Barb And Star Go To Vista Del Mar

And Criminalizing Homelessness

When I was growing up, I watched “Saturday Night Live” as ritual. My parents would accompany me in my early years, but if I was ever around them when I was older, surely we’d turn it on. My father was old enough to recall those earliest years, though there were times he gravitated more towards “MAD TV” because he wasn’t a man of taste. When I was older, in the early 00’s, I would sometimes watch “SNL” with my father, though he had started to dose off, and was less-than-receptive towards the more contemporary music acts.

When I got out of prison, I visited my parents a couple of times. One of those times, I had noticed the cloud of age beginning to darken my father’s mind. He was forgetting things, he was repeating himself. Sometimes he’d start a train of thought and it would just bust out, off the tracks, into the ocean. We could still have conversations, he could still take his time and think about what he wanted to say. He could still complain, this we all noticed pretty clearly. We managed to sit down a few times to watch the “SNL Channel” on his streaming service (which he knew nothing about) that looped sketches 24/7. With his drifting memory, a “Saturday Night Live” sketch at four minutes long or so was perfect for his attention span.

He’s now in a home, unable to finish any further thoughts, unaware of what’s happening around him, and in need of constant care. The man I knew is no longer there, and we only provide maintenance for the shell that remains. My mother puts him on the phone to speak to me sometimes, and it’s just a mixture of words that are meant to resemble a sentence but never do. I think back and realize – the last movie we watched together, in a life of watching movies together, was “Barb And Star Go To Vista Del Mar”. A bittersweet memory, considering I put it on for my mother, as it’s perhaps the most mom-coded movie in existence.

This is a reunion of Kristen Wiig and Anne Mumolo, who were once friends in The Groundlings before they collaborated on the screenplay to “Bridesmaids”. That movie earned the two of them Academy Award nominations, but that didn’t exactly elevate them to an upper echelon together. While Wiig moved into a leading lady career, Mumolo toiled in character actor roles while struggling to get another script off the ground. Apparently she penned the screenplay for “Joy”, the David O. Russell movie, but she has spoken rather uncharitably about that experience, which involved being rewritten by Russell and, given his reputation, who knows what else. Starring with Wiig in “Barb And Star Go To Vista Del Mar” should have been another major accomplishment in their partnership, though unfortunately it ended up being a peculiar VOD offering during a deadly pandemic.

Mumolo, to her credit, is the ideal screen partner for Wiig. As Barb and Star, they are two annoying, gossipy busybodies who are laid off from a fairly-undemanding job at Jennifer Convertibles. To celebrate their freedom, they plan to hit the beach at Vista del Mar, a cheeseball tourist attraction where all the men wear Tommy Bahama and all the ladyfriends parade in culottes. Because of their suburban, middle-aged positive thinking, it seems as if everything is coming up Barb and Star, from the drinks to the living arrangements to just how perfectly tacky life can be on the boardwalk. You’ve never seen so much enthusiasm for the caricature artist on the pier.

What Barb and Star haven’t realized is that they’re pawns in a much larger scheme. The deadly albino Sharon Fisherman (Wiig again, playing Tilda Swinton, more or less) plots revenge against those at Vista del Mar who bullied her as a child. Complete with an underground lair, she plots to attack the beachgoers with mutant insects, the better to cackle over their misfortunes while dressing like Interstellar Rick James. Her henchman Edgar (Jamie Dornan) is tasked with reconnaissance, but what he didn’t expect was to fall for both Barb and Star, a fierce confusion that forces him to reconcile his inner turmoil in inarticulate song. Dornan, the stoic abuser in “Fifty Shades Of Grey”, is down to clown in more ways than one.

“Barb And Star” ends up being about two idiots who hide their affairs with the same man in hopes of preserving their friendship. It’s a familiar structure for movies with women in the lead roles, but rarely two clumsy, goofy older ladies like this. It’s worth noting how often men get to be goofy in mainstream media, and women usually have to play the “straight man” to those shenanigans. Women don’t get to just be silly and dumb, which feels like collective sexist chivalry on the part of Hollywood’s screenwriters. Barb and Star are dopes, but what’s most amusing is how they aren’t the butt of the joke the way that “dumb girls” usually are in comedies. Here, it reminds more of the male goofballs who enter narratives as dense and inflexible, only for the arc of the story to bend towards them. Barb and Star are not equipped to battle an underground supervillain, but this is a case where just being the main characters means they’re gonna have some luck on their side.

This is a big, broad comedy (my father loved it, for the record), but it’s also a movie of small, silly pleasures. You have to be willing to have an appreciation for “SNL”-style hijinks to really be on the film’s wavelength, which means not only do you get the jokes that prompt big applause, but also the smaller ones that, on “SNL”, would whisk by with no audience recognition. During Edgar’s big number, a seagull walks away from him, and on the soundtrack, you can hear the bird’s steps as if they were clacking heels. If you can appreciate that, or Wiig mega-acting as a bewigged albino criminal maniac, then this is the movie for you.

I mentioned yesterday how President Trump is overseeing a considerable, and violent, expansion of the carceral state. It’s worth noting who falls under his intentions, because we should know that first on the chopping block are the homeless. The ancient and long-denied lure of punishing the poor, a right-wing talking point until it became “impolite”, has returned, which was seen through the Big Beautiful Bill that supercharged the cost of living for millions while granting unprecedented relief to the wealthy. But that’s not enough. Trump believes they must be out of our sights (and he probably agrees with that imbecile Brian Kilmeade, but that’s another story).

ICE funding has increased thirteenfold, but it’s clear those resources will not primarily be used to chase immigrants. They will become Trump’s personal police force, tasked with carrying out whatever idiot whim Trump feels when he’s on Truth Social at 2 AM. They will be wielded against the unfortunate, and the poor and unhoused are next. And this is a larger mindset that boosts the viability of mass incarceration, a beast that imprisons over two million people in this country right now. Because when criminals are sentenced, the attitude is that they’re put away, out of sight, out of mind. It’s the idea, a false one, that we can just put away those that violate the law, we can banish people so that they don’t exist anymore. It’s a way to take people who need help and make them disappear. Well, I was in federal prison for over eight years. I didn’t disappear, I’m here now. And the same will be true for most of those two million other men and women I left behind. They can’t be eliminated. Fight back against the attitude that anyone can be erased, housed or otherwise.