either.” Needless to say, things only get worse from there. 

 Despite being banned by his father from visiting, Michael soon sneaks over to Sheila’s house and she warns him that all parents are evil phonies and then inspires him to distrust his father all the more by remarking, “Daddy says your father has a lot going on inside his head. Doesn’t say much. Just like you.”  Considering she seems to be the only person he truly trusts and respects since she is the only person that accepts him for who he actually is, Michael ultimately takes Sheila’s words of wisdom very seriously as he immediately decides to sneak into the ‘Division Of Human Testing’ laboratory of his father’s work where he hides under an autopsy table while Nick is carefully dissecting an elderly male corpse. When Nick accidentally drops a pair of surgical scissors on the ground, Michael foolishly grabs them and then runs out of the building.  While Michael manages to evade being spotted by his father, it does not take long for a hopeless paranoiac like Nick to realize what his son has been up to. Of course, things get a little bit unnerving for Michael when his father not only discovers him walking him home, but also later discovers that he has his scissors while they are sitting at the dinner table, thus confirming that the protagonist has been spying on his father. When Michael lies and absurdly states that he found the scissors on the front lawn, his father states, “Do you know what happens to little boys who tell stories? The muscles in their jaws start to tighten and then their lips get stuck together permanently” and then violently stabs a slab of meat with said scissors that is sitting on a plate right next to the protagonist. Later that night after his parents go to bed, Michael finally gets enough testicular fortitude to go looking around the basement and he ultimately gets the shock of a lifetime when he finds a dismembered human leg hanging from a meat hook. 

 When Michael finally tells Millie about his concerns regarding his parents’ antisocial eating habits, the sullen social worker reluctantly accompanies the protagonist back to his house to prove that the decapitated body parts that he claimed to have seen in the basement are just a figment of his imagination. Of course, the two eventually happened upon a corpse, thus causing Millie to scream like a banshee that is being gang-raped by a gang of meth-addled Mexican bikers. Not surprisingly, Millie’s piercing scream alerts Michael parents and thus leads to the social worker being hunted around the house while the protagonist hides. In a scene that was blatantly lifted from Blue Velvet, Millie hides in a closet while Lily stabs through the door with a butcher knife. Though Millie puts up a valiant fight for a neurotic woman that even includes her intentionally wounded her hands by grabbing the knife blade so as to make Lily think that she has been mortally wounded, she is ultimately killed and cooked on the family grill, though Michael vehemently refuses to eat it. In fact, Michael trips his father when he is carrying a tray of Millie’s grilled body parts to the kitchen table, thus hinting that the protagonist developed a special affection for the social worker despite his general distrust of grownups. As punishment for his reckless indiscretions, Michael is tied to his dinner chair while his father states to him in a sadistically self-satisfied  manner, “I’ve been watching you, Michael. You’re an outsider. You’re not like them. You’re like us […] We’re bound for life. No matter how much you hate us. I’m untying you and when you’re free, you can sit down with us and eat, or you can run outside and shout your little secret to the world. And you know what they’ll do? Michael, hmmm? They’ll come here, and they’ll burn us.”

As it turns out, Michael would rather see his parents burn. Indeed, aside from telling his parents that he does not love them anymore due to their quaint eating habits, he stabs his father immediately after he unties him. At this point, Nick decides enough is enough and resolves kill his only son, even yelling like a disgruntled mad man, “Kids! Who made the little bastards? […] We’ll have another one, Lily. We’ll bring him up right.” Of course, despite being a deranged bitch, Lily loves her son too much to allow him to die, so she stabs Nick in the back while he is carrying Michael down the basement stairs. Naturally, Nick stabs Lily back and while he is lying on top of her and penetrating her wife with a knife, it seems like they are making love in what ultimately proves to be a sick (anti)sentimental moment that seems symbolic of their unhinged marriage. While Nick makes a dramatic attempt to catch and kill Michael while succumbing to his wounds, he ultimately causes the entire house to blow up after breaking a gas line and knocking over a large wine rack containing dozens upon dozens of bottles of Château Margaux.  Luckily for Nick, he at least dies in his cannibalistic mancave while drenched in his two favorite drinks: blood and wine. In the end, Michael is happy to go live with his grandparents in the country, though he is left somewhat uneasy when his elders leave a sandwich filled with dubious meat on his nightstand after they tuck him in at night in what is a superlatively stupid and entirely predictable yet somehow fitting twist ending. 

 Be it looked at as a poor Judaic’s take on Lynch, pro-Vegan crypto-propaganda piece, satire of lame old school TV sitcoms like Leave It to Beaver, allegorical depict of American’s Jewry’s innate feeling of alienation in WASP suburbia, PSA for young Jewish children about the dangers of white goyim or all of the above, Parents thankfully invites many interpretations that—for better or worse—oftentimes transcend what is probably the film's true intrinsic intellectual worth. For example, it should be noted that the protagonist’s family surname, Laemle, is very close to that of German-Jewish Hollywood pioneer Carl Laemmle, who was a founder of Universal Studios and who both financed and sponsored hundreds of Jews from Laupheim and Württemberg to emigrate from Nazi Germany to the United States in the 1930s. Notably, director Balaban comes from a similar background as his uncle Barney Balaban was president of Paramount Pictures for nearly 30 years from 1936-1964, his father co-owned a movie palace chain, and his mother was an actress. If one were to take the Laemle surname seriously as a subtextual reference of sorts, one could argue that the cannibal family is a metaphor for American Jewry's attempt to assimilate into the white Christian majority, with the boy protagonist ultimately rebelling against the secret cannibalism (translation: crypto-Judaism) of his parents (interestingly, there is no evidence in the film that the Laemle are Christians, as they have no crucifixes or portraits of Christ on their walls, which was quite common among white families during that time).  After all, whether it be the Marrano crypto-Jews of Iberia or the Ashkenazim of Germany and Prussia during the early 1800s who, like Karl Marx's family, oftentimes disingenuously converted to Protestantism as a means to enjoy all political rights of citizenship, Jews have a very long history of living schizophrenic existences and acting in a completely different manner while behind closed doors. Either way, there is no question that Parents is a playfully pernicious assault on pre-counterculture white American before feminism, cultural Marxism and the so-called ‘New Left,’ sexual liberation and birth control, civil rights and multiculturalism, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and no-fault divorce turned white gentile America into the innately amoral and irreligious chaotic nightmare it is today. 

 While not exactly a hit film among most respectable film critics and academics, Parents actually received a fairly rave review from respected American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who gave it three out of four stars and listed it is a “must-see.” Indeed, Rosenbaum audaciously wrote, “Choosing a movie to take with me to a desert island, I would opt without a second’s hesitation for Parents over such relatively predictable Oscar-mongering exercises as RAIN MAN, THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST, or DANGEROUS LIAISONS, because it’s a movie that kept me fascinated, guessing, and curious — even when it irritated me.” On top of quite generously comparing Balaban’s directing techniques to that of Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, and even Raúl Ruiz, Rosenbaum, who is a proud leftist Jew (and, like Balaban, comes from a family of movie theater owners), lauds the film for not succumbing to what he sees as the “politically conservative,” “reactionary,” and “retrogressive” nature of David Lynch’s films, arguing, “Far from being nostalgic about the 50s (i.e., the present) like BLUE VELVET, PARENTS is corrosively analytical about the subject, and there’s no real innocence to be found or celebrated here; even Michael has too much of a morbid streak to qualify as “pure” (like the Laura Dern character in BLUE VELVET).” Personally, I have to agree with Rosenbaum’s sentiments, even if I do not subscribe to his outmoded political beliefs, as it is plain to see that Lynch loves white suburbia and Balaban absolutely loathes it.  Interestingly, in the same review, Rosenbaum notes the curious fact that many of Lynch's fans are leftists, thus underscoring the seeming willful ignorance of his fan base.  Of course, to his great credit, Lynch has thankfully never made a film with imaginary negro rocket scientists or ultra altruistic Judaic humanitarians, as he seems to be completely incapable of following in line with the cultural Marxist Hollywood narrative.  After all, only Lynch could get away with directing a film like Wild at Heart (1990) that begins with Nicholas Cage violently beating to death a supremely sleazy sambo to the less than soothing sounds of heavily distorted metal music.  In many ways, Lynch seems to be the living embodiment of the deranged white suburbanite that inspired Balaban's debut feature.

Personally, I cannot even count the many times that I have seen wholly worthless horror films with both covert and overt anti-WASP sentiments, so it was almost refreshing to see a film as preternatural and nuanced in terms of its goyim-bashing as Parents.  Indeed, more than just simply moronically mocking white suburbia, the film is practically dripping with Balaban's own angst, paranoia, and disdain for mild-mannered blue-eyed and blond-haired people.  For whatever reason, it seems 1988 was a good year for wildly idiosyncratic anti-Aryan horror, as it also saw the release of the all the more perversely autistic horror-melodrama Pin (1988) directed by kosher Canadian Sandor Stern. Despite its absolutely bizarre brand of anti-Aryan paranoia, Stern’s film is absolutely beloved by an extremely gay Belgian nationalist/Odinist/neofolk fan that I used to somewhat know, but I digress.  

 A film that does for 1950s white suburbia what Revenge of the Nerds (1984) did for traditional Anglo-run universities and WASP fraternities in terms of mirthfully yet mercilessly maligning the old Euro-American mainstream and celebrating its demise in a fashion comparable to when Stalin’s Hebraic chief henchman Lazar Kaganovich bragged “Mother Russia is cast down. We have ripped away her skirts” while standing at the ruins of the great Cathedral of Christ the Savior after he had it destroyed, Balaban’s debut is an unintentional reminder why pogroms happen but that is also one of the reasons why it is so surprisingly intriguing, as it offers a rare insight into the sort of Hebraic paranoia that has led to Jewish politicians to promoting multiculturalism and the flooding of the United States with the sort of hostile third world people that have been brought here specifically to destroy the traditional racial, moral, and cultural character of the country.  Of course, this is also why most Jews, including the so-called conservative ones like Zionist warmonger and neocon Bill Kristol, are so petrified of Donald Trump becoming the president of the United States as he is a symbol of both WASP power and a serious threat to Jewish power and subversion, even if he pays superifical lip service to the welfare apartheid state of Israel.

Undoubtedly, it is hard to hate a film that the rather rotund celebrity film critic Roger Ebert once described as, “a real weirdo, one of the strangest, most depraved, certainly most depressing films I have ever seen.”  Of course, Ebert was also famously offended by Blue Velvet, so Balaban's film is in good company.  While Balaban would take one more shot at the horror-comedy subgenre with the rather lame undead romcom My Boyfriend's Back (1993) and would direct episodes of various horror oriented TV series like Eerie, Indiana (1991-1993) and The Twilight Zone (2002-2003), he never again directed anything nearly as interesting or socially substantial as the cryptically hateful iconoclastic idiosyncrasy of Parents and is probably best known nowadays for his acting roles in Wes Anderson films and quirky cult films like his fellow four-eyed Hebraic homeboy Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2001). Certainly, it is strange to think that the four-eyed dork that conned Jon Voight out of a free suck-fuck in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969) would go on to direct arguably the most sardonic and socio-politically esoteric of cannibal films. On a more personal level, I can thank Balaban for strengthening my craving for red meat.  Indeed, I have never considered Schrader's ladylove Mary Beth Hurt to be a particularly sexy broad, but in Parents she looks rather delectable while both fingering red meat in a dress and engaging in a sort of cannibal sex ritual while vital bodily fluids are covering her quite fair flesh.  Likewise, I never thought wild mensch Randy Quaid would be so good at portraying an unnervingly uptight bourgeois bastard who has more dark secrets than Jerry Sandusky.

-Ty E