“Thursday Trails” is a feature dedicated to linking TV, movies, and music as a trail to book recommendations. To read how it works, click here.
This Week’s Topic: Cult Classics / Cult Followings
Note: Thursday Trails Spotify Playlist is Here.
3 Time Tony Award Winning Musical, Next to Normal
Amazon, iTunes
Pretty much every Broadway show has a cult following… I would know. So putting a musical here is kind of cheating but this is such a great lead in to my trail, I couldn’t resist. The songs, “Make Up Your Mind/Catch Me I’m Falling,” “Aftershocks,” and “So Anyway” come to mind first when connecting the music to the themes present in the rest of my trail but don’t listen to “So Anyway” now if you plan on listening to the soundtrack in order. This is a musical, so it is recommended you listen to the story in the order that it is supposed to be told (at least the first time around). You’ll understand a lot better why I included this in my trail.
Okay, I know I have musical on the list already but it was either Hair or Across the Universe here (I’m always in a musical mood, this was bound to happen) and this fit better for the underlying theme here. Are you catching onto the thread among these titles yet?
Brimming with the energy, passion and music that rocked a nation, Hair is an entertaining and powerful tribute to the turbulent spirit of the ’60s. Brilliantly recreated by Oscar-winning director Milos Forman and screenwriter Michael Weller (Ragtime), this vibrant screen version of the Broadway phenomenon ranks “among the best film musicals” (The Hollywood Reporter)! Fresh from the farm, Claude Bukowski (John Savage, The Thin Red Line) arrives in New York City for a date with the Army Induction Board, only to walk into a hippie “happening” in Central Park and fall in love with the beautiful Shelia (Beverly D’Angelo, American History X). Befriended by the hippies’ pacifist leader, Berger (Treat Williams, Mulholland Falls), and urged to crash a formal party in order to declare his love for Shelia, Claude begins an adventure that lands him in jail, Central Park Lake and, finally, in the army. But Berger’s final effort to save Claude from Vietnam sets in motion a bizarre twist of fate with shocking consequences.
Lost Episode 3.17 “Catch-22”
iTunes, Amazon, Netflix Streaming
Yeah, I’m not going to tell you what happens in this episode. If you watched the show, you know what happens and it is…ah…sigh. I need a box of tissues just thinking about it. Anyway, you could can the “catch-22” theme (involving death, freedom, etc…) the breadcrumbs in my trail of cult followings. Which brings us to…
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Goodreads
“Catch-22” is like no other novel. It is one of the funniest books ever written, a keystone work in American literature, and even added a new term to the dictionary. At the heart of “Catch-22” resides the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war. His efforts are perfectly understandable because as he furiously scrambles, thousands of people he hasn’t even met are trying to kill him. His problem is Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions that he is committed to flying, he is trapped by the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, the hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule from which the book takes its title: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.
“Catch-22” is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to some one dangerously sane — a masterpiece of our time.