Jeff Buckley, “Forget Her” (1993)

[listen up!]

Word is that Jeff Buckley specifically wanted this song left off of what turned out to be his only album, the 1994 Grace. “Forget Her” is a bittersweet breakup song, plurality of emphasis on the bitter, and Buckley wanted to stay friends with his former and presumably worried she would not react well to it. But I’m glad it finally made it out. It’s too good not to release. Anyone who’s had a broken heart (viz., everyone) is likely to feel this down deep. “Don’t fool yourself / She was heartache from the moment that you met her,” he wails. The dramatic scene is that he’s walking the streets, walkin’ after midnight so to speak, to stop his weeping. It’s the terrible moments at the first of the break, when eating and sleeping is self-denied and a kind of catatonic state descends. No appetite, no stopping the brain. On the Kubler-Ross scale of grief, the singer is flitting between anger and bargaining. Indeed, a case can be made that choosing to leave the song off the album was itself a bargaining ploy. None of that is my business or has much to do with why and how this song goes right through me. I have my own history, of course, and this song opens up some of my own darkest, saddest days. It’s cathartic, in a way—certainly I’ve had my daily infatuations with it. It has often stolen up on me unexpectedly one way or another. More than that, at this point, it’s a reminder I survived, made it past, and found happy places for myself that are reasonably free of grudges and resentment. I hope Buckley got there himself before his sad, untimely end. He was obviously a sensitive soul in many ways on many levels and deserved the peace. This beautiful song is one example of what was lost.

“The Erl-King” (1993)

Elizabeth Hand offers some interesting ideas in her long story, such as reaching for Andy Warhol and his Factory clan, featuring a sort of glitter-era rock star figure who seems to exist somewhere between Robert Fripp and the Moody Blues. I wasn’t much persuaded by it, or more often felt vaguely embarrassed it was even being attempted. But there are also lots of things to like, including, paradoxically, that someone is making the attempt at all. The magic is positively Merlinesque. The rock star’s name is Lie Vagal—“Lie” from Elijah and no idea about the last name, though it’s a pretty good rock star name overall. His neighbor, or tenant—it’s complicated—is Aurora Dawn (another good name), a hanger-on Lie knew back in the day, now washed up, middle-aged, and drunken. Think Nico in the ‘80s. Exotic animals populate the story, as rock stars are wont to go for, which draws Aurora’s daughter Linette and her best friend Haley, staying with her for the summer, to Lie. As the plot develops it becomes silly with reveals that are only unlikely, if not entirely unexpected. Lots of details are planted as foreshadowing for what’s to come. The structure of the story tends to make everything feel obvious or hard to believe or both. Did I mention Vagal is mentally ill? Sounds like schizophrenia. He hallucinates and thinks he sees, or is actually able to see, mythical creatures such as fairies and this Erl-King. This stuff is basically not for me, except maybe the rock star part, a theme Hand has also pursued elsewhere. Hand seems to be reasonably well regarded, winning her share of awards and nominations. This story veers closer to fantasy than horror for my taste but I suspect I will be running into her stuff again. “The Erl-King” does have some nice girl power elements, which is always good to see, though perhaps faint praise on my part. I would label it as a kind of “classy” horror, closer to gothic but not as skilled as the best gothic. Just evoking a sort of semi-contemplative mood. But I always appreciate the attempt to bring decadent rock culture into the horror mix.

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.

So Tough (1993)

Saint Etienne’s second album is something of a disappointment after the impressive Foxbase Alpha debut. Insert the hoary rock critic term “sophomore slump.” The elements are largely the same, but the emphasis has shifted away from more pure pop aesthetics and toward maddeningly vaporous experimental realms with sound collages, witty skits and audio clips from movies and TV ads, and hushed little semi-grooves under influence of ambient house figures of the moment such as the Orb. Saint Etienne is perfectly capable of the popsmithery I love them most for, later albums like Good Humor prove that out, and for that matter there’s a couple of winners at the very end of So Tough, “Who Do You Think You Are” and “Join Our Club.” For those studying versions of things as a hobby, those songs were released separately as singles and apparently included only in some (not all) US versions. It’s all actually quite complicated and I don’t have the heart to go into it for something that misfires more than not in my version. Those last two songs save the album for me, to the extent it is saved and to the degree you consider them part of the album, but set that aside. “Mario’s Café” starts things well, then “Railway Jam” follows with a certain template for much of the album: a witty audio clip, a droning train-on-the-tracks sound collage that goes more than a minute, and finally wisps of a song that sounds like it could be pretty cool. “Calico” and “Avenue” (5:12 and 7:34, respectively) similarly start out strong but ultimately go dithering off into ... stuff. I find it’s actually hard to specifically focus on this album as it plays, which might give it some utility as background music for dinner parties and such. The witty skits and audio clips are sure to be sources of conversation. Mix and match them with the sources listed at Wikipedia: “Peeping Tom, Billy Liar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord of the Flies, and That'll Be the Day, as well as the television series The Family and the 1958 stereo demonstration album A Journey into Stereophonic Sound.” When I think of myself and witty skits and audio clips I think of Lou Grant from Mary Tyler Moore and spunk. I hate witty skits and audio clips. YMMV

“The Woman in the Painting” (1993)

I liked a lot of things about this story by Lisa Goldstein. It’s old-fashioned in a way that is somehow fresh, not only focused on a mysterious witch monster shape-shifter, but told epistolary style, in a nicely done series of letters among three characters. It’s set in the 19th century too—1858 specifically, if it matters, and it might. It’s effective, a little bit hysterical, a little bit scary, and compulsively readable. I note that it’s not easy getting a handle on the shape of horror short fiction in the 1990s. Novels by then had replaced short stories as the essential product of horror literature. In a way this story represents a kind of nostalgia for those short stories, drawing on the traditional structure of correspondence among principals. Goldstein has been a prolific writer in the realm, ranging into fantasy as well as its subset horror. I would classify this particular story as closer to horror, but the genteel 19th-century approach may be more by way of the eclectic nature of what horror had become by 1993. Lots of writers prefer working in the shorter form (and not just horror writers), but publishers and the public at large had made it clear by then they’d rather look at novels. “The Woman in the Painting” feels more natural than contrarian, almost quaint as it takes care of its horror business. The scary parts feel modern, though they are also constrained by the historical context. The horror is in the uncertainty of what the monster is, or even at first whether it’s a monster at all. The uncertainty, the anxiety, is what feels modern. If it were actually 19th-century literature, it might, by contrast, focus rather on the certainty, both that it’s a monster and that it actually exists. So Goldstein pulls off a neat bit of almost uncanny ambivalence here. But it wouldn’t work at all if it weren’t done so engagingly in the first place, which makes me kind of hopeful I will run across more of her stuff. This story is boldly experimental in its retro way, with the epistolary strategy, which is exactly right. It’s a pretty good story all the way around.

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.

Thirteen (1993)

For a long time I knew Teenage Fanclub for Bandwagonesque and that was it. I didn’t even know they had a first album until last year and I didn’t know anything about Thirteen either or the rest of the catalog. Bandwagonesque was a handful for me—one of the best albums of that year, 1991, I was drawn to playing it repeatedly, because it’s good, but at the same time I was embarrassed for the abject aping of Big Star and Alex Chilton (a bit too close for me to the Replacements piling on the pyre of the Big Star legend circa 1987). I didn’t know how many agreed with me in 1993, for example slagging the album’s title as more of same (for the Big Star song “Thirteen”). But if the problem with Bandwagonesque has somehow worn off for me it never existed with Thirteen (which has 13 songs). I only arrived at it last year. Oh, I admit it took sitting with it a few times for the high points to assemble and register. But they are there. File under the slippery label “power pop,” with Teenage Fanclub and Thirteen further landing in the shambolics wing. Even as it comes rumbling in like bad weather with the exquisite five-minute opener, “Hang On,” when the singing starts it’s all homely heart, lovely melody, glowing harmonies, a flute, a lulling orchestra. It’s like that all the way. One of the secrets here is three songwriters, in singer guitarist Norman Blake, singer bassist Gerard Love, and singer other guitarist Raymond McGinley (plus drummer Brendan O’Hare contributes the 1:22 gem “Get Funky,” which comes complete with irresistible handclaps). I can’t say I’ve picked out anything distinct about any one of them. I’m more impressed with how the songwriting blends, like the singing, into something with its own distinct identity. I will say it’s Love who wrote the opener “Hang On” and the closer “Gene Clark,” which strike me as notably apt in their sequencing positions (although the latter has a somewhat annoying two minutes of silence at the end of the song. What’s up with that, streaming service?!). “Gene Clark” bears a worthy name-check by reputation, although I don’t know Clark well enough myself to know how well the song works as tribute. It’s nominally hard rock with an epic electric guitar solo leading the way into a fine round of righteous head-bobbing. Turn it up. Light that Bic. Get with the Teenage Fanclub.

“Some Strange Desire” (1993)

More weird sex: this story by Ian McDonald is another longish, exotic, sexualized (not erotic) fantasy. Something must have been in the air? This one riffs on evolution, gender, and ancient vampire-like secret societies. It was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in the Short Fiction category in 1994. It seems that a mutant form of homo sapiens has lived among us for centuries. They embody both (or all) genders and can physically transform into them at will. And there are humans who get off sexually on them. What could possibly go wrong? The mutants are mostly just surviving, with little interest sexually in humans. Anyone annoyed by confusing pronouns will be annoyed here too, as the mutants are all referred to as “he” even when they are in female form, even as family bonds are referred to as “sister,” “daughter,” and “mother.” I don’t miss that the story was published in 1993, which is reasonably early for the kind of sophisticated LGBTQIA+ discourse given here. So points for vision, though of course Samuel Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin were basically already there and had been for years. The story is dense with concept, giving hurry-up explanation that must be parsed as we go, with a narrative that is perhaps necessarily butt-simple: one of the mutants is dying and unfortunately a human must be sacrificed for it to live. I never managed to get into this story. I understand the difficulty of what it’s trying to do—maybe it should have been a novel? That would have given the ideas here more room to breathe. The ideas are interesting but we are breaking down things like mutant terminology most of the way through, which thwarts narrative momentum. The story has so much concept to pack in that it really shorts character and story value. The concept could well be exactly what people like so much about this story, but I found myself getting impatient quickly with the slow pace and spoon-feeding of the ideas, however necessary. As I say, it probably just should have been longer to do that concept justice. Contrary to popular writing advice, everything doesn’t have to be showing. You can just tell us some things. It’s often quicker and more efficient—part of what the old-fashioned framing stories were doing.

Edited By, ed. Ellen Datlow
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
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“Dying in Bangkok” (1993)

There’s a lot to sort out about the provenance of this strange story by Dan Simmons. It’s already on the long side (ca. 25 pages) but word is there’s an even longer version (called “Death in Bangkok”) which was incorporated into his 1989 novel Carrion Comfort. The premise from that novel—people among us who can use mental powers to control others—is not really part of this story, or anyway not in the version in the Year’s Best anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Datlow and Windling used “Dying” in the title whereas ISFDB is adamant it is supposed to be “Death.” Somebody has something wrong. The story is extremely and ridiculously over the top and full of cliches, with Vietnam grunts on R&R during the war encountering depraved and decadent scenes in Bangkok brothels. It’s not erotic but there is a grotesque blowjob scene (actually more than one) involving a prehensile tongue that’s what? two and a half feet long? Guys come so hard they shoot blood, which is then consumed by these monsters. I mean... Simmons just patiently lays it out there deadpan. It’s incredibly repulsive stuff but he never breaks character as narrator, just keeps telling it. It’s basically a revenge story, as the main character’s best friend was killed by these exotic prostitutes. He takes years to find them again and set his own trap, which is tediously timebound by attitudes of the ‘80s and ‘90s. His plan is to get infected with HIV before he has his sexual encounter with them. My first and obvious complaint is how racist, and how boomer, everything is here about Bangkok. Simmons reels off statistics about the sex trade in Bangkok and its high levels of HIV infection. He views it all as a freak show and the biggest freaks tend to be Asian. Then the sex scenes are gross, overly detailed, and go on way too long. What I remember of Carrion Comfort is that Simmons had some sadistic tendencies, by which I mean he doesn’t just traffic in extreme violence but also puts his most likable characters in great peril and makes us watch. I never felt like he was getting off on it himself (unlike, say, John D. MacDonald in his Travis McGee novels) but it does feel mechanical about being extreme. Let me tell you about a prehensile tongue that’s two and a half feet long and makes you come blood. Too much! And the revenge story is weak. So I do not count this story as a good one, but I was happy to be reminded of Carrion Comfort, which is a pretty good horror novel.

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.

San Francisco Days (1993)

Chris Isaak is a Roy Orbison pastiche so good that, with his pouty James Dean good looks, he was a natural for David Lynch and the Twin Peaks franchise. He appeared in Fire Walk With Me as an FBI agent on approximately the same psychic wavelength as Special Agent Dale Cooper. Isaak’s biggest commercial splash occurred with his previous album, from 1989, Heart Shaped World, home of the #6 “Wicked Game,” his only hit (which makes him technically you-know-what). He has carried on since, with a half-rack or more of albums over the years. In many ways San Francisco Days represents the beginning of the back side of his career, featuring, for the last time, Isaak’s secret weapon of lead guitarist Jesse Calvin Wilsey, the so-called “King of Slow.” Wilsey helps make the best song here, “Can’t Do a Thing,” with his sultry play. But the song is also a good example of Isaak’s songwriting skill, which is not negligible. He’s got an Orbison / Lynch theme about dreams and dreaming running through much of his material, but in “Can’t Do a Thing” it takes a notable turn. The singer rues a relationship he is still not over, taunting her passive-aggressively, in his mind, with the things he can imagine. And she can’t do a thing to stop him. Example: “Makin’ love with somebody / Exactly like you.” The sad, irresistible “Except the New Girl” follows, continuing the best part of the album, with a tender loser sensibility and Wilsey’s piercing play on the lower strings. “Beautiful Homes” positively glides. “Waiting” may or may not be a response to “I’m Not Waiting” on Heart Shaped World. Yes, much of San Francisco Days, even the best, is not far from the usual Orbison place, taking a somewhat rancid turn occasionally. But I have to forgive because Isaak and Wilsey make love-sickness work so well and so effectively. “I Want Your Love,” a total smoothie, plays more in the rockabilly mode, a reedy organ taking command. Orbison played rockabilly too, of course, but in the end the better model for Isaak might be Neil Diamond, which he seems to signal in a way by closing the album on a perfectly conceived cover of “Solitary Man.” Diamond was a great songwriter too, and even moody bruised singer in his own right, but the way Isaak records and sequences his cover here feels significant, even if it’s not much in the running for best tune on the album. Then here comes the rest of Isaak’s career.

“Troll-Bridge” (1993)

I read the first graphic novel in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series many years ago and always meant to get back to it. But that was before he got into his recent troubles for alleged (by five different women) sexual assault or at least misconduct. I don’t otherwise know his work well and now I feel like there’s an excuse to skip it. He always seemed to lean into fantasy more than I like anyway. The allegations make me sad in a general way and contemptuous in another—just another overprivileged guy who can’t control himself. Like Louis C.K., he is now already attempting a comeback, denying the worst charges and hoping fans can forgive and forget. We’ll see how that goes. It doesn’t seem to be working for Louis C.K. In the better days of the ‘90s, “Troll-Bridge” earned a nomination for a 1994 World Fantasy Award for short fiction. In 2016 it was adapted into a graphic novel by Colleen Doran. Gaiman’s story was published originally in Snow White, Blood Red, a thematic 1993 anthology devoted to the arguably suspect subgenre of fairy tale retellings (edited, like the Year’s Best anthology where I read this story, by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling). I like the idea of these fairy tale retellings—see especially Angela Carter’s work—but the execution is too often uninspired and mechanical (part of the reason I skip themed anthologies as a general rule). Gaiman’s exercise here riffs on “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” which a 2010 Norwegian found-footage faux doc, Trollhunter, is altogether better on, with more humor and better special effects. Maybe that’s because this particular fairy tale has roots in Norwegian folklore. Gaiman is more going for something elegiac, with a self-pitying protagonist and a decaying urban setting, London in the late 20th century. Various basic elements such as the bridge itself confused me. The story hangs together largely because the fairy tale does. The bones of it are sticking through the fabric of “Troll-Bridge,” although not necessarily in the best ways. It felt too serious about itself for me. The troll under the bridge threatens to “eat” the life of our first-person narrator. It’s a confusing threat, but the end clarifies the meaning as something like the story’s designated twist. You’ll have to read it to discover it for yourself and I hope you have a better time than I did.

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

“England Underway” (1993)

This story by Terry Bisson with its kooky, whimsical premise—perhaps too kooky and whimsical for me—was nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards in short fiction categories (it is apparently long enough to be a “novelette” by Nebula standards). It surprised me that Bisson is from the US, Kentucky specifically, as the story succeeds in feeling British. Or maybe it feels British to me the way an American conceives it. Anyway, for whatever reason—plate tectonics is the only detail given that sounds remotely plausible, but who cares in a fantasy, right?—England and some British territories (not Ireland) have come loose and set out west across the Atlantic. No one knows why. It’s all over the news. I have to admit some of this story went over my head because I don’t know UK geography and have never been good with spatial relations. The entire land mass is also spinning slowly so the south of England becomes the east and so forth. It’s confusing. The story does have a soothing, gentle tone, milking humor from the absurdity of the situation as well as UK politics (pre-EU), especially regarding Ireland. The main character is a British chap set in his ways, with a dog and a niece in the US who writes him monthly and says he must come visit to see her baby, his grand-niece. Eventually England delivers him for the visit and he meets the baby, shortly after which England departs the New York harbor, headed east, presumably returning. There’s a nice sense of how strange it would be if England were literally only a ferry ride away from New York, but what’s strange and interesting in this story is mostly swamped by what’s cute. On the whole it’s well done but on the whole it is merely cute. In a way it plays to my own, mostly unfortunate preconceptions about fantasy—that it’s intended to be harmless if not entirely vapid (I say this knowing better now that horror is a subset of fantasy). But in other ways the story pulls against my bad attitude. Though Bisson is obviously trafficking in British stereotypes he’s doing it with a good deal of urbane charm and wit. I’m curious how Americans and Brits respond comparatively to it. I wouldn’t be surprised to find Americans like it more.

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Read story online.

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

USA, 112 minutes

Director: Fred Schepisi

Writer: John Guare

Photography: Ian Baker

Music: Jerry Goldsmith

Editor: Peter Honess

Cast: Stockard Channing, Will Smith, Donald Sutherland, Ian McKellen, Mary Beth Hurt, Bruce Davison, Heather Graham, Anthony Michael Hall, Eric Thal, Richard Mason, J.J. Abrams, Kitty Carlisle

Six Degrees of Separation is one degree of separation from a 1990 stage play of the same name, based on a real-life con man, which approximately sums up most of the problems here. Well, except for the conceit of a high concept that never quite comes off. Google AI summarizes: “Six Degrees of Separation is the theory that everyone on Earth is connected by a chain of no more than five other people (six acquaintance links).... [It may be] illustrated by the ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ game, where any actor can be linked to Bacon in six or fewer roles.”

The funny thing (funny dumbass, not funny ha ha) is that this idea has little to do with anything going on in this picture, beyond something that one major character is fascinated by in a daydreamy sort of way. That is the unbearably named Ouisa, pronounced “wee-zuh,” short for Louisa (Stockard Channing). Donald Sutherland plays her husband Flan. They are rich New Yorkers living off Central Park. Sutherland is excellent, as he always was, but he can’t save this mess. Will Smith plays Paul, who says he is the son of Sidney Poitier. That claimed connection might have something to do with the six degrees. I don’t know. I never figured it out. I did notice that Will Smith did not slap anyone in this picture.

“The Lodger” (1993)

Fred Chappell’s story is very clever and enjoyable exactly for that reason. I found it in a Year’s Best anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and what’s more it also won a World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction too. Clearly a lot of people have enjoyed it. But I think it’s closer to literary satire than fantasy, let alone horror. The clear target is postmodernism. At the same time it certainly has affinities with the bookish surrealism of Jorge Luis Borges, so give it that too. “The Lodger” manages to eat its cake and have it too in many ways. Chappell namechecks Alfred Hitchcock (whose 1920s silent movie supplies the title) and Edgar Allan Poe. The main character, Robert Ackley, is a low-level librarian in a university with a modest collection (by the tone) of 2 million volumes. He spends his evenings plunged into the strange finds he makes by day in the library. He likes the weird and elusive and obscure. He may be living in the right universe for it because this is a strange one. It’s much like our own but with certain key differences, such as, apparently, no Allen Ginsberg or Howl. Instead, there is Gerald Grayforth and Squall, which has obvious fragments from Howl and affords Chappell the opportunity to unleash, in 1993, some no doubt long-simmering mockery of the beats. There are other targets I recognized here as well and many more I suspected. Basically Chappell is making a party out of it. Everyone’s invited. One evening Ackley is reading an obscure poet from Cleveland, Lyman Scoresby—something to do with Hart Crane—and picks up Scoresby’s spirit, who then lives in Ackley’s head and begins to systematically take him over. The story then becomes a contest of wills between them and a good time is had by all. I like it because I am open to this assessment of the po-mo project. As someone who loves Ginsberg and Howl, however, I also got a glimpse of what highbrow condescension looks like coming from a vanity-damaged specimen like Scoresby, in which case I’m afraid Chappell, by extension and presumption, looks merely smug. So perhaps he and I are both smug about postmodernism, if you follow me. It stands to reason. And the story remains entertaining on balance, an intriguing piece of intellectual stunt work, especially in the way it resolves.

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.

Addams Family Values (1993)

USA, 94 minutes

Director: Barry Sonnenfeld

Writers: Charles Addams, Paul Rudnick

Photography: Donald Peterman

Music: Marc Shaiman

Editors: Jim Miller, Arthur Schmidt

Cast: Anjelica Huston, Raul Julia, Christopher Lloyd, Joan Cusack, Christina Ricci, Carol Kane, Jimmy Workman, Carel Struycken, David Krumholtz, Christopher Hart, Kristin Hooper, Dana Ivey, Peter MacNicol, Christine Baranski, Cynthia Nixon, Peter Graves

My principled stance is that I avoid most movie sequels. Certainly there have been some that are winners—Bride of Frankenstein, The Dark Knight, Evil Dead II, The Road Warrior, Terminator 2. And, yeah, beyond that some noisy consensus on others I don’t like nearly as much as the originals: The Godfather Part II, The Empire Strikes Back, Aliens. Then there are sequels like Addams Family Values, which may be better than the originals but are just too lightweight and/or marketing-driven in the first place to take seriously. If you want to laugh, however, you could do worse than Addams Family Values.

Director Barry Sonnenfeld absorbed the lessons of the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams, who pumped up the gag volume in their Airplane!, Naked Gun, and other parody franchises. The pace of Addams Family Values is not as frenetic but the rhythm of punchlines and sight gags is reliably steady. Sonnenfeld’s IMDb known-fors include two Men in Black movies, which are comparable comedies for a sense of his style. He also did Wild Wild West and the original Addams Family adaptation from 1991 (which is not as good as this sequel). While you can argue that none of it amounts to much, the all-star cast and the overall vibe here indicate at least that people wanted to work with Sonnenfeld. They bring a lot of infectious we’re-having-a-ball chemistry to Paul Rudnick’s rapid-fire screenplay. It’s the director as popular guy, a tradition that goes all the way up the line to Howard Hawks.

“Thanksgiving” (1993)

Here is another effective pile-on by Joyce Carol Oates—perhaps it piles on too much. It’s certainly not restrained. Calling Oates’s brand of horror here hysterical might be insulting, but it’s not my intent. Her stories can take place at a very high pitch, let’s put it that way. The setting in this one seems to be the impoverished white trash South, white trash being one of her specialties. A father suddenly wants to take his 13-year-old daughter shopping for Thanksgiving. He tells her that her mother needs the break. The mother usually does the shopping, but this year she’s not. No explanation—in fact, we never see her at all. The father keeps referring to her as if she’s alive, but she could be dead. The scene at the grocery store is incredible, Oates in high nightmare / dream mode. From the descriptions, it appears the store has been bombed from the air. In one aisle part of the floor is gone with a hole that drops into the basement. It’s chaos everywhere. The lights are low and flickering—there has been a power outage too. There’s lots of spoiled food all over, really disgusting stuff. Yet the place is crowded with shoppers and, while it’s impossible to ignore the inconvenience, no one seems to remark anything about it being unusual. There’s a kind of shared grim determination to get what they need there and get out. It feels like a society rotting out in front of our eyes. In some ways the story feels pro forma—take something comforting like the Thanksgiving holiday and turn it inside out, because there’s no such thing as comfort in this world. The story is built around dysfunctional family dynamics. For at least half of it I was sure it had to be about the mother but it’s actually more about a world in pure collapse. Yes, it goes too far. There are cockroaches, the meat is bad, and they are often up to their ankles in unexplained standing water. Yet everyone acts as if it’s normal. That’s when it feels most like a nightmare. The bland acceptance of this chaos and degradation is what comes to seem the worst. The story has few answers. It leaves us with only more questions. Literally the only thing that seems to matter now is consuming. But what about the bombs? What about the mother? The story works, but it might be overdone. But it works.

Joyce Carol Oates, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque
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Demolition Man (1993)

USA, 115 minutes

Director: Marco Brambilla

Writers: Peter M. Lenkov, Robert Reneau, Daniel Waters

Photography: Alex Thomson

Music: Elliot Goldenthal

Editor: Stuart Baird

Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock, Nigel Hawthorne, Benjamin Bratt, Bob Gunton, Denis Leary, Jack Black, Jesse Ventura, Adrienne Barbeau

Demolition Man belongs with that genre of jokey science fiction action shows that includes RoboCop and Total Recall: come for the stunts and fistfights, stay for the laughs and scratchy high concepts. It’s not Schwarzenegger in the starring role in this case (or Peter Weller either), but Sylvester Stallone. And he’s not your dad’s Rocky but a triangular-shaped specimen from his neck to lean waist, in supremely good shape and inclined (or director Marco Brambilla, otherwise unknown to me, is inclined) to show off the impressive pecs and overall physique. He is well supported by a manic Wesley Snipes, a very funny Sandra Bullock, a strange Benjamin Bratt, and a handful or more of hey-that-guys from the ‘80s and ‘90s. I’m here for Demolition Man, a little against my will, because it seems to understand the sweet spot of action, humor, and science fiction—and I wasn’t prepared for that. In fact, I was astonished to see that Halliwell’s gives it two stars whereas Searching for Bobby Fischer, for example, does not even get one, and I thought maybe it deserved at least that.

Demolition Man is set in 2032, in a justice system that freezes the guilty for the duration of their sentences and then feeds them subliminal training based on their aptitudes so they will have a skill when they awake for parole or release. Detective John Spartan (Stallone) has been trained for knitting and sewing. He’s in for accidentally letting 30 hostages die. Oops, as he might say. The 21st century of this movie has turned into a paradise for hippie lovers of peace, harmony, and political correctness, a panacea of woke we would say nowadays. Everything bad, including swearing, smoking, drinking, and eating meat, has been outlawed. But when supervillain Simon Phoenix (Snipes in a blonde dye-job and high Joker hysterics) breaks out of his ice cube they have to get real (as one does) and turn to Spartan, who’s not a bad cop but a good cop who is brutal, if you can exactly tell the difference. Just go with it.

Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993)

USA, 109 minutes

Director: Steven Zaillian

Writers: Fred Waitzkin, Steven Zaillian

Photography: Conrad L. Hall

Music: James Horner

Editor: Wayne Wahrman

Cast: Joe Mantegna, Joan Allen, Max Pomeranc, Ben Kingsley, Lawrence Fishburne, Robert Stephens, David Paymer, William H. Macy, Laura Linney, Dan Hedaya, Michael Nirenberg

Searching for Bobby Fischer is a feel-good sports movie about chess. So you know, it doesn’t have much to do with the eccentric chess genius Bobby Fischer (who died in 2008), except that the real-life chess prodigy the movie is about, Joshua Waitzkin (Max Pomeranc), idolizes, in whispered voiceover, Fischer and all his mystique. For his part, the typically rancorous Fischer thought the movie violated his privacy by using his name without his permission and he reportedly called it “a monumental swindle.” Yeah, OK. If feeling good is what you’re looking for, you can do worse. The main problem here is the specific subject at hand. It’s possible to do chess as a sports movie—the TV miniseries The Queen’s Gambit made a pretty good job of it a few years ago—but it’s not easy. Searching for Bobby Fischer abruptly gets very “chessy” in places, with fast shots of the board and obscure chatter and jargon about openings and “bringing out the queen” and such.

But I, for one, can’t just glean the situation from the position of pieces on the board, especially when they come at us so fast. Chess is complicated and hard to dramatize visually. Making movies about it is a bit like making movies about computer hacking activities. There’s only so much you can do with someone sitting at a keyboard in a darkened room and looking up to say, “We’re in.” Fred Waitzkin, Josh’s father and a New York journalist published in the New York Times, New York magazine, and Esquire, shows his seasoning (or maybe that’s cowriter Steven Zaillian?) by injecting a fair amount of sideline nostalgic baseball lore into the story, knowing that’s easier for most of us to grasp. Ken Burns’s Baseball would come out the following year, but this movie is already onboard with the idea of New York as the capital of baseball (and everything).

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)

USA, 76 minutes

Directors: Kevin Altieri, Boyd Kirkland, Frank Paur, Dan Riba, Eric Radomski, Bruce Timm

Writers: Alan Burnett, Paul Dini, Martin Pasko, Michael Reeves, Bob Kane

Art direction: Glen Murakami

Photography: Song Il-Choi

Music: Shirley Walker

Editor: Al Breitenbach

Cast: Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, Dana Delany, Stacy Keach, Abe Vigoda, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Marilu Henner

This animated feature—officially the first by Warner Bros. Animation, rising out of the ashes of Warner Bros. Cartoons—was intended to capitalize on the Batman franchise, then blowing up, lately fortified with “dark knight” intimations out of Frank Miller and, kinda sorta, Tim Burton. Mask of the Phantasm is based on a TV series, Batman: The Animated Series, which ran from 1992 until 1999, and followed the second Burton picture, Batman Returns, a second big hit after the 1989 Batman. Phantasm was intended originally as a direct-to-video release but, because the Burton pictures were making big money, it was rushed into a theatrical release and flopped. But time has been kind to this one, which features Mark Hamill as one of the better Jokers and Kevin Conroy sounding a lot like Adam West, a subtly comforting element.

Unlike the Burton pictures, which worked the dark-knight thing but always kept one foot (or maybe three toes) planted in the campy exercises of the ‘60s TV show, Mask of the Phantasm is all in on the gritty nighttime crime-fighter who strikes terror etc. The giveaway on the serious Batman pictures remains how much hay they make out of the origin story, often including Bruce Wayne’s parents Thomas and Martha as characters but at least making a point of visits to the cemetery. Phantasm also retcons a new girlfriend for Batman/Bruce Wayne, one “Andrea Beaumont,” who has since gone on to further appearances in Batman stories. But let’s pause a moment on “retcon” because it’s an idea unique to continuing series in both the comics and TV and an important key to deciding whether or not such stories work.

Three Colors: Blue (1993)

Trois couleurs: Bleu, France / Poland / Switzerland, 99 minutes

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Writers: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Agnieszka Holland, Edward Zebrowski, Slawomir Idziak

Photography: Slawomir Idziak

Music: Zbigniew Preisner

Editor: Jacques Witta

Cast: Juliet Binoche, Benoit Regent, Florence Pernel, Charlotte Very, Helene Vincent, Philippe Volter, Claude Duneton, Hugues Quester, Emmanuelle Riva, Julie Delpy

Trilogies are an idea that comes from the literary world, where it appears to have become every novelist’s ambition to write one—that is, three novels that are linked somehow. Did you know William Gibson’s Neuromancer is the first novel in a trilogy? (I’m not even trying to address series that can run for many, many often very big novels. People like them too but no one appears to want to call them octologies or whatever. Make it “cycle.”) Sometimes a trilogy can amount to a single long work—John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings are good examples. Sometimes it’s more notional. Beat writer William Burroughs has at least two trilogies that are united only, as far as I can tell, by consecutive publication dates and/or by Burroughs (or someone) saying they are a trilogy.

Director and cowriter Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy is more like the latter, with separate narratives and characters, playing with larger political and cultural themes. One way that point is emphasized at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (TSPDT) is by listing the three titles separately. (They do the same for the Lord of the Rings movies, but I’m more inclined to take those as a single very big movie.) (To confuse the matter further, there is also another 1993 picture, written and directed by Derek Jarman and featuring Tilda Swinton, called Blue.) Three Colors is formally united by the colors of the French flag—the “blue, white, and red,” as they say—which in turn represent liberty, equality, and fraternity, respectively. Kieslowski treats them separately by film (perhaps ironic that white is equality in the weakest of the three, but we’ll get to that). This very impressive first picture in the trilogy formally plays with the idea of “liberty”—it may be somewhat strained, loaded down with art film markers, and it may be a somewhat narrow view of liberty (“emotional,” per Kieslowski), but nonetheless it works well and makes a good picture.

The Heroic Trio (1993)

My first look at a picture by Hong Kong director/producer Johnnie To came courtesy of my local art house, cheerily cashing in on the renewed interest in Michelle Yeoh brought on by the big sweep by Everything Everywhere All at Once at the Oscars this year. Yeoh is indeed part of this heroic trio, along with the equally iconic Maggie Cheung, plus Anita Mui. They are ridiculously young. Cheung was close to 30 when this was made but she looks closer to 17. She rides a motorcycle and totes a shotgun. Tung (Mui) is known as Wonder Woman. She wears a mask and not even her own police investigator husband recognizes her. Well, that’s par for the course isn’t it when superheroes are involved, but really this movie came out well before the commercial juggernaut of superhero movies. I also noted a special effect around gunshot fire that looked to me like a reasonable approximation of “bullet time,” more often associated with The Matrix from 1999. It appears someone is kidnapping babies—18 of them and counting in a matter of weeks as the picture starts. No one’s asking for ransom and no one knows what it’s about, but police need to get it under control pronto. The first of several don’t-miss-it sequences in The Heroic Trio, arriving early, feature the rescue of many endangered infants, who are dropping from buildings, even in their swaddling, and of course helpless as babies as they plummet. The plummeting is generally leisurely, the rescue maneuvers impressively thought through. It’s all a good-hearted romp, built around sensational stunts, special effects, sight gags, and other random switch-ups. Some of them miss but there’s always another on the way. The narrative, coming at us so pell-mell, is confusing—though things like rescuing the babies is entertaining enough and they just keep coming. The humor is broad and transitions abrupt. I sometimes felt like I was at a drive-in show or a midnight madness picture. It never entirely makes sense (how could it?!) but it has a rousing, Terminator-like finish that’s thrilling to watch and hilarious too. The Evil Dead movies felt like still another touchpoint here. The Heroic Trio bristles with energy and resourcefulness and who cares if it’s trashy. Play loud.

“Ridi Bobo” (1993)

I thought this story by Robert Devereaux was pretty well done. It’s on the short side, which helps it stay so resolutely in bizarre character. Killer clowns don’t seem that original anymore but maybe they were more so then, and these aren’t exactly killer clowns anyway. In fact, actually, I get more of a hit of Roger Rabbit cartoon physics in the way this goes (which also fits the timeframe of when Devereaux might have been writing). Lots of bops to the noggin and so forth. Extreme violence but generally everyone recovers quickly. The story is all cliches as Devereaux clowns up the details of an extramarital affair and its exposure. Some of it is comical but more of it, like clown sexuality, is a little disturbing. All I know about that is genitalia is described as rubber chickens for males and honkers for females and it’s all right out there to observe, though it’s not entirely clear how these rubber chickens and honkers work. But then, we may not want to know. But then, we may. The story: a clown husband suspects his clown wife is cheating on him. He hires a clown detective to look into it. Sure enough, Momo the detective trails Kiki the wife to a seedy low-rent motel and gets pictures of her in the act with some other clown. When the husband finds out, he slaughters his whole family—pet piglets, twin sons, and wife—and then kills himself. So I guess it is about killer clowns after all. The simple beats of the story enable it to lean very hard and creatively into the clown aspect. There’s a lot of slapstick, pratfalls, miming, clown costumes, and clown props, and if some parts of it are funny they are often uncomfortable. The clowns have names like Bobo and Momo and Juju. We see a law enforcement scene with “the screaming whistles in the bright red mouths of the Kops clinging to the Kop Kar as it raced into the neighborhood, hands to their domed blue hats, the bass drums booming.” As Bobo kills his family he pauses to draw teardrops on his face under his eye. Actually, if anything, what’s most disturbing about this story now is the familiarity of the spectacle of a madman slaughtering a bunch of people and then himself. Sad!

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.