The hosts of Green Screen take a sentimental journey, in Cody’s case to the dusty plains of West Texas where he was raised, and in Sean’s to a transatlantic flight where he saw this film for the first time while hung over after a heavy metal festival. In Holes, a Disney adventure film made for kids in 2003, Texas teen Stanley Yelnats (Shia LaBeouf) is wrongly accused of swiping some superstar keds from a charity auction and is punished by being forced to dig a bunch of pointless holes at a prison camp in the desert. He thinks it’s because of his family’s bad luck, but he discovers he’s been drafted into the unpaid labor corps of the prison warden (Sigourney Weaver) in her search for the buried treasure of a Wild West outlaw who played kissy-face with a poisonous lizard and cursed the town to 100 years of climate change. Environmental issues include global warming (you should have guessed that), the environment of West Texas, its real-life curse to be ravaged by fracking and other forms of fossil fuel extraction, and the mismanagement of water resources in the modern West.
How is West Texas different from other parts of the state? Why don’t environmental historians study it—are they cursed or something? How do you pronounce “Shia LaBeouf”? When did lipstick start to come in tubes? Have we ever seen a Ku Klux Klan rampage before in a Disney film? Why do the hosts of this podcast re-watch this movie at the end of July every year? Why was Europe’s biggest heavy metal festival laid low by a disease endemic to cattle? How did the director manage to recreate a Mafia hit sequence from The Godfather and sneak it into a kids’ movie? What are the Marfa Lights? All these questions and more are ready to be unearthed in this onions-and-peaches-scented episode of Green Screen.
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