Father Knows Best On Killing People

Title: Frailty

Rating: 5 Stars

I was on a cross country plane ride a little bit ago. For the ride, I decided to watch two of my all time favorite films. I’ve already written about Killing Them Softly. One of my other favorites is Frailty.

It is a strange film with a strange provenance. It was a passion project for, of all people, Bill Paxton. Jokingly, he said that he called it Frailty because at any point in time the project felt like it could collapse.

There is a serial murderer that calls himself the God’s Hand. A man (Matthew McConaughley) comes to the FBI claiming that the killer is his brother. The FBI agent (Powers Boothe) is skeptical but hears his story. Most of the film is told in flashback.

Fenton and Adam Meiks are two young brothers living in a small town in Texas. Their mother died giving birth to Adam. The older brother Fenton has taken on much of the role of the mother. He looks after Adam. He cooks for the whole family. Their father (Bill Paxton) works as a mechanic. Although there’s only three of them, they seem to have adjusted and are living perfectly normal and happy lives.

That is, until one night the father bursts into the children’s bedroom, turns on the lights, wakes them up, and tells them that he has momentous news. That night, an angel came down from heaven and told him that he and his children have a mission. There are demons that live among us. Their job, passed down from God, is to destroy the demons.

Adam is excited by the news. Fenton thinks that their father is losing his mind. Hoping that it will go away, instead the father becomes more enthusiastic as God points him to the three implements that he must use to destroy demons: an ax, a pair of gloves, and a metal pipe.

Fenton still hopes that his father will come to his senses. One day, the father comes home. In his hand is the list of the first seven people that they must kill. These are just random names. He kidnaps the first one and knocks him unconscious with the metal pipe. When the victim is secured, he takes his gloves off and lays hands upon the victim. Then he can see all of the sins that they have committed. Enraged by the sins, he then kills them with the ax, chops them up, and buries them in a rose garden. 

Adam completely believes his father. In fact, he comes up with a list of demons that they should destroy that just conveniently are kids that have crossed him. His father gently corrects him. Fenton is horrified that their father is now a murderer and plots an escape.

For future victims, it becomes a family affair. The children, even Fenton, against his will, are involved in the abduction of the next victim. Multiple people are murdered. Fenton finally rebels and runs away. He beseeches the local sheriff for help. Not believing him, the sheriff reluctantly agrees to investigate. His father murders him and is completely beset by grief because he ‘has never murdered before’. Destroying demons does not count as murder.

Things finally come to a head between Fenton and his father. Fenton knows that his father is a mass murderer while his father has come to believe that Fenton is a demon.

Decades later, Fenton (McConaughley) has come to the FBI agent because he believes that Adam, now an adult, has taken on their father’s role as a destroyer of demons.

There’s a lot of twists and turns here that I won’t go into. I know that it’s a 20 year old film, but I wouldn’t want to spoil one of my favorite films.

The main thing that I love about this is that Bill Paxton brings his most simple, down home, aw-shucks demeanor to the role. He’s not some gospel spouting, wild eyed mad man. He’s a loving, hard working father that just happens to have visitations from an angel. He’s doing the Good Lord’s work as best as he can. There’s not even a twitch of irony in his acting. 

Fenton, desperate to keep the family together, tries to talk sense to his father. Failing that, he wants to get away with Adam. Adam, full of hero worship of his father, cannot understand why Fenton doesn’t want to destroy demons as God told their father to. Since we see the family through Fenton’s worldview, we are horrified by what the family is turning into.

Beyond the interesting family dynamics behind the scenes of horror, I find the whole voice of God angle interesting as well. Throughout history, many people have heard the word of God and have been inspired to take action. This goes all the way back to God instructing Abraham to kill his only son Isaac. Many other times people have been led astray by voices in their head claiming to be God (eg Charles Guiteau assassinating President James Garfield because God told him to).

How do you know when it truly is the voice of God or just a symptom of a mental illness? Who gets to decide?

The Business Of Crime

Title: Killing Them Softly

Rating: 5 Stars

This is a film that didn’t get a lot of audience love. The audiences of CinemaScore gave the film a score of F. It’s sitting at a measly 44% on RottenTomatoes. It does do better with the critics. I’d take this even further than the critics. I’ve now seen the film around four times now. It’s one of my favorite films. Amazingly enough, even though I’ve seen it so many times, apparently I’ve never written about it. So here goes.

The film is closely based upon George V Higgins’ novel Cogan’s Trade. If you haven’t read Higgins before, I strongly recommend giving him a try. I call it the tough guys talking tough genre. His novels are populated by career criminals, some successful and most not, as they go about trying to stay alive another day. He has an ear for dialog that gives his characters a grim poetry. Cogan’s Trade is a great novel as a first look at Higgins.

Be forewarned. Killing Them Softly doesn’t even come close to passing the Bechdel Test. In the entire film, there is one credited female role. Her character name is Hooker. This is a man’s world.

Markie (Ray Liotta) runs a card game. Years ago, his card game was robbed. Years later, he laughingly confessed that he actually organized the robbery. Since everyone liked Markie, he was forgiven. Now, Squirrel (Vincent Curatola) has the bright idea of robbing Markie’s game again. Since everyone knows that Markie robbed it the first time, suspicion will necessarily fall upon Markie. He enlists the recent parolee Frankie (Scott McNairy) and perpetually wasted Australian Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) to commit the crime. They successfully do so. The crime syndicate, represented by the attorney simply known as the Driver (Richard Jenkins) contracts with Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) to find the guilty and to kill them. Since multiple people are going to be hit, Cogan arranges to bring another hit man (Mickey, played by James Gandolfini) to help him.

I usually don’t list all of the actors like this. I did so because the film is perfectly cast. Jenkins is perfect as the harried and harassed middle manager. Gandolfini is perfect as the once good hit man that has become completely dissipated and is now useless to Cogan. McNairy and Mendelsohn are both perfect as the not too smart criminal foot soldiers. Liotta is perfect as the personable wiseguy that everyone loves until the robbery puts a huge target on his back. Curatola is perfect as the guy that thinks he’s smarter than everyone else and has designed the perfect crime that falls apart since no one seems able to keep their mouths shut.

The quiet, efficient, almost bored menace of Brad Pitt is at the center of this film. I once read that Pitt is a character actor in a leading man’s body. This is not a huge role. He certainly doesn’t get the girl in the end. He’s no hero. He’s a merciless killer that treats killing just like it’s another day at the office.

Apparently set late in the year 2008, in the background of the film are running news commentaries about the housing crisis and the near collapse of the world economy. You hear bromides from President George W Bush and incoming President Barack Obama. In the foreground you see uncollected garbage, condemned buildings, and a general sense of societal collapse.

This is reflected in the criminal organization. Over time, this organization has become like any other large corporation. Like all middle managers before him, the Driver complains about how bureaucratic the crime syndicate is getting. No one makes any decisions. They balk at Cogan’s rate for murder (including a scene where the Driver explains that $15,000 for a hit in today’s economy is actually a good deal). The Driver cannot understand why Markie needs to be hit until Cogan explains it to him in PR terms. For those of us with painful corporate experience, the conversations between the Driver and Cogan are darkly hilarious. 

The dialog, as in the novel, is wonderful. Having not read the novel for some time, I don’t know if the film dialog is taken from the novel. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was. These are tough guys with a sensitive side. Two bruisers are given the task of beating up (not killing) Markie. Before they start, they commiserate with each other that Markie will probably make it hard on them. As they start to beat up Markie and he (understandably) tries to talk them out of it, they whine to Markie that he’s making it hard on them. Even Cogan explains that he doesn’t like it when murder gets ‘touchy-feely’. The soft side of these very hard men makes for great entertainment. 

I’m not sure why audiences didn’t like it. Seeing these actors, maybe they expected to see a conventional Scorsese style gangster epic. Instead, you have a bunch of mid to low level functionaries trying to get their job done or maybe get a bit ahead.

This is quite a violet film, but the best part of the film is what happens between the violence.

You Will Be Assimilated

Title: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

About four months ago, I read Finney’s novel The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You can read about it here. This week, I managed to find time to watch both the 1956 film and the 1978 film. They both follow the basic plot of the novel. A man and a woman hear stories of people seemingly being replaced by identical copies that act somehow differently. They remain skeptical until one of their other friends finds an apparently inanimate body that is slowly transforming into a human. Horrified, they rush to the authorities. The authorities do nothing. Everyone around them starts turning into emotionless animatrons. They desperately try to figure out a way to stop the progress of these transformations or at least try to find a way to raise the alarm to the larger world. These pod people turn on the couple and implacably chases them. They’re exhausted but know that if they fall asleep that they will become pod people themselves. Will they survive? Will humanity be saved?

There are several common scenes between the two films. A mutual friend and his wife first find a body that is in the state of transition. To rescue the woman, the man must break into her basement, sneak into her bedroom, and carry her off to safety. The couple and their mutual friend and wife hole up together for a while. This safe house is no longer safe when they find four pods ready to take over their bodies. They watch as the pod people start loading trucks to distribute the pods far and wide. This leads them to understand that all of humanity is at risk. 

In a nod to the original, the 1978 film replicates the famous scene using the actor from the original film where he runs from car to car screaming that they’re coming for all of us and that we’re next.

The 1956 film hews pretty close to the novel. The main characters are a doctor and a woman recently returned to the small town. The other characters in the film are the same as in the novel. The 1978 film is set in the much larger San Francisco. The man works for the city health department and the woman is a research scientist. The woman becomes suspicious when her boyfriend suddenly begins to act unaffectionately. 

So, right away, a difference between the two films is small time life vs big city life. In the small town, everyone knows everyone. It’s hard to believe that someone has been taken over by an alien when you’ve seen that person every day of your life. In the big city, there’s a lot more anonymity. People are ignoring each other anyway, so why is being possessed by an alien different?

The pacing of the 1956 film is much tighter. It efficiently tells the story in eighty minutes. The 1978 film takes its time. It’s just under two hours. I think that I preferred the tighter pacing. The extra 35 minutes didn’t really add that much to the story.

It’s probably not shocking that the special effects was much better in the 1978 film. In the 1956 film, the transformation was pretty much represented using something like soap bubbles. In the later film, it was much more realistic. Some of the added screen time was dedicated to showing the development of the pod as well as the destruction of the human body as the pod person took over. 

Also probably not shocking is that the acting is better in the 1978 film. It’s fair to say that method acting had not caught on everywhere by 1956. The acting, while serviceable, is pretty wooden. In 1978, with actors like Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, and Leonard Nimoy, the acting is much richer. Weirdly, Robert Duvall even makes a very brief appearance with no lines.

Finally, the ending is different between the two and both are different than from the novel. In the novel, due to unexpected resistance, the aliens basically give up and search for another planet. In the 1956 film, the doctor alone survives the small town. Desperately he leaves the town to try to warn the world. Believed to be insane, he is only believed when, in the last minute of the film, a truck containing pods is in an accident, validating his story. In the final moments, the authorities are finally leaping into action, hopefully not too late to stop the invasion. In the 1978 film, one survivor (the friend’s wife) comes up to the leading man at the end of the film and seeks help. To her horror, he is now a pod person. All hope is lost. Considering what all had happened to the US over the preceeding twenty years (Vietnam, Watergate, assassinations, etc), the pessimistic ending probably seemed appropriate.

Which did I like better? Hmmm, hard to say. If you’re in the mood for a horror film, the 1956 version is probably the way to go. If you’re interested in a film that leans more heavily upon social commentary, you should go with the 1978 version.

Punishment And No Crime

Title: The Blunderer

Rating: 4 Stars

Walter Stackhouse is unhappy. It’s all the fault of his wife Clara. Neurotic and high strung, she harasses Walter incessantly. She is in the process of alienating all of his friends. She falsely accuses Walter of having an affair with Ellie, a music teacher. Somehow the false accusation motivates Walter. He now starts having an affair with Ellie. Ellie is everything that Clara isn’t. Walter tells Clara that he is going to divorce her. As a result, she attempts suicide and nearly dies. Momentarily reuniting them, Walter and Clara fall back once again to their bickering.

While this is happening, Walter reads about the murder of Helen Kimmel. She was murdered at a rest stop while on a long distance bus ride. Walter imagines her husband, Melchior, following behind the bus, waiting for the bus to stop, calling to Helen, and then strangling her.  Walter even visits Kimmel to see if he has the look of a killer. Walter begins to fantasize about killing Clara.

Clara’s mother falls deathly ill. Even though they’re not close, Clara decides to ride the bus to visit her. His fantasies coming to life, Walter follows the bus. At its first rest stop, all passengers disembark. Walter, now out of his car, tries to find Clara. She is nowhere to be found. The bus leaves. Confused, Walter goes home.

He wakes up the next morning to the news that Clara’s body was found at the bottom of a cliff at the rest stop. It is assumed to be suicide. Especially given the fact that she’d just recovered from a previous attempt, this seems logical to the police. 

However, Walter was seen at the rest stop. Understandably suspicious, the police, in particular one LT Colby, begins a dogged investigation. At first denying that he was at the rest stop, Walter admits it. He can give no plausible reason for being there. Colby discovers how unhappy Walter and Clara were. He learns that Walter purchased a plane ticket to Reno to procure a divorce. He discovers the affair with Ellie. In Walter’s office, he finds the news clipping about the Kimmel murder.

Colby identifies the similarities between Clara’s murder and Helen’s murder. Eventually Walter confesses to meeting Melchior before the murder. Convinced that Melchior actually did murder his wife, Colby repeatedly tries to beat a confession out of Melchior. Given that there was no police suspicion on him before Walter interfered, Melchior tries to blackmail Walter for money. Walter refuses and Melchior goes public with a false accusation that Walter confessed to him that he murdered his wife.

This confession, along with all of the other inflammatory publicity that Colby had already leaked out, ruins Walter life. Ellie deserts him, he quit his job before he was going to be fired anyway, his partner for a prospective law practice backed out, and all of his friends, convinced of his guilt, have abandoned him. Melchior, outraged that his libel hasn’t resulted in the arrest of Walter, is now out to kill him. It’s fair to say, especially in the world of Highsmith’s noir, that no happy ending awaits Walter.

Remember that he is innocent of the initiating action. He has moments of hallucination where he visualizes killing Clara, but in fact, he didn’t. It might have been an accident, but in all likelihood, Clara probably committed suicide. If so, her revenge is complete. By the end of the novel, Walter is ruined, a murderer, and finally, is himself murdered. She could ask for nothing more.

What’s really interesting about this novel is how Walter brings all of this onto his own head. Walter, at least up to the point of Clara’s death, has committed no crime, but his punishment is extreme. Although not guilty, his actions inevitably lead to his ruin. You hear Walter’s interior thoughts. He’s convinced that every new idea or action that he comes up with will lead to some positive progress but instead is just another shovelful of dirt on his grave.

He lies when he doesn’t need to. In lying, he makes himself look so much more guilty. He simply can’t leave Melchior alone. Every time he visits him is just more evidence to Colby that the two are in cahoots. His friends stand by him, and since they know Clara, are sympathetic to his plight, until the bad publicity and his own suspicious actions drive them away. Ellie stands by him the longest, but even she ends up finding the weight of evidence against Walter (most of which was the direct result of his actions) is overwhelming.

Highsmith is particularly ingenious here. This is a crime noir. There is a femme fatale and a love triangle. The central character is a pretty hapless man that gets wrapped up in a web of intrigue. There is an implacable detective trying to get to the truth.

However, it’s also not a traditional crime noir. The central crime is actually not a crime. The femme fatale is a neurotic shrew, not some manipulative spider spinning webs of deceit. Every move that the protagonist makes is not only the wrong move but is actually the right move if the goal is ruination. The detective, not a good guy at all, ruthlessly beats Melchior, seemingly more interested in the glory of catching two murderers with one stroke than any pursuit of truth.

Although not as well known as other of her novels, I found this to be one of Highsmith’s strongest efforts.

The Good Old Days Of Real America

Title: The Last Picture Show

Rating: 4 Stars

About a year and a half ago or so, I watched The Last Picture Show. I wrote about it here. For some reason, I started thinking about it again and decided to give the novel a shot.

The film adheres closely to the novel. This is the story of Sonny and Duane, high school seniors, living in a very small town in Texas in the early 1950s. This is also the story of Jacy, the belle of the town (and girlfriend of the high school football star Duane). As all three navigate graduating high school and getting ready to be full fledged adults, you see how lost they all are. Their small town, Thalia, has nothing for them. There really is nothing to do. There are no prospects. They are looking at adulthood, and all around them are adults that are themselves, at best, unhappily struggling.

Since it is a novel and not a feature film, it can go into all of this in much more depth. To put it mildly, it does.

There’s a certain group of people that, if you asked them when and where the US was really great, they would say that it would be in the 1950s in small town America. There weren’t people with long hair protesting or taking drugs. Children were polite and only spoke to their elders with deference. People had morals then. There wasn’t all of this rampant sexuality that you see today. The civic leaders provided moral leadership. People looked after each other. People that live in small towns are the salt of the earth, somehow superior to those living in the crowded, cramped cities. This is the heartland of America where real Americans live.

The Last Picture Show takes each of these beliefs and rips them apart. McMurtry was born and raised in a small Texas town in the 1950s. Published in 1966, it was written at a time when his memories of small town living must have been still very fresh.

The novel rips apart small town living. Most everyone lives in poverty. Paid weekly, Duane and Sonny regularly run out of money and have to spend part of their last day living off of Butterfingers. They don’t have much prospects to climb out of poverty. The adults are not in a much better state. Genevieve, the diner’s waitress, is only working because of an injury to her husband. Sonny’s father is reduced to living in a hotel room. Knowing how much his father needs money, Sonny refuses to accept any money that his father offers him.

There is nothing to do in this small town. The only places to hang out are the pool hall, the diner, and the movie theater. Desperate to find something new to do, Duane and Sonny buy alcohol, drive around, and occasionally get in fights.

Probably because of boredom, the young men of the town are almost thoughtlessly cruel. They constantly torture the goody two shoes Joe Bob Blanton, regularly stripping off his underwear and other indignities. They brutally prank the good-natured, simple minded Billy.

Those few that are different are punished. The effete English teacher, Mr Cecil, is, based upon no evidence other than the way he looks, accused of being gay. Without even so much as a discussion, the school superintendent immediately fires him. Mr Cecil’s wife leaves him and takes the children. It’s unstated but the irony is that the chief accuser, the football coach, if anyone, appears to be the person acting most inappropriately to young men. Joe Bob Blanton, forced by his father to become a minister ends up so sexually repressed that he ends up accused of and arrested for molesting a child. His father uses his son’s arrest to preach a real stem-winder of a sermon.

Even though high school girls are taught to rigidly protect their virginity, sex is rampant in the town. Duane and Sonny frequent a brothel when they go to Mexico. They do so again when they spend their last night together in Fort Worth. Even more disturbingly, a group of high school boys go to a barn yard where they commit acts of bestiality upon a blind calf. Instead of being ashamed, the boys look upon all of this as high adventure. Only Sonny, upon whom much of the novel is focused upon, is repulsed. When Jacy does lose her virginity, it is painful and awkward. True to Jacy’s personality, she immediately figures out to use her new found sexuality to manipulate the young men.  

There is a sadness to growing old in a small town. The 40ish sexually repressed wife of the football coach, Ruth, comes to life when she is able to seduce the teenage Sonny. While their affair progresses, Ruth blooms. Later, Jacy beckoned her little finger to Sonny and he dropped Ruth like a hot potato, breaking her heart and driving her to depression. After Sonny realizes that Jacy was just manipulating her, he comes crawling back to Ruth. Ruth, wanting to hate him, cannot.

In its explicitness, the novel reads almost like pulp fiction. In laying bare the emptiness of small town life, for some reason I thought of Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis’ novel about the vacuous life of teenage life in 1980s LA. In both novels, there is almost a form of nihilism to the characters. They care about nothing and have nothing to live for. They search for meaning where there is only meaninglessness.

Lynchian Kafka Or Kafkaesque Lynch?

Title: Eraserhead

Rating: 4 Stars

How do you talk about this film? How do you rate it? I have no idea. Since David Lynch refuses to talk about the film in interviews, I’d imagine that any perspective that I bring to it is just about as equally good or bad as any other.

Usually when I write about a film, the first thing that I describe is the plot so as to ground the film. Here, that’s a bit difficult. The protagonist is Henry Spencer. He has a girlfriend named Mary X. At an extremely uncomfortable dinner with Mary’s parents, he learns that, not only has Mary gotten pregnant and has already given birth, but that he’s the father. Mary moves in with Henry to take care of their infant. The infant is of some alien form. The infant’s incessant mewling drives Mary to leave the apartment, leaving Henry to take care of it alone.

While that is happening, there is The Man In The Planet shifting gears. There is The Lady In The Radiator singing songs and encouraging Henry. There is The Beautiful Girl Across The Hall that seduces Henry. There is the scene where Henry’s head is chopped off and thrown to the street, where it is picked up by a child, brought to a factory, and is used there to make pencil erasers. No, I’m not making that up.

All of this takes place in some wind swept dystopian industrial wasteland, where the sound of wind, machinery, and other metallic sounds are endlessly present.

I find it amusing that the screenplay for this 100 minute film was 20 pages. The usual rule of thumb is that one page of a screenplay equals one minute of screen time. In Eraserhead, there are long stretches of time where there is virtually no dialog, including the first 10 minutes of the film and its last 20 minutes. The actor playing Henry, Jack Nance, is somehow vaguely reminiscent of Chaplin’s The Tramp. He’s always dressed in the same somewhat beat up drab garb. He’s put into all kinds of strange situations and his only overt reaction are facial expressions. 

The film took five years to complete. Apparently, for over a year, Lynch lived in the film’s bedroom set. He ran out of money and at one point the actress Sissy Spacek, of all people, chipped in money to keep production going. Nance kept his, shall we say interesting, hairstyle for the whole five years.

What’s going on? I have no idea. I just have guesses.

I don’t think that plot or characters are really all that important here. Considering Lynch’s background as an artist and the fact that this was his first feature film, he was not interested in the traditional approaches to film making, What is important is how you feel as you watch the film. As I watched it, I felt disconcerted, upset, and confused. The level of discomfort was probably the point.

One of Lynch’s inspirations was Kafka. If you’ve read works of his such as The Trial, The Castle, or The Metamorphosis, you can see it. Kafka was the canary in the coalmine of the 20th century. His works are all about individual alienation from the bureaucratic machine of modern civilization. Bizarre things happen in his novels that the characters have no recourse other than to accept it at face value and try to struggle through. If Kafka could watch this film, I think that he’d recognize Henry as one of his characters’ spiritual descendants. 

One of Lynch’s other inspirations was Gogol’s The Nose. This story is about a man that wakes up to discover his nose missing. He spends the day searching for it as his nose, newly free, goes around dressing in finery, riding fancy carriages, and getting promoted. This absurdity is prevalent throughout Eraserhead.

Although Lynch himself denied it, it’s hard not to see this film as some kind of primal scream against sex and paternity. The horrid infant with its whiny mewling voice and horrible skin lesions is disgusting. Henry is at a loss of what to do with it. The child is not human. Is it some kind of a monster or is it an alien?

There are repeated images of what can only be giant spermatozoa. The Lady In The  Radiator makes a point of stomping on the heads of the sperm as they land near her.

Death appears to be everywhere. In Henry’s apartment, there are what appears to be piles of dirt in which dead plant stalks stick out. In the industrial landscape in which he lives, I don’t remember seeing any living plant. I can’t say for sure, but in one scene in his bedroom it looks like there’s a picture framed of a nuclear explosion. Is Henry living in some post nuclear landscape?

Finally, what is dreaming and what is reality? Is there a difference?

One thing that I found amazing is that several people watched this film and thought to themselves that David Lynch must be the person to direct their next project. Most famously, Mel Brooks (yes, of Young Frankenstein fame) saw this film and thought that Lynch would be perfect for the film The Elephant Man. Even more weirdly, George Lucas saw Eraserhead and thought that Lynch should direct Return of the Jedi. I can’t even imagine what that film would have been if Lynch directed at. 

Although now that I think about it, if you squint your eyes just right, Jabba the Hut does kind of look like a giant sperm. 

On Your Mark, Get Set, Stroll!

Title: Pedestrianism

Rating: 3 Stars

Once upon a time in America, there really wasn’t much need for mass organized sport. Most people lived on farms. Roads weren’t very good. People didn’t have much disposable money. Leisure time was a dream for most.

Sometime around the 1860s or so, some things started to change. People had just a bit more free time and a bit more money to spend. There was a hunger for leisure activities. People wanted to get together and share in some celebratory sporting event. 

Into this void stepped…competitive walking?

Indeed for a ten to twenty year period, thousands of spectators would gather at large buildings to watch a small number of men walk around an oval track. For days on end. And this was entertainment. Arguably, this sport (known as pedestrianism) could be said to have ushered in the large scale sports that we enjoy today.

It all started in 1860. Two friends wagered on the Presidential election. One man, named Edward Payson Weston, was so convinced that Lincoln would lose the election that he bet that, if Lincoln won, Weston would walk from the State House in Boston to the Capitol in Washington. This was a distance of 478 miles. He’d do it over ten days and would arrive just in time to witness the inauguration ceremony.

He lost the bet, but history was made. He did the walk. He missed the inauguration by five hours. However, a natural promoter, he cashed in while walking. Even on this, the first walk, he had sponsors. Several companies gave him circulars to hand out as he walked. He arranged to have his itinerary published in newspapers on the way. This word of mouth ensured that he would have ample crowds as he walked. His exploits were reported far and wide. Weston knew that he was on to something.

The Civil War intervened and put a hold to Weston’s plans. Once it was over, he picked up again. In 1866, with the backing of a gambler, Weston bet another gambler $10,000 that he could walk from Portland, Maine, to Chicago in 30 consecutive days. This was a distance of 1,200 miles. This truly captivated the nation. In cities, a police phalanx had to be built around Wesley just so that he could walk without interruption. He won the bet with a day to spare.

This sparked an entire craze for distance walking. Some of the achievements can scarcely be imagined. A Scottish aristocrat named Captain Barclay made a wager. He bet that he could walk 1 mile an hour for 1,000 consecutive hours. Notice that this isn’t 1,000 miles over that period. It means that for every hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, that Barclay would walk one mile. That’s a period of time over 41 days. He came upon a plan where he’d walk one mile at the bottom of every hour and the next mile at its top. This gave him a period of somewhere around 90 minutes that he could try to sleep at a time before doing the next set.

As can be imagined, sleep deprivation is brutal when doing this. Once, having fallen asleep at the starting line, his servant had to beat with a switch to wake him up (probably a good day for the servant, I’d say). Be that as it may, he won the bet.

Not to be beaten, another person walked 1/4 mile at 15 minute intervals for 4,000 hours. How you can do that and not die seems mysterious to me.

Ultimately, such amateur sporting begat something much more professional. With Weston again at the forefront, the standard professional race became a six day race (since after all, the seventh day is a day of rest). A group of men would walk / run / crawl as many times around a track as they could in six days. Each man would put in a stake. There would be bonuses if certain goals were hit (eg 500 miles). It’d be open to spectators. Not only would the winner get the stakes and the bonuses, but would also get a portion of the gate receipts.

Thus birthed the modern sporting era. So many things that we see today were first in evidence even back then. I’ve already talked about sponsors. There are others.

There were the showman athletes and the deadly serious ones. Weston was a showman. He’d walk around in fine clothes and carrying a walking stick. He’d talk to the crowd. He was a musician and would play a cornet as he walked around.

His arch nemesis, Dan O’Leary, was the serious one. Looking only straight ahead, he’d grimly step onward with pumping arms. It probably goes without saying that the two men hated each other and would regularly trash talk each other publicly (140 years before Twitter!).

Nationalism raised its ugly head. There was much talk about the relative superiority between American and English pedestrians. When walking in England, American pedestrians would be harassed and vice versa. Dan O’Leary, an Irish immigrant to America, was claimed by both the US and Ireland.

Well before baseball, trading cards were created for the most popular walkers.

There were accusations of doping. In particular, Weston was accused of chewing coca leaves during his contests in England. 

At one event center, an overcrowded balcony fell and gave way, injuring many, prefiguring some of the stadium disasters that have happened since from overzealous fans.

Much like soccer hooliganism, these events were the scenes of riots. Usually, it was fans frustrated that they couldn’t get in and would rush the doors. Police, already there in force, would beat them back with truncheons.

These events had concessions. Granted, they’re not exactly like what we have now. Instead of hot dogs and popcorn, the fare was more likely to be pickled sheep’s tongue, oysters, eggs, and clam chowder.

There were people that broke through the white man barrier. One of the most popular and successful walkers was Frank Hart, a black grocer from Boston. He won several races until his body broke down. Ada Anderson proved that women could also walk great distances (for some reason, instead of pedestrian, she was known as a pedestrienne). In an exhibition, she successfully walked 1/4 mile every 15 minutes for 1,000 consecutive quarter hours. 

Finally, as with other sports, the morality police stepped in. Various religious leaders were angry that many of these competitions did not respect the Sabbath. Others were horrified at the spectacle of watching half-dead, delirious, wretched people shuffle around the track at the end of the fifth or sixth day.

This bad publicity certainly did not help the sport. Even worse was when the bike craze hit. When cycling became popular, six day races, except now on bikes, became all the rage. Considering the increased opportunities for mayhem that could result from having a group of cyclists go around on a small oval for six days, pedestrianism became, well, pedestrian. 

Other sports like baseball also rose in popularity. Boxing, having adopted the Marquis of Queensbury rules that included such innovations as padded gloves and a standing eight count, moved out of the shadows and into mainstream.

Even so, all of these sports owe a debt to Edward Payson Weston and the sport of pedestrianism. 

O.G. Slasher

Title: Halloween

Rating: 3 Stars

I can’t remember if I saw this in the theaters or not. For sure, I haven’t watched it in decades.

Everyone knows the plot. On Halloween in 1963, a young boy named Michael Myers kills his sister after he sees her with her boyfriend. Fifteen years later, again on Halloween, Myers escapes from the asylum that he has been incarcerated in. He returns back to his home town and fixates on the high school student Laurie Strode. Over the course of the night, as Myers’ psychiatrist desperately tries to hunt him down, Myers murders several people as he relentlessly closes in on her. After several stabbings, it ends when the psychiatrist shoots Myers dead as he plunges over a balcony. Or does he die?

There are certainly horror films that predate this. With the glinting, flashing butcher knife, John Carpenter pretty explicitly pays homage to Psycho. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre certainly had its moments of shock. 

Even so, there’s much in Halloween that serves as a template for future horror films.

There’s the masked killer. Being faceless, this is murder at its most impersonal and implacable. Myers seems to be more of a force of nature than a man. In fact, in later sequels, it’s spelled out that Myers is possibly immortal. No matter how thoroughly you kill him, you can’t. No matter how well you hide, he will inevitably find you. 

Sex will be punished. Although Carpenter himself, who wrote and directed it, after all, said that there’s no linkage to sex, it’s hard to take that statement at face value. Myers, as a young boy, kills his sister immediately after she has sex with her boyfriend. Later, one of Strode’s friends has sex with her boyfriend as Myers watches. They are both immediately dispatched. He kills with the phallic plunge of a knife, much like Bates’ mother in Psycho.

Here are age inappropriate high schoolers.  Much like the later slasher films to come, it centers around high school students. These are young people getting ready to embark upon adulthood, where all kinds of dangers, some of which are mortal, await them. Even so, these actors do not appear to be teenagers. In fact, several of the actors are actually in their late twenties. Even though they are ostensibly high school students, does the fact that the actors portraying them are clearly older somehow ameliorate some of the cultural shock of watching the murders of teenagers?

So, why only three stars? First of all, the characters are at best stock. They are not really fleshed out at all. There are the sex crazed high school students. There is the virginal, smart high school student that will survive. There are a couple of children thrown in just to put them into danger. The sheriff and even the psychiatrist just really aren’t that interesting. This becomes even starker when comparing it to a film like Psycho, in which even minor characters are richly drawn. For better or for worse, having such flat characters set the pattern for future slasher films to come. Faceless killers murder featureless victims.

The last fifteen minutes is legitimately harrowing. The middle hour or so moves along at best ploddingly. It seems to me that there could have been better use of that time.

Finally, and this is not the fault of the film, but seeing it now forty years later, it’s lost a lot of its shock value. The slasher POV shots, the false scares, the implacable killer, the killer that won’t die are all now established tropes. Having seen these things so many times, it’s lost a lot of its power to shock. It doesn’t really have that truly shocking moment, like the root cellar scene in Psycho or Leatherface’s first victim in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. These are scenes that, even having seen them many times, still creeps me out.

Still, it’s worth sitting through the middle hour to get to the last fifteen minutes of horror.

The Defiant Ones Meet John Wick

Title: Razorblade Tears

Rating: 4 Stars

Having read Cosby’s last novel, Blacktop Wasteland, I was looking forward to reading his latest. It was quite the ride.

The story shifts between Ike’s and Buddy Lee’s perspectives. Ike is a former gang member that at one time had a wild reputation as Riot Randolph. Having spent many years in a penitentiary, he comes out determined to made a new start for himself. Twelve years later, he is running a successful landscaping business and put all thoughts of violence behind him.

Buddy Lee Jenkins is also an ex-con. His post prison life hasn’t been as successful. Living in a grungy double wide, he lives a life pretty close to poverty. Even so, he has good Southern boy charm and apparently looks like Sam Elliott gone to seed.

Their lives cross paths when their two sons, the only children of both, fall in love with each other and marry. Both men, products of their hard bitten environment, are horrified that their sons are gay and nearly cut them out of their lives due to their respective homophobia.

Their lives change forever when both of their sons are murdered, execution style. Frustrated by the inaction and disinterest of the police, they become enraged when someone desecrates their son’s graves. Galvanized to action, they both vow to avenge their son’s deaths, regardless of the cost. This kicks off a plot drenched in death, violence, and mayhem.

In case it’s not apparent, Ike is Black and Buddy Lee is white. Even though their sons were married, they essentially had no prior relationship. So, just like Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones playing two men chained together that have to work out their racial differences as they try to escape and survive, Ike and Buddy Lee are also chained together. Instead of a literal chain, their figurative chain is their shared grief of their sons, murderous desire for vengeance, and shame of how they’ve failed their sons.

Together they work the case. They are both able to reach back into their respective past lives to gain information and material that moves the case forward. They discover that a woman named Tangerine is somehow behind the reason that their sons were killed. In their search for Tangerine, they come across a murderous biker gang determined to kill them, a famous rapper, and the local criminal king pen. All of the while, they are both taking and inflicting damage. Will they be able to avenge their sons’ deaths or will the biker gang track them down and kill them first? Will they somehow find a way to assuage the deep guilt that they both feel?

As in all mismatched buddy movies, they start off antagonizing each other, and then over time, begin to appreciate the other’s point of view. Even as the mayhem reaches fever pitch, their unlikely friendship deepens.

There are a couple of problems with the novel. As I’ve said in previous plots, I’m not actually all that good about predicting plot twists, so I’m usually pleasantly surprised as the plot unfolds. Here, the plot points are pretty well telegraphed. There are three main twists to the plot. At least to me, all of them were pretty obvious, almost from the outset. Missing that surprise took away some of the enjoyment of reading the book.

I give Cosby credit for, in what is basically a genre action novel, to make race and LGBTQ issues so paramount. My only issue was the lack of subtlety in doing so. I just felt that much of this discussion seemed to take the form of exposition as opposed to natural dialog. If it wasn’t in the form of exposition, it seemed to also occasionally take the form of simplistic trite dialog. Some of it seemed crowbarred into the novel instead of naturally flowing discourse.

Finally, by the end of book, Ike is basically a Terminator. Granted, twelve years ago, he was a hardened murderous criminal, but now he’s capable of effortlessly using any weapon that he has on hand, brutalizing all comers in hand to hand combat, and can create a perfectly timed bomb. The problem with any novel that has over the top violence is how do you keep your protagonist human? Here, I’d argue that Cosby fails. Ike truly becomes an immortal killing machine. He might as well be an Avenger.

Anyway, that’s what’s keeping it from 5 stars. However, it is a compulsively readable, fast paced novel. Even with its warts, I applaud the diversity of views that it brings forth and am looking forward to his next novel.

Geriatric Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Title: Harold and Maude

Rating: 5 Stars

I’ve been reading a book that contained a chapter that, among other things, discussed the director Hal Ashby. In the 1970s, Ashby had a crazy run of exceptional films, including such classics as Shampoo, The Last Detail, Coming Home, and Being There. His first film from the 1970s was the 1971 Harold and Maude. Until I read this chapter, I had no idea that he’d directed it. I’ve never seen it, but having enjoyed his later work from the 70s, I decided to give it a try. 

Like a lot of people, I had the very general idea that it was about a young man becoming romantically involved with a much older woman. Beyond that, I really had no idea what to expect.

The film stars Bud Cort as Harold and Ruth Gordon as Maude. Harold is apparently in his early 20s, although to be honest, in his first scenes he appears to be about 15. Raised with great wealth, it’s fair to say that Harold feels nothing but ennui. There is nothing exciting about his life. The one recent highlight was when he got in a seemingly serious accident and he was able to watch his mom react to his supposed death. Seeing her experience, for once, true emotion, changed Harold for the worse.

He’s now obsessed with death. He goes to random funerals. He stages mock suicide attempts for his mom to stumble upon. He drives around in a hearse.

His mom is fed up. She doesn’t even react now to his mock suicide attempts. She attempts to goad him into action by setting him up with a dating service. That goes disastrously as he stages suicide attempts at every first meeting of a prospect.

At a couple of funerals that he attends, Harold notices an older lady. Eventually, the lady beckons him over and they begin to talk. As opposed to the stolidity of Harold, Maude is full of life. She steals cars. She drives crazily. She’s an artist, a musician, and an inventor. She flouts all authority.

As Harold and Maude become closer, Harold begins to open up. He realizes that there is more to life than waiting for death. He begins to participate in Maude’s shenanigans. They confess their love to each other. To his mom’s shock, he announces that he intends to wed Maude.

Why did I give it 5 stars? This might have been a consequence of low expectations, but I found the film to be really quite funny. In many places, the comedy is quite dark. Harold’s mock suicides are hilarious. He hangs himself, slits his wrists, sets himself on fire, chops off his arm, and commits ritualistic Hari-Kari. In all of these attempts, his mom just rolls her eyes in a blase manner. When he attempts Hari-Kari, he does so in front of one of his potential dates. Instead of being horrified like the other woman, this one, an actress, gets into it and proceeds to do, much to Harold’s disgust, Juliet’s death scene.

It wasn’t all dark comedy. Maude’s persistent tweaking of figures in authority, be they priests or any of several police officers, is quite fun.

The sound track is interesting as well. Instead of getting a composer, Ashby used Cat Stevens. At random moments in the film where there wasn’t any dialog, a semi-relevant Cat Stevens song would start playing. It reminded me of The Graduate, where a similar thing would happen with Simon and Garfunkel songs. It reinforced that, during this time of the late 1960 / early 1970s, film makers were trying to create synergies between the youth movements of music and of cinema.

Ruth Gordon’s career is pretty interesting. She was in some early silents way back in 1915. She then went to Broadway before starting to appear in films again in the 1940s. Now, here she is, in 1971, in a starring role at the age of 75, over fifty years since she made her debut. 

Bud Cort, aged 23 in 1971, was apparently a very serious method actor. The story is that he went up to Ashby and suggested that, since he was a method actor, he should have sex with Ruth Gordon to truly live the role. Ashby’s response was that he didn’t want to know anything about it.

Although the term is not used any more, at one point there was kind of a meme about regarding the manic pixie dream girl. The plot was generally about some stolid white guy somewhat morosely going about his life with no purpose. A woman, full of dream and whimsy, happens into his life, and through her sheer exuberance, manages to bring about a sea change in the man and leads him to happiness. Usually (or really, always) this is a young woman. Think about Kate Winslet’s character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Natalie Portman’s character in Garden State. Sandra Bullock does a turn in Forces of Nature. You can even reach further back to Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. His character just wants to go back to jail until he meets a lively young woman that flouts all authority. In the title cards, she’s identified by the word gamin. According to Wikipedia, gamin means ‘slim, often boyish, elegant young woman who is, or is perceived to be, mischievous, teasing or sexually appealing’. That just about sums it up. Given Chaplin’s, um, proclivities for young women, you can see how this is a somewhat problematic meme.

Here you have the same archetype, but instead of a young woman, you have a much older woman that has lived a full life (even a life of significant tragedy if the tattoo of numbers on her arm are any indication) and is full of hard acquired wisdom. She has so much more to offer than just the fresh sex appeal of youth.

The generational torch of joie de vivre is passed in a loving, funny way. At the end of the film, Harold performs one final mock suicide attempt and then walks off, ready to live his life.