Horror film monster who has become an L.G.B.T.Q. icon / TUE 6-27-23 / Famed 1990s TV psychic / One-act Strauss opera adapted from an Oscar Wilde play / Beret-wearing rebel familiarly

Constructor: Anthony Gisonda

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (maybe harder if you don't know The BABADOOK, maybe easier if you do...)

THEME: MUSTACHE (59A: What each set of circled letters in this grid represents) — circled squares both spell and take the form of different varieties of MUSTACHE:

The Mustaches:

DALI

FU MANCHU

HANDLEBAR

PENCIL

Word of the Day: The BABADOOK (44A: Horror film monster who has become an L.G.B.T.Q. icon, with "the") —

The Babadook is a 2014 Australian psychological horror film written and directed by Jennifer Kent in her feature directorial debut. It stars Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Daniel Henshall, Hayley McElhinney, Barbara West and Ben Winspear. Based on Kent's 2005 short film Monster, the film follows a widowed single mother who must confront her son's fear of a mysterious humanoid monster in their home. [...] The Babadook premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 17 January 2014 and was given a limited release in Australian cinemas on 22 May 2014, initially failing to become a commercial success in its native country. However, it generated wider attention internationally, grossing $10 million against a $2 million budget. The film received universal acclaim, with particular praise for the performances of the cast, creature design, premise, and themes. At the 4th AACTA Awards, it won for Best Film, and Kent won for Best Direction and Best Original Screenplay, respectively. In the years since its release, it has become a cult classic partly due to its popularity as an internet meme. [...] In October 2016, a Tumblr user joked that the Babadook is openly gay; in December 2016, another Tumblr user posted a viral screenshot showing the movie classified by Netflix as an LGBT film. Despite the absence of overt references to LGBT culture in the film, fans and journalists generated interpretations of queer subtext in the film (dubbed "Babadiscourse") that were often tongue-in-cheek, but occasionally more serious, highlighting the character's dramatic persona, grotesque costume, and chaotic effect within a traditional family structure. In June 2017, The Babadook trended on Twitter and was displayed as a symbol during that year's Pride Month. The social media response became so strong that theatres in Los Angeles took the opportunity to hold screenings of the film for charity. Michael Bronski said to the Los Angeles Times: "In this moment, who better than the Babadook to represent not only queer desire, but queer antagonism, queer in-your-faceness, queer queerness?", and drew comparisons to historic connections between queerness and horror fiction such as Frankenstein and Dracula. (wikipedia)

• • •

This one was really betrayed by its revealer. Such an anticlimactic thud of a way to conclude a pretty interesting shape-themed puzzle. You'd be forgiven for not knowing that it was a MUSTACHE theme if all you had in the grid was the DALI, but after FU MANCHU or HANDLEBAR or whichever MUSTACHE you uncover next, it's obvious, so that when you finally get to the revealer, it's completely redundant and non-revealing—telling you what you already know. There's no wordplay, no snappy phrase, no nothing. Just plain old MUSTACHE, so what should be the punchline ends up being just a "[Shrug], couldn't think of anything good to put here so ... MUSTACHE." The clue doesn't even try to be clever. It's just pointing at the MUSTACHEs like, "nice MUSTACHEs, right?" I guess it's possible that you somehow got MUSTACHE first (?) or at least early, but since it's essentially unclued if you don't have the MUSTACHEs in place, it seems unlikely that revealer's gonna help you get the themers. Puzzle is designed for the reverse to happen, but the reverse just leads you to "yeah, I can see that already, thanks." So the puzzle has a revealer problem. There's gotta be a better, more oblique way to come at the revealer. As is, it's a letdown. But ... *before* I got let down, I thought this was pretty good, as shape puzzles go. You get four solid, visually accurate MUSTACHE types, of varying degrees of ornateness, and HANDLEBAR really does look great right across the middle of the puzzle's face. A very marquee MUSTACHE, for sure.

I did not know the DALI was a MUSTACHE type. I actually thought his was a variation on the HANDLEBAR, but it seems to be its own thing. I have never heard of anyone but Dali sporting a DALI, maybe that's the (slight) issue I'm having with that one. Dali's MUSTACHE is of course an iconic part of his image. It was like a creature unto itself. At certain moments, it's basically a reverse FU MANCHU:

The fill in this puzzle started out rickety. After coming out of the NW into ANAL / ALLIN / I LIED, I started having bad feelings about how much short gunk was going to dominate the puzzle, but things picked up a bit in the middle of the grid, and only plural USOS really felt clunky (35A: Shows for soldiers, informally). MISS CLEO and The BABADOOK give the middle a lot of personality, and the middle was already brimming with HANDLEBAR MUSTACHE personality, so that was remarkable. GLAM ROCK, always sizzling (18A: Ziggy Stardust's music genre). ON OCCASION and AS PROMISED aren't exactly sizzling, but they are weirdly satisfying as perfectly apt two-word phrases that require a little thought, maybe a few crosses, to parse accurately. This is important on Tuesdays, when the fill can run flat (because answers need to be relatively easy to get). I tried to make AS PREDICTED work at 29D: "Just like I said I would..." and ran out of room. I don't think I made any other outright errors. I was lucky enough to know of The BABADOOK, even though I've never seen it. I think if you're on social media a lot, and you follow a lot of film and LGBTQ folks, the Discourse just finds you. If you have never heard of The BABADOOK, I suspect this puzzle played at least a little harder than usual. Either way, I hope you were able to find some love in your heart for this whimsical little Tuesday. If you just pretend the revealer doesn't exist, it's really quite enjoyable.

 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]