This website is going to cover movies. I can’t think of a better collection of writers to guide you, constant visitor, through what’s turning out to be both a cataclysm and rebirth of what it means to conceive, execute, distribute, view, and ultimately talk about—and argue about—cinema. With that in mind, why not look at a dozen of my favorite “tour guides”—not only in movies, but in books, songs, and comics?

There are a few iconic characters I left off this roll call—and I’m willing to hear counter-arguments. The three ghosts in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, The Scarecrow in The Wizard Of Oz, The Emcee in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, and, finally, Beetlejuice, who rises from his crypt wearing a “Guide” cap—none of them make the list. Dickens’ ghosts are each focused on showing Scrooge one specific event or object; if anything, they’re QVC presenters. The Scarecrow is just as surprised as Dorothy by the people and situations they encounter on the way to Oz, and is essentially a traveling companion. The Emcee, despite being demonic enough to rise above the petty politics of both The Kit Kat Klub and the Third Reich, is a snarky, singing commenter, and doesn’t see the pink triangle and striped pajamas in his future. And Beetlejuice isn’t interested in guiding anyone anywhere.

Unlike…

The poet Virgil in Dante’s Inferno. One of the first, still one of the best. Who better to guide you through Hell than a Roman poet?

Actually, I can think of a lot better people, but Virgil does a slick job leading mid-life-crisis-suffering Dante though the first part of the Divine Comedy. Dante’s Hell is a barely coded laundry list of personal grievances and score-settling, inflated to the level of eternal damnation. I can’t blame him. Ten minutes in line at Trader Joe’s, and I’m imagining every Satanic torment within the cosmos visited on the people in front of me.

One line from Canto XXI has always haunted me, however. While crossing a little bridge, Dante alludes to a discussion he and Virgil have, “…of which my Comedy cares not to sing.” Wait, what? Considering the tsunami of rape, torture, forced shit-eating, disembowelment, and extreme awfulness that follows, what in the fuck could they have been chatting about that would make Dante think, “My readers are not going to want to hear this.” Where are the DVD extras on classic literature?

Speaking of “classic literature,” here are some tour guides from two graphic novels. If you listen carefully, the moment I put the words “classic literature” and “graphic novel” in the same sentence, Harold Bloom’s head exploded. But Sir William Withey Gull in Volume Two of Alan Moore’s From Hell and The Trenchcoat Brigade in Neil Gaiman’s The Books Of Magic are the evil and good, dark and light opposites of each other, as far as guides go. Especially guides of the supernatural.

Despite all the gaslit gore, coal-black killing, and Victorian disembowelments in From Hell, the most chilling scene comes early on, before a single murder: Sir William’s carriage ride through London (unfortunately excluded from the 2001 film adaptation). Netley, the illiterate coachman, is our confused, increasingly alarmed stand-in for Gull’s rapid-fire monologue about the history hidden in London’s streets, its link to male magic, and the sinister design that traps the city’s inhabitants inside a gigantic, ever-unfolding “magickal” rite. It’s Iain Sinclair channeled through a far scarier “mad doctor” than Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, or Hannibal Lecter, told to an idiot who recognizes the maze he’s trapped in too late. Eddie Campbell’s pen-and-ink crosshatching, like hasty morgue sketches, only deepen the darkness.

Then there’s Neil Gaiman’s quartet of DC Comics’ most enduring magical heroes, dubbed the Trenchcoat Brigade by Alan Moore creation John Constantine, to the annoyance of the other three: The Phantom Stranger, Dr. Occult, and Mister E. Together, they guide a young boy, Timothy Hunter, through DC’s occult universe. The four Books Of Magic are an amazing stand-alone story (and act as a more adult prequel to the Harry Potter novels), but also a good-hearted reminder that sometimes even tour guides are in as much danger— and are as lost—as those they guide.

We’re about to make the jump from books to movies, but we get there by way of song. A friend of mine from the U.K. once told me, “Of course the film industry is centered in California. The light’s so even and perfect out here.” Later on, when I became a regular guest on Steve Jones’ delightful Jonesy’s Jukebox on the now Internet-only Indie 103.1, he wondered aloud how any Briton could disparage Los Angeles. “Why would you trade the weather out here for the grey and rain of London?”

Yep. Brits love California, especially Los Angeles—and specifically, within Los Angeles, Hollywood. In “Celluloid Heroes,” The Kinks’ Ray Davies takes listeners on a mopey tour of the Hollywood Walk Of Fame, making lewd jokes about Rudolph Valentino, clumsy jokes about Bela Lugosi, and poignant, gorgeous statements about Marilyn Monroe and Bette Davis. But he gives the most positive accounting to, who else, another Brit: George Sanders, who “if you covered him in garbage” would “still have style.” Pretty accurate, since George ended his movie career with the distinctively trashy movie Psychomania, before killing himself and leaving a suicide note that said, elegantly, “I am bored.”

The idea of the musical tour guide, naturally, made its way to videos. Fee Waybill, in The Tubes’ “She’s A Beauty,” leads a pre-pube teen on a bumper-car ride through censored nipple posters and stark, early-’80s new-wave girls in cages. Holly Johnson, the lead singer of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, popped up in a music video within a feature film in Brian de Palma’s Body Double, leading a befuddled Craig Wasson through what had to be the most expensive porn shoot in history. If pornos normally have Bela Tarr-length handheld shots and Busby Berkeley-level choreography, then I’m watching the wrong pornos.

But it’s ol’ Diamond David Lee Roth in the video for his cover of The Beach Boys’ “California Girls” who remains the king of the music-video tour guides. Splayed on a conveyor belt like a fresh tuna roll, wearing a white vest and fedora as he points out 1980s MTV masturbation fodder, David Lee Roth was seemingly as confused about and ravenous for sex as us teenagers. Sex was fucked up when I was a teen. It was fucked up when everyone was a teen, and always will be. But we won’t always have a Diamond Dave to dance us through the jungle.

There’s nowhere to go beyond David Lee Roth in terms of music videos, so we might as well talk about movies. Before ascending to where most of you can guess where we’re going, we’ll start small and subtly.

Like Joey in the Philip Kaufman’s The Wanderers. The jittery, David Byrne-in-his-teens character, as played by John Friedrich, is clearly a stand-in for author Richard Price’s adolescent self, while also serving as a brief guide to the different ethnic gangs who make up the 1960s-era North Bronx. In a terrific, chaotic sequence near the beginning of the film, the diminutive Joey escorts Perry (Tony Ganios), his hulking, just-arrived protector, through the teeming hallways of their high school. That’s where he points out the Del Bombers, Mau Maus, Pharaohs, Executioners, Wongs, and, during a nightmarish later scene, the 28 Days Later-like Ducky Boys. It’s like a Marvel fanboy pointing out the various heroes, villains, and random factions between them, all in a breathless patter.

House Of 1000 Corpses, Rob Zombie’s 2003 directorial debut, has its fans and detractors, but does anyone not love Sid Haig’s cackling, having-a-ball performance as Captain Spaudling, the proprietor of the forgotten granddaddy of every early-’90s hipster/ephemera/memorabilia store, the Museum Of Monsters & Madmen? His spiel during the low-rent, charming, creepy “murder ride” is a foreshadowing of the meat grinder our four annoying protagonists are about to be dropped into. If only they knew how to listen unironically…

There is nothing ironic about either The Narrator or The European in Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark, a POV tour through Russia’s endless Hermitage Museum. Transported back in time depending on what masterpiece they’re standing in front of, both of the guides in this film are fearful of attacks from the figures they’re showing us. As severe and gloomy as a Russian winter, Russian Ark is a guided tour through Mother Russia’s wary, weary soul.

New York’s soul is wary and weary, too, but it disguises its spiritual exhaustion under a cheap mask of aggression and impatience. Which is why there’s no one better wired to lead us through it than Timothy “Speed” Levitch, in Bennett Miller’s superlative documentary The Cruise. I saw it in theaters three times, because I couldn’t get enough of Levitch’s living-Internet brain. He zips through Greenwich Village on the roof of a Gray Line Tour bus, pinging every literary, artistic, musical, and cinema connection that gets within 10 blocks of his roving eye.

Post-9/11, the Academy Awards did a tribute montage of New York. All the usual shots and dialogue samples. But there was one they didn’t use. I know why they didn’t use it, but it’s one of the most affirmative, hopeful, and hilarious assessments of what Manhattan was, is, and will be into the future.

It’s a shot with Timothy in mid-profile, shot from his right side. His tour bus is passing through midtown Manhattan, and he says this, while gazing out of the rear window:

“…You are sitting amongst the 20th-century invention. A city that grew up at an explosion, as an explosion, that is an explosion; an experiment, a system of test tubes gurgling, boiling, out of control. Of radioactive atoms swirling. Civilization has never looked like this before. This is ludicrousness and this cannot last.”

He then cuts his mic. There’s a period to his paragraph in the form of a raspy chhhh as the mike cuts out. He spins, counterclockwise to his left, and, after considering the city, which he now views moving toward him rather than disappearing behind him, says:

“The new Ann Taylor store on the right.”

It’s going to be okay. Thank you, Timothy.

Which brings us to Wonka. Not the bearded tatterdemalion from the original illustrations in Roald Dahl’s Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. And not Johnny Depp’s Anna Wintour-dressed-as-Michael-Jackson-for-Purim interpretation in Tim Burton’s movie. Nope. Gene Wilder. They might as well change the character’s name to Willy Wilder at this point, he so owns the role.

There’s been so much written about Wilder’s interpretation. The fact that you can’t entirely trust him. His weird, sadomasochistic undercurrents. The sly, passive-aggressive way he handles questions from the parents of the kids he’s guiding through his chocolate factory. I remember, in the TV column of Seattle’s The Stranger, a description of the film read, simply, “Children fight for survival in Willy Wonka’s chamber of horrors.” Not an inaccurate description.

So how about this, and I’ll leave you in the able hands of The Dissolve’s staff: Willy Wonka, for all his terrorizing, cheating, mockery, and riddles, ultimately wants everyone who visits his factory, and who tastes his wares, to dream better. To imagine better. To take in the creative arts with the same level of originality as those who made it.The people who create—the singers of songs, the dreamers of the dreams—demand the same from the people they’re trying to reach with their creativity. And I hope the same thing for the writers here at The Dissolve, as well as any future readers. Through passion, arguments, controversy, and ultimately understanding, maybe you can pilot your way through the psychedelic tunnel that movies seem to be racing through now, and come out the other side with your imagination and perceptions stronger. Imagination is the only Everlasting Gobstopper we’ve got.