Kansas City Royals put Weekend At Bernie's cut-out in the stands, inadvertently driving us to despair
Aux Features Film
The Kansas City Royals put a cut-out of Bernie from Weekend At Bernie’s in the stands as they played. At first blush, this is nothing more than a funny sight gag—a cute way to break up the tide of fan photographs filling stadiums during COVID-19 by offering a nod to a classic comedy. We have tried as hard as we can to leave it at that. We’ve tried to see this cut-out and just have a nice, pleasant, fleeting laugh at the creative decision. It’s a good joke.
It’s also, god help us all, something that leads to increasingly disconcerting thoughts the longer you look at it.
While Korean baseball teams have stuffed their stands with teddy bears and one Japanese stadium used a group of singing, dancing robots as an audience, America, like the subject of a Leonard Cohen song, wants it darker. Bernie Lomax is a dead man, after all, and, notably, he’s a dead man who is carted around throughout the length of a movie by people who like to pretend he’s actually still alive.
The grade 9 English class metaphor is easy to spot. Here is one of cinema’s most famous corpses, propped up like death hasn’t come for him, watching as MLB players compete in a disease-ridden battle royale for the benefit of their corporate overlords and the amusement of a country seemingly helpless in the face of a deadly pandemic. Bernie, mixed in with so many other frozen depictions of real people who can’t safely attend a baseball game, is an ominous symbol watching over all of this.
But no, we can’t think this way. The only choice we have to get through 2020 is to ignore the most horribly on-the-nose stuff we see in front of us, look on the bright side of things, and keep trucking. And hey: Maybe the Kansas City Royals don’t even know the plot of Weekend At Bernie’s. Maybe they just liked the laid-back attitude of a mustachioed Terry Kiser slumped motionlessly in his seat. Maybe that’s all there is to their choice, and we should just hum a few bars of “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” from beneath our face masks as we get on with the day.
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22 Comments
Two idiots propping up a corpse: as good a metaphor for America as I can think of right now.
Or for the Royals themselves, who had lost their last 6 games – a full tenth of the season – entering last night’s game.
Should put a cutout of Herman Cain next to him.
These pictures are fan-submitted, which means a season ticket holder did this.
And that person is a genius and they are invited to my birthday party.
“SERPENTINE!”
I’d love to see a Steve Bartman cutout at Wrigley Field.
Ah, should have Googled first — someone in Seattle had the same idea.
I mean, it’s a little funny, but I wonder about the legal issues around paying for someone else’s likeness to be printed and displayed. Bernie Lomax is one thing, since he isn’t a real person, but Bartman is, and has done quite a lot to remain hidden from the public.
Considering they basically handed his identity to the press to see a private individual’s life ruined I think MLB and a lot of news outlets should be really happy Bartman seems to be a really nice and humble guy who just wants to be left alone. I’d bet he could have sued them all and made many millions.
The grade 9 English class metaphor- The AV Club
When the country singer Joe Diffie passed away a few months ago, I shared his video of “Prop Me Up Beside The Jukebox (If I Die),” which is a direct ripoff of “Weekend at Bernie’s.” I wondered at the time if it was in poor taste, but I figured that Diffie would probably find it funny. (Diffie himself does not play the corpse in the video; that might have been a different story.)
Baseball and Weekend at Bernies already have a history together when the Oakland A’s and their fans were doing the Bernie Lean.
Like Bernie, the joke was already dead, but the AV Club is going to keep writing a whole article about it anyway.
I demand Bill Murray and Harry Carry cutouts for the Cubs. And maybe the cast of Major League for Cleveland.
PLEASE tell me some team out there has filled a few rows of seats with all the celebrities featured on the Sgt. Pepper’s album.
Or Waldo…..
Yay, it’s shit on the Midwest time!“The Kansas City Royals put a cut-out of Bernie from Weekend At Bernie’s in the stands as they played.”Sort of- these are paid for and submitted by season ticket holders, with a portion of the proceeds going to food banks.“Maybe the Kansas City Royals don’t even know the plot of Weekend At Bernie’s”We have movies, dick.“The grade 9 English class metaphor is easy to spot.”Agreed! Just look in the byline for Reid McCarter.
Stick to sports!
I maintain that the movie “Weekend At Bernies” does not actually exist. No one has actually seen it, it is just a meme that Mandella Effected itself into existence.
Hey Reid, are you or anyone else in the A.V. Club (or Kinja generally) ever going to do anything about the deranged troll who’s been harassing another user by taking his name and spreading vicious racism and misogyny on thread after thread for months, maybe years now? Or are you going to sit around with your thumb up your ass while your website is gradually transformed into the Daily Stormer?
Hey fellow commenters, are you ever going to start dismissing his comments, or are you going to keep replying to and promoting his comments like a bunch of hapless dumbasses?
Just let fans into stadiums to watch sports live and teams will get the real thing, rather than a cardboard cutout of a corpse.