THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE

Remember the original? Not Goethe’s Der Zauberlehrling (1797) but the Fantasia segment in which Mickey Mouse tries to speed up his chores (you can’t) and then the brooms go wild—he chops them up with an axe and the splinters regenerate, multiply—and the water rises with his panic, a child’s sick dread when trouble comes. His master’s name is Yensid—spell it backwards and it’s the old sorcerer himself, the dapper cipher with all our imaginations held firm in his ink-stained hands. But why imprint expansive American generations with the gnarly German forest? This remake is Arthurian legend—Cage is Merlin’s apprentice, and in turn the master to Jay Baruchel in what Chris Kraus would call a classic case of the Cowboy (Cage’s leather duster) and the Kike. So did Walt, who looked around to find himself the most influential goy in studio-era Hollywood, somehow provide, consciously or not, the modern antidote to all those dwarves and witches and dragons by way of his humble alter ego? People, is Mickey Mouse a Jew?

Add to that the intertextuality with Spielberg, Disney’s spiritual heir, as when Baruchel weighs the magic Russian-doll before stealing it back with precisely the same gesture made by Indiana Jones when he palms the golden idol. And then to cast Alfred Molina: “Throw me the idol, I’ll throw you the whip.” A perfect economy, and far simpler than the vexed moment when Indy swaps the bag of sand onto the altar and all hell breaks loose. Because he miscalculates the weight, or because the temple senses, somehow, its own desecration? The great thing about Indy is how tired and beat-to-shit he is all the time. But when he finds an artifact, his eyes light up.

Reconciling magic and science, a geek gets a blonde. They’re NYU students, juniors, which if this is present-day means they would’ve taken Writing the Essay back in 2008. But they didn’t have me, or who remembers? When Molina’s asked to provide a Faculty ID he uses the jedi mind trick, but that won’t work, I need to get mine renewed this week. “I’m not your mentor, I’m your master.” Will we ever be done with school?