From The Whitney Review of New Writing, Spring/Summer 2025
CHARLIE HAAS THE CURRENT FANTASY Beck & Branch, 2024 368 pages
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Charlie Haas wrote the screenplay for Gremlins 2 (1990), a film that speaks to audiences now because of its anarchic demolition of predatory capitalism and its cartoony-but-live-action relentlessness and wit. Before that, Haas wrote the movie Over the Edge (1979), which starred Matt Dillon and was one of the era's great movies about blowing up your high school—there was more than one. And before that, he was a magazine writer, one of the New Journalists of the 1970s, based on the West Coast though he's from Brooklyn.
He quit screenwriting at some point in the 1990s—really, how do you follow Gremlins 2? And once you've written Gremlins 2, what do you do with that sense of freedom at a place like Amblin Entertainment? He wrote one other wild movie, Matinee (1994), which was also directed by Joe Dante, then turned to novels.
His new one, The Current Fantasy, speaks to today like the movies he wrote, though it takes place about a hundred years ago, between 1914 and 1934. It starts in pre-World War I Berlin, moves across the Atlantic, then the whole U.S., to arrive at Sunland, a bohemian semi-nudist art colony in the California desert, an experiment in communal living and farming. The protagonists are a family, the Lanzes, the kids caught between their parents' semi-conflicting desires. Anna, their mother, wants "to know nature and bodies," to "meet the dispossessed," "to run naked in the woods and let the rain paste petals" on her skin. Which is not what their father wants from above. According to Anna, Gerhard's hope is that "Communism will fall from the sky and save us all."
The Naturmenschen were German intellectuals and free spirits who came to America in search of room to live, eventually inspiring the hippies. The Current Fantasy is like Thomas Mann writing Little House on the Prairie, an experiment in German idealism set in the dust of a new American nowhere starting to bloom. The difference between now and then is that America was functional, despite the various strains of bigotry and jingoism the Lanzes encounter.
In this unexpected, vivid novel, there is never the sense that Haas is ahead of his characters or that they are pawns of history. The book asks an essential question: Who told you things have to be this way? Maybe the movies did. The young Lilli Lanz goes to see her first film and Haas nails the ballyhoo on the way in. "NEXT WEEK! Pauline Frederick, the Queen of Emotionalism, in ASHES AND EMBERS from Paramount Pictures! . . . she chokes herself (as her double) into insensibility—a magnificent technical and dramatic achievement!" that somehow mirrors the history of Western civilization.
-A. S. HAMRAH