The earliest literature in
every culture is filled with gods, demigods, and mythical beasts doing
fantastic things and interacting for well or ill with ordinary mortals. Ovid’s Metamorphoses reads like an adult
superhero comic book. In time these characters largely were replaced in fiction with
mortals such as Don Quixote, Tom Jones, the gunslingers in dime novels of the
19th century, and the ray-gun wielding adventurers of 20th
century pulp science fiction. To be sure, many of the heroes of these stories
might be braver than you or I and more skilled with a sword or six-gun, but
they are not superhuman – not even the most fanciful of them. Flash Gordon is
just a guy with keys to a space ship. Yet, in the past 7 decades we have come
full circle. Movies (today’s prevailing form of fiction) populated by superheroes
dominate the box office. The superheroes are very much in the mold of classical
demigods. A few (e.g. Thor) actually are the old mythical gods.
This was brought to mind by a
movie and by Halloween. Last night with friends I watched Thor: Ragnarok. On this Halloween day amid the ghosts and goblins wandering
the streets are numerous superheroes of the DC and Marvel universes. Superhero
films are not my preferred genre; this is not snobbiness – I enjoy plenty of
much trashier and more lowbrow fare – but just personal inclination. These
films are so much a part of the culture, however, that I make some effort to
see the major ones. Thor: Ragnarok was
pretty good for its kind. The dialogue was clever. The characters could be
enjoyably petty and make missteps in the manner of flawed humans – and Chris
Hemsworth has his fans for reasons that are obvious.
The prototype of the modern
superhero and still the most iconic is, of course, Superman, who debuted in
Action Comics in June 1938. He appeared in a live action film serial in 1948,
but my first introduction to the character was on the TV series The Adventures of Superman starring
George Reeves that ran from 1952 through 1958. Reruns ran regularly from the
50s to the 80s and irregularly ever since. Naturally, I watched the show as a
kid and was as likely as anyone to tie on a towel as a cape and pretend to fly.
Seasons 2-6 were family-friendly with a vengeance in accordance with so much of
the 1950s backlash to 40s worldliness. But not Season 1. Even as a preteen I
noticed something different about Season 1 quite aside from it being black-and-white
and starring Phyllis Coates as Lois Lane. (Noel Neill had the part of Lois in
2-6.) I wasn’t precocious enough to put into words what the difference was, but
by my late teens I began to get an inkling. To this day, despite the show’s low
budget and the limitations of early TV, Season 1 (first aired in 1952 but shot
in 1951) remains my favorite depiction of the man of steel. The explanation
begins a decade earlier.
The 1940s were the
quintessential decade for American culture – all the good and bad in high
relief. At its best, 40s music is great and
its style is better. Ugly social attitudes, behaviors, and laws were rampant in
the US, and were on display in the movies. Yet, whenever 1940s scriptwriters
slowed down to think about something and then actually tried to make a moral
point, the point almost always is unexceptionable. They knew better, in other
words, and the war tested folks’ moral compass like nothing else could. There
was more. WW2 veteran and accomplished author Gore Vidal frequently asserted
that the Sexual Revolution (in all its aspects) usually attributed to the 60s
really took place in the 40s – the 50s largely undid it, but that is another
story. Vidal himself contributed his part, publishing the best-seller The
City and the Pillar in 1946. The sophistication shows in the movies of the
era even through the constraints of the Hays Code: particularly in 40s film noir. Adult cynicism permeated
the genre but not to the point of nihilism and not without gritty humor. Philip
Marlowe is apt to do the right thing (not the same as the legal thing) in the
end, after all, even though he doesn’t expect to change the world by it. The
culture seemed headed the right way in the 40s, even though in practice it had
far to go. Life seldom proceeds in a straight line, however, and the 50s took a
turn.
Lois tries to rescue a trapped miner by
herself in defiance of safety rules
Decades never quite know when they are over, and some 40s style spilled into
the 50s. (For that matter, much 50s style was foreshadowed in the late 40s.) It
spills into the first year of
The
Adventures of Superman. But
for the fact that Clark Kent is a “strange visitor from another planet,” the scripts
and direction are classic noir. No episodes were written by Raymond Chandler,
but they might as well have been. Phyllis Coates’ Lois is the strongest most
capable Lois to date, very much including the Amy Adams version. Superman is
not the Boy Scout he is in the remaining seasons. When a crook and his moll in
one episode discover Clark’s identity, for example, Superman strands them on a
mountain; they die trying to climb down. So, I’ll take Season 1 George Reeves
over the wholesomely virtuous Christopher Reeve, the homey domesticated Dean
Cain, or the grimly broody Henry Cavill. I’ll take Bogart as Sam Spade or
Powell as Marlowe or Veronica Lake as undercover agent Ellen Graham over any of
them, but, as Superman portrayals go, George in Season 1 is my man.
While the modern superheroes have been around
for decades, until recently they have been a quirky minor genre on the screen. The
question remains why they are so popular today in a way that dwarfs all previous
time periods. There are entire books on that subject. (Try The Psychology of Superheroes: An Unauthorized Exploration by
Jennifer Canzoneri and Robin S. Rosenberg for a consideration of what motivates
the characters and why we care.) The abbreviated version of the consensus is
that at a time when few of us feel powerfully in control of our own destinies the fantasy of power is more appealing. Superheroes and their enemies also
paint our fears and concerns in broad palatable strokes: it is hard not to see
a proxy for partisan division in Captain
America: Civil War or for real existential threats in the ambitions of
Thanos. Then again, sometimes the appeal might be simpler. Maybe sometimes we
just like to tie a towel to our necks as a cape and pretend to fly.
On the last Saturday before Halloween, the Jerzey Derby Brigade (JDB) hosted
the Hudson Valley Horrors before a largely costumed audience in Morristown,
which itself abounded with costumed bar-hoppers.
The score see-sawed in the early jams of last night’s bout. An early
lead by JDB vanished as Hudson’s Durty Surely in a power jam put the
Horrors ahead 14-19. Hudson held the lead for several minutes until JDB’s #8
Lil Mo Peep added 19 points in a single jam and tilted the advantage back to
JDB 38-25. JDB did not surrender it again.
Both teams were tactically good at blocking in formations and
individually, with #0 Daemon’s Mistress (Hudson) and #1 LL Kill J (JDB) getting
in some well-timed individual hits. Jammers for both teams were skilled at initial
breakthroughs to lead status. Heavy lifting of the starred helmet for JDB was
by A-Bomb, Lil Mo Peep, and Val Royale; for Hudson most of the
jams were skated by Better off Red, Durty Surely, Eradikater, and Smashing Pumpkin. The difference was that JDB lead jammers more often made
multiple passes once they broke through, which is another way of saying JDB
blockers held up Hudson jammers longer. Hudson jammers regularly were pursued
fairly closely and so were forced to call off jams after a single pass. Blocking
was often aggressive with a takedown of Val Royale inadvertently taking down a
ref as well. JDB expanded its lead in the latter part of the first half, ending
the half with a substantial but not insurmountable advantage of 103-48.
In the second half, as often happens in derby, the trailing team
redoubled efforts. Hudson skaters took lead jammer status in the first three
jams, adding a few points at a time. A triple pass by JDB’s A-Bomb, however,
strengthened JDBs position from substantial to dominant by bringing the score
to 130-57. Knockdowns became more frequent on both sides as blocking stiffened,
but the scoring pattern persisted. In a star pass maneuver #64 Madeleine
Alfight took JDB over 200. #1979 Smashing Pumpkin put Hudson over 100. Despite
a strong multipass final jam for Hudson’s Durty Surely, the clock ran out with the final score at 228-131 in favor of JDB.
I don’t usually write four
blogs in a row that are Halloween-related. A look back shows that in most years
I don’t post even one. Perhaps the grinning guardian by my door this year keeps
reminding me of the holiday every time I enter and leave. The posts are a way
of tipping him for his service – not that he likely will be called upon to
greet costumed strangers.
A long way for candy bar
My driveway is just long enough to deter trick-or-treaters.
It is too much work to walk all the way up to my house for a single handful of
candy. Furthermore, after dusk my driveway is spooky, and the point of
Halloween is to laugh at fear, not actually to experience it. Not just kids but
adults frequently get spooked in and around my house at any time of year. At
night there are sounds of sizeable creatures moving in the woods that unnerve some
guests. I doubt ghosts and goblins are responsible for any of the crepitation; deer
are the most common source though there is the occasional bear or coyote. So, I
don’t get many kids coming to my door on October 31. Not one ever has walked up
the driveway. On rare occasion neighbors on my street will drive up to the
house and walk their kids to the door, but in two decades of Halloweens I can
count the number of times that has happened on one hand.
A visitor sniffs around my driveway
This is unlike the town center or any local side
street where the houses are less than 100 feet (30m) apart. Residents there are
visited by scores of kids – sometimes hundreds. Nowadays the homeowners meet
the kids’ parents, too. Back in the ancient days of my childhood parents
accompanied only very small children. By the time we were 8 or 9, while we
didn’t typically go out alone (groups of between two and six were commonplace),
we did go without parents. Someone probably would call the police if
unaccompanied 9-year-olds, even if in a pack, went door to door today. 13-year-olds
are unaccompanied (usually) even today because a 13-year-old would rather not
go out at all than be seen with a parent, but no one younger unless (sometimes)
in the company of a late teen sibling.
My scariest Halloweens were in my teens, but not
because I was in the spirit of the moment. Halloween (and the night before)
have a less harmless tradition than cadging candy: vandalism. Most of it is
relatively minor: egging, soaping windows, toilet
papering, pumpkin smashing, and the like. Some, however, is not minor at all. My
dad was a builder and construction sites seem to be a special draw to marauding
teens. Over the years they did substantial damage including broken windows, spray-painted
obscenities, and slashed tires on construction vehicles. So, by age 16 I had been
drafted into guard duty on construction sites on the last two nights of October.
If you want to spend a spooky Halloween, spend it alone (before cell phones) in
an unlit, unfinished house on a dark wooded lot.
Sis and I in my earliest Halloween
pic. 1954, I think.
We tend not to think of Halloween as a cultural
ritual, but that is what it is. There are harsh truths about life from which
children cannot be protected for long. There really are monsters in the world
(albeit not supernatural) and the harshest truth of all is that life ends. There
are worse and less healthy ways to learn to deal with all that than by mocking
it with graveyard humor, which at bottom is the point of the holiday. The
sugary treats help, too. Below a certain age kids don’t grasp the darker
elements of course, so they are happy to wear (as in my old photo)
bunny suits. (A teen might wear a bunny suit, too, but only as irony.) In a few
years, though, they will want something edgier like a vampire or zombie, which is
menacing but has advantage of being mythical.
For adults the lampooning of mortality is more
straightforwardly cathartic, since it is more imminent. As the size of the
Greenwich Village parade demonstrates, the holiday is enduringly popular with adults,
and it always has been more merry than morbid. Many costumes, of course, are
purely fanciful in the manner of a masquerade ball with no reference to the
holiday’s origins. In nearby Morristown, a typical midsize town, the streets
fill with bar-hopping costumed 20-somethings as dusk falls on October 31. I
realize the whole thing must seem odd to those raised outside the tradition,
but the ongoing spread of the holiday into seemingly unlikely countries
indicates it does have cross-cultural appeal.
So, this year, a jack-o’-lantern guards the door
once again. (For more on pumpkin jack-o’-lanterns, see an older blog How
Do You Say Isqoutm?) While I expect no rings of the doorbell
from costumed nippers, I am prepared with a candy bucket just in case. As for
the musical selection below, as an unrepentant carnivore I can relate to a fear
of being stalked by celery.
Les
Brown & Doris Day – Celery Stalks at
Midnight (1941)
This flick turned up on a movie
channel a few nights ago amid the seasonally gruesome October fare:
The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)
This modestly budgeted and unhyped
horror film, directed by Trollhunter
director André Øvredal, opened in theaters at the very end of 2016 to generally
positive reviews. The movie begins with a grisly crime scene in a house in a
rural Virginia county; this is the only scene in the movie that does not take
place in the morgue. All but one of the bodies at the scene are mangled. The
one exception appears pristine, and she is the only unidentified body in the
house. The young woman, were she alive, would be pretty, though no one ever
mentions that. The sheriff delivers the Jane Doe body to the morgue run by
father/son coroners Tommy and Austin (Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch). The sheriff
asks them to determine a cause of death by morning. Austin delays his date with
his quirky girlfriend (Ophelia Lovibond) in order to help out his father. The
autopsy reveals interior damage indicative of abuse and torture that is strangely
inconsistent with the body’s perfect exterior. Occult symbols are on an
artifact removed from the stomach. Odd things happen in the morgue including
the radio resetting itself. A storm strikes, power fails, a tree blocks the morgue’s
exit, and sound seems to come from another body stored in a locker. Austin
should have gone on his date.
Weirdness and tension build nicely
in this taut 86 minute film toward the final rush of action. It works as the
kind of movie it was intended to be. I’m not the best audience for it, however.
I never find stories that rely on supernatural elements to be scary. I’m
willing and able to suspend disbelief for the duration of a movie of this genre
enough to enjoy it on some level, but I don’t feel the suspension in my bones,
and so miss out on much of the intended dread. That said, this is (once again)
a pretty good film of its kind, so I’ll still give it a qualified Thumbs Up.
**** ****
There are horror movies for which I
am a better audience. By and large they are films in which the threat is all
too human. A list of ten follows. By no
means is this my list of “10 best horror movies.” That would be a very
different list and would contain better known titles. None of the following is
likely to appear on anyone’s “10 best” list. They are just ten films with
something to recommend them but nonetheless did poorly enough at the box office
that they might have passed under the reader’s radar. Although a few of their plots
do stretch credulity, none relies on the supernatural or physically impossible.
Not all entries are scary. A few are anything but serious.
The Girl Next Door(2007)
JackKetchum’s novel The Girl
Next Door was made into this deeply disturbing movie that Stephen King
called a dark-side Stand by Me. The
book and movie were inspired by the very real case of Sylvia Likens who was
tortured and murdered in a manner similar to what happens in this film. In the
1950s, Ruth takes in two distantly related girls when their parents are killed
in a car accident. Ruth has deep psychosexual problems and is angered by the
attractiveness of the older teen girl. Ruth orchestrates ever more vicious
abuse of her with the help of her sons and neighborhood boys and girls. One
neighbor boy, the protagonist, is basically a good kid but is tempted to
observe the dark spectacle for too long, which then makes his own guilt an
issue when he wants to intervene. The film is not for the squeamish – not
because it is graphic (it isn’t, really) but because what happens largely off
camera is horribly clear.
Orphan (2009)
This oddball variant on
the “evil child” movie has very disparate reviews but I’m among those who think
it works well. It’s hard to summarize without spoilers, but the ads for the
movie at the time said, “There's something wrong with Esther.” Something
indeed. A well-to-do Connecticut couple with two children of their own choose
to adopt a talented young girl whose previous adoptive parents died in a fire.
It’s a more multi-level and disturbing tale then that set-up leads one to
anticipate.
The Killer inside Me (2010)
The seamy low-life characters of Jim
Thompson’s marvelous novels are notoriously difficult to bring to the screen. There
have been three attempts at The Killer inside
Me. The most recent one with Casey Affleck and Jessica Alba is the most
successful. The relationship between the sadistic cop, who enjoys getting away
with mayhem, and the masochistic prostitute, who actually wants to be punished,
is perverse long before it turns deadly.
Faster, Pussycat Kill! Kill! (1965)
This cult classic B movie is superb trash. It is trash
transcending itself. Though there is not a scene or word of dialogue in it that
cannot be aired on daytime broadcast TV, the movie isn’t shown there because,
collectively, the scenes and dialogue are definitely not for kids. There are
killer strippers, a terrorized hostage, and (four years before Manson) a
twisted murderous family in an isolated desert ranch. Russ Meyer, with pocket
change for a budget, directed a quirky cast to make something special.
Depraved, but in a good way.
Psychos in Love (1987)
This was filmed for $75,000 and one wonders where they spent
all the money. OK, this is a bad movie. A really bad movie, despite the “cult”
status. The fact that some people (my hand goes up) laugh at it doesn’t change
that. Two psychotic killers find each other and discover that not only do they both
like to kill but they both detest grapes. True love ensues along with copious
gore. This is definitely not for everyone, but if your silly streak extends to a
certain type of (I’ll say it again) bad movie, you might chuckle at this.
Kalifornia (1993)
This is the highest profile
film on the list. It turns up frequently on cable movie channels. Kalifornia, starring Brad Pitt, David
Duchovny, Michelle Forbes, and Juliette Lewis, explores the nature of evil. The
difference between a “normal” person and a sociopath is not always obvious.
Most of the time, they look, act, and talk alike. They aren’t always “in
character.” Sociopaths can be kindly; normally kind people can be cruel. All of
us are capable of lethal violence in certain circumstances. But there is a
difference. Not all of us are casually brutal. Not all of us kill just for fun.
The distinction between those who are this way and the rest of us may be narrower
than we generally like to think, but the distinction is crucial. The parolee Early
(Brad Pitt) is evil, if that word means anything, as his traveling companions
find out too late.
Wild Tales [Relatos salvajes] (2014)
Quite a lot of harm in the world is committed
not by bullies, though plenty of bullies exist and do cause harm, but by people
who regard themselves as victims and lash out disproportionately. (Most mass
shooters fall into this category.) Damián Szifrón’s Argentinean film Wild Tales has six stories of people who
are unquestionably mistreated, but whose reprisals are, to put it gently,
immoderate. (1) "Pasternak": All the passengers on a plane discover
they know a flight crewman named Pasternak, and that he has a reason to bear each
of them a grudge. (2) "The Rats": A waitress contemplates a creative
use of rat poison when she recognizes a customer as the gangster who ruined her
family. (3) "The Strongest": Road rage erupts between two drivers on
a lonely highway. (4) "Little Bomb": A demolition professional has
his life and career ruined when he fights with bureaucrats over parking fines
and towing fees. (5) "The Proposal": A wealthy man’s son has a lethal
hit-and-run accident, which a detective and a lawyer both see as an opportunity
for extortion. (6) "Until Death Do Us Apart": During her wedding
reception, a bride ascertains that her new husband had cheated on her with one
of the guests. In all six stories the retaliation is so massive as to be the
larger crime. Wild Tales is
well-directed, well-constructed, well-acted, and full of graveyard humor.
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010)
Do you think the
horror movie plot of "preppy college kids attacked and killed by hillbilly
cannibals" has been done to death? Yes, me too: Offspring, Hatchet, The Devils Rejects, The Cottage, Wrong Turn (I –VI), etc., etc. So, it seems, did Eli
Craig (writer/director) and Morgan Jurgenson (writer), the makers of Tucker and Dalevs. Evil, so they turned the plot on its head. They present us with a classic horror set-up: exceptionally
attractive preppy college lads and lasses are driving into deep backwoods hill
country on vacation. At a gas station they cross paths with two rustics who own
a ramshackle cabin near the lake where the kids are camping. In fact, the men
are just a couple of completely harmless good ol' boys on a fishing weekend, but
the college kids have seen so many teen slasher movies with redneck villains
that they are frightened by the encounter. Later, when the two men rescue one
of the girls who has had a swimming accident, the remaining kids misinterpret
what they see. Believing the worst, the kids terrorize the hillbillies. Inadvertently,
they kill one another. The script is clever, dark, and very funny.
The Doom Generation (1995)
In the 90s there was a bumper
crop of ultraviolent films from mainstream directors and studios: Goodfellas, Natural Born Killers, Pulp
Fiction, and more. Most had something to say amid all the blood and gore.
Nonetheless, I get the feeling Gregg Araki found what they had to say
pretentious. Araki’s The Doom Generation
is simply nihilistic. The meaning of its violence is that it is without
meaning. While the three main characters (James Duval, Rose McGowan, and
Johnathon Schaech) don’t go seeking violence, violence always finds them. It
fazes them very little. Nor do they take sex seriously enough to be troubled much
by jealousy in their bisexual triangle. They don’t much care that their lives
are hell. (A careful viewer might notice that whenever they buy something the
price is $6.66.) This in many ways is the harshest movie on this list. Be
advised that though it has 61% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, those who hate it hate
it with a passion.
Eating Raoul (1982)
Decades never quite know when
they are over, and culturally the hedonistic 70s slopped over a few years into
the 80s. This film is both of that era and a parody of it. The prudish couple
Paul and Mary Bland have unsatisfying jobs, but he is a wine expert and she is
an inspired cook. They want to open a restaurant but don’t have the money. They
hit on a scheme of placing sex ads and then killing and robbing the people who
show up because “These swinger-types always seem to have money.” The bodies are
sold to a meat-packer. Then there are the cars in which the swingers arrived.
Darkly funny.
**** ****
There is not enough October
left for a longer list to be useful, but I’m sure something soon will turn up
appropriate for November.
In a couple of weeks ghouls, goblins, and other night critters will be
wandering the streets in the USA and beyond. Halloween has Celtic origins but
it was in the US that it took off in a big way, and the American style of
celebrating it has spread in recent decades even to seemingly unlikely places
such as Japan. The ghost costume – sometimes just a simple sheet and sometimes
something elaborate – is always among the most popular, and it is the most
classic. It is the costume most closely related to the origin of the holiday, after
all, since Halloween was supposedly the night when the boundaries between the
living and dead were at their most tenuous.
Halloween ghost costume from
California Costumes
I don’t recall a time when I believed in ghosts. I enjoyed ghost stories
as a child as much as anyone, but it never occurred to me that they were any
more real than werewolves or vampires. This wasn’t from any logic or insight
beyond my years. I believed in the most astonishing things including about the
manner in which presents appeared under a tree on December 25. Ghosts, however,
weren’t in the mix. In all probability I simply had been told they weren’t real
and believed that as readily as I believed other things my parents told me. By
the time I was old enough to start considering such things on my own, I saw no
reason to change my mind – about the ghosts, that is. I still could be creeped
out by dark places, of course. People are hard-wired to be fearful of the dark,
and for good reason. For tens of thousands of years very scary and very real predators
lurked just beyond the light of the campfire – other people being the scariest predators
of all. Along with these real threats, our ancestors worried about spirits. So
do many of our contemporaries.
It is impossible to tell when humans started to believe in ghosts and in
other types of afterlife since those beliefs predate civilization. They are
part of the lore of every culture and belief in them continues to the current
day. They are mentioned in the earliest writings from every continent. Whether
in the West, Asia, or Mesoamerica one theme dominates: ghosts are especially
apt to linger when they have unfinished business. Sometimes they visit the
living in dreams and sometimes they manifest to people who are awake. Revealing
a killer is a common reason to stick around, but sometimes the reason is
pettier. Sometimes the ghosts are just annoyed with their families. In Mesopotamia
illnesses were often blamed on ancestral ghosts, and shamans called Asipu
(which means “scholar” but “shaman” describes better what they did) would be
called in to placate them with charms and rites.
Ghosts are part of past and present literature. In the Roman comedy Mostellaria [Haunted] by Plautus from around 200 BCE, a well-to-do merchant
returning from a journey is deterred from entering his own house when his son’s
slave tells him the house is haunted by the ghost of a guest murdered by the
previous owner. Actually, the slave wants to keep him away because the
merchant’s son has been carousing inside with his buddies and with a courtesan
he bought and freed, but the merchant accepts the ghost story without question.
In the second century CE, Apuleius in The
Golden Ass or the Transformations of Lucius tells of a widow who is told in
a dream by her husband that the fellow now courting her in fact killed him; she
blinds the suitor with a hair pin. In Elizabethan times Shakespeare has no
trouble stretching the credulity of audiences with the ghost of Hamlet’s father
advancing the plot or with Caesar’s ghost warning Brutus about Philippi. Shakespeare
didn’t invent the latter encounter; he found an account of it in Plutarch.
Ghosts and hauntings are very much a part of American popular culture. They
include the likes of Resurrection Mary, a vanishing hitchhiker who haunts
Archer Avenue in Chicago, and the Greenbrier Ghost in West Virginia, whose
testimony figured in a murder trial. Regarding the latter, the death of Edward
Shue’s wife Zona in 1896 was originally ruled natural, but Zona’s mother Mary
Jane said Zona’s ghost appeared to her and said she had been murdered. Mary Jane
demanded an autopsy which revealed a broken neck. The defense introduced the
ghost evidence in order to discredit the prosecution, but it turned out that
the 19th century West Virginia jury believed the ghost, and Shue was
convicted. The White House is particularly ghost-infested. Abigail Adams turns
up frequently according to various visitors, and during the Wilson
Administration Dolley Madison was seen at least once. Mary Todd Lincoln heard
Andrew Jackson cursing in the hallways. Abraham Lincoln has been spotted repeatedly
including by Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands when she was a guest of FDR.
Every town has some house, hotel, or restaurant reputed to be haunted.
Some people see ghosts almost everywhere. What brought all this to mind was a
talk last week with a friend and former renter of an apartment in an old
building (built 1850) that I once owned but no longer do. She told me there had
been a ghostly woman in there with long black hair whom she and her mother placated
with candles. This apparition never accosted me in the 40 years I conducted
business in the building, but perhaps real estate bored her. The house where I
live now, built in 1978, makes a lot of noise: it groans, creaks, and knocks as
it expands here and contracts there with the weather and vagaries of the
heating system. I’m accustomed to the sounds, but overnight guests often
comment on them in the morning and say they thought I was walking around the
house all night. (I don’t walk around the house all night.) “Don’t worry,” I
tell them. “That’s just the troll who lives in the basement.” That doesn’t
always evoke a smile, and more than once I’ve been given an alternative
spectral explanation in response. The people who have said this to me so far without
exception have been sane in a general way. They just believe in ghosts.
It is surprising (to skeptics at least) just how many modern folk do
believe in them. According to a CBS
News poll 48% of Americans believe in ghosts. A Huffington Post survey had similar results with 45% believing, 32%
disbelieving, and 23% unsure. Counterintuitively, belief
in ghosts rises with education. In a 2006 study by Bryan Farha at Oklahoma City
University and Gary Steward Jr. of the University
of Central Oklahoma (reported in the Skeptical
Inquirer) education level was shown to be positively correlated with belief in the paranormal including
ghosts. 23% of college freshman believed in the general gamut of the paranormal
including astrology, clairvoyance, and ghosts (40% believed in haunted houses specifically, with 25% unsure), while
31% of seniors did, and 34% of graduate students did. The numbers are higher
when you narrow the questions to ghosts alone. One might think that most of
these students were not science-oriented in their studies, but science literacy
seems to make little difference. A 2012 study (see Science Education is No Guarantee of Skepticism by Richard Walker,
Steven J. Hoekstra, and Rodney J. Vogl) showed that the level of science
education among undergraduate college students had a negligible impact on
belief:
“We were interested in whether science test scores were correlated with
paranormal beliefs. For each sample, we correlated the participant’s test score
with their average belief score. Across all three samples, the correlation
between test scores and beliefs was non-significant (CBU r(65)=-.136, p>.05;
KWU r(69)=.107, p>.05; WSSU r(70)=.031, p>.05). In other words, there was
no relationship between the level of science knowledge and skepticism regarding
paranormal claims.”
The opinions of many of my fellow humans in this matter (as in so many
others) baffle me as mine necessarily must baffle them. “You’re not
open-minded,” is a charge I’ve heard from believers including personal friends.
Perhaps not, though I like to think that if a long-haired specter like the one
seen in my old building strikes up a conversation with me, I would be open to a
change of view. Few of us are entirely rational in our beliefs, much as we like
to pat ourselves on the back for being so. We believe and disbelieve what we
must, mostly for reasons beyond evidence and logic. Why do so many people
believe in ghosts? Christopher French, a psychology professor at the University
of London, says (quoted in The Atlantic),
“There is also the emotional motivation for these beliefs. The vast majority of
us don’t like the idea of our own mortality. Even though we find the idea of
ghosts and spirits scary, in a wider context, they provide evidence for the
survival of the soul.”
There are some other advantages, I imagine, to being a believer this
time of year. A movie such as Poltergeist
must be a lot scarier. I watch flicks of that nature the way I do ones
about Middle Earth: entertaining in its own way, but not remotely connected the
real world. Haunted houses must be more fun to visit, too. (I like the one in
Disneyland, though.) All, the same, I’ll stick with fearing threats from the
living rather than from beyond the grave. If in the end it turns out I’m wrong,
though, I’ll come back as a ghost to join the troll creeping around this house
at night. Scaring overnight visitors sounds like fun.
The following comments were not pre-planned for October, but by chance they
are seasonally appropriate. A couple months ago after finishing Matt Haig’s
scifi novel The Humans (see my August
6 review) I opened his earlier book The
Radleys. The Radleys are a middle class suburban family who are Abstainers
– not from alcohol but from blood. They are vampires, you see. I finished the
book in a few days, but decided to pair a review with one of a TV series with similar
night creatures. The critically well-regarded series Angel will be 20 years old in 2019. Somehow during all those years
I ignored it thoroughly, but, in the way that one thought leads to another, The Radleys brought it to mind and prompted
a belated look. The series lasted 5 seasons, and there are limits to my binge
watching tendencies, so only now am I done with it.
First, The Radleys. I know
what you’re thinking. Actually, I don’t but I can guess: “Not another book about vampires. You know it’s
been done.” Yes it has, but this is worth a read anyway. Haig’s vampires crave
blood the way an addict craves a drug, but they don’t actually need it. They
lose all their special abilities (including supernormal longevity) if they
abstain, but some do anyway for ethical reasons. There is an Abstainer’s
Handbook that reads like a 12-step program. Abstainers can live more or less
normal lives and even go out in daytime if they wear enough sunblock.
Peter and Helen Radley left the London nightlife behind in order to
raise a family. They are Abstainers residing in the Yorkshire village of
Bishopthorpe on Orchard Lane. They raise no suspicions from the neighbors of
being anything other than a bit quirky. Their teen children Rowan and Clara are
vampires, too, but they don’t know it. In fact they don’t know anything about
the family vampirism; they have been told that their photosensitivity is an
inherited medical condition, as in a sense it is. Peter and Helen maintain this
prevarication even as Clara makes herself sick with a vegan diet that is unhealthy
to vampiric metabolism. When a drunk boy gets pushy with Clara during her walk
back from a party, however, her fangs come out for the first time. Instinct
takes over. She kills the boy, drains his blood, and is physically and mentally
transformed. The lives of the whole family are upended by Clara’s act of
homicide, by the subsequent family revelations, and by the sudden risk of
exposure. Peter Radley calls on his emphatically non-abstaining brother Will to
help with the family crisis, apparently unaware that Will and Helen share a
secret about Rowan. Will, however, attracts the interest of authorities and of a
vigilante.
The Radleys’ embattled vampiric drives are described not just in the
terms of addiction but (not coincidentally) much in the same way Freud
describes the animal drives we all have and repress in order to be civilized. (See
Civilization and Its Discontents by
Sigmund Freud.) We do this with varying degrees of success, and if we are too
successful we make ourselves sick, as did the Radleys for so many years. The adult
Radleys encounter crises, choices, and betrayals of a sort that are largely
ordinary, if one allows for the vampire element, and these things get their due
satiric treatment. The true focus of the novel, though, is the struggle faced
by Rowan and Clara with adolescence, told through the metaphor of vampirism. Their
young lives are enhanced by discovering and accepting what they are, but at the
same time this poses dangers. It is one thing to know oneself and another fully
to act out all one's desires. Part of growing up, they learn, is “knowing which secrets need
keeping.”
Haig has written a funny and clever book. Thumbs Up.
Next up: Angel (1999-2004),
created by Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt, stars David Boreanaz, the fellow
from Bones and Seal Team. Boreanaz’ first big break came in 1997 when he was cast
as the 240-year-old vampire Angel in Buffy
the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003). Angel, unlike other vampires, has a soul
due to a curse by Gypsies back in 1898. A “soul” in Whedon terms is a moral
compass, so Angel is as capable of regret and self-recrimination as normal
people. (Normal vampires are guilt-free sociopaths.) Accordingly, he chooses
not to hunt people for dinner anymore, which on the whole makes him a better
date for Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) than otherwise would be the case. In the
final episode of Buffy Season 3 in
1999, Angel leaves Buffy and Sunnydale for Los Angeles – and for his own
spin-off TV show Angel.
It is not necessary to be a fan of Buffy
to watch Angel, but it helps. Buffy fans already understand the
backstories of several characters. Cordelia and Wesley, characters in the first
three seasons of Buffy, are regulars
on Angel, and there are appearances
(some in flashbacks, some in crossover episodes) by other Buffy characters including Darla, Drusilla, Spike, Buffy, Faith,
and Willow. Though the two shows take place in the same Buffyverse, there are
differences in how the para-world is presented in each. In Sunnydale only a
handful of people are aware that vampires, werewolves, demons, and the like are
real; Buffy and her small circle of allies therefore are pretty much on their
own in combatting them. In Los Angeles the demons are much more in the open and
a sizeable minority of people are aware of them and interact with them
regularly. (There is a cheap shot at L.A. in there somewhere.) Angel, Cordelia,
and Wesley operate a detective agency specializing in cases where those
paranormal interactions with humans go bad. Whereas Buffy is a show that metaphorically is about growing up, Angel is about the ongoing trials of
life once you’ve done that. What if you never watched an episode of Buffy? You’ll miss “in” references, but
the show still works on its own; only rarely (as in the season 1 “Five by Five”
episode when Faith comes to town) would an absence of familiarity with Buffy make a character somewhat
puzzling.
Joss Whedon likes to genre-bend and genre-blend. Angel is a film-noir/horror/comedy. It’s actually not the first
such mix in a TV series: Kolchak: The Night Stalker back in the 1970s had
just this combination. What Kolchak
didn’t have was character evolution, multi-episode story arcs, and meaningful
themes. (Kolchak had more of a
“monster of the week” format.) Joss Whedon just can’t help waxing philosophical
even at his silliest, and his taste for existentialism informs Angel as it does Buffy. The show is better for it. There also are thoughts about
corporatism and how it affects private ethics in the evil law firm (the reader
can decide if that is redundant) Wolfram and Hart. The show can be sentimental,
gruesome, and funny at the same time. Its characters range from baldly credible
to colorfully fanciful – including a demon who owns a karaoke bar. The result
isn’t Buffy, but it’s not bad. Yet
another Thumbs Up.
Vampires persist in the lore of our popular culture and
don’t seem to be going away anytime soon. The prevailing explanation is that
they allow us to express our hidden impulses through them. The sexual aspects
of vampires have been understood from the beginning – bisexual, one might note,
since they are open-minded about their victims. In much of the 19th
and 20th centuries guilt over fantasies that were at variance with traditional
morality could be lessened by employing fictional creatures to explore them. In
the 21st century guilt about violating PC morality (just as
puritanical in its own way) can be assuaged in the same manner. In a broader
sense, we can see vampires and other monstrous creatures as our own dark sides.
Carl Jung talked about the shadow: the part of the personality that is wild,
dark, and savage. Jung believed that only by acknowledging and coming to terms
with one’s shadow – rather than just denying its existence or projecting it on
to others – can one truly be healthy. The Radleys and Angel manage to do it in
fiction. Perhaps they can help us do it for real.
World War One has received (in
this country anyway) surprisingly little retrospective coverage in publications
over the past four years given all the 100th anniversaries of key
events that have followed one after another since 28 June 2014, the anniversary
of that fateful shot in Sarajevo. It pales in comparison to the coverage (which
I’m old enough to remember) of the 100th anniversaries of Gettysburg
and Appomattox. Nonetheless, the major catastrophes of the 20th
century were grounded in 1914 and even in the 21st century we continue to live
with much of the war’s consequences including in (but not limited to) the
Middle East. I imagine we will hear much more come 11 November, the anniversary
of the 1918 armistice, but meantime I occasionally opt to get a jump on the
crowd by revisiting a relevant book or DVD from one of my shelves when something
reminds me of it. There were two such revisits in the past week.
The
first was Hotel Imperial (1927), a
war film of sorts that was well regarded by most critics at the time and still
receives generally good marks today. The movie was directed by Mauritz Stiller
and stars Pola Negri, Rudolph Valentino’s squeeze who made a notorious spectacle
at his 1926 funeral. Hotel Imperial
is curious in that, despite being an American production, it comes off as a propaganda
film for Austria-Hungary, a country that didn’t exist in 1927. Part of the
explanation is that it did exist in 1917 when Hungarian author Lajos Bíró wrote
the original play. Another part is that by the mid-1920s animosity in the US
toward the former Central Powers had all but vanished. It is easier to be
generous in this way when one is on the winning side. (Vietnam, one may note,
is fairly friendly toward US these days.) It had become possible by then to see
the perspective of the other side. This was demonstrated even more clearly
three years later in All Quiet on the
Western Front (1930), the superb Hollywood adaptation of Erich Maria
Remarque's novel. A third and less obvious part of the explanation at this
distance from 1927 is public opinion about the war in the ‘20s. The hysterical
jingoism of the war years had given way to a widespread sour conviction that
the whole thing had been a colossal mistake, as in fact it was. I’ll return to
this last point in a moment.
Anna rescues Almasy again
Plot (some *spoilers*): Austro-Hungarian
cavalry officer Paul Almasy (James Hall) is caught behind enemy lines and takes
refuge in the Hotel Imperial when Russian forces capture the town. The
patriotic Austrian chambermaid Anna (Pola Negri) risks her life by disguising
Almasy as a hotel waiter; civilians in occupied areas could be (and were) shot
for doing such things. General Juschkiewitsch, the commanding officer of the
Russians occupying the town, makes the hotel his headquarters. The aging,
obnoxious, and rather corpulent Juschkiewitsch takes a very pushy interest in
Anna, stopping just short of force. Anna fends him off even as he plies her
with gifts. When Almasy can’t produce his identification papers, however, Anna
gets the general to overlook the matter of the “lost” papers by being
more…well…friendly. Attractions and jealousies among the hotel staff pose an
ongoing risk of exposing Almasy’s disguise as a waiter. A Russian spy comes
back through the lines with critical information on Austrian artillery
dispositions, but Almasy kills him before he can deliver it to Juschkiewitsch. As
the Russians investigate the killing, Anna once again risks her life by giving
Almasy an alibi of a nature that enrages Juschkiewitsch, though at least he is
not enough of a villain to shoot them over it. Almasy leaves the hotel at night
in an attempt to reach Austrian lines with his knowledge about Russian plans. (Juschkiewitsch
had been very indiscreet in front of the servant staff.) An Austrian advance,
with Almasy back with the cavalry, soon recaptures the town and the hotel.
There is a hero’s recognition for Anna – also a romance with Almasy despite he
being an aristocrat and she a chambermaid.
There is an unspoken subtext more
obvious in 1927 than today: all this patriotic heroism and violence was totally
pointless. A couple years after the time frame of the story Austria-Hungary
lost the war and broke into pieces. The Russians arguably fared even worse. What
was it all for? Even the romance has an unpleasant element of condescension to
it. This makes it a worse love story but a better movie.
The second revisit was motivated
by a discussion with a friend about (of all things) the 2017 Wonder Woman movie. I commented that the
movie keeps many elements from the original 1941-42 comics including the
underlying conflict with Ares (yes, that Ares) but reset in time to World War
One. The reset presumably was because morally it was a far more ambiguous
conflict than the second war, which works better for the tone of the script.
However, I added rather snarkily (hey, we all have flaws), that Wonder Woman’s
suspicion in the movie that Ludendorff was Ares in disguise was pretty silly:
“I’ve read Ludendorff’s memoirs,” I said. “He was a brilliant tactician, a
dubious strategist, and an arrogant ass, but he was not Ares.” In truth,
though, it was about four decades since I’d read those memoirs. They were still
on my shelf, so a revisit seemed in order to see if my opinion would withstand
a second look. Short version: it does.
Ludendorff’s Own Story, August 1914 - November 1918 [Meine
Kriegserinnerungen, 1914–1918] by Erich von Ludendorff was first published
in 1919 when conditions in Germany were chaotic in the aftermath of war. Ludendorff,
of course, had been Hindenburg’s right hand man and by the end of the war was
operationally in charge of the military effort.
One expects memoirs of this kind to
contain spin and self-justification, and those expectations are met here, but
it is still an invaluable record of the war from the viewpoint of highest level
of the German military. I wouldn’t recommend this as a general history of the
war, but if you already have some familiarity with the wider ranging events of
the era, the book makes fascinating reading. One surprising aspect of the
account is the sense of desperation it reveals, despite the General Staff’s
public bluster, from the moment the Schlieffen Plan started to go wrong in
1914, which was almost at once, until the last days of the conflict. It helps
explain some of the seemingly reckless gambles including Ludendorff’s final
1918 offensives in the West.
Ludendorff’s bitter invective at
the final defeat is directed less at the Allies – he expected no quarter from
opposing foreign governments – than at his fellow countrymen whose politics, he
believed, prevented a chance at respectable peace terms: “They and the
soldiers’ councils worked with zeal, determination, and purpose to destroy
everything military… The destruction of the German power, achieved by these
Germans, was the most tragic crime the world has witnessed.” This was a widely
shared belief that would lead to horrific consequences unforeseen in 1919.
This level of greater bitterness
towards one’s fellow citizens than towards foreign enemies is not uncommon: we
have some hint of it in our own country in our own day even without having lost
a major war. Mostly it is still manifested just as verbal rudeness, and one may
hope it remains no more than that. When actual civil wars finally break out
they are particularly brutal, which is what makes the escalation of civil
strife something to avoid. Thucydides wrote more than 2400 years ago about the outbreak
of civil war in Corcyra in 427 BCE between oligarchic and democratic partisans:
“The Corcyrans continued to massacre those of their own citizens whom they
considered to be their enemies... There was death in every shape and form. And,
as usually happens in such situations, people went to every extreme and beyond
it…ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally
unfitted for action.” We aren’t there yet, but I doubt human nature has
improved since 427 – or 1919.
I’ve posted the video below
before when discussing the First World War, but it’s poignant enough to repeat.
It was written by Irving Berlin in 1914 and recorded by Henry Burr that same
year, but I’ll use the 1968 Tiny Tim rendition in part for sound clarity and in
part for nostalgia – I first heard it sung by Tiny Tim.
