If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll want to know is where I was born, and what deformities I had, and how my parents didn’t help when the townspeople burned me alive in our house after what I did to those two little girls, and where I got my mask, and all that Jason Vorhees kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my fans would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything that made my backstory even more complicated and nonsensical than it already is. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially the fat ones. They’re nice and all — fans generally don’t run away when they see me, at least until it’s too late — but they’re also touchy as hell. Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around that summer camp just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and lay low. I mean that’s all I told J.C. about, and he’s my producer and all. He’s in Hollywood. That isn’t too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every weekend. He’s going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Hummer. One of those retired army jobs that has chains and everything in the back for holding back bombs and junk, but I bet I could break them. It cost him damn near an arm and a leg. At least that’s what I would’ve paid. He’s got a lot of dough, now. He didn’t use to. He used to be just a regular writer/director, he used to be small-time. He made this terrific film, Dark Star, in case you never heard of him. The best scene in it is with the alien. It has this alien that looks like a beachball with feet and claws, it’s like a mascot, and the main character chases it around the spaceship and slaps it with a broom. It killed me, which most things can’t really do, considering the number of sequels. Now he’s out in Hollywood, J.C., being a prostitute. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.
Tag: yes in-fucking-deed the magic of cinema
dark deeds, darkly answered
The Measure for Measure research project has begun and continues apace. It’s shaping up to be interesting. In my readings I’ve learned some interesting facts, like that outside of the great tragedies, M4M is Harold Bloom’s favorite Shakespeare play. What.
I suppose I can afford to link a few things I’ve found that I think are cool or noteworthy. First, Neil Gaiman has a wonderful piece on Ray Bradbury in the Times Online, one with which I agree wholeheartedly. I tend to think of myself pretty strongly as a Midwestern writer — so in a more canonical sense my lineage would consist of people like Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson and their stories of small-town grotesqueries. And while I’ve read those writers and they’re indeed good, none of them has affected me more than Bradbury — also their literary child, but in addition to petty rural politics, he also wrote about monsters and spaceships.
And with that, my second link. Jeffrey Anderson, a blogger over at Cinematical, asks if sci-fi as a genre has surpassed horror. Of particular interest is this bit:
At its best, horror is capable of — and even expert at — taking the temperature of a time and mood in very subtle ways. But, like comedies and erotic films, it will always be an embarrassment, something one enjoys inwardly but does not celebrate outwardly (at awards ceremonies). But there’s also no denying that science fiction has struck a chord with audiences.
Now, this is a film site talking about films and blah blah blah. You know what I’m going to say: he’s wrong, at least partly. Yes, horror does its best during times of social and economic duress (the sf/horror boom in the 50s, the satanic horror boom in the 70s leading to the general horror explosion in the 80s, the post 9-11 J-horror boom, and so on). But to say that a piece of horror fiction is always going to be an embarrassment because it is the product of a certain time — well, absolutely not.
I’ll hedge my bets to begin with. Let’s look at Dracula: now, this book absolutely takes “the temperature” of Victorian Britain. Vampires operate entirely by means of metaphors for (repressed) sexual activity. Quite titillating! And is it dated? Yes. Do people seem to care? Not particularly — the architecture Stoker established for his vampires is still in use today. I mean, Twilight, goddamn.
I could also talk about a film that’s both sf and horror — Alien. It’s a bit harder to make this one relate to its time-period — perhaps you could say it relates to fears of increasing corporate control of society at the end of the 70s. Anderson seems to assume that a film cannot be tense and foreboding (horror) but also quiet and thoughtful (sf). Well, Alien is both, and it’s damn good.
Now for straight horror fiction, I could talk about The Shining — the book and the movie. The book is probably one of the best things King has written, and the film is Kubrick, so you know it’s good. Unless you want to tie both of them to a particular social event (eg, an increasing number of divorces in the 70s) then they’re both very thoughtful (in their respective ways) and also very tense and frightening. King’s novel is a meditation on fatherhood, family, abuse, and self-determination; Kubrick’s film is… well, take your pick.
But Anderson does raise a valid point in that horror is simply not as popular as sf (or even fantasy) these days. Part of this is Peter Jackson’s LotR films being so damn good — fantasy is suddenly respectable, and sf is closer aesthetically to fantasy and therefore easier to digest. Not to mention sf has a cultural pedigree already in Star Wars and similar things. Horror’s cultural icons — the old Universal monsters, which aren’t so scary anymore, or Kubrick’s The Shining — are plenty respectable, too, but, as Anderson points out, the ‘modern classics’ of Shaun of the Dead and Let the Right One In haven’t had as great an impact on the culture as either of those.
Well, I guess two reasons as to why, the first being that those films weren’t American. Before you call me xenophobic, understand: I loved them both. But that’s because I’m a horror fan and I’m willing to search for good horror. I’m willing to read the subtitles for LtROI. The American films Anderson cites (Drag Me to Hell and The House of the Devil) are, mutually, absolutely goddamn terrible and uninteresting. The second reason is that horror isn’t attuned to zeitgeist at the moment — we’re looking for feel-good escapism, which is what something like Avatar offers, and horror (usually at its best and even sometimes at its worst) is noble for not allowing that. Horror can have a happy ending, but it exists only to remind us of the dangers and uncertainties of existence, and at the moment, we’d rather fawn over sparkling non-horrific vampires or pretend to be peaceful blue catpeople living on a planet with a ridiculously impractical and unbelievable ecosystem. I’ll leave it to someone smarter than me to figure out why that is.
In other news: I might have exciting news about something or I might not. It depends on when I get confirmation of details. Watch this here space.
Richard III @ Riverside Studios
This was not a very good production.
The thing about R3 is that it works best when the title character is played as an over-the-top hilarious cartoon — a sort of evil ain’t-I-a-stinker Bugs Bunny. What this means is that you need a Richard who is crazy, zany, hilarious, and carries the production on his hunched back. Unfortunately, the folks at Riverside Studios decided to attempt deep emotional resonance, and while they actually achieved this to some degree — the Elizabeth was absolutely amazing, especially when Richard proposes marrying her daughter and she rips him to pieces, and the elderly Margaret (played by a man!) was quite convincing as a drunken, curse-spitting old woman fallen on hard times. The guy playing Richard was actually good, spinning it as a kind of Crispin Glover thing.
Despite this, the play was just boring. It was far too somber and therefore very grueling to sit through — the last third was nicely abridged, especially the procession of ghosts, but the first two-thirds were plodding. Richard needs to be energetic and awesome in a love-to-hate-him way; the audience needs to know he’s unquestionably evil, yet at the same time really want to see him fuck people’s shit up. It simply works better when it’s a crazy Marlovian spectacle. My evidence: Ian McKellan’s Nazi-flavored 1995 adaptation, which plays hell with the source text (they all do, as R3 is ungodly long and sloppy) but it’s loads of fun and pretty damn stylish.
A more positive note about the Riverside production: Catesby was also very good. The staging was a sort of modern multinational corporation boardroom setting and they chose to make Catesby a smartly dressed young female secretary with a clipboard and a constant uncertainty about what the hell was going on around her, and who slowly realized she was both in over her head and pretty much stuck in the plot for the long haul. This worked.
On the other hand, both sides of the stage had this industrial scaffolding that, at various points in the play and for no specific reason, Richard would climb around on despite apparently suffering from palsy. I think the idea was to make him sleek and dangerous, and the acrobaticsmaybe would recall the “bottled spider” remark Margaret makes about him. A neat idea, kind of awkward in execution. SPEAKING OF WHICH: the Battle of Bosworth Field was a dance party. I am not kidding. Both sides glowered at each other from across the stage, dancing slightly while techno music played and strobe lights went off. Occasionally they staggered as if they’d been hit. It was like watching a Final Fantasy battle screen, which again was pretty neat, but within the context of the play and production completely crack rock.
And that’s all I have to say on Richard III’s Jungle Gym and Rave from Hell. On Wednesday keep an eye out for my thoughts on the RSC’s recent production of Twelfth Night. Here’s a preview: it’s also not very good!