The premise of
Night at the Museum is simple but totally compelling — every evening, once the lights are turned out and the front doors shut, the exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History come to life. The Tyrannosaurus rex runs rampant. Dexter, the capuchin monkey, wreaks havoc. The replica of Theodore Roosevelt does indeed wax eloquent. And the Neanderthals — possibly protesting Ron Perlman’s performance in
Quest for Fire — torch their own display.
I love the idea that exhibits have secret lives, hidden away from us casual museum-goers — that what we see when we walk by a static, glassed-in set of artifacts is merely the smallest fraction of an exhibit’s life. It’s easy to think of museum exhibits as static entities, but artifacts on display are actually dynamic objects with their own, unique histories...