Books – Ash Clifton, Writer

What I’m Reading: “Bogie and Bacall”

So many good books have already been written about Hollywood legend Humphrey Bogart that even a biographer as talented as William J. Mann must have felt the need to find a new twist. A new gimmick. And with Bogie and Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair, Mann found one—a combined biography of Bogart and his famous wife, Lauren Bacall. It makes sense. After all, in the last years of his life, Bogie found himself as half of the first great celebrity couple. Long before Bennifer or The Beckhams or even Taylor/Burton, Bogie-and-Bacall entranced the public with both their movies and their marriage, never mind the fact that the public image of their relationship was largely fabricated by studio hacks.

It wasn’t all fabricated, though. Yes, Bogart and Bacall spent much of their marriage living somewhat separate lives, as one might expect in a pairing where one partner is so much older (and hard-bitten). They often travelled separately, for extended periods. Bogart continued a intermittent affair with his long-time mistress, and Bacall had an intense (and possibly physical) relationship with Frank Sinatra, to whom she was briefly engaged after Bogart’s death. Yet, by all accounts, the love and respect between the world’s most famous couple was genuine and deep. So deep, in fact, that Bogart actually cut down on the booze, at least for a time, after Bacall got sick of him coming home plastered (when he came home at all).

Indeed, in Mann’s telling, the story feels very much like a redemption tale for Bogart. This is especially true since most of the book is devoted to his life story. I would estimate a 70/30 split between words devoted to Bogie and Bacall, respectively—an imbalance that makes sense for a number of reasons. For one, Bogart’s biography began twenty-five years before Bacall’s. And by the time their romance first kindled in 1944 (and the Bogie-and-Bacall legend thus began), Bogart had been a movie star for over a decade and had already made his two greatest films, The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, establishing him as the most important film actor of his (or perhaps any) generation.

So, it’s perhaps inevitable that most of Mann’s book would be devoted to his life story. And, as Mann reveals, most of that story was taken up by his Bogart’s two obsessions—acting and booze. The two pursuits were related, of course; Bogart’s damaged psychological state (he had a sterile, lonely childhood) informed his acting even as it fueled his drinking. A deeply intelligent man, Bogart honed his artistry to a level unseen previously in cinema—he could play heroes and villains with equal prolixity—yet his intellect caused him to hate most of the Hollywood people he met, including himself.

Beginning in his youth, Bogart was known for getting drunk and punching other guys in the face. He took the habit with him to Hollywood, where he struggled for years under the thumb of studio system, grinding out B- and C-grade melodramas for the ruthless Jack Warner. And even as his star began to rise (his breakout role was that of a mesmerizingly evil villain in 1936’s The Petrified Forest, much like Javier Bardem’s in No Country for Old Men), his drinking only intensified.

As often happens with alcoholics, Bogart soon married someone who could match him drink-for-drink. Mayo Methot was a highly regarded actress who starred in many films throughout the 1930s. She was beautiful, intelligent, and deeply troubled. After marrying Bogart, she essentially gave up her already waning film career, and the disappointment and frustration of married life drove her to drink even more. And fight. Humphrey and Mayo soon became known as “The Battling Bogarts” in the tabloid press for their frequent, public rows. One of the most notable of these came while they were on a U.S.O. tour in Italy, entertaining troops fresh off the battlefields of World War II.

[The] Battling Bogarts made at least one appearance. After practically “distilling themselves” drinking with a group of paratroopers, the couple squabbled and Mayo locked her husband out of their room. As Bogie attempted to break in, he was apprehended by a colonel, whom he told to go to hell. As a guest of the army, he was called to account. “I didn’t mean to insult the uniform,” he said during a hearing. Looking at the colonel, he said, “I only meant to insult you.”

Despite their conflicts, Bogart doggedly remained married to Methot. Until, of course, he met a nineteen-year-old beauty named Betty Joan Perske, who went by the stage name Lauren Bacall.

One the most compelling aspects of Mann’s book is the almost unbelievable contrast between Bogart’s long, grueling rise to fame over almost two decades and Bacall’s overnight success. Bacall was doing a bit of acting and modelling work in New York when her photograph was spotted by Nancy Keith, wife of legendary actor Howard Hawks. Keith convinced her husband to give her a call. As if that development weren’t serendipitous enough for the young actress, Hawks’s secretary misunderstood his instructions and sent Bacall a plane ticket to Hollywood for a screen test. After meeting Bacall in person, Hawks was so taken by her beauty, intelligence, and poise that he immediately signed her to a seven-year contract. For her first picture, To Have and Have Not, she had a small part, intended to only give her one or two short scenes with the lead, Humphrey Bogart.

There is a scene in Homer’s Odyssey washes ashore on the island of Phaeacia. Naked and starving, he is discovered the virginal princess Nausicaa, who takes pity on him and saves him. I have heard the moment of their meeting described by one professor as “absolute innocence (Nausicaa) meeting absolute experience (Odysseus).” After all, by this point in the story, Odysseus has been at war for ten years, lost at sea for another seven, survived numerous monsters, witnessed the death of all his men, been held as a captive sex-slave by two powerful women (Circe and Calypso), and even made a short trip to hell (well, Hades).

I thought of all this as I read Mann’s account of the romance that quickly blossomed between the teenaged ingenue Bacall and the forty-five-year-old, world-weary, thrice-married, hard-drinking Bogart. But while Bacall might have been something of a princess (in Hollywood terms, at least), she was not a total innocent. As Mann recounts, she had been single-minded and ruthless in her pursuit of acting career, attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York (where she had a crush on one of her classmates, a young Kirk Douglas). After graduating, she endeared herself to various directors, producers, and writers until she finally got a few breaks, appearing in at least two high-profile productions. And though, according to Mann, she never succumbed to the casting couch, she had no qualms about flirting with older, powerful men to get ahead.

This series of flirtations culminated with Hawks himself, who took Bacall under his wing, sculpting her image and even teaching her how to lower her naturally high-pitched voice. (Yes, Bacall’s famously low, sexy, husky voice, immortalized in an erotic moment in To Have and Have Not, was as fake as Bogart’s toupees.)

Yes, Hawks was clearly grooming her for an eventual affair (perhaps even a marriage), and when he realized that she had become infatuated with Bogart, he was livid. However, to his credit, Hawks cared more about making a good movie than about bedding Bacall. Watching the dailies, he took note of the obvious, crackling chemistry between Bogie and Bacall, and he had the script revised to expand her part, giving them more screen time together. Hawks also featured Bacall heavily in all of the film’s publicity.

In less than a year, Bogart had divorced Methot and married Bacall. Taking over from Hawks, Bogart became Bacall’s mentor as well as her husband, instilling in her his passion for acting at a deep, psychological level years before The Method was even a thing.

Bogie remained her acting teacher. Once, after watching Betty rehearse a scene in which she opened a door, he told her, “You walked out there like a model.” She took his advice and changed her stride. “You must always realize you have come from someplace,” Bogie went on. “What were you doing before? Were you filing your nails? Were you writing a letter?” Every scene must convey an attitude. “That is a very important part of acting, and I never forgot it,” Betty later said.

As I said above, their marriage was initially rocky but soon settled into a mellow, happy rhythm. They lived somewhat separate lives, but were united in their love of acting and also their political causes. (Bogart was what we would now call a liberal, so much so that he was—like so many liberals today—accused of being a communist; Bacall, for her part, was so involved in Democratic politics that she nearly had an affair with Adlai Stevenson.) They also had two children.

Then, after over a decade, the marriage ended when Bogart died of throat cancer. Bacall was, of course, still a young woman (in her thirties), and the last third of Mann’s book covers the rest of her long and surprisingly illustrious life. For while it is clear that Bacall was neither as good an actor as her late husband nor as powerful a cultural influence, she was still pretty damned cool. Having moved back to New York after her leading roles in Hollywood began to dry up, she went on to a long and distinguished career as a stage actress, eventually winning two Tony Awards. She also did the occasional character bit in films, most notably her Oscar-nominated performance in 1996’s The Mirror Has Two Faces.

That’s another reason I really liked this book. Bacall’s life serves as a kind of bridge between the old Hollywood of Bogart’s day and the New Hollywood of the 1970s, when I got into films as a kid, and then into the modern era. She spanned three worlds, at least, and did so with enormous charm.

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “The Dispossessed”

This installment of my ongoing Classic Sci-Fi Book Covers series is another “modern classic,” dating back only to 1999. But I still really like it. The book itself, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, is quite a bit older, having been published in 1974 when it won the trifecta of sci-fi literary awards—the Hugo, the Locus, and the Nebula. And, yes, it is a classic.

A couple of years ago, Margaret Luongo and I made a couple of YouTube videos about it. I had never read it before, and I really enjoyed it. Indeed, it is now one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time, despite the fact that its premise sounds a bit like an episode of Star Trek. Two diametrically opposed civilizations exist on two adjacent worlds—Urras, a lush, earth-like planet, and Anarres, Urras’s barren, desert moon. While opulent, decadent Urras is run by rival capitalist/fascistic governments, the poor folk of Anarres eke out their existence in a vaguely socialist, anarchistic system. Everybody is free, but poor.

Le Guin’s third-person narrative is told from the point of view of Shevek, a genius physicist from Anarres. Stricken by wanderlust and curiosity, he decides to break an age-old taboo and travel to Urras, whose oligarchic rulers are happy to receive him, hoping to gain his scientific secrets. Half of the story follows his journey to Urras and his subsequent struggle to understand its violent, Machiavellian culture; the other half is told in flashback, revealing his past on Anarres—where he faced a very different set of struggles.

On one level, the book is a great political novel about competing cultures and economic systems. On a much more personal level, it’s a fine coming-of-age story, showing how Shevek gradually becomes disillusioned with the egalitarian but stifling culture of Anarres and thus decides to explore Urras. There, he is disillusioned again, albeit in a much more horrifying, violent way. All the while, Shevek tries to maintain his relationship with another scientist on Anarres, a woman named Takver, with whom he falls in love and has a daughter.

I won’t spoil the ending, but like Le Guin’s other great novel, The Left Hand of Darkness (which is set in the same fictional universe), the plot eventually thickens into that of a taut thriller, with Shevek on the run from his “hosts” on Urras as he flees to a rival state that seems more humane and progressive.

I like this cover by Chris Moore because, while it was done in the early days of the digital age, it still feels like a painting, although an almost photo-realistic one. It features a sun-burned Shevek on Anarres, wearing something that looks very much like a Fremen still-suit from Frank Herbert’s Dune—which makes sense because Anarres is almost as brutal a world as Arrakis. Also, I like how the cover depicts Shevek as a kind of grizzled-yet-optimistic adventurer, ready to explore his neighboring world.

What We Talk About When We Talk About “Theme” (Repost)

As I was working on a recent post about the great sci-fi and fantasy movies of 1982, I re-read the Wikipedia page on one of those films, Conan the Barbarian. It’s a great movie, despite the fact that it’s really just a raunchy, gory, over-the-top B-movie with an A-movie budget. I loved it when it came out, as did millions of others. It was, in fact, a culturally significant film, in its own way, and the Wiki page reflects this. A lot of passionate, obviously smart people have contributed to the page over the years. (Wikipedia is, imho, the single greatest triumph of the internet, but that’s a subject for another post.)

Of course, the page inevitably includes a rather insightful section called Themes, in which people have enumerated the topics that the film explores—or at least seems concerned with. These include “The Riddle of Steel,” “Death,” “Wagnerian Opera,” “Individualism,” and “Sex.”

I’m sorry, but “Sex” is not a theme of this movie, nor any other. Neither, for that matter, is “Death.” It’s a topic, surely, perhaps even a motif. (Note that I’m using the word “motif” in its strictest, compositional sense, as it is referenced in musicology.) But it’s not a theme.

Yeah, I know. I’m being a bit of an English-major-snob on this one. A word-Nazi. But bear with me, please. If you’re a person who really tries to appreciate literature, either on the page or on film, then the distinction between theme and motif is important. It’s even more important if you’re a fiction writer who struggles to create books that have some meaning and not mere entertainment that is purely disposable. Not that there is anything wrong with fiction that is mere entertainment—entertainment is great—but let’s not kid ourselves that it’s the pinnacle that people should aim for.

The film’s Wiki page comes much closer to the idea of a real theme when it discusses “The Riddle of Steel” (although it completely mischaracterizes and misinterprets the real matter at hand). As anyone who has seen the movie knows, The Riddle of Steel is a connundrum—not so much a riddle as a philosophical question—that Conan believes god will ask him when he dies. The question goes something like this: “Which is stronger? The sword, or the hand that wields it?” Or, put another way, “Technology? Or willpower?” “Brute force, or the power of conviction?”

It’s actually a pretty deep question, especially when one considers that film’s original script writer, Oliver Stone (who later went on to direct a few films, himself) is a veteran of the Vietnam War, which surely represented one of the greatest struggles of all time between technology, on the American side, versus sheer determination and courage on the North Vietnamese side. (Please don’t write to me and tell me that determination and courage were displayed on both sides of that tragic war. I realize this, and I am over-simplifying the conflict for the sake of argument.)

This posing of a philosophical and moral question, which the hero of the film (and, thus, the viewer) struggles to answer is, to my mind, the real definition of a theme. Perhaps the supreme example of this questioning is Raymond Carver’s classic short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” in which three couples—all in late middle-age, all alchohic, and all jaded—discuss the definition of “love” over drinks. It’s a great story, not just because it captures the individual voice and attitude of each character, but also because all of the characters seem to be genuinely struggling with something—a matter of real import that, each one senses, will reveal something about their own lives. As one might expect, each character has their own story to tell about the subject, beginning with this one from a woman named Terri.

Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her. Then Terry said, “He beat me up one night. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles. He kept saying, “I love you, I love you, you bitch.” He went on dragging me around the living room. My head kept knocking on things.” Terri looked around the table. “What do you do with love like that.”

She was a bone-thin woman with a pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair that hung down her back. She like necklaces made of turquoise, and long pendant earrings.

“My god, don’t be silly. That’s not love and you know it,” Mel said. “I don’t know what you’d call it, but I sure know you wouldn’t call it love.”

The story continues around the table, with each character telling their own story about the general subject of “love.”

In Carver’s supremely able hands, each of these stories is shocking, yet rings true. Completely, brutally true. Some of them are also funny as hell, in a gallows-humor sort of way. One of the greatest things about the story, though, is the way it never gives us a definitive answer to the question it asks. To the contrary, the story raises even more questions—deeper meta-questions that the characters, themselves, are unaware of but which we, as readers, are. Is there a single definition for love? Is that question even meaningful? Does love even exist, really, in the cosmic sense? Does it matter?

In the same way, Conan the Barbarian presents its hero with several possible answers to its central thematic question. The first is given by Conan’s father (played by the great character actor William Smith) in the opening scene, where he tells the young Conan that the one thing he can ever depend on. “Not men. Not women. Not beasts. This,” he says, gesturing to a sword he has just forged. Of course, he is not talking about that particular sword, or even swords in general. He is, we sense, talking about all the intangible things for which the sword is a symbol—discipline, training, courage. The martial ideal.

Later in the film, the villainous Thulsa Doom presents Conan with another answer. In that famous (and surprisingly shocking, even now) scene when he beckons one of his followers to literally jump off a cliff, he suggests that control over the human mind—through dogma, religion, and all the other tools of tyrants—is far more powerful than strength of arms, either literal or metaphorical.

So, which of these answers does Conan accept. Neither! In fact, his tale seems to suggest a third answer, one which is never articulated—never explicitly told—to either Conan or the viewer, but is rather born out by the action of the narrative. The answer, simply, is love. It’s Conan’s love for his murdered parents that sustains him through the ordeal of slavery and drives his desire for revenge. He also loves his friend, Subotai, and he comes to love Valeria even though she is, initially, a rival. Later, it’s Valeria’s love of Conan (along with some help from Subotai) that saves his life after they rescue him from the Tree of Woe. And it’s Conan’s grief over the death of Valeria that causes him to go on his final (foolhardy) confrontation with Thulsa Doom, where he uses his father’s broken sword (note the symbolism, there; steel really isn’t that strong, after all) to behead the man.

I think it is important to note that even in a “silly” genre movie like Conan the Barbarian, good writing can add a level of thematic resonance to any work of fiction. That is, it can turn a potentially crappy movie into a good movie, and a good movie into a great movie. It’s this complexity that separates the vast majority of films (and books, for that matter) from the few we remember years later—that tiny minority that we deem “classics” after the fact.

Another thing to consider is how Conan the Barbarian, like Carver’s short story, doesn’t fully answer its own thematic question. At least, not completely. The ending is ambiguous. Yes, Conan kills the bad guy, and (we are told) ends up a king himself, but he “sits on his throne with a troubled brow.” In others, the verdict is still out on what the real answer to The Riddle of Steel is, after all.This kind of ambiguity is, of course, a hallmark of all good fiction. We, as viewers and readers, don’t get a definitive answer—mainly because the kinds of questions that good fiction asks are, ultimately, unanswerable in any objective sense. They are always about choices. Priorities. Does honor matter more, or friendship? Revenge, or love?

AI Heaven, AI Hell (Repost)

When I was an English major at the University of Florida, one of the best classes I took was a Survey of Science Fiction Literature course. It covered a lot of famous American and British SF, some of which I had already read as a teenager and some of which were new to me.

Looking back on it now, it occurs to me that two of the writers we read in the class were not only totally different from each other, they also presented two completely opposite visions of what we now call artificial intelligence. These writers were Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison.

For Asimov, we read his early, seminal work, I, Robot. This is the short story collection that included his first formulation of the Three Laws of Robotics, which have been alluded to (i.e, ripped off) in countless other science fiction stories, including Star Trek. The book came out before the term AI became common parlance. Yet, in Asimov’s imagined future, the world is rife with robots that are essentially AIs with mechanical bodies. All of them have positronic brains (yeah, Star Trek ripped off this conceit, too) with the Three Laws hard-wired in. The result is that all robots function as humanity’s tireless, benevolent servants. (Some would say, slaves.)

Actually, they are much more than that. They can think, reason, and make choices. In fact, they have to make choices. The moral dilemmas created by the Three Laws as the robots interact with chaotic (and often evil) human beings is the source of drama in most of the stories.

Despite the mystery and drama of the stories, though, Asimov’s vision is a very optimistic, almost Buck-Rogers-esque idea of the future—not quite a utopia but close to it. There is no poverty, no hunger, no war. It’s only upon close reading of the stories in I, Robot that the exact nature of the master/servant relationship between humans and robots appears fraught—probably more so than Asimov consciously intended. This is especially true in a few of the stories, where it’s revealed that future governments are secretly run by the highest order of HAL 9000 style robots, whose plans might be beyond human comprehension.

Later in the Science Fiction class, we read Harlan Ellison’s short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” which is quite possibly the darkest and most disturbing short story I have ever read, sci-fi or otherwise. And, of course, it involves an AI.

The story is mostly set underground, about one hundred years after a nuclear war wiped out all of humanity except for five people. The war was started by a mutinous Pentagon computer (yeah, just like Skynet) called AM that becomes self-aware and decides it hates human beings more than anything. After killing everyone on the planet, it preserves the five people as its playthings, running them through an endless number of elaborate, sadistic games. Unfortunately for them, AM has somehow obtained God-like technological power over physics, able to shape and project matter wherever it wishes, and also to keep the humans alive and immortal in their banged-up, miserable state. So, in effect, the protagonists spend an eternity in a kind of Holodeck-like hellscape, trying to figure out how to either escape or kill themselves.

Yeah, it’s heavy.

This enormous gulf between Asimov’s and Ellison’s visions of the future—an AI paradise versus an almost literal AI hell—is, in part, symptomatic of various generational and cultural shifts between the two men. I, Robot was published in 1950, on the tail-end of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, the time when the prosperity of America in the post-war years seemed destined to go on forever, fueled by newer and greater technological innovations (AI among them). In contrast, Ellison’s short story was published in 1967, at the height of a counter-cultural revolution that extended into science fiction literature —the New Wave that introduced some of my favorite sci-fi writers of all time, such as Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Ellison himself.

Thus, the difference between Asimov and Ellison’s work is essentially the difference between the lingering triumph of World War II and the horrors of VietNam. Between the optimism of the Atomic Age and the nihilism of the Cold War. In some ways, it’s also the difference between fantasy and realism, and between genre fiction and literary fiction. As dark as Ellison’s short story is, it’s also a much better work of fiction than Asimov’s. More convincing, too, alas. Told from the point-of-view of AM’s youngest victim, Ted, the story is filled with vivid, sharp writing and devastating passages, like this one:

Nimdok (which was the name the machine had forced him to use, because AM amused itself with strange sounds) was hallucinating that there were canned goods in the ice caverns. Gorrister and I were very dubious. “It’s another shuck,” I told them. “Like the goddam frozen elephant AM sold us. Benny almost went out of his mind over that one. We’ll hike all that way and it’ll be putrified or some damn thing. I say forget it. Stay here, it’ll have to come up with something pretty soon or we’ll die.”

Benny shrugged. Three days it had been since we’d last eaten. Worms. Thick, ropey.

You don’t have to be a literary critic to see that Asimov and Ellison are worlds apart, not just on the subject of Artificial Intelligence but on literally everything. Asimov was a scientist, a rationalist, and his optimistic views on the future of humanity were deeply rooted in the legacy of the Enlightenment. Ellison is more of a Gothic Romantic, full of existential angst and cosmic horror. His story is essentially an updated version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with the supercomputer in the role of the monster, determined to torment its creator.

Of course, the Frankenstein story is, itself, a reworking of an even older one—the Faustian myth. According to German legend, Faust is an intellectual who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge, and ends up going to hell. If the story seems familiar, it’s probably because the legend has been the psychological basis for countless tales of perverted science for centuries. Scientists, the story goes, want to attain the power of God, and thus end up being destroyed by their own hubris (often in the form of some infernal creation like Frankenstein’s monster or, more recently, SkyNet).

Perhaps the biggest irony here (at least for me, personally) is that while I have great admiration for Ellison’s story, and I believe it is a much greater artistic work that anything ever penned by Asimov, Asimov’s vision is probably more accurate of what we can actually expect from the AI revolution. For all the hype about AIs destroying art and music and literature and taking away our jobs, I think AI will be a net positive for humanity. Perhaps a big net positive. It’s already making contributions in the fields of materials science, medicine, and even fusion energy. Yeah, it’s probably going to take away some people’s jobs, but those were probably crap jobs anyway. (If you train an AI to do it as well as a human, it’s probably not worth doing.)

As for the whole AM/Skynet thing, I don’t worry about it because I don’t believe computers will ever become conscious. In fact, the very idea of a machine becoming conscious seems like a category error, the kind of conceit that will seem laughable a hundred years from now as those old drawings of “men of the future” with feathered wings strapped to their arms.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that we won’t, someday, create an artificial life form that might replace us. But it won’t be a computer. It will be…something else.

But that’s a subject for another post.

What I’m Reading: “Scream with Me”

The idea that horror films might in any way be construed as “pro-feminist” seems counterintuitive to most people. It certainly did to me. After all, women are the preferred victims of horror films, especially the slasher genre in which entire sororities and girls-only sleep-overs are massacred wholesale, often in grisly—and blatantly sexual—methods.

But, as I recently learned, pro-feminist readings of classic horror films are a genuine thing, having a genuine moment. And I was completely convinced of their validity by Eleanor Johnson’s excellent book, Scream With Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism, 1968-1980. Early in the book, Johnson’s addresses the apparent absurdity of looking for feminist ideas in horror films, going so far as to quote Alfred Hitchcock’s famous formula for an effective thriller: “Torture the women.” Johnson does not minimize the misogyny of classic horror films. Indeed, she goes to great pains to explain that horror films—like any work of art—can often be self-contradictory, sexist on one visceral level but feminist on a deeper, almost subconscious one.

She writes:

[H]orror also has a deep and enduring relationship with American feminism. In fact, American feminism and American horror have been—for more than half a century—allies on issues of domestic abuse, reproductive control, and women’s restricted rights relative to men.

Horror films that focus on violence and persecution of women often do double-duty, serving as a means of getting otherwise conservative or traditionalist viewers to see the plight of women in the first place. More importantly, as Johnson’s title suggests, horror films subconsciously force the viewer to participate in the suffering of women, and thus empathize with their condition.

She writes,

What’s so important about the domestic horror films in this book is that they make viewers—whether or not the viewers are female—carry the fear and vulnerability embodied by the women in the films home with them. They center on a woman’s perspective, making audiences feel wracking physiological and psychological compassion for the women characters who are abused and terrorized. The films, although they showcase women’s suffering, do not simply fetishize that suffering, but rather humanize it, make it palpable, exportable to the viewers’ own minds and bodies. They invite viewers into the lived, embodied experiences of abused women; women barred from power, barred from speaking for themselves, barred from defending themselves; women who weren’t taken seriously by the people from whom they sought aid—doctors, police, lawyers, psychiatrists, husbands, coworkers. These movies took what was going on in American cultural, political, and legal history in the late 1960s and 1970s, and they made those things feelable. They made women’s suffering come alive to viewers who might not otherwise ever have stopped to think about what or how women suffered in the United States, behind closed doors, in the twentieth century. They made that suffering seem like an emergency. And then they made that suffering follow viewers all the way home and nest there.

Johnson goes on to explain her main thesis—namely, that horror films were instrumental in raising public awareness of women’s civil rights issues, and even in changing laws—by focusing on six classic horror films: Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Stepford Wives, The Omen, Alien, and The Shining. She examines these films in chronological order, and so it is probably no accident that the oldest, 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby, is also the basis for her most compelling argument.

For those who haven’t seen it (i.e., anyone under 40), Rosemary’s Baby is the story of a young couple, Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse, who move into an old, spooky apartment building in Manhattan. They befriend their elderly neighbors, the Castevets, who (it later turns out) run a coven of witches. With the secret cooperation of Guy, the witches drug Rosemary, conjure up Satan, and watch as he rapes the poor woman. Throughout the act, Rosemary is doped up but conscious, hallucinating that she is on a boat, rocking on a rough sea. At moments, though, she becomes lucid, and realizes that she is actually being raped by a huge, hairy creature. “This is no dream,” she yells, in the film’s most horrifying line. “This is really happening.”

The next morning, Guy tells her that he had sex with her while she was asleep. (The scratches on her body, he explains, are due to his “getting a little carried away”). Rosemary is unconvinced but, in true trad-wife fashion, doesn’t make a fuss. When she later becomes pregnant, the Castevets refer her to an old OB-GYN, Dr. Sapirstein, who puts her on a regimen of foul-tasting protein shakes and other noxious concoctions. As the pregnancy progresses, Rosemary finds herself in agonizing pain. Her women friends (whom Guy discourages her from seeing) beg her to find a new doctor, but, again, Rosemary doesn’t make a fuss.

After she finally gives birth at home, the witches take the baby away. Guy tells her it died. But she can hear an infant crying from next door, and the neighbors insist on collecting Rosemary’s milk, which they convinced her to express into glass jars.

At some point, she finds a secret door into the Castevets apartments, only to find them, Dr. Sapirstein, and a bunch of other nattily-dressed devil-worshipers having a party. They are gathered around a cradle in which, of course, Rosemary’s baby lies. The baby himself is never shown. Rather, we only see her horrified reaction when she pulls back the veil and views the hell-spawn. “What’s wrong with his eyes?” she asks. “He has his father’s eyes,” Mr. Castevet replies.

I’ve probably seen Rosemary’s Baby half a dozen times, yet I never put it together that the film is almost a parable about the cruelty of anti-abortion laws. Not until I read Ms. Johnson’s book, that is. As she points out, Rosemary is probably cinema’s most extreme example of a woman forced to complete an unwanted (and very dangerous) pregnancy. One that is, in fact, the result of a rape (by the Devil, no less). As Johnson writes,

By New York State’s own abortion laws in 1968, Rosemary would not have been able to get an abortion on grounds of rape alone. Rape was not justification enough for abortion in 1968 in New York, nor was physical danger, nor psychological harm. Nor, indeed, was the prospect of having a baby born with deformities—which would seem likely when the child’s father is a claw-handed, leather-skinned, goat-eyed demon. The Satanic fetus, whose true range of deformities could only be known after the birth of the child, allegorizes the thousands of thalidomide pregnancies across the United States that women were forced to carry to term, anxiously waiting to see how compromised their babies would be by the drug the women had taken. Like them, Rosemary is going to be forced to carry to term a pregnancy of unknown viability. [Link added]

Of course, it isn’t just a lack of reproductive health rights that causes Rosemary’s ordeal. It’s her lack of freedom in general—financial, educational, and (above all) psychological—that traps her in a private hell. In some ways, her husband, Guy, comes off as even more evil than the Castavets in the way he gaslights and manipulates his wife. And it is this kind of domestic abuse—sometimes physical, always mental—on which Johnson primarily focuses for the rest of the book.

In The Omen, for instance, a wealthy man lies to his (much younger) wife, Kathy, when their baby dies at birth. At the urging of a local priest, he takes another baby whose mother has just died and passes him off to Kathy as her own. Naturally, the baby turns out to be the anti-Christ (once again), and the wife suffers mightily (once again), finally being killed by the little bastard and his evil minions. Unlike Guy Woodhouse, the husband in this story is not evil, nor self-serving. He genuinely thinks he’s being kind to his wife in doing the ole baby switch-a-roo, trying to spare her the heartbreak of losing a child. Of course, she has lost a child, and she deserves to know the truth. Moreover, she certainly does not deserve to be tricked into raising the spawn of hell. But her husband, in true patriarchal fashion, does what he sees fit. The result is the same.

I especially enjoyed Johnson’s examination of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which she presents as an apotheosis of the domestic-abuse horror genre. I have always felt that Shelley Duvall’s fine, selfless performance as the tormented wife, Wendy, was the most underappreciated (and even mocked) aspect of the film. Indeed, she is the center of the movie, without which it would have no meaning.

Also, of all the films’ hapless heroines, Wendy’s plight is the most isolating and claustrophobic. As Johnson writes,

Rosemary can’t easily get away from the coven, but she can go see her doctors and, on occasion, her friends. Chris [in The Exorcist] is in thrall to the demon every bit as much as Regan is, but she still manages to go out to see doctors and priests. Joanna has quite a bit of freedom of movement, until the end of Stepford Wives; same with Kathy from The Omen. Ellen Ripley [in Alien] is every bit as imprisoned as Wendy Torrance, but her imprisonment feels incidental because she’s trapped on a floating domestic space, and everyone else is trapped right along with her. Wendy’s entrapment feels obvious, manifest, total, unbreachable. She’s trapped by the hotel; by [her husband] Jack; by the weather; by the distance to any other person or place, to any kind of shelter. The horror of The Shining isn’t ultimately the ghosts in the hotel. It’s Jack and his total imprisonment of Wendy. And, as viewers, we are trapped with her.

Indeed.

Scream with Me is a hell of a book. Check it out…!

Today I Learned a Word: “Eucatastrophe”

Ever since I stumbled upon it some years ago, In Deep Geek has been one of my favorite video podcasts. In each episode, the creator/narrator (known only as Robert) goes into extreme depth on some subject of profound interest to fans of The Lord of the Rings, The Witcher, and A Game of Thrones. I’ve never seen those two latter shows (yeah, I know; I live under a rock), but I am a big fan of LOTR, so I watch those episodes with great interest and enjoyment. I don’t know Robert’s background, but I would guess he has some training in English Literature. His explications—which are unfailingly graceful, insightful, and genuinely interesting—remind me of the “close readings” I used to do as an English Major.

One especially perceptive episode is one that I saw recently on the subject of Tolkien’s Eagles. These are, of course, the race of giant, sentient eagles that play a small but crucial role in the lore. In fact, they literally save the heroes from catastrophe, flying in to assist in the Battle of the Five Armies at the conclusion of The Hobbit, and rescuing Frodo and Sam from incineration on the slopes of Mt. Doom in The Return of the King. As Robert explains, the eagles provide a eucatastrophe—a word I had never heard before, and one which (as Robert helpfully goes on to explain) was coined by Tolkien himself.

You don’t need to be a linguist like Tolkien to get the gist of what the word eucatastrophe means. Basically, it’s the opposite of a catastrophe—a sudden, unexpected change of fortune that saves the hero(es) from near certain doom. I think the key adjective here is unexpected. Indeed, a true eucatastrophe must be not only unexpected but unforeseeable, coming (quite literally, in the case of the eagles) out of the blue. For example, the ending of Star Wars: A New Hope, when Luke Skywalker uses the Force to blow up the Death Star, is a great, thrilling ending, but it’s not a true eucatastrophe. After all, Luke did what he came there to do. Yes, the odds were incredibly stacked against him, but the ending is not unforeseeable. It’s just very, very unlikely (and, therefore, very exciting and dramatic).

Upon being introduced to the term, one might wonder—as I did—what the difference is between a eucatastrophe and the classic Deus ex machina ending, as used in the theater of ancient Greece. Literally the “God-from-the-Machine,” it took the form of an actor playing Zeus or Poseidon or some other God, who was “levitated” over the stage using a wooden cherry-picker called a mechane. The “God” would then deliver some boon that rescues the protagonists and resolves the drama. Basically, a happy ending, courtesy of the divinity.

All good writers know that a Deus ex machina-style ending is usually pretty lame, simply because it has nothing to do with the drama that has preceded it. It doesn’t force the characters to get themselves out of trouble in a way that has meaning for the reader (or viewer). It’s the sudden “happy ending” that completely subverts the conflicts and themes that the reader has invested themselves in and is anxiously waiting to see how they will be resolved, not by some magical deity swooping in and snapping His fingers, but by the characters themselves.

Clearly, this is not the kind of ending Tolkien had in mind, nor does it describe the rather fabulous and exciting conclusions of both The Return of the King and The Hobbit. Rather, in both cases, the sudden appearance of the eagles seems somehow perfect. Unexpected, yet totally satisfying. And fitting.

But how? How does Tolkien do it?

I think it has something to do with the fact that, in Tolkien, the appearance of the eagles only comes near the end of some great struggle. In The LOTR, for instance, when the eagles rescue Sam and Frodo, the main goal of the story has already been achieved. That is, they have already destroyed the ring and defeated Sauron. More importantly, they have overcome—not just Sauron—but themselves. Their own fear, exhaustion, and despair, as they held the true course to victory.

Tolkien knows that if Sam and Frodo were to die afterward, their deaths would serve no purpose, either dramatically or thematically. So, the eagles’ showing up at the critical moment seems not only fitting but logical; the eagles have witnessed the Hobbits’ ordeal, and, like us, they seek a better ending for those poor little fellows who have saved the world.

In other words, unlike a Deus ex machina ending, a true eucatastrophe comes as a result of what has come before. It is a kind of miracle, but an earned miracle.

Also, as Robert points out so beautifully in his video, the eagles also function as a stand-in for God in Tolkien’s legendarium, Eru Ilúvatar. Ultimately, a eucatastrophe represents a kind of divine intervention. A deliverance from evil.

As Robert states:

This is sometimes dismissed rather sneeringly as Deus ex machina…. The writer intervening in the plot to save characters or move things along in a way that otherwise wouldn’t happen in that created world. The eagles, some have said, are a failing in Tolkien’s writing. A convenient, easy way to save characters from whatever scrape they find themselves in. But to think that would be to completely misunderstand Tolkien’s notion of eucatastrophe and what the eagles represent. The eagles’ appearances aren’t failures of imagination on Tolkien’s part. They are deliberate and intentional, and they are supposed to feel like God intervening. They are God in the works.

The important thing to note is that intervention comes after the fact. The battle, in a sense, must already be won, if only symbolically. In the Battle of the Five Armies, for instance, the true victory—the coming together of dwarves, elves, and men in common purpose—has already been achieved, even before the battle starts. The intervention of he eagles to finally win the day is, more or less, just icing on the metaphysical cake.

Come to think of it, there is a kind of eucatastrophe in Star Wars: A New Hope. It comes, not at the end of the battle for the Death Star, but just before it, when Luke is about to be blown to smithereens by Darth Vader. “I have you now,” Vader intones from inside his deluxe, specially fitted TIE Fighter as he prepares to pull the trigger. At that very last instant, though, Vader’s ship is hit by a laser blast and disabled. Luke is free to finish his mission.

But where did the blast come from? All of Luke’s friends are already dead.

The blast was fired, of course, by Hans Solo, who has come to the rescue in the Millenium Falcon. The moment feels momentous because we, the viewers, know that Solo should not be there. He has, in the previous scene, vehemently declared himself to be a selfish man—a cynic—concerned only with his own survival. He would never be a sucker for any crazy, doomed cause like the Galactic Rebellion.

Yet, there he is—a symbol of people’s ability to change, to discover their own basic, human decency and courage. And, just as the eagles are a stand-in for Eru Ilúvatar, Solo is a stand-in for God, The Force, or whatever you want to call it. He represents the potential for good in all people and living things.

What I’m Reading: “The Peripheral” (Repost)

Once again, I’ve been too slammed to finish a new blog entry, so I’m re-running an oldie-but-goodie (I hope). Enjoy…!!!!

A few months ago, I wrote a post about M. R. Carey’s excellent sci-fi novel, The Girl with All the Gifts. I recounted how incredibly impressed I was by the way Carey took an exhausted genre—the zombie apocalypse story—and found a way to make it fresh and vital.

As luck would have it, the next novel I chose to read was William Gibson’s latest book, The Peripheral. I tore through it over the course of a weekend, and at some point, it occurred to me how similar the book is—in spirit, if not content—to Carey’s. Gibson, after all, faced a similar challenge to Carey in that his preferred genre, the cyberpunk novel, was also played out, in large part due to his (Gibson’s) own amazing success. His iconic works like Mona Lisa Overdrive and Burning Chrome helped define the cyberpunk aesthetic, that weirdly prescient vision of a future divided between poor street people and the ultra-rich. It was Gibson who coined the term cyberspace, and, by the end of the 1990s, the cyberpunk vibe had permeated not only popular fiction but movies (Blade Runner, The Matrix) and anime (Akira).

Now, in 2019, reality itself seems to have caught up with Gibson’s work. We live in a world where the vast bulk of humanity is virtually impoverished and uneducated. These teeming masses distract themselves with 3D games and social media (literal cyberspace) while a few fantastically rich individuals build spaceships and private islands for themselves. We live in a world where teenaged soldiers kill people via satellite-controlled drones on the other side of the planet, and where rogue Chinese scientists make designer babies.

How’s a poor science fiction writer supposed to keep up?

What I’m Reading: “The Descendants” (Repost)

(Author’s Note: I’ve been a bit busy lately, so I’m reposting this essay about one of my favorite modern novels. Enjoy…!)

Even though I fancy myself a literary fiction writer (even when I’m writing detective or sci-fi novels), I don’t read that much literary fiction. I read a ton when I was young, especially in college, and lately I’ve found it difficult to find novels that don’t seem derivative or poorly imagined or just downright silly. And for those rare books I do find engaging, I often arrive at them in circuitous ways.

Take Kaui Hart Hemmings’ celebrated novel, The Descendants. Like a lot of books I read, it became known to me from a movie adaptation, although, strangely enough, I didn’t actually see the movie. I was on a flight to Europe some years ago, on an older model jet that still had drop-down movie screen, and the in-flight movie was The Descendants. I didn’t pay for the earphones, but even as a silent film it looked interesting, with George Clooney skulking about some lush tropical landscape that I somehow knew was Hawaii. I looked the movie up on Imdb.com and found that it was based on a novel, so I looked that up. It was a debut novel and looked the kind of book I might like: a literary story, told from a single point-of-view, with relatively few characters, a vivid setting, a compressed time-span, and an intriguing premise.

So, I checked it out on Overdrive. And, man, was I lucky I did.

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “The Man in the Maze”

Once again, I have the great library district of Alachua County to thank for my latest classic sci-fi book cover post. I was browsing through the library’s website, looking at their most recent e-book purchases, when I stumbled upon this oldie by famed sci-fi author Robert Silverberg. I don’t know how exactly, but I never read Silverberg before. I had heard of him, of course. I knew that he was a famous sci-fi author (he’s actually still with us, at 91, as of this writing), often lumped in with the New Wave that emerged in the 1960s.

Having read one book by him now, I must say that he feels more like a Golden Age writer to me. The Man in the Maze, after all, has not one but two brilliant, highly educated yet macho heroes (ala Heinlein) who live in a Buck-Rogers-style galactic civilization of the future (ala Asimov), where they are very successful with the hot babes of many, far-flung planets.

Still, this book has a lot more character depth and thematic complexity then the average sci-fi tale, then or now. In fact, it’s clever as hell. I mean, how many other sci-fi works are based on an ancient Greek play? Specifically, this one is a retelling of Sophocles’ drama Philoctetes, in which the titular hero, a great archer and warrior of the Achaeans, is wounded early in the Trojan war. His wound is of a supernatural origin—literally a curse from the Gods—and will not heal. It also stinks to high-heaven, so much so that the other Achaean Greeks dump him on an island called Lemnos, where he stews in his own self-pity and growing hatred of all humankind.

Silverberg cleverly transposes the tail to a far-future civilization, where interplanetary diplomat Dick Muller is similarly afflicted after completing a mission to a newly discovered planet, Beta Hydri IV. During his visit, the Beta Hydrians bestow upon him the “gift” of telepathy. Unfortunately, the kind they give him only works one way, outward. When he returns to human-occupied space, he is horrified to learn that his innermost and darkest thoughts, fears, and impulses are constantly transmitted to those around, to the point that people literally run away.

Basically, he stinks. In despair, he exiles himself to a bizarre planet (called Lemnos, naturally) which was abandoned millions of years earlier by a highly intelligent but now extinct race. All that remains of their civilization is a huge, diabolical maze, filled with automated traps and snares that kill virtually everyone who goes into it. Except Mueller, that is, who finds his way to the center and takes up residence there.

All this occurs before the main action of the novel, when, as in the original Sophocles drama, Muller’s old friends soon realize that they desperately need the forsaken man to save them from a new crisis. In the play, the Achaeans learn via prophecy that only Philoctetes, with his awesome archery skills, can secure the final victory over Troy. In the novel, Muller’s old friend, Charles Boardman (the guy who sent him to Beta Hydri IV) seeks his help in dealing with yet another alien civilization, this one threatening to enslave all humanity.

I really like this cover from the 1987 Avon edition because it feels like a great, archetype 1980s cover. Done by master illustrator Jim Burns, it has the photorealistic, industrial style that was typical of that era, the age before digital art was even a dream. (It feels a lot like a Syd Mead work actually.) It’s also got a strangely muted scene, with a rugged-looking man—Charles Boardman, presumably—sitting in the cockpit of a starship while a younger comrade—Ned Rawlins, presumably, whom Boardman convinces to venture into the maze and befriend Muller, in hopes of gulling him into coming with them back to civilization. And behind Rawlins, of course, is the insane, sci-fi maze of Lemnos.

It’s a really fun book. Kind of a precursor to The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner and lots of other, later yarns. Check it out…

The Anti-Heroes of American Cinema: A Tribute

Author’s Note: I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve read that someone is going to remake John’s Carpenter’s class B-Movie action flick Escape from New York. I’m of two minds about this news. On the one hand, I find it repulsive that someone wants to make a new version of already perfect, classic film that hasn’t gone anywhere. (It’s streaming on Amazon Prime right now for cripe’s sake.) On the other hand, I realize that cinema is a popular medium, and young people today deserve a chance to see the tale told anew. (Young actors deserve a shot at it, too.)

At any rate, the news got me thinking about old Snake Plissken, who is one of the greatest anti-heroes in the history of Hollywood. So, I thought I would repost this short essay, which original appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes. Enjoy…!

When I was writing my last post about George Lucas’s digital fiddling with the iconic character of Han Solo, I started think about about the role of the anti-hero in American film. Why is it that so many of our cinematic “heroes” are anything but?

An anti-hero is usually defined as a protagonist who exhibits non-heroic traits, such as selfishness and amorality. Han Solo surely qualifies as a classic American anti-hero in that he firmly avows his own self-interest, only to later commit himself to a cause larger than himself. But when I think of an anti-hero, I usually think of Humphrey Bogart. Bogart’s Rick Blaine is perhaps the pinnacle of the American anti-hero, embodying as he does the core of American isolationism in the face of the Second World War. “I stick my neck out for no one,” Blaine says to his friend, the even more corrupt Captain Renault. Blaine seems to epitomize those very American qualities of pragmatism and an apolitical business sense (he runs the the most profitable bar in Casablanca, after all). But of course, he comes around, in the end, finding himself inextricably bound to humanity in the form of Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa.

Blaine might be the ultimate American anti-hero, but he is by no means the first. If you ask me, the American anti-hero has deep roots in the wild west, with our cultural fixation on cowboys, gunfighters, and the men who tamed them. Wyatt Earp might well be our first, best anti-hero, the saloon keeper, gambler, and occasional pimp who became the most famous lawman in history. America is a nation, after all, of exiles, people always seeking the frontier, and the values of the frontiersman are deeply intertwined with our own.

It’s no accident that the greatest Western ever to come out of Hollywood is John Ford’s The Searchers—a movie in which the “hero”, Ethan Edwards, is a borderline psychopath. Ethan (which means “strong” in Hebrew) exudes physical strength and a cold, practical wisdom. (He takes time to rest his horses even when pursuing the Indians who killed his brother.) Only Ethan has the strength to pursue the renegade Comanches and finally kill their leader, Scar, but Ethan comes perilously close to murdering his own niece in the process. Even in our greatest myths, the dark side of the American anti-hero seems to lurk just beneath the surface.

William Holden played not one but two famous anti-heroes in World War II dramas. Both were POWs: the cold-hearted, viciously entrepreneurial Sefton in Stalag 17, and then the resourceful Commander Shears in Bridge Over the River Kwai. Both films seem to acknowledge a kind of philosophical transition that took place in the post-war environment, a shift in values from the resolute, romantic heroism of the British Empire in favor of the more ambiguous, morally flexible version that Americans seemed to espouse. (It was we, after all, who dropped the atomic bomb and thus finished the war that the Old World started.)

All through the 1960s and 1970s, this new, darker, and perhaps more realistic vision of heroism seemed to thrive in counter-cultural films like Easy Rider, Billy Jack, and Cool Hand Luke. Perhaps the greatest actor to inhabit the anti-heroic mold since Bogie was Jack Nicholson, who in 1974’s Chinatown played the world-weary Jake Gittes, a private detective who specializes in taking compromising photos of cheating spouses, and who confesses to his lover that, when he was a cop, he did “as little as possible.” And yet Gittes is a bona fide American hero. Despite his better judgment, he finds himself unable to condone the corruption and evil that surrounds him.

Perhaps the darkest version of the anti-hero can be found in Francis Coppola’s flawed 1979 masterpiece, Apocalypse Now. Martin Sheen plays the American Army assassin Captain Willard, who is dispatched on a journey through Cambodia to find (and kill) the renegade Colonel Kurz. The movie represents the intersection between our darkest war (Vietnam) and our darkest novel (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), the result being a kind of cinematic descent into hell

Even the greatest anti-heroes of science fiction like Mad Max and Snake Plissken have their roots in the post-war characters of Holden and Bogart. When Mad Max paces menacingly across the post-nuclear Outback, he seems like the reincarnation of Ethan Edwards, haunting our depopulated future even as John Wayne haunts our sun-scorched past.

Which brings me to my main point about the American anti-hero. For all their faults, there is one quality that Han Solo and Rick Blaine never come up short on: courage. Characters like Sefton and Gittes may profess to be cowards, but they aren’t. Not really. As Americans, we like to believe that we have no Old World illusions of grandeur, but we also want to believe in our own basic decency and moral integrity (despite all evidence to the contrary). Like Jake Gittes, the American anti-hero often fails—and sometimes fails miserably—but by the very act of attempting to do the right thing, he finds a kind of redemption. Americans pride themselves on not being suckers, but in the end, we want to think we are good.

Otherwise, what was all the fighting about, anyway?