Charlie Brown and the Alien Grave Robbers

From Menletter March 2005

By Tim Baehr

In Plan 9 from Outer Space, a cheesy low-budget sci-fi thriller from 1959 written and directed by Ed Wood, Jr., a couple of aliens have made repeated attempts to get the attention of the stupid Earthlings who seem bent on destroying their planet. After eight unsuccessful attempts, the aliens come up with Plan 9: to dig up a graveyard and reanimate an army of the dead to march on world capitals.

How often do we have a Plan B, let alone C, D, E, F, G, H, and I (that's nine) in our attempts at dealing with life? And how do we know when to quit, or even if we have the option to quit? The aliens in Plan 9 were ultimately unsuccessful, and there was no Plan 10.

And how often do we have to put up with cheesy settings, plots, and dialogs just to get through the day, week, month, or year? Or life?

Charlie Brown didn't have a Plan B. Think of the ultimate pathology behind Lucy Van Pelt and Charlie Brown with the football in the running gag in Peanuts. Lucy holds the football for Charlie to kick, and then yanks it away at the last minute, as Charlie whiffs the kick and lands on his head. Apparently, all Charlie needs to continue this farce is Lucy's repeated assurances that she won't yank the football away. The gag was repeated dozens of times over the life of the comic strip.

One definition of mental illness is the unvarying repetition of an unsuccessful act. At least the aliens in Plan 9 kept trying different stuff. They may have been stupid, but Charlie Brown seems to have gone a bit beyond stupid into crazy.

Both of these situations are played for laughs. Charles Schulz knew that a good comedy routine, especially slapstick like the football whiff, could be repeated; in fact the repetition itself became part of the shtick. Ed Wood may have had some serious intentions when making Plan 9, but his low budget and corner-cutting have, over the years turned the movie into a camp classic.

Ummm . . . let's see . . . what are the life lessons we can take away from Peanuts and Plan 9? I thought I could come up with some ideas, but mostly they're just questions:

· What unsuccessful things do we do over and over, especially if they involve an unreliable friend or partner? Would Charlie have been better off with a kicking tee, at the cost of ending a piece of drama in his life? Charlie had an unproductive relationship with Lucy, but at least he had a relationship. Do we sometimes need the drama, or the human connection, more than we need the solution? Maybe Charlie wasn't so crazy after all.

· Charlie didn't have a backup plan; the aliens did. How many backup plans do we need for any new undertaking? Do we need a backup plan even (or especially) if we succeed? Or are our lives just a series of backup plans so that when we die, we're in the middle of "Plan 34,927 from Inner Space"? How do we know when to quit? Can we know? Should we know?

And finally: How much of our lives are basically cheesy B-movies and slapstick kick-whiffs? Do we live mostly in a world of cardboard props, improbable plots and dialog, and two-dimensional cartoon characters? To the extent that we do, maybe sometimes we can take a step back, look around, and just . . . laugh.