Moles and trolls, moles and trolls, work, work, work, work, work.

Real Genius (1985, dir. Martha Coolidge) is a lightweight comedy that is enveloped in a larger plot about the CIA using a university program to develop a weapon to kill political targets outside official declarations of war (topical!). Val Kilmer plays his part with a heavy-handed kookiness that isn’t as cool as it seemed at the time, but the dialogue is witty. Real teen Gabriel Jarrett, the central character who is not featured in most of the film’s advertising, is very good. He also strikingly resembles a young male version of Sarah Jessica Parker. There is a requisite party scene that looks like a ZZTop music video and some lite misogyny, but ultimately the film (for the most part) can be viewed with minimal cringing at the past. 

Resident artist Maura Murnane created her soft-sculpture installation around nostalgic physical pieces of dead media that she has held on to even though they have lost their function. This specific movie shared a themed VHS cassette in her childhood home with the movies “Weird Science” and “My Science Project.” Her parents taped it off of HBO when they had a 1-month free trial in California in 1989.

Murnane was born and raised in the oil base city of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where uncensored western movies in general were technically illegal. Pirated VHS tapes, smuggled from Bahrain, could be rented through private clubs run from people’s homes. After leaving Arabia, Murnane has lived in Texas, New York, and California. She has a BFA from UT Austin and an MFA from UC Irvine. Murnane has taught art at Scripps College, Pitzer College, Whittier College, and UT Austin, and also works as a commercial photo retoucher. She is drawn to and repelled by petroleum byproducts and their many forms, and the nature of desire as is it constructed in images.

This project is supported in part by the City of Austin Office of Arts, Culture, Music and Entertainment