You may have seen this video where Shelley Duvall says hello a bunch of times:
It’s now used to underscore sequences of outfits on Tik Tok, each one “radically” different from the last. The significance is basically, she wears shorts skirts I wear t-shirts can be the same person:
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Hilariously, in more recent iterations of the trend, the difference between looks is barely discernible:
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In the original supercut, each split second offers a fully fleshed out world with Duvall at its center. We see a glimpse of a setting that suggests a lush history - a forest, a cottage, a mansion, a void. Then, the next. You never quite know who the figure speaking to the camera is, who is meant by her costume, besides Shelley Duvall, our curator and host. Hello!
Shelley Duvall had two very successful children’s series: Faerie Tale Theater and Shelley Duvall’s Bedtime Stories. In each, Duvall appears in these richly detailed worlds for about six minutes an episode for two minutes at a time, only to say hello, goodbye, and introduce children’s stories other people had written and animated (narrated by “Hollywood’s biggest stars, including Mary Steenburgen!!”). Shelley always wore an eyepatch. One story about monsters coming to your door had a weird motif that was just a major pentatonic scale. I would play it on the Yamaha keyboard in my bedroom to send tingles down my own spine.
At the age that I watched Faerie Tale Theater and Bedtime Stories, I had an abstract sense that the world was deep instead of panoramic or even 3D, consisting of a series of doors that led to other worlds behind those doors forever.
Once, on the way to Disneyland, my parents decided they would rather take me and my siblings to Cape Canaveral. We rode the Mars rover simulation. We climbed into a shiny bumper car type thing and felt what it would be like to ride over craters and bumps in space. There was no identifiable object of fascination, the excitement of the experience was a cumulative set of sensations that it was clear people had set up for you. The sensations analogized a potential adventure.
(Is this so different from a rollercoaster? Yes, it’s way less fun. Or, it’s the kind of fun that doesn’t dislocate your heart from your ribcage.)
As I was writing this I realized I’d woven Bedtime Stories and Faerie Tale Theater together in my mind. In Bedtime Stories, Shelley introduces the program in a bedroom and never from anywhere else. In Faerie Tale Theater, Shelley introduces the show on the set where the entire fairy tale play will unfold. Maybe I misremembered because I watched each series for hours on end at an impressionable age, maybe because I’d replaced the memory of watching with the supercut that I’ve seen more recently, but this layered misremembering feels most accurate.
Footnotes:
Back in winter I saw the psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster speak about masturbation fantasies. She said these fantasies hold the contours of our deepest desires, you can deconstruct them like it’s a game to find the truth at the center. But even that center (which I guess is “the truth of what you want”) is something vibratory, to be relished, something that ripples. She played the game with the audience in real time. She also said she hated the magic wand because it just blasts you right into oblivion. There’s no process. Knowing this, I bought myself a magic wand for my 26th birthday.
In high school theater, my director forced us to strike the set no less than forty minutes after curtain call at the final performance. THEATER IS EPHEMERAL, he’d shout at us. Then he’d send us into the black box with vats of inky paint with which to obscure our labor of love. At the time, this felt very cruel to me. But maybe he meant to teach us that whatever you just did, you’re always in process. This was a great lesson that I took the wrong way.
”THEATER IS EPHEMERAL, he’d shout at us. Then he’d send us into the black box with vats of inky paint with which to obscure our labor of love. At the time, this felt very cruel to me. But maybe he meant to teach us that whatever you just did, you’re always in process.“
Aw beans, I miss this guy.