High Weirdness (2019)

Erik Davis, former rock critic and now full-time seeker, offers up a meditation with densely sourced notes on Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, as the subtitle of High Weirdness charts the path. Davis focuses, after a lengthy scene-setting introduction, on the McKenna brothers, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick. I barely knew of the first two, and Dick I knew primarily for his work before 1974. High Weirdness focuses on Dick’s work after 1974, when a religious experience produced a frenzy that lasted the rest of his life, sprawling across some 8,000 handwritten pages known as The Exegesis. Extractions from it contributed heavily to his last and most difficult novels. As it turned out, I was more interested in the McKenna brothers, Terence and Dennis, who retreated to South American jungles in 1971 to experiment with very strong hallucinogens and contemplate the results, which are worth reading up on. Robert Anton Wilson, for his part, experimented with hallucinogens too but, under the influence of William Burroughs, seemed more interested in the pursuit of paranoid weird experience as such, recorded in unlikely places like the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, UFO reports, and Trilateral Commission discussions. The affectionately labeled RAW contributed to the prankster spirit of the ‘60s and ‘70s—the Yippies, the Fugs, the Church of the Subgenius, and like that. Dick had his brush with deep Christianity in 1974 and never stopped trying to figure it out. He did a moderate share of hallucinogens in the ‘60s but his drug of choice over time was amphetamines, which among other things gave him the stamina to write a huge number of revelatory science fiction novels and stories and arguably the psychosis to make them mind-bendingly weird. For better or worse, I remain suspicious of anything too connected to his Christian leanings—Episcopalian, to be specific. I’m not always sure what Davis is after in High Weirdness. It’s not the drugs and esoterica seemingly as much as the visionary experiences themselves, which leaves him a tricky balance between objectivity and credulity. He manages it well. If I wished for more on the drugs and esoterica, I was happy enough to settle for the visions. Davis cuts a wide swath of strange post-‘60s experience. I learned about a lot of things I didn’t know before—and I thought I was a pretty good student of the ‘60s—but there were many places Davis rushes through where I wish he would have lingered. With Dick’s Christian experience as a chief example, on the other hand, the places he did linger were those I was less interested in. Still, overall, a pretty interesting survey of bizarre ‘60s psychic fallout.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Stairway to Heaven, UK, 104 minutes

Directors/writers: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Photography: Jack Cardiff

Music: Allan Gray

Editor: Reginald Mills

Cast: David Niven, Kim Hunter, Roger Livesey, Marius Goring, Raymond Massey, Robert Coote, Joan Maude, Abraham Sofaer

I must have been in a bad mood the first time I saw this war picture cum extravagant fantasy romance by the Archers, who are collaborating coproducers, codirectors, and cowriters Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. I know I was put off by the romance they give us between Peter Carter (David Niven) and June (Kim Hunter)—rhymes with “moon” and “swoon,” no last name necessary because it’s obviously going to be “Carter” before they’re through (later she will go on to a career as a country singer). It’s wartime—4:11 p.m. London time, May 2, 1945, to be specific. Carter’s plane is going down over open ocean and his parachute has been destroyed. He spends his last minutes in radio contact with Boston babe June. He asks her if she’s pretty. “Not bad,” she blurts. This is approximately the moment they fall in love but, realistically, the whole experience has to be accounted a trauma, for both of them, and arguably the rest of the story is mutual PTSD. Carter jumps out of the burning plane and somehow survives. The story is based on an actual incident, so I don’t want to hear any complaints about suspension of disbelief.

I’ll take care of all that, though I must say I enjoyed the picture much more the second time around. A Matter of Life and Death (released as Stairway to Heaven in the US, which reportedly had an aversion to the word “death” so soon after the war) is a fantasy show, featuring a place they call heaven and a pouty French angel, “Conductor 71” (Marius Goring), who couldn’t find Carter at the appointed hour in the thick fog. That’s the explanation for Carter’s unlikely survival. Now the conductor is supposed to collect him, but for some reason Carter and June falling in love is a basis for arguing an extension of life. Ultimately the issue turns into a trial and a courtroom drama and I’m pretty sure you know where it’s headed. It’s by the numbers as a romance, but Powell and Pressburger are interesting moviemakers and they find a number of ways to save it and make the case for it as one of their greatest pictures, which is saying something from the team that gave us The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and many others.

“Duel” (1971)

This story by Richard Matheson is a classic that served as the source for a TV movie directed by Steven Spielberg early in his career, which itself is considered a kind of classic. And it is pretty much for the same reasons as the story, which is that it only tells you what you have to know, and all the action is concrete, visual or easily describable, and almost unbearably tense. It’s in anthologies all over the place. I read it in Foundations of Fear, edited by David G. Hartwell, whose preface to the story says, “Without a hint of science fiction or an overt whiff of the supernatural, ‘Duel’ manages to invoke both the science fiction tradition of the menace of the intelligent machine and the monster tradition of the horror genre. It is a psychological monster story, subtly shocking, compelling, fantastic.” ISFDB confirms in a general way, classifying the story into its “non-genre” basement, but three voters and I have combined to rate it an 8.25 of 10. That means it’s good. It’s also very scary and induces feelings of frustration and helplessness. You probably know the story: a guy is driving a two-lane highway west to San Francisco for an important meeting that afternoon. He encounters a semitruck tanker with a trailer whose driver evidently gets mad when our guy passes him. He begins to toy with him and even threaten his life using the truck. Whenever our guy pulls off to let the truck get some miles down the road, he always finds the truck parked on the shoulder a mile or two down, waiting for him. Lots of strong elements showing Matheson at his best. The facelessness and anonymity of the truck driver makes it all seem more effective. The fact that so many of us know road rage from both sides is used well here (even if 1971 somehow seems early for road rage). Hartwell is right that Matheson makes the truck itself a terrible thing to see, though I was always aware there was a driver and he was the aggravating factor. I see the problem in calling this story horror, yet I think you have to. It raises profound anxiety and dread. In many ways that’s what horror is—all it is. This story is a prime exhibit in that argument. The human cruelty is tempered and deliberate, rather than a moment’s impulse. That also makes this story insanely creepy. Have to look at the movie again.

Foundations of Fear, ed. David G. Hartwell
The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
A Century of Horror 1970-1979, ed. David Drake
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Oppenheimer (2023)

Somewhere along the line I developed a bad attitude about director and writer hail the auteur Christopher Nolan. I didn’t like Inception, I didn’t like Dunkirk, and I really didn’t like The Dark Knight Rises (is there consensus it’s his worst?). On the other hand, to be fair, there are as many that I do like, at least by parts (the first two Batmans, The Prestige, Interstellar, and especially Memento). But when last summer’s “Barbenheimer” phenom went down, famously restoring movies to commercial oomph, I was dubious, especially when I ventured out to see Barbie first. But I finally got around to Nolan’s A-bomb and frankly have to file it with things that make me shrug. It’s long, to start with, it’s packed full of strutting stars (Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Kenneth Branagh), the sound design is pretentious, and so is the gaudy overall visual strategy, alternating color with black and white because what? Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer is a stout enough moral being, heart in the right place, all that, much like oh, say, Kevin Costner in Hidden Figures. Murphy mumbles too much but I understand that’s part of the sound design. Points for being reminiscent of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Still, by my lights the only certifiably great turn in this one, perhaps not surprisingly, is from Robert Downey Jr., who continues to bank the fires on being the best movie actor alive. The picture is arguably worth seeing for his performance alone. But I’ve heard enough disputes now about the historical veracity of Oppenheimer that I felt obliged to not believe any of it. I suspect the things I liked most and didn’t know already were the things that were made up. For a three-hour movie about A-bombs there was only one mushroom cloud. That’s probably for the best, at this point. Even nuclear anxiety isn’t what it used to be. Much too much was clonkingly obvious, like the quote attributed to “Oppie” out of the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” It came to remind me of Samuel L. Jackson’s faux Bible quote in Pulp Fiction. I won’t go so far as to call the fatally self-serious Oppenheimer out and out bad. But I’m willing to say it’s 85% mediocre.

“The Battler” (1925)

Here’s another good one by Ernest Hemingway from the In Our Time collection(s)—actually a late-breaking substitute for “Up in Michigan” when a publisher got squeamish. It seems to be set in Michigan, but the scene is different. Nick Adams has just been tossed from a freight train he jumped on. He’s been riding the rails. It’s too early for the Great Depression as such, but it has much of that violence—just as the 1920s had much of the same financial woes for many agricultural and other workers. It’s striking how much this feels like a Depression story now. Nick makes his way to a campfire he sees going in the woods by the railroad track. He meets a man who notices Nick’s black eye and torn clothes and seems to like the fighting spirit they suggest. He turns out to be a boxer whose name Nick knows. Now down on his luck, obviously, and we learn why later in the story. Another man shows up who is more or less the boxer’s minder. The third man is African-American, and the story is not without its problems regarding him. I hold Hemingway responsible for turning the slave Jim in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn into “N-word Jim,” which has stuck even though Twain himself never used that term. It’s possible it would be useful to look at each use in this story of “negro” and the N-word to see if Hemingway intended any kind of useful distinction. But I suspect not. There is some unpleasant racism in his first novel as well, The Sun Also Rises (1926). My sense is more that Hemingway was a hostile racist. But that said, his portrayal of the unfortunately named Bugs is not insensitive. Bugs is interesting, complex, fully formed, and the most competent person here. It’s a little surprising to see Nick so loose in the world, riding the rails and brawling. I like the dynamics between these characters. We already know Nick but the other two are impressively vivid. The boxer is closer to cliché maybe with the mental problems that make him alarmingly violent and alarmingly quick to turn on someone. The story remains problematic because of the race issues but it’s still also very good.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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18. Todd Rundgren, A Wizard, a True Star (1973)

[2007 review here.]

You could probably argue that my favorite album by Todd Rundgren is psychedelic only because the production purposefully jams many of these songs and fragments seamlessly together, each one blurring into the next across a range of styles. Among other things that makes it hard to listen to it on CDs or via streaming, which routinely insert a couple of annoying seconds between all tracks. The album reminds me structurally of the Beatles’ Abbey Road, stringing together a series of songs (or fragments) under 2:00 at one point, or their White Album, with its wide and seemingly senseless assortments of rock or pop song style. Yes, Wizard has annoying throwaways—I could do without the 1:08 “Dogfight Giggle,” for sure. And it is now unfortunately dated with the crypto-homophobic ditties “Rock & Roll Pussy” (1:11) and “You Don’t Have to Camp Around” (1:06 and still lovely). Fair enough. It also has songs in Rundgren’s achingly beautiful and friendly (if slightly tinged with ‘70s self-help vibes) pop song mode (“Sometimes I Don’t Know What to Feel.” “I Don’t Want to Tie You Down,” “Does Anybody Love You?”). It has more songs that are intended to be inspirational in a heroic juveniles-against-the-world mode (“Zen Archer,” “Just One Victory,” “When the Shit Hits the Fan / Sunset Blvd.”). Perhaps most surprising—though also looking forward to the mistakes of his overly faithful Faithful covers LP a few years later—is an 11-minute soul medley featuring the Impressions’ “I’m So Proud,” Smokey Robinson’s “Ooh Baby Baby,” the Delfonics’ “La-La Means I Love You,” and the Capitols’ “Cool Jerk.” The last is the only clinker in that bunch. The first three are gorgeous and moving versions. Thus, much like the cover art suggests, we are set adrift here inside Todd Rundgren’s tender octagonal die-cut elfin musical world, which moves through its 55 minutes of material with masterful ease. I’m not sure Todd Rundgren ever had an imperial phase but, if he did, this album was part of it. He was producing one substantial album after another in the early ‘70s, with Runt; Runt: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren; Something / Anything?; A Wizard, a True Star; Todd; and Initiation (plus his Utopia project). He stayed close to his pop instincts bleeding into prog and/or thrashing heavy rock on all of them. A Wizard, a True Star is his psychedelic phase.

Strangers on a Train (1951)

USA, 101 minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writers: Raymond Chandler, Czenzi Ormonde, Whitfield Cook, Patricia Highsmith, Ben Hecht

Photography: Robert Burks

Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Editor: William H. Ziegler

Cast: Robert Walker, Farley Granger, Patricia Hitchcock, Kasey Rogers, Marion Lorne, Ruth Roman, Leo G. Carroll, Howard St. John, Jonathan Hale

In director Alfred Hitchcock’s rogue’s gallery pantheon of woman-hating psychopaths—which includes at least Joseph Cotten as Charlie Oakley in Shadow of a Doubt, Robert Walker as Bruno Antony here in Strangers on a Train, and Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho—Walker is not to be underestimated or taken for granted. I would not put him last in any stack-ranking and might put him first. Everyone knows the story in Strangers on a Train from the Sonic Youth song “Shadow of a Doubt”: “Met a stranger on a train / ... He said / ‘You take me and I’ll be you’ / ‘You kill him and I’ll kill her.’” Tennis player Guy Haines (Farley Granger) becomes the target of convenience in Antony’s plot for the perfect murder(s). Antony wants to rid himself of his judgmental tycoon father and save his inheritance too. He offers to kill Haines’s troublesome wife Miriam (Kasey Rogers, billed as Laura Elliott), who won’t give him a divorce now that she knows he’s involved with a senator’s daughter. Miriam is also pregnant by another man. Antony says his plan is perfect because no one can connect the murderers to their victims. Haines, who has indeed just met Antony on a train, takes it as an unpleasant joke and thinks no more of it. Then Miriam turns up dead, strangled to death in a lover’s lane near an amusement park. And now Haines begins hearing from Antony about what he needs to know to murder Antony’s father.

Miriam is killed surprisingly quickly, almost as soon as the idea comes up—barely 20 minutes into the movie. It’s practically a shock to the system. Miriam and the amusement park and the two men she is on a date with are lurid and wanton and the whole scene seems made to order for murder if not orgies of violence. Once the deed is done the boom increasingly lowers on Haines, who doesn’t know how to get out of the mess and instinctively tries to hide that he knows Antony at all—which of course does not work. Antony has ways, as a D.C. party scene shows, of insinuating himself into the life of Haines and the senator’s family. Granger plays Haines like a cornered rat, sweating and licking his lips in anxiety and trying to square the various points of guilt that are hemming him in. Inevitably the movie ends up back at the amusement park, whose ambience has not improved any.

“The Machine Demands a Sacrifice” (1972)

This story by the ever-restless Dennis Etchison might be more science fiction than horror, though it’s certainly horrific. In the future, in Los Angeles, freelancers cruise for deaths among the auto accidents of heavy traffic, hunting body organs to sell. Policemen, called COPters, patrol from above in jetpacks somehow built into their nightsticks. The “COPter” neologism reminds me of Philip K. Dick and the story does too. As usual, Etchison’s setting is a strong part of the story. Here it is Los Angeles traffic—freeways full of cars that wait minutes to travel feet, and the web of arterials that feed them. We see one freelance team commit a heinous murder to get to the product, and Etchison even notices that the victims are Black, using racism to jack up the horror a little more. It’s good stuff, although, ever since the urban legend (waking in a strange hotel bathtub with a terrible wound in your side), criminal organ harvesting has been somewhat overplayed as an idea (even if your story was written before that market opened up). And it’s arguable that the Phildickian aspects ultimately work against the story. On paper, it shouldn’t be as good as it is. Maybe I like it more than some other Etchison stories because it’s direct rather than allusive or suggestive. I wouldn’t call it restrained and, in a way—perhaps paradoxically, and perhaps I’ll change my mind—I’m saying that’s a virtue. The crime it depicts is horrible. It makes clear what a horrible world this is. Maybe that’s too black and white? I couldn’t find much about it on the internet, which suggests it’s not considered among his best. And that’s fair enough. The science fiction trappings are probably a net negative. On aesthetic grounds “restrained” probably still wins the day. But I liked Etchison’s effortless turn to the soul-eating traffic jam. Even in 1972 he obviously knew that scene well. I also like Etchison’s Southern California roots, this seems like a good time to say. He’s like the Beach Boys—maybe he didn’t surf and all that, but he knows the landscape intimately—psychic, cultural, and otherwise. Now that I think about it, the title is also Phildickian, which does make sense for 1972 California. Etchison remains an intriguing problem in horror for me. I don’t always know why his stories work, but they often do.

Dennis Etchison, Talking in the Dark
Story not available online.

The Green Ripper (1979)

I was sure I could randomly pick up any Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald and find unpleasant scenes of diabolical sexual assault and murder, because that was my experience when I was reading them in the ‘80s. But this was my second in recent times where it didn’t happen. Maybe I’m remembering it wrong or maybe I’m tougher or maybe this is related somehow to my “best travis mcgee novels” google search? I might try a couple more and see how it goes. I’m not unhappy with this result. MacDonald and his McGee novels are very popular among fans of mystery and detective fiction and with good reason. MacDonald is good at doing this. But the rapey qualities drove me away so I’m enjoying what I have while I’ve got it. This one starts with a girlfriend dying suddenly. It’s another of MacDonald’s glowing Man and Woman relationships. One shtick in the series is that McGee is a bit of a white knight for the ladies. It’s typically heroic heterosexual sex out of the Hugh Hefner mold. I have no idea whether Gretel appears in previous novels. McGee gets around. In his defense, he may feel a little smarmy, but he always seems to deliver the noble sex of dignity and gentle care. I’ve heard these affairs described as the “sexual healing” part of the story. No raping for McGee though he lives in a world full of it. But revenge—that’s another story. Revenge he will do. Once he finds out Gretel was murdered by poison, not done in by disease, he is on the case. It leads down byzantine corridors until he finds himself in a training camp for Christian terrorists. “The Green Ripper” is a private joke with Gretel, a mangling of “the Grim Reaper.” It is here solely to get the color word into the title for the series’ ridiculous titling scheme. This is the 18th McGee novel of 21, so it’s near the end, which came with MacDonald’s death in 1986. The Green Ripper is a bit rote but pulls us right along, with few slow patches and little to distract by way of plausibility, although that’s more a personal call. I didn’t miss the various plot conveniences, but I didn’t mind them either. YMMV. A lot depends on what you think of MacDonald. I know he’s got nasty stuff out there, it just wasn’t in the two I looked at. He’s good enough I may read on. But I don’t trust him yet either.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

La Llorona (2019)

La Llorona is a ghost out of Mexican folklore that hangs out, by reputation, near bodies of water, howling and mourning for her drowned children. There are lots of versions of the story and how the children came to be drowned and actually there are even lots of movies too, going all the way back at least to a 1933 La Llorona, a Mexican picture. Lately there has been a spate of them, perhaps connected to an appearance in Pixar’s Coco of the Mexican folk song about the business, “La Llorona.” Wikipedia details a specifically Guatemalan version of the La Llorona story so it shouldn’t be a surprise that a Guatemalan, director and cowriter Jayro Bustamante, stepped up with his own take. It made the rounds of film festivals a few years ago and remains worth a look. This version of the tale takes an interesting political bent, with a former dictator who has been forced from office, brought to trial for genocide and convicted, and then his sentence commuted by the country’s supreme court. No doubt they were more interested in looking forward, not backward. This dictator figure, played by Julio Diaz, is called Enrique Monteverde here, but he is based on the real-life Guatemalan dictator in 1982 and 1983, Efraín Ríos Montt, who faced his own charges of war crimes and genocide. The movie takes place soon after his conviction has been set aside, when Montaverde and his family (wife, daughter, granddaughter, servants, and security) repair to their home where they are virtual prisoners. The action is mostly interior but constantly punctuated by chants and calls from the crowds that gather daily to protest him. Sometimes they throw stones and break windows. The swimming pool is strewn with wanted posters for him, tossed over the fence. Even most of the servants have given up and taken off. But the need for servants is still there and one day a woman shows up ready to work, and with experience—Alma, played by an otherworldly Maria Mercedes Coroy. Later her credentials turn out to be falsified but she’s in the household by then. This La Llorona skillfully blends the horrors and depredations of Latin American death squads and repressive right-wing regimes with the La Llorona legend. Julio Diaz is nearly perfect as Monteverde, still a monster after all these years, with a little bristly mustache, an omnipresent sidearm, and bottomless horndog notions. I admit this La Llorona feels a bit like a film festival usual suspect, but don’t hold that against it.