that’s PRESIDENT kick-ass to you

Our national cinema, when we need to show that something is important, that will rock us deep to the core, we always go for the presidential seal. Once things get all the way up the chain to the Commander-in-Chief you know that’s where the buck is going to stop. But what does it mean to have the highest office in the land (well, here in the ol’ US of A that is) used so freely in our national storytelling?

Recently while watching the movie Air Force One I couldn’t stop wondering what the founding fathers would have made of Harrison Ford’s portrayal as president James Marshall. Would a bunch of dudes who were so eager to create a new form of government where no one branch would be more in control than another have appreciated this portrayal of the head of state as a man of action, able to single-handedly defeats terrorists on board, fly the plane itself for a bit, and then perform a dramatic escape in air via zip line to another plane? The events themselves are patently absurd – if we had a presidential candidate that buff I’m guessing the election would have been decided in an epic arm wrestling match. But leaving aside those improbabilities, why was it important to make fictional American president the hero?

When you look at the history of actors who have played fictional presidents it seems like there was a hands-off policy at either portraying or making fun of the office until after Nixon. There are a couple portrayals in the 30s (including the most bizarre Gabriel Over the White House in which divine intervention converts a fat cat into a benevolent fascist with a little help from god) and a few more in the 60s (Dr Strangelove) but seriously, after Nixon, the gloves are off and the president transitions from wimpy buffoon (Being There, Escape From New York) to in-your-face catchphrase-spouting dudes (Air Force One, Independence Day) to everything in between (Dave, Americathon).

Is the United States the only nation that does this, that creates fictional versions of its top official for entertainment purposes? Occasionally, yes, an international spy thriller will need various heads of state to give the nod or order the plot further into motion, but are their European movies whose leaders are taking names and busting heads of CIA task forces who dare threaten them?

And at the very least, what could the rest of the world make of so much Hollywood product dedicated to projecting our elected officials as heroic stoics or power-mad? Once you compare these cardboard toughs with the actual candidates running for office in any election year the disconnect is so great that it wouldn’t be hard for outsiders to assume American citizens are clueless to their own delusions. We want Arnold Schwartzenegger, or at the very least Morgan Freeman, but in the end would settle for Tom Hanks.

In the end I don’t think it does us any good to focus so much time and energy on this idea of a president being as integral to our entertainment as they are to running the country. In fact, I would rather our politicians quit trying to manage their images in appearing “presidential” and instead focus a little more on the real heroics of making things work.

I don’t imagine Hollywood would make a movie of that. Not enough ass-kicking going on.

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the ‘i’ of katniss

I got into a bit of an argument with a teen girl about The Hunger Games. I know, I’m a grown man and should know better than to step between a teen girl and her beloved heroine. Especially so since it was my older daughter.

Having seen the movie this past weekend (twice for her, first at midnight on Thursday, then a little less bleary-eyed on Sunday) our conversation eventually wended its way toward the differences between the book and the movie. I should also note that the book was fresh in my mind after having read it a few days earlier. For the first time.

Yes, yes, I know, what’s wrong with me?

While we both ticked off changes made in the movie, no doubt for the sake of economy — “spoilers” will not be mentioned here — I finally decided that what bothered me most was how bland Katniss’ personality was in the movie. My daughter’s explanation: because the book was in first person there was no way you could hear what she was thinking without voiceover, and that would have ruined it.

I agree and disagree.

Voiceover would have ruined the film, bogged down the action and made it feel, well, unoriginal. The argument I tried to make was that while the movie was faithful to the plot there was absolutely no emotional development for Katniss, not on the screen at least. What I wanted, my daughter insisted, was impossible to do, which is where we disagreed. The solution is one known to many a writer of both books and screenplays which is why it was odd it wasn’t evident in the movie.

Show, don’t tell.

In the first-person the character can tell us much about what they are thinking in the moment, and in The Hunger Games everything we learn we get from Katniss. She knows the games, how they work, and she knows the risk she takes by putting her name in so many times for the Reaping just to keep her family alive. She knows Gale as a hunting buddy, a close ally, someone with whom she has complete trust if not a budding romantic fondness for. She knows Haymitch as not the town hero but the town drunk. She knows Peeta as a simple, kind boy but grows to suspect that he might have more cunning than she imagined. And throughout she knows what will happen to her once she reaches the Capitol — not the details but the gist of what she’s seen on TV for the 16 years she’s been alive. She knows sponsors are important to her survival, she knows she will be assigned a stylist to make her presentable for the ceremonies, and she is constantly thinking about what she has to do to survive so she can return home. Constantly.

In the film, Katniss comes off as a bit of a dolt, an innocent who’s never seen the games before. Her relationship with Gale is cursory at best, and Peeta is as genial as his brain is empty. She is put through her paces according to the plot but who she feels about the game before, during, and after makes for a rather flat emotional arc — call it an emotional plateau if you will. Sure, she get’s a moment here and there — with Rue, with Cinna — but they are reactive moments and not enough of a peg to hang a complete thought on.

How can you do it, how do you show what a character is thinking without voiceover?
You show it.

You know who got it right?
Peter Jackson when he adapted The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Am I suggesting The Hunger Games should have been a 3-plus hour-long movie?
Yes, yes, I am.

Let me narrow in on Katniss and Peeta from the moment they get on the train to the moment Peeta makes his confession during his interview before the game. During that time in the book Katniss goes from thinking Peeta is a simpleton, to pitying him for the inevitability of dying in the games, to resenting him for wanting to get separate advice from Haymitch, to feeling both dumbstruck and betrayed at the TV interviews. These shifting feelings are important because, though Katniss doesn’t feel he is a threat to her, she does feel she owes him for a kindness he performed earlier shortly after he father died. This conflict of emotion becomes compounded during the game when Peeta makes an alliance and helps lead them to Katniss to kill her. In the movie little of this comes through. Peeta seems resigned to his fate and blander than his character in the book, which is hard to believe. The separate training, the confession, these come off in the movie less like Peeta is a master of calculation and more a puppet doing what he was told to do.

Katniss’ reactions to these shifts in his character don’t make sense because we haven’t “seen” what she’s been thinking. The plot pushes them through the train ride, though training, with only the most necessary of information. This “economy” of storytelling also removes every semblance of character from the other tributes, making them easily expendable when their time come. We should care about every. single. child. up on that screen, because they have been put into an arena to fight to the death! For our, er, Panem’s entertainment!

Impossible! my daughter screams as she storms away, not upset with me so much as she doesn’t believe it can be done. She hasn’t seen the movies I’ve seen. She hasn’t seen the masters of the German and French New Wave, or the films of Fellini or Kurosawa, films where characters are front-and-center even through action. She hasn’t tired of the faster-faster mentality of Hollywood films enough to recognize or appreciate how much better the tension is when action scenes burst like dams from the built-up pressure of emotional weight behind them. And given that The Hunger Games is so clearly centered on The World According to Katniss it’s too bad the movie couldn’t show us that.

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thanksgiving memories 2011

A few days ago on Thanksgiving I bombed Twitter (#tdayvidbomb) with Holiday-themed videos and clips, a sort of tribute/send-up for our National Eating Holiday. It occurred to me that not everyone who visits here might be on Twitter, or saw all the day’s tweets, so I’ve collected them here along with some annotations to explain some of what’s going on.

First, no American Thanksgiving is complete without that most noble of beasts, the turkey. And here they are, fattening themselves up for your enjoyment!

Wait, reducing the grain surplus? Wasn’t this during the depression?

Now, what would Thanksgiving be without the Macy’s Parade?  Second to Christmas, it was the one holiday we wouldn’t sleep in because we wanted to turn on the TV and watch the parade. Living in California we also hoped to see snow and cold. Weird, I know. Here’s what it looked like in 1935.

That’s right, you bark and show you don’t approve!

Now, time to truss up that bird and make it golden brown. The secret? It’s better with butter, baby!

Bake your turkey the American Dairy Association way!

How about a Tex Avery cartoon to keep the kids busy while you’re in the kitchen? A little “Jerky Turkey” coming right up. And for those who can stream to their TVs, this is an exceptionally fine copy.

Time for a little football, perhaps? This is some old home movie (1929!) from my current home town’s rivalry game. This field is still in use by both the high school and a nearby college.

Everyplace I’ve lived there was always one radio station that would play Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie from beginning to end. It was pretty much the only way they could ever give it any radio play. It was made into a movie, which I still have yet to see, but here’s an original (and longer than normal) trailer for it.

Alright, looks like the bird’s out of the oven and we’re ready to eat. Let’s let Jimmy Stewart deliver the thanksgiving prayer (from the movie  Shenandoah).

Charlie Chaplin reminds us that not everyone can afford Thanksgiving. Maybe this isn’t going to be so funny in the future.

(By the way the shoe was made of licorice, which posed quite a health risk as two pounds of licorice is enough to cause serious heart arrhythmia!)

A little light dining music? Yes, nothing better for the appetite than classical music. Ladies and gentlemen, Liberace and his take on “Turkey in the Straw.”

Say what you will, the man could play.

And for a little after dinner entertainment, the children will put on a little play. Leave it to the Addams Family to teach us the true meaning of the holiday (and with Swedish subtitles).

Let’s work off some of those calories Little Eva and do the “Turkey Trot.”

In the days before DVDs and VCR and cable and movies on demand, many a family enjoyed the annual Thanksgiving tradition of watching The Wizard of Oz on TV.

I kind of miss those shared TV events. Aside from live sports events and awards shows and the occasional marathons, is there anything like this these days?

Looking ahead, while the adults are out doing shopping on the day after Thanksgiving, what are the kids supposed to do? Watch TV of course! This promo is from 1972.

Or, if you were a little more sophisticated, you did the Godzilla marathon.

Finally, if Macy’s announced the arrival of Santa and the holiday season, the deal wasn’t sealed for us on the West Coast until the Santa Claus Lane Parade took place (usually the weekend AFTER Thanksgiving). Proximity to Hollywood made it easier to draw big names, and floats towed by tractors replaced large balloons. Oh, and Gene Autry wrote “Here Comes Santa Claus” back in 1946 as a reference to his participation in this parade.

BONUS TIME!

I found some more videos during the holiday that people posted elsewhere that I didn’t tweet. You can call these leftovers or seconds or the feverish dreams of a tryptophan nap, but here they are. This first one features Christina Ricci making a repeat visit, this time from the movie THE ICE STORM. Another sarcastic holiday dinner prayer.

Red Skelton delivered this homily during one of his TV shows back in 1952. Was he talking about a Communist invasion?

This recently discovered home movie footage from 1939 (in color!) shows the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade that took place on what we consider the modern Thanksgiving era, i.e., the first year the holiday was moved to the third Thursday in November to lengthen the shopping season an stimulate the economy. I think to do this today we’d need to have Thanksgiving sometime around the middle of July. Note, this would be the first appearance of the Tin Man from THE WIZARD OF OZ which came out earlier the same year.

And for all those turkeys who made it through the holiday without ending up on the table, a disco tribute.

And that’ll do it. Hope you and yours had a fine holiday and enjoyed the traditions that were uniquely your own.

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#poetryfriday: the man who actually fell

I didn’t mean to wind up on a Poetry Friday vacation, but life happens. You end up out-of-state, away from home, out of routines, and the next thing you know you’re trying to redefine your routines.

Summers remind me of the years when I hung out with older kids who could drive and loved movies. They took me on as a mascot to the rep houses and introduced me to the world behind the world, the world of movies filled with adults who were nothing like the ones on TV and certainly unlike my family. It was a lifting of a veil of sorts, full of images that linger with me to this day.

Watching the oh-so-very non-linear The Man Who Fell to Earth I was intrigued by David Bowie’s alien character but when it was over was more struck by the destiny of the Buck Henry character being the one true man who would fall to earth. He stood for something and suffered the fate of his convictions, more than any other character in the film. Bowie’s alien lost his way and suffered but he was allowed to live with that suffering guilt. Henry was punished for his stand, and in those adolescent self-righteous summer nights I felt like life was warning me about what awaited those who dared stand up to power.

Obviously, I’ve learned so much more since about the subtleties of conviction, but at fifteen I felt that door to my mind opening.

two men in helmets
sparkling burnt orange suns
two tawdry, officious suits
hustling buck henry
toward the plate-glass window

a heave and a ho
like tossing a campmate
into the lake
except he bounces back
from the tempered glass
“i’m sorry”
“ah, don’t worry about it.”

then

through the window
no scream, no fear
only the labored breath
and the knowledge of
the inevitable

a single shoe
liberates itself
at the last moment

barbels chasing
floating despite their weight
through the canyons of high rises

the fall from grace
the corruption of power
the frailty of principle

at fifteen
flickering 24 times a second
these were the lessons
I learned in the dark
from the man
who actually fell

Poetry Friday. Every Friday. This week the round-up is hosted by Libby over at A Year of Literacy Coaching. Plenty of things to read there. Probably none of them as dark as the recollections of my fifteen-year-old self.

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my favorite thing i wrote all week

Of course there’s a story behind it, and facebook is involved.  Ever notice how it doesn’t seem like you can go a day without hearing or saying something about facebook?

So my friend Mikki posted a lolcat that someone tagged to make reference to West Side Story.  This prompted comments, one of which was someone’s take on the Jet’s song, which I took as a throw-down to write a parody of Cool.  But could I let it go?  Could I stop from thinking about other song parodies while I should have been working on my thesis?  Would I be posting, would I have written my favorite couplet (this week) if I could have let it go?

Thinking about cats, out on the town, hiding from the bulls (police), and about the song Tonight, and then when I was in the doctor’s office waiting I came up with the following:

the bulldogs won’t arrest us
and calicoes in estrus
will caterwaul our names

Man, it isn’t everyday you get an opportunity to rhyme the word estrus. For context, here’s the whole of what I wrote in the waiting room.

tonight, tonight,
we’ll roam the streets tonight
tonight we’ll be perched on the walls

tonight, tonight
we’ll chase the rats tonight
perhaps even cough up hairballs

tonight
the bulldogs won’t arrest us
and calicoes in estrus
will caterwaul our names

and though we’ll fight
we’ll hiss and spit ’til morning light
tonight!

Someone with more time and ambition than I currently have should make an all-cat version of West Side Story.  I’ll be more than happy to help with the libreto.

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slumdog imperialist guilt trip

First, I haven’t seen Slumdog Millionaire, though I want to.  That said..

I woke up this morning unsettled by last night’s Academy Awards ceremony.  It’s always bothered me that a storytelling medium gives lip service to the people who actually write the stories, and that it spends vast fortunes to tell these stories.  It calls itself entertainment but it is an industry, it employs a vast number of people and produces a product that occasionally fleeting and ephemeral.  It is an industry that talks openly about its magic, and like a magician performs slight-of-hand to prevent the audience from thinking about the larger issues.

Here’s what’s bothering me this morning after: If Slumdog Millionaire had been produced and directed by an Indian national, if it had been funded primarily outside of Hollywood, would we be seeing newspaper headlines about its awards today?

The Indian film industry has been producing movies for quite some time, and not just Bollywood product but Oscar-quality films at least since the 1950’s with the work of Satyajit Ray. I’m not going to pretend to know more than I do, but I have seen my share of foreign cinema co-opted by Hollywood that, in turn, pats itself on the back for its forward-thinking inclusion of other cultures.  It doesn’t often do so in the Best Picture category though because films have to be primarily produced through an American studio to be nominated, so often this self-congratulatory affair takes place in the Best Foreign Film category where every other country in the world gets to put forth a single film to represent them that year, and from that mush pot the Academy chooses five films to duke it out for attention.  At last count there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 190 countries in the world besides the United States, some with film industries of their own.

So I guess with odds like that I shouldn’t really be bothered that a film set in India, with a British director and another Brit adapting the screenplay from a book by an Indian author, should win hat is typically considered an American award.  The Academy Awards go out of their way to honor the “best” in film, and yet like the World Series of baseball, their definition of “best” rarely extends beyond its continental boundaries.

Are we really to believe that this is the best film of its kind, about India?  Is this truly the best film produced in the previous year over all others?  Or is this the best film about India that is commercial enough for an American filmgoing audience to accept?  Is this about the uniqueness of the foreign, about a moviegoing nation full of people who can’t remember the last film they saw set in India (if ever) that didn’t feature known British actors in key roles?  Is this award not really about people patting themselves on the back for being so inclusive of other cultures that they are blind to everything else that culture may have to offer cinematically?

Years ago when I was a film reviewer I saw a film at a festival set in Iran, a simple love story about a local boy and girl who quietly fall in love while on the set of a movie where their characters are allowed to speak for them in ways they cannot.  It was a great film, a simple story well (and cleverly) told, and I was happy to see an American company (Miramax) was it’s distributor.  But it was never released.  The story I heard later was that the film rights were purchased to be refilmed as an American romantic comedy.  And thus, Through the Olive Trees languishes in obscurity, and our knowledge of Iran is limited only to those news reports we get from the BBC and NPR and, when it serves their purposes, American News media.  The film isn’t even available on DVD.  And then there’s Gabbeh, another Iranian love story, set in the mountains among goat herds and carpet makers.  This film got some limited release but still isn’t available on DVD as well.  Can it really be that there’s no interest in Iranian films, or is it there’s no interest in Iranian films that don’t fit an agenda or our preconceived notion of Iran?  Is it harder for Hollywood to sell a love story from Iran because there aren’t any terrorists or nuclear arms or weapons of any kind to be found?

Likewise, is it easier to sell a film about the Dickensian love story from the slums of Mumbai because that is what an American audience will expect?  Is Slumdog Millionaire the best film to come out of India this past year or just the only one American audiences would tolerate because it as marketed to their expectations after some good reviews following a few film festivals? Was it really the Best Picture made in 2008?

I used to have a mantra in my film reviewer days: see everything and judge for yourself.  Basically, never trust a critic or a reviewers word, but more importantly, see it all and go beyond the emotional first impression.  I’m still planning to see Slumdog Millionaire, but it’s going to have to compete in my mind with all the Indian, India-based, and Indian-directed films I’ve ever seen.  We’ll see if it holds up as award-worthy and hoopla-deserving then.

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poetry friday: nosferatu blues

From the collection Blues Poems selected and edited by Kevin Young

Nosferatu Blues

To be honest, I love your awkwardness most.
Not the naughty plumage of your lips

Or the splayed wildcat of your accent
Or the unexploded heartbeat of your paintings,

But your uneasiness in crowds–
How you skirted the edges

And wandered companionless,
Fidgeted and tried to mingle.

What should I tell the torch-bearing mob?
That I longed for you like a lost dog,

Spent an undead winter wondering
What your throat tasted of?

How you sashayed across white-haired sidewalks
Into the end credits of back-projected afternoons?

Or just how your car flashed silver in the sun,
Your voice shot through with radio and slang?

Shit, damn, what does it matter.
I’d settle for some broken piano chords,

For a half-finished B-movie from the 60s
To walk around in.

Then again, you know, I know, forgive me, but
What South Carolina do you dream in whoever’s
bed tonight?

What flaming hotels, what French aviators,
What ginger ale?

~ Jeff Fallis

Poems are funny sometimes in how they can strike you one moment, confound or frustrate you the next. Reading through this excellent collection, this poem jumped out and hit a nerve in me. I brought to it, and with it, a background and love of movies, visions of Max Schreck and Klaus Kinski. I thought about all those images of vampires that have come since Stoker — the Bela Lugosi, Anne Rice’s Louis, the Frank Langella, the Anita Blake prey, and now the Edward Cullen — and none of them can shake those black and white German Expressionist shadows, those angled buildings and stilted expressions that treated celluloid like a canvas rather than an entertainment.

This poem holds me until the last two stanzas, when my world crashes into the poet’s. Not that the poet didn’t have a specific object in mind, but as I read I could project into these words and feelings my own sense of what it means to be in thrall of such a creature. At the end the details become too specific for my images to hold and suddenly I feel shut out. And that’s appropriate, because this is not my Nosferatu.

I understand the Poetry Friday roundup is at Brimstone Soup today.

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mad monster party

A simple request to the universe: would someone please make some new, interesting monsters so we can have some new monster movies.

I guess technically what I mean when I say monsters includes a wide variety of human and humanoid creatures who populate the psyche as vividly as any man-made creature in a rubber suit.  While I’m getting all specific, what I’m looking for are the literary creatures that captivate the imagination and then enter the cultural lexicon as a shared experience. Not to put too fine on it, all you vampire-wannabes, we need some new blood.  And we need it to repair the damage to our psyches.

Seriously, I can think of nothing more dull than this current vogue in blood drinkers.  It’s gotten to the point that the number of vampires extant in the literary world now outnumber the population of our planet.  Yes, I get it, blood is elemental, and the various promises of powers and eternal life and blah-blah-blah, but it’s old. It’s tired. It’s 19th century Victorian in a 21st century geodesic dome.  We’re talking about a leech in human form, no longer an outcast of society but a parasite.  This is sexy?  When it’s a single vampyre in the world, driven by a need and felled by lust, yes, it’s got some erotic overtones.  When it’s selfish armies driven to feed you might as well set up shop with a sign that says “billions served.”  Ma, I’m headed down to the mini mart for a pint of blood.  You need me to get you some anticoagulants?

The children of Victor Frankenstein fared a little better.  Obviously the first time someone sewed a human together and woke them from an eternal slumber that didn’t work so well.  We learned that putting the vehicle together and making the motor run didn’t put a driver behind the wheel.  So science fiction picked up the slack and gave us robot think, just once, an intelligent robot would decide You know, I’m thinking the point of life is happiness, so I’m gonna grab a little spiked lube and go hang out at the beach.  But no, our robots follow the grand tradition of the monster and come for us.  Now it looks like cloning and DNA work are going to make the possibilities less “monster” and more human as we grapple with the moral questions.  Frankie’s always been a moral question, with the the fundamentalist villagers waving their burning flags and Armageddon pitchforks asking “Who died and made you God?”  The monster just doesn’t scare anymore.

Speaking of the undead coming back for seconds, what’s with zombies anyway?  Seriously.  Undead, slow-moving, flesh- and brain-eating creatures who do as they’re controlled to, like armies.  What’s the appeal in watching humans prove they can out-last and out-think the lowest of creatures on the monster food chain?  Maybe it’s me, but I just can’t get excited about these guys.  They’re an inefficient vehicle for examining our fear of being alone and exposed in public.  Now, if the zombies didn’t want to eat our brains but instead want to strip us naked and keep us from wearing clothes in public, wouldn’t that be something!  What if the zombies went from town to town destroying food supplies that contained high fructose corn syrup and trans fats?  The horror!  What would we eat, what would we eat?

The werewolf cracks me up as a monster, because nothing screams PUBERTY more than this creature with a lunar cycle that culminates with the sudden growth of body hair and animal behavior.  Was this ever really a monster to take seriously?  And why always male?  Don’t wolves have mates, and don’t they mate for life?  Why would they need to go marauding the moors or prowling the plateaus in search of… well, the werewolf really never has articulated exactly what it is the old boy wants. Could it be a bath?  Maybe a nice stick to fetch?  A tummy rub? Maybe the Wolfman still has punch for a modern crowd, given that young people today seem to have a pathological fear of body hair and would rather be shorn and waxed than appear hirsute.

Now, as for mummies, I have to admit I liked what they did recently when they revisited the old Egyptian myths.  At least for the first movie.  I could have used a little less camp, but it was still fun, they were still able to mine some unexamined aspects of the original curse thing.  And while I admire them making a go at those mummies in China to expand the franchise I’m not a little nervous that there’s more going on politically with the choices of mummies in countries America currently has uneasy relations with.  Instead of monsters cursing those who disturb their eternal rest we’re now faced with armies (again with the armies!) of undead looking to wreak havoc on the living.  But as with werewolves, where are the literary stories of these creatures, what are we really dealing with when we face down the changeling or the creature who has been pickled and cured?  Mummies are like zombies in that fear-of-the-undead way, but until recently they, too, were slow moving and posed little threat.

In the 1930s Universal pictures gave us what are now considered the great monsters of movies.  They came from literature and they came from recent archaeological discoveries.  They also came from a world that was just beginning to open up.  Following World War I soldiers deployed overseas had seen parts of the world barely in their consciousness outside of classrooms.  Foreign lands and foreign cultures – all this strange newness presented Hollywood and movie-going audience a chance to learn (and fear) things unlike anything American.  The Old World with its charms and customs also had its mysteries and secrets: remote mountain villages with scientists living in castles, remote feudal countrysides with dark lords, funerary monuments filled with treasures and curses.  Today these are all travel destinations with guidebooks explaining quaint superstitions.

By the 1950s our fears became political and nuclear.  The Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation brought us a new breed of monsters.  Creatures bombarded with radiation mutated and grew into city-destroying men in rubber suits.  What is a Godzilla movie if not a mutant lizard battling other mutants (like a giant mutant moth?) in an East-versus-West showdown over superiority.  Yes, it’s up to the people on the ground (again with the armies!) to push the fear back into the sea or find some other way to placate the fears.  And, as if the symbolism of Communist invasion could be made any more blatant, aliens arrived from space to turn us into unfeeling blank slates, to turn us into bits of machinery for the state.  Whether the beast came from 20,000 Fathoms or It Came from Outer Space the fact remains, it came and it came to get us.

By the 1970s our eyes were fully opened to the world and our monsters came from within.  We no longer would run from mummies or aliens – those were the fears of children, the monsters under the bed from long ago.  Instead we would run from our neighbors wielding chainsaws or donning hockey masks and lurking in the darkened corners.  Ancient grudges paid in full, more recent grievances are answered in buckets of bloodletting at remote campsites, in haunted houses, and anyplace else of significance to the specters of vengeance.  Fear of the unknown or the unusual was simply replaced by fear of each other.

It would seem we have exhausted our ability to be scared from within and have now moved to bring each other to a state of blind terror.  How can you expect to tell stories of monsters when you are in a constant state of fear over the monsters among us.  You could take all the monsters of literature, all the cultural monsters from movies, all the fear of nuclear warfare and the end of civilization and the couldn’t replace the fear now deeply embedded in the psyche of the average American.  Where terrorism was once a remote act of violence that happened elsewhere, now we fear unseen acts of terror awaiting us at every turn.  And where is our release for this anxiety, how are we to work out our irrational fears and come to grip with the changes in our society?

Superheroes are not the answer, though I suspect they are an attempt to assuage those fears.  We root for superheroes to serve as our surrogates, but they do not show us how to combat our own fears.  They are the mommies and daddies who save helpless children, they are the protectors of the weak and frail and those who have abdicated their own responsibilities.  That is not who we are or what we need.

What we need are monsters who stand-in for what scares us and shows us how to stand up for ourselves.  Accepting the old cliched monsters, wanting to be like them or longing for them romantically, is a defeatist attitude.  Why run from the Wolfman when you can lust for him?  Why fight the power of the vampire’s magnetic personality when you can open a vein and bleed for her willingly?  Ancient curses from ancient cultures have no power over us when we can instead harness those powers for our own ends.

Over the recent decades we have been badly damaged, made to believe that monsters do not exist and that the people we should fear the most are Other People.  The people we should fear are those telling us we should fear each other, they are the real monsters.  They are the scariest monsters of all because they are accepted, believed, trusted with power and money and government.  But as monsters go they are alos uninteresting.  They look and talk like us and no one goes running from the room when they enter, no one goes looking for a pitchfork to wield when they draw near.  Because we don’t recognize them as monsters we have forgotten how to stand up to them.

So I say it’s time for some new monsters.  It’s time to tell the allegories that instruct, to show us how to stand up once again and teach us how to fight back.  No superalien from space who will come at the last minute to save us, no humutant with elemental powers to stand in for us, we need credible creatures who invade our mental spaces on a visceral level and show us that our guns are useless, that passivity results in death, and that only by banding together and using our intelligence wil we survive.

We need some new monsters, both in books and movies and any other new media that can support them.  The old ones just don’t cut it anymore.

*     *     *     *     *

For those finding the title strangely familiar, or to those who might think I am not aware of such things, yes, I do vividly remember this movie from my childhood.  How many kids today would get these referneces the same way I did back in the day?  Could a similar movie be made today?  Do we have enough of a shared culture anymore to say we have modern, universal monsters?

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nouns

It’s as simple as that sometimes, a single word.  I’m reading Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing and he talks about his writing journey and how he’d been sitting his butt down and writing every day for a decade before he sold his first story at 22.  It’s called showing up.  Not by him but by others, and it’s instructive to realize not only the truth of this idea of sitting down and dedicating time to what you do, but that over time it really is the only way to get anything done.

So brother Ray has 20+ years on me figuring this out.  But does he stop there?  No, he rubs my face in it with another simple exercise that he also happened to chance upon.  After he’d written a number of published stories he wrote the titles down as a list and discovered they were all nouns, all based on things that he was curious about as a kid, all general enough that they could be about anything but for him they were specific triggers for memories.

In unpacking things into my new office space I finally had almost all (there’s one missing!) my screenplays in one place on a shelf.  Spine out, with their titles handwritten on the bluntly bound pages, I stacked them in order of when they were written and studied them from my reading chair.

The Resort.
Pumpkin Thieves.
The Death of Chris and Jenny.
The Book of Isabel.
(the missing Helena would go here).
Peace of Mind.
Come and Gone.
Tips for the Dating Impaired.
Whim.
Undesireables.

What did these titles tell me about my writing?  They begin as concept stories, a mad dreamscape about a movie being made in the space between this world and another, between life and death, followed by a pseudo-political story concerning government-controlled and -funded criminals.  Next come a trio of character studies that explore (or attempt to) the underground youth culture.  These are followed by a weak attempt to write a Hitchcockian thriller, that actually was read by an agent who was kind at pointing out that I was still having problems with grammar.  Two autobiographical stories follow, then a What-If fantasy based on an idea tossed away by a film director in an interview (“What if I pretended to be the interviewer and you pretended to be the filmmaker and we see how many people we can fool…”), and lastly my epic homage to Victor Hugo concerning the professional street people who occupy our urban centers.

And those were the finished ones.

Many of these stories were built off ideas, or collected observations, but not around those ideas and observations.  I wasn’t telling stories as much as I was trying to stitch ideas with tenuous narrative threads and borrowed styles.  Even the biographical stories seemed to be missing the target emotionally, and that’s why they failed.  It’s why they all failed.  The titles don’t do what they’re supposed to — trigger memories — because the stories they represent come from the head.

I can’t tell you how this pisses me off, because lately everyone’s been talking about emotion in writing.  Emotion this and emotion that, and what are these characters feeling, and, crap! Why don’t I know?

Well, according to brother Ray, it’s because I’m not stepping on my own landmines.  I need to blow myself up, tear myself apart and find out what everything’s really all about.  And then there’s my advisor, Margaret, who’s pointing out that I’m not letting the boys in my story get into enough danger, that I’m protecting them too much.

Why.  It’s a no-question-mark question, the kind where the answers are questions in and of themselves.  Why am i protecting my characters?  Why won’t I let them feel?  What part of the world that I’m a part of am I protecting them from…

Ah.  The world.  I’m trying to protect them from the world that didn’t protect me.  Is that a statement or a question?  Do I really feel like the world didn’t protect me?  Or is it because I never learned the langauge of the emotions, that I can’t pass them along to my characters because, like passing on bad genes, I don’t have them to pass along?

Freakin’ Ray Bradbury.

So I sat down and wrote out a lit of nouns, titles to future stories, triggers for ideas that I may or may not write about one day.  Each one of those nouns has more intrinsic meaning than any of those titles above.  Some have stronger emotional centers than others, and some strange things came out of the exercise — like the eerie early memory that links cult-like religious indoctrination with soccer.  But as personal stories they underscore moments where I (the main character) encountered a strong emotional experience that I don’t think I ever really understood.

Nouns.  Word association.  Emotion.  It reads like therapy.

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loser film treatment: yo, dawg, go!

I never do well at these things because (a) writing on command for contests really freezes me up and (b) I just don’t think I get the right vibe on the humor around this ol’ Vermont College.

The deal is, with every graduating class comes a party, and with each party a writing contest.  Last year… I forgot what it was.  I entered and lost.  Whatever.  This time around I thought I might have a chance: a good news/bad news film treatment contest.  The good news is that a famous/classic children’s book has been chosen to be turned into a big Hollywood film.  The bad news is, well, it’s being made into a crappy big Hollywood film.  100 to 200 words.

This should so totally be mine.  I know films, I know classic kid’s books, I even know how to write a freakin’ treatment.  But humor is the name of the game and maybe I’m not as funny as I think I am when under the gun.

There were co-winners, a treatment for Kathi Appelt’s The Underneath pitched as as musical — “It’s Cape Fear meets Oklahoma!”  The other winner was Anne of Green Gables starring Li’l Kim.  Me?  I went with It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World crossed with Pulp Fiction for a retelling of the P.D. Eastman classic Go, Dog, Go! It goes a little something like this…

Yo, Dawg, Go!

An Old Dog careens off the highway and with his dying breath reveals to a group of strangers of a secret stash hidden in a suitcase in a coastal California city.  Among the strangers are Big Dawg and Little Dawg, a pair of hitmen who have been assigned to retrieve the suitcase for their boss, Top Dawg.  They immediately wipe out the other witnesses to the accident and head off to claim the loot themselves.

Along the way Little Dawg is asked by Top Dawg to look after his wife who insists on a series of exchanges over whether or not they like each other’s hats.

Eventually Big Dawg and Little Dawg continue their drive across country and discover the suitcase with the loot on top of a large tree full of other Dawgs.  While Little Dawg sends the tree full of Dawgs to bed for the Big Sleep, Big Dawg foams at the snout barking biblical verse from Ezekiel before returning the suitcase to Top Dawg.

Driving away, Big Dawg and Little Dawg discuss the misuse of the article “der” in the name of the fast food chain Der Wienerschnitzel.

Quentin Tarantino directs.

Eh, I at least gave it a shot.  Maybe I was too esoteric in my references.

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why i am not a filmmaker

If you had asked my friends in high school what I was destined to be they wouldn’t have hesitated to anoint me the next Spielberg, the next Lucas.  In the late 1970’s there could probably be no greater honor, akin to calling a young golfer today the next Tiger Woods, or tapping a teen hacker the next Bill Gates.  It’s a heady thing to know you’re thought so highly of, that your peers see something in you that you do not see in yourself.

The problem wasn’t a question of self-esteem, it was that the people I was being compared to and the things they produced didn’t resonate with what I wanted to do.  I had always felt that I wanted to do something with film, in motion pictures, something that had to do with sequential storytelling in a visual media, but by the time I trucked off to college I still didn’t have my definitive role model.  I held onto the “dream” and went along for the ride through college, coming out the other end only slightly less clueless.

It’s taken me nearly 30 years to figure it out, but today while reading a newspaper article about the band R.E.M. I realized why I’m not a filmmaker.

It’s because I wanted to be in a band.

I didn’t want to be in a rock band, or a blues band, or any kind of musical organization.  I wanted to be in a film band.  I wanted to join up with a bunch of like-minded people and pool our collective talents into filmmaking.  Like music, film is a collective medium, with individuals specializing and participating for the whole.  The problem is that filmmaking is generally consumed by people full of authorial ego and is collaborative in the most mercenary of ways.  You don’t see the bassists union making pay and lifestyle demands while the drummer’s union stipulates the length of a workday.  You don’t see lead singers with their agents holding off until contracts arrive stipulating their name above the title of the album.

Sure, there are film production companies that are formed by people who have gained enough clout to make the films they want.  But that’s not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about a small crew of people who get together and jam out some ideas until a cohesive image comes together.  Not some cheesy collective, like some holdover from the hippie days, but a group artistic endeavor that expresses themselves visually the way musicians do aurally.

Oh, Hollywood tries to market their movies this way with “From the producer of” and “From the director of,” and historically you have director/star match-ups like Burton-Depp and Scorsese-DeNiro but these are hardly what I’m talking about.

Imagine you’re off to see a new film by The Seven Samurai, or Die Wenders Staat, or perhaps a little something from Un Petit Chat.  As with bands, over time would would come to know their strengths, could fairly compare them with their previous works, and have a better sense of the quality of the work going in.

Perhaps then, with bands as brands, we could address the ticket price issue.  A local band playing a local gig isn’t going to command the same door fee as a big ticket band commanding seven nights at the local arena.  A paperback doesn’t fetch the same prices as a hardcover.  So why does the low budget indie film get stuck helping foot the bill at the box office as a big budget box office failure?

But I digress.  The sad fact is that it’s taken me 30 years to see now what I wish I could have seen then.  Bands are for the young.  No forty-something dude is going to pick up a guitar and pull together his poker buddies and start making waves as The Midlife Crises.  Sure, you can age into the scene but you can’t capture the market, you can’t reach the hearts and minds of viewers and listeners open to your ideas.  Couch surfing and living in a van just isn’t conducive to folks in need of daily fiber and condroitin supplements.

In the off chance there’s a band of filmmakers out there looking for an elder member with a sense of history and humor; I’m totally into the French and German New Wave (Godard, Wenders, Herzog), early 80’s indie films (Cox, Syales), classic screwball comedies (Sturges is king), and any film that isn’t afraid to go longer than 45 seconds before cutting.

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