Lights Off and Crying
Last day before Christmas break at vocational school, and we’d been grinding through databases and specifications—the kind of shit that makes you genuinely question the entire premise of learning anything. So when someone suggested ditching the final class and watching a movie, I was already on board. The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Tim Burton, 1993. I’d seen it a dozen times before, but somehow it never gets smaller.
Half the class hated it immediately. The songs got to them—that thing Burton does where characters just break into elaborate musical numbers about their feelings. But I’ve never been able to resist this film. There’s something genuinely magical about the way he builds the world. Everything feels both deeply familiar and completely wrong at once. The textures. Sally’s particular sadness. Jack’s absolute certainty about everything. It holds up.
Then Fiona Apple’s version of Sally’s Song
came on. Lights off and crying.