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The Dresser (“Trapped in the Closet, Chapter 1”)
by Lee
“What dresser?” you might be asking yourself. If you forgot, let me refresh your memory:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RtY-iJy6MU&start=213
Checks under the bed
Then under the dresser
He looks at the closet
I pull out my Beretta
He walks up to the closet
He goes up to the closet
The dresser doesn’t figure too prominently in the story–it’s just one of several places that the woman’s husband checks to find the source of R. Kelly’s ringing cell phone–and you barely even see it in this segment. So why am I choosing this obscure piece of furniture to stand along the likes of the Simpsons’ couch and Superman’s bed? Well, I think R. Kelly’s own words speak for themselves:
Now, to be honest with y’all, the Beretta, uh, I really needed a rhyme word for dresser, you know, and Beretta just came out. But at the same time, it make sense. That’s the interesting thing about Trapped in the Closet.
In other words, the presence of the dresser provides the creative spark for R. Kelly to introduce the Beretta into the story (he clearly would have had no pretense to introduce firearms into the story otherwise). With one stroke, R. Kelly raises the stakes of the game far above that of a simple love affair and a closet. The stage is now set for all of the high drama that ensues over the following 21 chapters. The midget? The stuttering pimp? It’s all made possible by this dresser.
Monkey outta nowhere! Fenzel, your reference to the wonderful Tick cartoon warms the cockles of my heart. This has nothing to do with furniture, but have you ever read the original Tick comic books? I read them before I read Watchmen, and I didn’t realize until recently how very many Watchmen references there are in there. A very gentle and loving superhero parody parodying a far more negative superhero deconstruction? How meta!
I have read a bit of the old Tick – but most of my downward spiral of comic self-parody comes from a years-long reading of the ENTIRETY of Cerebus the Aardvark, which literally drove me to the brink of a mental breakdown — to the extent that I actually had to throw away most of my books (I think I kept Jaka’s Story), to avoid looking at them again and becoming phenomenally depressed.
You know what I was really surprised to see? The _American Splendor_ references in the early volumes of _Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles_ I read recently. My roommate’s girlfriend picked up a compilation of some of the earliest TMNT books from somebody who was throwing them out – and there’s a lot of reverence in there to other early independent comicsp, which of course TMNT surpassed in popularity by orders of magnitude.
Pretty funny that TMNT was name-checking American Splendor ten years before the first TMNT movie – and twenty years before the American Splendor movie.
History works in mysterious ways – especially when you’re dealing with artists who see the world as individuals, rather than the institutional creativity you see out of the corporate titles.
Wait, it’s a devil face on the back of the chair? I always thought it was a cat.
The Dude’s rug from “The Big Lebowski”. It really tied the room together, you know?
I thought about the rug from Lebowski, but then I wondered if a rug really counts as a piece of furniture. It’s more of a home furnishing, no? I think part of the definition of furniture is that it rises vertically from the floor to provide utility.
But then again, as Donny often is, I may be out of my element on this one.
If I’m not stretching it by suggesting a TYPE (and if they aren’t just appliances), I’d say the televisions in the _Toy Story_ movies. Every time a TV shows up, one of the major characters has a pivotal self-identity revelation, one that drives the plot forward and without which no character development would occur; or it gives characters plot-driving clues without which the story would end.
Some other suggestions from the OTI writers that didn’t make the post were:
Arthur’s round table
C.S. Lewis’s wardrobe
Cat in the Hat Credenza
Python’s comfy chair
The bed from Bedknobs and Broomsticks
Chairey from Pee Wee’s Playhouse
The table in Da Vinci’s Last Supper (is it fiction or non-fiction? Somewhere in between?)
All fine choices…but only one of them (sort of) rhymes with “Beretta.”