One venue in which enthusiastic moviegoing is still alive & well is the Outdoor Movie Night, especially the free, inflatable-screen showings of Family Friendly favorites like Coco or Moana.  Those screenings are more of a community event than your typical, isolating trip to the cinema.  Families spread out on picnic blankets, halfheartedly try to keep their kids in eyesight as they play around with new friends and, whenever bored enough, pay attention to the movie being projected.  It’s cute.  The Broadside offers that same kind of Outdoor Movie Night experience with a little more formal structure & focus, having built a Family Friend compound next to The Broad Theater for regular concerts & laid-back screenings.  The recent Wildwood showing of 1980’s Carny made great use of that communal atmosphere.  To play off the movie’s traveling-carnival setting, they invited face-painters, stilt-walkers, tarot readers, and cotton candy spinners as a pre-show warmup, concluding with local musician Brookiecita (of LSD Clownsystem) introducing the film over a slideshow of her own childhood photographs from growing up on the carnival circuit.  There were indeed kids running around the grounds too, this time eating cotton candy and enjoying the “VIP room” of inflatable pools.

That Outdoor Movie Night atmosphere is worth noting here because Carny is absolutely not a Family Friendly affair.  This is one of those teenage Jodie Foster roles that edge right up to the line of being too slimy to stomach without ever fully crossing it (see also: Taxi Driver, Foxes, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane).  Foster plays an underage waitress who’s bored with the tedium of small-town living, so she joins a traveling carnival on a whim after lusting after its most boisterous performer (Gary Busey in horrifying clown makeup).  Struggling to establish her place in the carnival beyond her function as The Dunk Tank Clown’s girlfriend, she briefly auditions as one of the striptease dancers in the “hoochie coochie” tent.  This decision lands the teenager in multiple compromising scenarios: modeling lingerie for hooting drunkards, getting body-slammed onto the stage by said drunkards, and eventually getting tied to a bed by a villainous goon who threatens to sexually assault her before her fellow carnies intervene.  The worst part is that her much older boyfriend knows exactly how old she is (while she lies to everyone else about already being 18), and the safer, more appropriate job he eventually finds for her is still as sexual bait in one of the carnival-game booths – this time working marks for pocket change, which we see play out in a lengthy sequence of lesbian cruising.

All of this dangerous flirtation with Jodie Foster’s early cinematic persona as Teenage Jailbait is eased by the film always implying its sex scenes instead of fully illustrating them and by its characterization of her as a consenting participant in her own seduction & indoctrination.  It’s also eased by the fact that Carny isn’t really about her seduction into the carny lifestyle at all.  It’s more of a love story about the two best bros she gets between: Busey as the clown and musician Robbie Robertson as his “midway” hustler trailer-mate.  Busey & Robertson love each other with furious devotion, often expressing their mutual affection in drunken acts of group sex with women they pick up on the road.  It throws off their dynamic when Busey catches real feelings for Foster, then, and that goes double for when Robertson inevitably has sex with her too.  Their seething jealousies & whispered bickering just outside of her earshot end up taking over the foreground of the movie while her own coming of age carny-life story fades into the background, so that it’s less of a love triangle than it is a tortured bromance.  That helps steal some attention away from the situational leering at Foster’s body, but Carny still made for an intensely uncomfortable watch at times, especially in an Outdoor Movie Night setting.

Of course, discomfort was the intent.  The movie opens with Busey smearing on his greasy clown paint before hopping into the dunk-tank cage, antagonizing every mark who strolls by like a screeching gorilla.  It concludes with a classic hall-of-mirrors horror sequence in which the carnies plot to scare off local thugs who are shaking them down for obscene payouts, essentially borrowing its climax from Tod Browning’s 1930s cult classic Freaks.  Despite those intentionally scary images and the amoral sexual politics of Foster’s seduction into the carny lifestyle, Brookiecita introduced the movie as a humanizing, empathetic portrayal of traveling carnival folk as a type of found family.  Likewise, Robertson co-wrote, produced, and partially scored the picture based on his own experiences as a teenage carnival worker, fondly remembering his time in the business.  Personally, I got my own “seedy underbelly of the carnival” crash course from Bikini Kill’s “Carnival,” not The Band’s “Life is a Carnival,” but I like to think I still got the message.  In Carny, Robertson seemed to be acknowledging both the warmth of the carnival community when dealing with their own and the grimy, violent hucksterism they could stoop to when dealing with outsiders.  In a way, that clash of familial warmth and carnival grime actually made it a perfect Outdoor Movie Night selection, the best one I’ve seen since The Broadside screened Demons with live prog-rock accompaniment.

-Brandon Ledet