The Lost Boys musical is so fascinating to me, not just because it's a powerful adaptation, surprisingly sexy, and great to listen to. It's an adaptation that manages to pack in a lot of depth and complexity, tweaking and giving new angles of approach to the original text while managing to be its own distinct beast. On a thematic and structural level, it's a very smart show.
So I’ve been thinking and talking to @vraik about Wild, specifically this shot:
And something that I haven’t seen discussed too terribly much is how Max’s actions during this song mirror and presumably illuminate the origins of behaviors we’ve already seen David display.
Obviously one of the charming things about Wild is how the carousel is mimicking flight; Lucy and Max are presenting a theoretically more grounded, smaller, more ‘realistic’ adult counterpart to the soaring emotions and swooping nausea that David is giving to Michael one scene over. These feelings (love and erotic desire, Arden, jfc) make you weightless, spin you around, and leave you dizzy and disoriented; that’s why that massive prop is worth having on stage for this sequence, because it very effectively conveys those sensations as a match for the literal flights of the boys.
But the thing is, Wild isn’t just parallel to Belong to Someone--it also creates insights for readings of Time to Kill.
In the lead up to and throughout Time to Kill, he boys were loosening Michael up with his Very First Weed (and all the indirect brokisses puff-puff-pass entails); giving him jewelry; petting and playing with him and validating his emotions. David shows him how to “finger” and “strum”, (IYKWIM lol the fucking jerk-off motion kills me); he tells him he’s doing a good job at something he clearly finds impressive when he sees others do it.
They slide him down into a warm bubble bath of positive feelings so that by the time they’re ready to feed he’s already on Cloud 9.
The terrible irony is that it really seems like this is the happiest and most connected that Michael has felt to anyone in years, if ever--and that it’s a manipulation in the build-up to snuffing him out forever. This clearly isn't how they kill all their victims, but in this case they're sending their fan and Star's pick out on a high note, as it were.
With Wild, Max is doing substantially the same thing. He encourages Lucy to talk about her past, drawing her back into the nostalgia of having been Michael’s age and feeling the passion of free love, drugs, and counterculture. He takes her back to the happiest time in her life, to the young girl-turning-woman whose happy thoughts seemed to make flight a possibility. He doesn’t kill her, but right there he *wanted to.* She is Prey, and he’s lulling her just like David did Michael.
As David says, they both have fathers who don't deserve them.
We've seen some of the things that Michael learned from his father--that anger and violence is both dangerous and alluring. That his job is to stand in between. That 'softness' in a man is something to be scorned. That he's got too much and not enough in common with his father, and he fears that no matter which way he turns he will in some way be defined by that abuse.
Lucy, too, is being drawn to the idea of reversal; she tried being a hippie, married a hippie (and that was 100% because she got knocked up with Michael, as a child of EXACTLY that type of failed marriage I reserve the right to project). She tried being part of the counter-culture and she loved it, but it didn't love her back. Maybe the world was right, and she should just marry this Very Conventional Guy who idolizes Barry Fucking Goldwater because he's the opposite of what she had before... but first, let's take a spin on this carousel, remember the Good Old Days, and feel those butterflies that are from the centrifugal force, but you can pretend are love.
David was 'alone' for 100 years (except for Max 😬). Whatever his story is (and boy oh boy do i have headcanons. With timelines. It's extensive, but not actually part of the text.) David, for better or, let's face it, mostly worse, has picked up habits and traits from the very authoritarian 'father' against whom he rebels; he's learned how to get close, make a victim feel safe (it's not a date! just a tour! have a puff, you won't get caught!) and crave his approval (Max hated the 60s--can you change his mind? Can you strum this local rock star's guitar while he 'does the neck?' Can you keep up?)
IDK I just find it fascinating how the initial construction of David as a person in Michael's imagination (made clearer by the sexy dream Satan outfit in The Secret Comes Out)...
(Sorry folks, David does not literally own a pair of wet-look sequined pants and a velvet frock coat, Michael has just read too much Anne Rice and is Experiencing The Horny Torments)
...is directly inverted by our knowledge of the actual situation, especially since we're denied closure to it because by the time we/Michael can process it David is already descending into the pit. That's part of the tragedy: that Michael, buying David's hype, never truly understood how alike they were in all the ways he's least comfortable with himself.
That's what makes a twist strong; its adherence to the themes, structures, and logic of the text as already established. Good fucking storytelling.
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