*batteries not included expressed something I’ve always felt in my bones: that interesting matters more than the beautiful.
Not the successful or the shiny – the interesting. Frank’s café with its cracked linoleum where the coffee tastes like forty years of conversations. Faye feeding pigeons on the roof while her mind drifts between decades. The artist upstairs whose paintings are terrible but whose heart is magnificent. This is where the magic lives in the film.
The tiny UFOs that show up, they’re not really the magical bit – they’re repair creatures doing what repair creatures do: fixing things. They can see what the developers can’t: some things are too interesting to throw away.
And those are the best places to be – I’ve never wanted to live in the posh areas. Give me the streets with graffiti layered like tree rings, the shop where someone will fix your broken tv and pretend not to notice you can’t afford a new one, the café where the coffee is unreasonably strong and the people watching is even better.
Throughout the film, you never get a sense that this renewal is permanent – we know it can’t last. The shiny developers, the yuppies and the gentrified always win eventually. Painting over everything interesting with words like “regeneration”. Which is like improving a forest by turning it into a car park.
We’ve traded character for convenience, discovery for algorithm and the interesting for the efficient.
So… yes, even with alien intervention, this is borrowed time. But maybe that’s enough – to keep the worn, the broken, the wonderfully complicated alive for one more day. And that’s the real magic – not the tiny flying saucers, but that someone thought this story was worth telling at all.
I miss those corners where you could still find something unexpected. I really do. -Mom
*batteries not included arrived on home video this week in 1988, after a lukewarm December 18th, 1987 theatrical release.