SPOILERS for Coyote vs. ACME and various Christopher Nolan movies.
I just saw Coyote vs. ACME, and I loved it! There were so many metaphors for the problems that average Americans face and the evil corporations that cause them.
But as I was watching Coyote vs. ACME, I realized it was the opposite of a Christopher Nolan movie in the following ways:
- This film features color instead of blue-gray slop and nicely fitted costumes that suit the characters. (I see you, The Odyssey.)
- Every Nolan film is release with fanfare, with interviews with the man himself, and a star-studded press tour. People online, in the cast and crew, and in the entertainment industry had to fight to get released. It did get a premiere, but only after three years of people demanding that we get to see it.
- Coyote vs. ACME is set in Albuquerque, New Mexico and covers how powerful people are willing to sacrifice marginalized people to further their own ambitions. That type of sacrifice happened during and as a result of the Manhattan Project, which was headquartered in Los Alamos, New Mexico, but Nolan chose to omit those stories from Oppenheimer because they didn’t fit with his “tortured great white man” narrative that he loves so much.
- This movie preserves the Looney Tunes’ personalities for the most part. There are some odd things, like Tweety Bird being an ACME operative, but that’s eventually explained in the film. But Bugs Bunny is still Bugs Bunny, for example, and he’s worked into the story in a way that suits his trickster personality. Same with Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, the Tasmanian Devil, and our main players, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. Compare that to how when Nolan adapting something like Batman or The Odyssey, he has to tone everything down and make it serious. I’ve seen clips of Nolan saying he needed to “bring Oppenheimer into The Odyssey.” But Odysseus, King of Ithaca, is not the same as J. Robert Oppenheimer (for starters, one of them is fictional). Everything has to fit his worldview and his style of filmmaking, which cannot be compromised, ever, even if a compromise would keep things truer to the text.
- You can tell a story about a dark subject while retaining a sense of whimsy and absurdity. Coyote vs. ACME is a movie about how corporations will experiment on people and animals to get what they want, and they don’t care who gets hurt in the process. And yet, it has a ton of humor and zaniness to help the audience process the awfulness of what the ACME Corporation has been getting away with for decades. By contrast, Christopher Nolan does not want anyone having any fun during his movies. You should not be laughing. The most you get from him it a few lines of dry humor, and you should be grateful for that. You should be horrified by the darkness of humanity, even if you’re emotionally traumatized by the end. Why? Because the world is a dark place, and you just have to learn to deal with that.
- Coyote vs. ACME gives us a wonderful female character in Paige Avery, niece and intern to Wile E.’s lawyer, Kevin Avery. She’s a plucky young lawyer who genuinely wants to help cartoons stand up to ACME, and she’s oddly drawn to the chaos of the whole situation. She even enjoys throwing a cartoon bomb out a window! And she has no love interest! Needless to say, Christopher Nolan is terrible at writing women, and he could never write or direct a character like Paige to save his soul. He’s too in love with the concept of dead wives and girlfriends for that.
- It’s possible to trust your audience to understand your movie’s concept, so you can introduce that idea gradually as the film’s story unfolds. Coyote vs. ACME‘s creative team understood that, while Christopher Nolan does not. You see, Coyote vs. ACME immediately introduces you to this would where cartoons and humans live alongside each other, as well as the experiments that ACME performed on cartoons, without dedicating multiple scenes to explain the concept. Contrast that with how Nolan kept explaining the concept of going into dreams in Inception. There were so many expository scenes in Inception because Nolan just did not trust us to understand his movie’s central conceit, that there’s technology in the world of the film that allows people to go into dreams, but that there are some rules for using that technology. That concept isn’t that complex, Chris.
- Since Christopher Nolan is from the UK, he turns the USA into a monolith in his work, and he only cares about men from the ruling class of industrialists for the most part. I realized this after watching Jamelle Bouie’s Take on The Odyssey, where Bouie points out that The Dark Knight, Oppenheimer, and The Odyssey are all about wealthy white men who make technological transgressions that haunt them, and that that can be read as a metaphor for the U.S. as a whole. I think Jamelle Bouie is right about that metaphor, but Nolan’s metaphor forgets that the majority of Americans are not white guy industrialists and that they usually have very little say in what the U.S. federal government does in terms of foreign policy or technological advancements. Meanwhile, Coyote vs. ACME understands that corporations prey on and harm ordinary Americans who do not have the power that the white guy industrialists do. And I’m guessing that Nolan and many other people in European countries wouldn’t grasp that Project Sisyphus sounds a lot like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and many other instances of human experimentation that have happened in the last 250 years. You can also compare ACME’s behavior as a company to that of cigarette companies, pharmaceutical companies (especially Purdue Pharma, which created the opioid crisis), oil companies (who lied about their environmental impacts), and health insurance companies in the U.S. TL;DR: Christopher Nolan doesn’t understand or connect with working-class Americans and their concerns, but Coyote vs. ACME does.
- Christopher Nolan thought that he needed to strip away the orchestra for The Odyssey‘s soundtrack, so composer Ludwig Goransson only had a few sounds to work with. From what I’ve heard of that soundtrack, it sounds so limited and is honestly just as boring and overly serious as everything else in Christopher Nolan’s work. By contrast, Steven Price’s score for Coyote vs. Acme is quite creative in that it uses the Roadrunner’s iconic “BEEP BEEP” (or is it “MEEP MEEP?”) sounds in the soundtrack, and those sounds are sung by a choir! And they sound epic! Also, a couple of tracks on the Coyote vs. Acme soundtrack (specifically, “Fastas Hellas vs. Hungrious Carnivorous” and “What’s Up Doc?”) start with a sound that mimic the sound that starts the classic Looney Tunes theme tune, but it’s been toned down a bit to fit with the rest of the soundtrack’s tone. Now that’s cool! Give me that over “I told the composer the orchestra wasn’t allowed” any day!
- As far as I know, none of Coyote vs. ACME was filmed in an occupied territory like the Western Sahara. Nolan DID use Western Sahara for part of The Odyssey. I should note that the citizens of Western Sahara are not allowed to film their experiences living in that territory. (Learning this makes me wonder: Would Nolan try to film in Gaza if Zionist Hollywood execs said he had their permission to do so? I hope not. Free Palestine.)
- Christopher Nolan could never make a film that features so many wonderful bolo ties! (Did you know that the bolo tie is the official state neckwear/tie of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas? Because it is!)
Okay, those are all the comparisons and contrasts I can make right now. And I know what you’re thinking: Why are you comparing this silly animation/live-action hybrid film to the entire oeuvre of Christopher Nolan? They don’t have anything to do with each other. And it’s true, this is a random comparison that my ADHD-addled brain started making as soon as I finished watching Coyote vs. ACME. But that’s the thing that happens when you combine a certain amount of media literacy with a neurodiverse brain: you get interesting and seemingly random comparisons. And maybe that’s a thing the world needs more of, especially when many people online love to say “it’s not that deep” these days.