Jim Cummings' Thunder Road

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Each week, Drew creates a watchlist with film recommendations provided by you.

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The category was movies that weren’t what you expected. The winner has earned one ticket in the annual mystery prize lottery.

VOTE this week’s category: N/A.

Drew and I were at Sundance Film Festival this week, and so we’ll compile the list for next week’s newsletter.

SUBMIT for next week’s category: good movie, bad title.

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A spoiler-free description of the movie.

A police officer faces a personal meltdown following the death of his mother.

If you like these things, then you’ll like the film.

→ Emotionally inept lead characters. I’m not sure there’s an actor that does it better than Jim Cummings in this film.

→ Tonal tightroping. When movies are as funny as they are sad, affecting, and maddening.

→ When shorts become movies. This movie was based on an original short of the same name, also written and directed by and starring Jim Cummings. It’s a more episodic film, possibly influenced by his experience in making short films.

What I liked about it.

I became a Jim Cummings fan immediately after watching his feature-length debut, Thunder Road (2018). It’s one of those films that so deftly balances the emotional with the downright silly, a thesis you’ll find immediately proven right even if you merely humor me and only watch the opening scene.

Cummings’ work has a very distinct flavor, one characterized by a strange combination of genuine heartbreak and physical comedy and cringe. It’s almost reminiscent of a previous tnmn headliner, The Climb.

Most of all, Thunder Road is the sort of emotionally-grounded, unafraid fare that stands out in a film market where there’s a whole lot of playing it safe.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat.”

→ Thunder Road is based on Cummings’ short film of the same name. Cummings’ couldn’t afford the rights to the famous Bruce Springsteen song, effectively the centerpiece of the short film. After some success at Sundance (it’s often described as one of the best short films ever made), he reached out to Springsteen’s team who generously granted him the rights to the song.

→ The CD player in the opening scene malfunctioned during the feature-length shoot. This was a happy accident, and Cummings realized that the desperation, sadness, and discomfort of his character became heightened in the silence of a faulty CD player.

Thoughts only a little bit related to this week’s film.

Bury me in a bag.

Did you know that lurking underneath the American funeral industry are some of the most baldly manipulative marketing schemes on planet Earth? The discussion is downright fascinating because at its core, in this author’s opinion, is the struggle between decency and evil and spiritualism and consumerism and traditionalism and progress — enough to make your brain implode from the sheer weight of ambivalence.

If you’ve dealt with the passing of a close relative in recent years, you might have noticed something obviously intriguing as you planned the funeral if you weren’t so (reasonably) blinded by grief.

The director of the funeral home was probably respectful and appropriately dispassionate while offering their condolences and discussing the (forgive the unsavory language) corpse preparation, funeral service, and burial. In this mix is a delicate balance between the part where they provide a very real and useful service (funeral planning is both weird and hard) and the part where they try to sell you stuff.

THE PART WHERE THEY PROVIDE A REAL AND USEFUL SERVICE: The master of ceremonies talks you through the nitty gritty details. The funeral home can accommodate two hundred guests at a time and the guest book will be placed in the entryway and the immediate family will have an hour with the deceased to say their farewells prior to the service. Clergy can be arranged by the funeral home or you can make the arrangements yourself. Pick three family members to do these readings and three to give eulogy-style speeches. Select at least six pallbearers, who will be called upon to stand at the back of the room seven minutes prior to the conclusion of the service to ensure they are ready to receive the casket.

THE PART WHERE THEY TRY TO SELL YOU STUFF: Have you picked a casket? Is pine okay or did your deceased family member have taste? Did you want to spring for a down pillow and silk pillowcase or did your dead relative hate being comfortable? They are going to be there in the eternal and anyways, when is the last time you’ve heard someone voice their regret for making their dead loved ones slightly more comfortable for forever? Before I forget, how are you planning on remembering them? Oh, just pictures? We partner with a wonderful jewelry outfit down the road that specializes in grief jewelry. What about a necklace with their fingerprint imprinted on the pendant? Or we can put a teaspoon of your loved one’s ashes inside the pendant instead (it’s the classier of the two choices if you ask me). I don’t do this for everyone, but I like you. I’ll throw in an extra 15% off ash jewelry if you get two (the owner of the shop owes me a favor).

It bears mentioning that obviously no funeral director worth their salt is going to sound like a salesman. But make no mistake that intertwined with the real and useful service provided (one that is unfortunately unreasonably priced as it is) will be opportunities in the excess to pay more or add something or upgrade to.

Note: I’m not some idealist schmuck who hasn’t a clue that keeping a funeral home open for more than a week requires the owner has an actual business model with more than one revenue stream. Strange a fact as it may be, funeral homes need to make money and their business is death. Even so, this author can’t help but laugh when reviewing the resources available to young upstarts interested in the funeral business — and it’s hard not to get a yucky-slimy-icky feeling when you see the words “funeral” and “business” next to each other.

Johnson Consulting Group specializes in partnering with funeral homes to take their business success to the next level. Their website seems to have been written either by artificial intelligence or a person whose first-and-only language is the very American dialect known as corporatespeak. Here’s a few (actual) pieces of writing that a marketing intern (I assume) gave to their web producer to publish and that no one in the chain of command halted and appropriately asked what the fuck these words actually mean:

It’s worth mentioning that your author had a very hard time picking what to include in the above examples because the website is so infested with moronic generalizations that the speed at which my eyes glazed could break the sound barrier.

The meat-and-potatoes of the site are the pages dedicated to more informative topics, like this article explaining how to run a profitable funeral home. The advice dispensed in these articles is mostly focused on the corporatespeak staple: how to diversify revenue opportunities. In plain English: how to get more money mostly from grieving families. You can offer virtual services, cremation (in-house, not outsourced), and sell innovative keepsakes (e.g. necklace or bracelet charms, memorial wristbands, engraved glass hearts, forget-me-not seed packets, memorial magnets, memory coins, bookmarks). Much of the advice is a brazen attempt to sell JCG’s services, like the third item in three things to make your funeral business more profitable, which is (I shit you not) “Hire Consultants”.

One’s imagination doesn’t have to wander very far to understand why, as studied by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the price of funerals rose nearly twice as fast as consumer prices for all other items in the United States from 1986 to 2017. Your author didn’t bother finding data that almost obviously confirms the suspicion that COVID and further inflation didn’t reverse this trend. Though, I did notice that the data provided on the National Funeral Director Association website seems to focus only on time horizons that favorably position the costs of funerals (e.g. the most accessible data point appears to be that the cost of funerals has risen since 2023, but not as fast as the rate of inflation).

The rising cost of funerals is likely a leading culprit for the rising demand for cremation instead of burial, the preference for which is expected to rise to 80% by 2045 according to the NFDA.

This necessarily brings our conversation to politics and the environment. Yes, cremation is bad for the environment because it requires casket-loads of energy and fossil fuels and the CO2 from burning bodies turns out to be quite high. Traditional burial practices also suck, for what it’s worth — rendering big swaths of countryside useless for agriculture or urban development and instead burying a bunch of wood and metal and chemicals.

In a plot twist about as milquetoast as it gets, this beckons a dive into funeral lobbying for lesser environmental regulations and conservatism and liberalism and how our systems of government prioritizes private and public interests. I’ll save you the heartache — we don’t have the time to cover this today.

Facts: Funeral homes have to exist in the this economic environment, and wealth is increasingly concentrated in a small percentage of the population. Funeral homes, as we’ve already established, are real businesses, and they need to provide services and goods that sell to those with wildly more disposable income because of the fact that the wealth is concentrated. And so, they end up lobbying for fewer environmental regulations, pushing cheap and efficient end-of-life options to poor people, and selling $100 (this is a made up price) ash-infused bookmarks to wealthy idiots. It all might seem rather unfair and it’s the kind of thing you may be able to appreciate, even if you don’t like it.

It’s hard to imagine where the funeral industry might go, and what an “affordable” funeral might look like for the have-nots if this trend continues. Perhaps homes will start selling shared funeral services in which eulogies are written by the person who wrote the JCG website, so as to remain generic and platitudinal enough to apply to anyone’s death.

I suppose the bare naked point is that the American funeral isn’t just about processing grief and getting closure. That it invokes discourse about nearly every major issue in the civilized world. That it is a hotbed for manipulation and in the same way that youth groups in churches often attract pedophilia (not because churches are bad but because pedophiles see an opportunity), funeral homes are now attracting consulting groups.

The irony of it all is that, no matter which side of every single one of these issues you’re on, we probably agree that funerals should be about no more than sending off your loved one with dignity and beginning the very challenging process of getting closure for yourself and your family. I submit that, these days, agreeing on something unanimously is just about as good as it gets.