“Okay, I got one. So, back when I was living in Brooklyn – industrial Bushwick- before Bushwick was East Williamsburg and you still had to watch your wallet on the way back from the Jefferson stop. Anyway, I was living in this converted factory.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I was playing in this band. In fact, this whole thing happened two days before we were supposed to go on a full U.S. tour. But so I got woken up at 5:10am.”

“That is pretty precise.”

“Yeah, well, I remember this because I had been up all night arguing with the girl I was with at the time. We finally fell asleep a half hour before that, and I remember being really pissed that it was that early. So I’m all the way on one side of the bed and she is all the way on the other side of the bed, and of course she has all the blankets, and I hear someone downstairs calling to me. I jump out of bed and toss on my pants and head down. There’s my neighbor and I say ‘What’s up?’ and he says ‘Come on’ and I follow him down the hall.”

“Yeah, so what happened?”

“I’m getting there. So we’re going down the stairs to where the front door is and he tells me he heard this sound like a bomb going off while he was in bed with his girl and went out to check it out. Apparently he saw my van had been smashed, real bad, like destroyed. The other car hit it so hard it ended up on the other side of the street facing the other way. It was a little thing, totally crushed, the driver’s-side door and the trunk were open. So he goes running down the street and finds the guy.”

“How’d he know it was the guy?”

“Because he was the only person stumbling down the street covered in his own blood at the time. Well, that and that before my neighbor even said anything to him the guy says ‘Hey, you hit me man!”

“That’s rich.”

“Yeah. And so Chris – that’s my neighbor’s name – says, ‘So, you’re telling me that my friend’s van, which was parked and no one was in, hit your car?’ The other guy, reeking of booze and covered in his own blood, says ‘Yeah, man you hit me, man.’ Chris said he didn’t know what to do. He wanted to hit him but didn’t want to screw up anything with me getting the insurance money. And nobody likes to call the cops.

“But then he hears sirens and so he runs back to the van. The cops aren’t there yet, but he sees the ambulance with the back open and the drivers are loading all these shoeboxes in the back. I guess the trunk was filled with boxes of brand new Nikes. They saw this and snagged them. Chris asked them what they were doing and one guy said ‘Welcome to Bushwick’ and then they drove off.

“Well, by the time Chris had come to get me and told me all this and we got out there the cops had already shown up. They told me they had to get a second ambulance there to pick the driver up because the first one never showed. They told me the case was pretty open and shut. That the guy had gotten out of jail the night before, stolen a car, got real drunk and hit our van going 60, and somehow didn’t die.”

“They never asked about the shoes?”

“They never asked about the shoes.”

“So what happened about the tour? I mean, you couldn’t go, right?”

“No, we went.”

“But the van was totaled, right?”

“Yeah, the frame was all bent up and the back window exploded. But we wired the bumper back on with a coat hanger and replaced the back window with cardboard. Our drummer, Weezy, was a mechanic and he jerry-rigged the rest. We did the whole tour. And when we got back we claimed the thing as totaled and collected the insurance money, which was just enough to cover the money we lost from going on tour and buy us a pizza dinner.”

And they cracked jokes and drank and tipped the person bringing the drinks and argued over which women in the place would be the most fun to take to bed. Then the storyteller stood up and walked to the door. His hands ached from the coming rain. Age had given him that, the ache that came when the weather changes. He felt it worst in the third knuckle, the one he broke punching a wall when he was twenty and told everyone he fought off a mugger.

When bloggers or interested people write to me about why they will not review my book, I have noticed in some instances that the two stories they do like are what I call “Anne Frank” efforts: they are safe, give humanity a free pass and play on the cello strings of the human heart. I felt them at the time and I wrote what I felt. Most of my 27 stories offer idiosyncratic points of view that are gritty, graphic, savage, caustic and satirical, and take no prisoners. When the head of a Jewish studies program writes me that she “shuddered” upon reading my other stories, I find that schizoid.  In a world in which we now have regular beheadings, her dainty perspective and head-up-her-ass attitude are hard to take. She is an intellectual wuss.

Films are much more graphic than books, but books incise into the mind in a different kind of way. So here is a Holocaust educator who has circumscribed what she reads, admits and accepts only what is safe. In Terence Des Pres’ book, The Survivor, about the concentration camp experience, he graphically describes how camp guards made some Jews eat their own shit. It happened. Learn from it. As a writer, use it. Don’t flinch. Or get out of the Holocaust experience as a writer. So if I write a story in which an inmate had to eat his own shit, I wonder if that would be rejected out of hand. Of course it would. It would make her “shudder.” So my literary imaginings get to her more than beheadings and Jews eating shit.

Another writer and educator complains to me, barely containing her rage, that she has no time for Holocaust fiction, that we should spend more time taking down the stories of survivors, become memoir recorders, assist them in encapsulating their experiences. I have no problem with that at all, but in the same breath she castigates Holocaust fiction as a waste of time at this historical moment. Holocaust as memoir, Holocaust as remembrance. Is that all there is? So no more Primo Levi, no more Elie Wiesel, no  Olga Lengyel, no time for explication and exploration or interpretation? I will take my copy of The Heart of Darkness and incinerate it and go up the mountain and crash.

I must say judgmentally that I experience these responses as a kind of moral cowardice. I have no need to defend my book nor to explain its contents or explain why and how I came to write it. When you mine for gold, digging produces slag and detritus; when you explore the heart of darkness you make things messy and muddied, conflictual, and, for the weak-minded nowadays, aggravating and unsettling. However, it is the search that counts. It always does.  My mind wanders back to a Contemporary Civilization course at Queens College in 1958. The instructor began to speak about Karl Marx and one of the undergrad women got upset with the mere mention of his name. The teacher went up to her seat and said “Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Karl Marx” to desensitize her, I imagine, to the very sound of Marx’s name. And so with the mentioning of Holocaust.

When I receive these responses I feel soiled by human beings who want the Holocaust neatly wrapped up, literally ended or just not written about at all. Underneath is a need to be safe. And my Jewish brethren are as guilty as anyone else. It is the dark and nether consequences of resistance, to put out of conscious mind what is nettlesome, frightening, scary and personally repulsive to bear under the scrutiny of awareness.

In short, it comes down to fear. I wrote in another place that fearlessness leads to authenticity in writing. I stand by that. I am so old that authenticity in living is still a vital principle for me to live by or struggle to sustain. And when I come across prissy responses to my book I don’t relate to them well, for they are foreign to me, but they are the low-flying scud in this rapidly collapsing culture. I’m naively taken aback that people don’t want to see, and yet I spent years dealing with the unsaid in my psychotherapy clients. So I have determined that if my book is to be read I must give it away, which I am doing in certain cases: to Holocaust museums, Holocaust studies programs, instructors and the like. After all, I am into sharing what I own and what I feel and what I can write about without an inordinate concern about marketing and making royalties. Royalties are sweet gumdrops, assuredly, but they do not make up the fabric of myself.

Apparently any book on the Holocaust nowadays is met with indifference, as the Jews were in the 1940s. “Ho hum” is the response. An ennui has settled in and, like a miasmic swamp, occludes efforts to understand again and again what the Holocaust is. Human beings are a shabby lot, one of my lifelong learnings.  I have no expectations of man because my own fellow man has not the slightest realistic expectation of himself, except to make money and fuck. Kazantzakis said it well on his epitaph: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”

Apparently I may like to get bruised or kicked in the ass, to perseverate in this agony, or I don’t really give a damn. I do have a measure of hope. I hand out my book free, like a business card, just to share: “Hey, brother, I can spare a dime.” To be read is all that I require, to be asked a question is a wonderful chakra, something to behold. It is the teacher in me. At my age I experience what Erickson called “generativity,” the need to give what wisdom one has attained to the young or those who are willing listeners.

And there is also the asbestos-like silence. I have mailed out over 1,000 queries, and more than a handful to reviewers who have read my earlier works, and they don’t nibble at all. In my imagination they feel not to reply is not to be involved with a foul subject, or one that makes them “shudder” or equivocate, or flee. Whatever the motivation, what I am left with is silence from previous supporters.  It is deafening. You might label this Holocaust aversion. Human beings rarely ever face what they are capable of, hence the hatred for Freud. Some “well-intended” individuals want to protect survivors from the very horrors they have experienced: how interesting, and self-servingly odd, as they open wide their heavenly batwings to succor survivors with grandiosity which is unseemly and unwise.

In education reading readiness, if I recall, has to do with the child’s ability at a certain age and grade to be introduced to reading or to another level of reading. I suspect Holocaustphobes are not “ready.” Apparently many of us cannot advance beyond Anne Frank’s outside experience. Although hidden from the concentration camp, some historians feel her diary is not part of Holocaust literature. Psychologically, many human beings or many readers suffer, with regard to the Holocaust, from arrested development. I have let out genii from bottles, from my powder keg. A writer can never control the consequences of what he says in print, the misinterpretations, the misunderstandings or the lack of nuanced reading.

I also sense that I have touched upon several taboos as reviewers write back. I am well aware that I rarely censor myself or hold back what I have to say. That is, I don’t send out my work to the cleaners. I am not a safe person to be around in any case. Some people cover holes with stones; I unearth them for a look-see. Call it characterological.

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ADDENDUM

During these past months the heavy breath of Holocaust resistance to my book has blown across my face. In short, we’ve read enough about the Holocaust. “What? Another book on the subject? It is too somber and morbid a subject! Finally, let us Pontius Pilate the book, wash our hands of it, sight unseen.” I can chew and taste the relentless unwillingness to invest time in the subject. There is no fair play in all this, nor can I expect any, as it is one more book I felt I had to write, and one more book not wanted. There is a surfeit of Holocaust books, fiction and non-fiction. (But can there ever be?) There is reviewer fatigue about the subject. And there is also a lack of balls to engage the subject. Intellectual and psychological cowardice blows through my computer as bloggers resist, say they “pass” or simply do not answer (what class). Often magazine editors willing to accept the book cannot find reviewers to read it.

The Inquisition was the original blueprint for the Holocaust. Historically we are still examining that period for it hisses and suppurates anti-Semitism, and is the template for the Final Solution. It has rightly been argued that the history of Jews has been a series of Holocausts. I recently read a history of Jewish pirates in the Caribbean who waged war against Spain, having been expelled in 1492 and forced to enter another Diaspora. Revenge! The horror stories of Marranos and Conversos, the burnings at the stake, autos-da-fe, led Benzion Netanyahu, the father of Benjamin Netanyahu, to write a 1200-page scholarly tome that specifically ascribes Jew hatred at the heart of the Inquisition. In short, it wasn’t the Jew as a non-Christian, it was hatred of the Jew as a people. The concept of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) led directly to the racial theories of Hitler. In a trip to Spain in 2007 I came across a resistance and unwillingness to discuss the Spanish Jewish experience. The odds are that most everyone in Spain, in the nooks and crannies of historical space, had a relative who was Jewish. Perhaps they feel “tainted.” Since Jews hold memory in high esteem, Netanyahu, centuries later, unearths the real motives for the Inquisition. His book is the last word on the subject.

I am experiencing as a writer a kind of crypto-phenomenon. When I enrolled I Truly Lament for a tour there were bloggers who resisted displaying the book on their sites. All this was subtly implied. The book is a “downer.” All this reaffirms, without rancor, my general assessment about the species, knowing full well the book would not be “popular.” And what is that assessment: Thou Shalt Not Know. It seems to me that the Holocaust is a litmus test for the mass of men. It reminds them of the continuing rolling reverberation of what each of us is capable of doing. The human race is not capable of remediation, never was, never is and never will be. Which brings me back to me and why I wrote this book. I wrote it for the same reason a prisoner etches dates and comments on his cell wall, announcing his existence.

I will forever announce that I am a Jew.

Matt is a writer who lives in Nevada.  He’s the author of The i Tetralogy, Down to a Sunless Sea, This Mobius Strip of Ifs and I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust. Visit his blog. His major works are now available in Kindle format.

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I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust is a collection of stories including inmates and survivors of death camps, disenchanted Golems complaining about their designated rounds, Holocaust deniers and their ravings, collectors of Hitler curiosa, an imaginary interview with Eva Braun during her last days in the Berlin bunker, a Nazi camp doctor subtly denying his complicity, and the love story of a Hungarian cantor.

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“… Freese’s haunting lament might best be explained (at least to me) by something Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about Herman Melville’s endless search for answers to questions that perplexed him all his adult life. Melville was incessantly obsessed with what one might call the why of it all—life, death, metaphysical mysteries. Similar to Freese, Melville was repeatedly afflicted with a dark and depressive state of mind.” —Duff Brenna, Professor Emeritus CSU San Marcos

—Duff Brenna, Professor Emeritus CSU San Marcos

“Freese says that ‘memory must metabolize [the Holocaust] endlessly,’ and his book certainly turns hell into harsh nourishment: keeps us alert, sharpens our nerves and outrage, forbids complacent sleep so the historical horror can’t be glossed over as mere nightmare. The Holocaust wasn’t a dream or even a madness. It was a lucid, non-anomalous act that is ever-present in rational Man. In the face of this fact Freese never pulls punches. Rather, his deft, brutal, and insightful words punch and punch until dreams’ respite are no longer an option and insanity isn’t an excuse.” —David Herrle, Author of Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy

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 Other books by Mathias Freese
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Praise for The i Tetralogy at Library Thing: “Over the week it took me to read this novel, my anxiety level rose steadily. My jaws would be so soar when I woke up in the morning and I found them clenching for no reason throughout the day. My physical reaction is a testament to the power of the experience. The i Tetralogy would not have worked if it were written by a lesser author.”

Praise for Down to a Sunless Sea at BreeniBooks: “This is the type of literature that haunts the reader long after the book is put aside. Mathias B. Freese is a brilliant and talented author who inspires serious reflection.”

 
Praise for The Mobius Strip of Ifs by David Fraser of Ascent Aspirations: “[Freese] advocates that we rummage for ourselves, analyze our lives, live in the moment, de-condition ourselves, be anarchist against conformity and above all struggle to chisel out and define who we really are. This book, although deeply personal, is also an open-ended journey for learning to live with awareness and inner freedom.”

Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Jules Dassin’s Night and the City, and Jacque Tourneur’s Out of the Past

Ruthlessly butchered in the editing process, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) remains Billy Wilder’s most cruelly underrated and overlooked masterpiece.  Wilder’s and collaborator I.A.L. Diamond’s screenplay is an exquisite extension of the super sleuth’s durable mythology: evergreen in its adherence to Arthur Conan Doyle’s intrigues of Sherlock Holmes. This is perhaps the truest evocation of the spirit of the Strand Magazine and undeniably the director’s least disaffected movie and by far his most tender and affecting. For all these many virtues, it was not the film Billy Wilder wanted to make.  His originally envisioned three-hour road-show salute to this enduring and endearing duo from 221B Baker Street was removed from his creative genius in the editing process and distilled into an even more traditionalist approach to the material by its distributor, United Artists, who felt Wilder’s overriding vision was much too grand and complex. 

They ought to have known better and, indeed, did attempt to recall Wilder in the eleventh hour to salvage his final cut. At 125 minutes, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is but a delicious prelude to the movie Wilder endeavored to make, although still fascinating and teeming with the sort of infectious glib subtleties for which Wilder’s best movies are most fondly remembered.  Alas, Wilder was to discover too late that his excised footage – nearly an hour’s worth – had been destroyed in his absence. Left on the cutting room floor were a series of mini-mysteries, each building upon Wilder’s and Diamond’s adroit concept of Sherlock Holmes as an increasingly isolated man whose personal investment in the penultimate case in the movie – involving a female German spy – leaves Holmes depleted of his more cerebral pursuits.

Reviews of the time were critical of Wilder’s and Diamond’s lithe approach to Conan Doyle’s enterprising superpower of deductive reasoning, herein recast (and given a multifarious, wounded psyche by Robert Stephens) as a somewhat effete, erudite, self-deprecating academic, who increasingly relies on a mild cocaine addiction to anesthetize his melancholia. More than any other movie in the Sherlock Holmes legacy, Wilder’s “private life” is an investment in the man, occasionally at the expense of his public persona: an absorbing deconstruction of Holmes’ iconography and an enquiry of his tortured inner-self. In short, Wilder is making a genuine attempt to understand Sherlock Holmes as a figure of flesh and blood, rather than one corralled from mere platitudes celebrating his scholastic braininess.

Fair enough, Colin Blakley’s Dr. Watson is no Nigel Bruce, the lovably befuddled cinematic incarnation that shared the screen with Basil Rathbone’s towering incarnation of Holmes from the late 1930s to 1949. But Stephens gives us the second most intelligent reading of Holmes as a creature of habitual self-destructiveness, refreshingly devoid of even a whiff of pomposity or perfection. And Wilder and Diamond immerse us in a richly satisfying milieu of intrigues Arthur Conan Doyle could most definitely admire: a mystery rife with oversexed ballerinas, spurious midgets, Trappist monks, bleached canaries, a mechanical Loch Ness monster and the likes of Queen Victoria (Mollie Maureen) no less – all neatly wrapped in a plot of international espionage. Better still is Wilder’s and Diamond’s venture into the emotional core of this iconic figure, superbly evoked by Miklós Rozsa’s heart-rending central theme.  Alexandre Trauner’s mind-bogglingly intricate sets resurrect the grace, charm and clutter of Holmes’ Victorian bric-a-brac, the perfect complement to Wilder’s and Stephens’ interpretation of Sherlock Holmes as a fallen, fallible and disenchanted misanthrope.

Like Billy Wilder’s best works, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is deceptively breezy on the surface, Dr. Watson’s voiceover narration, as Holmes’ champion, devoted lifetime companion and chronicler, promising to delve more profoundly into cases too shocking and bizarre for the average heart and mind to comprehend. Alas, the heavy edits that immediately follow the main titles betray this pledge, and the story slips into one joyous and comical vignette, involving Russian prima ballerina Madame Petrova’s vehement desire to have Holmes sire her child, before getting underway with the real mystery at hand.  Holmes narrowly averts illegitimate fatherhood – and inheriting a priceless Stradivarius for his efforts – by hinting of a homosexual predilection for Dr. Watson.

From this inauspicious and farcical debut, Wilder delves into a distinctly more intimate story, Watson forgiving Holmes his injudiciousness with their international reputations as “manly men,” but increasingly becoming gravely concerned for his friend as Holmes falls back on an all-too-familiar addiction to his seven-percent solution of injectable cocaine. Holmes also debunks his own stature as depicted in Watson’s accounts in the Strand, correcting a few misperceptions for the audience along the way. He isn’t 6 foot and 4 inches tall, but rather barely six feet, and he can’t play the violin like a virtuoso. Does it really matter? The film briefly settles into a sort of familiarity with the old serialized Holmes’ adventures made at 20th Century Fox and Universal in the 40s, even giving us a brief introduction to Irene Handl as the ever-devoted housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson. Holmes chastises this portly Scot for having dusted off his case files, insisting the density of the layers is all important to his cataloging methods.

Wilder gives us Holmes as a man of several incurable and idiosyncratic vices with very few outside interests apart from detecting the criminal element. In the middle of it all arrives the mysterious Belgian, Gabrielle Valladon (Geneviève Page), bedraggled and barely conscious after being pulled from the Thames. Valladon insists she has come to London to search for her husband, Emile, a brilliant engineer working for her Majesty’s government, but who has since mysteriously vanished without a trace. Unbeknownst to Holmes, Valladon is, in fact, a spy working for the Germans, and her handler, Von Tirpitz (Peter Madden), masquerades as a Trappist monk and tailing Holmes and Watson.

In the meantime, Holmes deduces that Valladon must have arrived by the boat train, tracing an imprint of a number on the palm of her hand to a luggage rack at Victoria Station, later discovering a series of letters, presumably written by Emile from a nearby London address. Holmes now encourages Valladon to address an envelope to the same.  Valledon, Holmes and Watson quietly sneak into the abandoned storefront as their letter is delivered by the post. The shop is empty, except for a cage of live canaries, tended by a woman in a wheelchair (Catherine Lacey). Presently, the trio observes as two burly movers arrive to collect twenty-four canaries.  Holmes afterward assesses that they are still no closer to the truth. Alas, he is given a precious clue in his discovery that the letter is from his own estranged brother, urging to attend him at his downtown gentleman’s club.

Descending on the Diogenes Club in search of clues, Holmes is urged by his brother, Mycroft, played by Christopher Lee,  who is utterly magnificent as Holmes’ cryptic and estranged counterpart, to abandon the case.  Mycroft alludes to knowing more than he is willing to reveal. Instead, Holmes stubbornly disregards his brother’s forewarning; pressing on with their journey by train across the Scottish highlands to Inverness. Holmes is intrigued by Valladon’s chronically malfunctioning parasol, gradually becoming aware she is using it to send Morse-code signals to the Trappist monks, who seem to be shadowing their journey.

Not long after, Holmes becomes intrigued by what the trio first misperceives as children standing over three newly dug graves. The gravedigger (Stanley Holloway) explains the coffins belong to a father and two sons, capsized and drowned at sea – an ominous precursor of things to come. Realizing the mourners are, in fact, midgets, Holmes elects to return to the cemetery late in the evening and exhume the bodies. When he unearths the remains of Emile Valledon, buried with three bleached white canaries lying dead atop his pant leg, his wedding ring turned green, Holmes begins to suspect foul play: asphyxiation by chloride gas. Together with Watson and Valladon, Holmes investigates a series of castles along the banks of Loch Ness, noting a considerable commotion taking place at an ancient ruins cornered off by a wooden fence and scaffolding, and a “no trespassing” sign, observing workmen carrying huge crates of sulfuric acid onto the premises. Holmes notes that when combined with sea water sulfuric acid can produce a highly toxic gas. Attempting to explore the ruins by going around back, Holmes and company are turned away by a stern guide who informs them the buildings are being restored by the Society for the Preservation of Scottish Monuments. Testing the guide’s knowledge, Holmes fakes a history for the ruins that the guide backs up.  Holmes realizes the man is lying to them about the work being done on the property. Holmes also observes the same men from the abandoned pet shop in London unloading a cage full of canaries on site. 

Traversing Loch Ness in a rowboat, Holmes, Watson and Valladon come in contact with what appears to be the infamous amphibious monster, and their tiny vessel capsizes. Later Holmes goes the journey alone on foot, discovering Mycroft in a glowing white tent pitched along the moors. Mycroft clarifies for Holmes he is being used as a pawn. Valladon is not the wife of Emile, who died from a chloride gas leak along with his feathered friends, but a German spy named Fraulein Ilsa von Hoffmanstal who intends to steal the blueprints for England’s latest weapon: a steel, cocoon-shaped submersible ship camouflaged to look like the Loch Ness monster. Before the brothers can debate Holmes’ next course of action, Queen Victoria arrives to inspect the top-secret project, utterly horrified to learn it has already cost British lives and has been designed expressly as a vessel of war. Instead, Victoria orders the already built submersible immediately dismantled and the project scrapped in its entirely, much to Mycroft’s chagrin.

A short while later, Holmes reunites with Valladon in their suite of rented rooms, exposing von Hoffmanstal for her treachery. The great detective then uses her parasol to send a Morris Code message to the waiting Trappist monks – actually, Von Tirpitz and a small troop of German seaman anxiously awaiting her cue. Holmes then explains to von Hoffmanstal how Britain intends to let the Germans have the submersible, albeit booby-trapped to sink them into an eternal resting place at the bottom of the sea. On the surface, Holmes is glib and immensely pleased with himself, hinting to von Hoffmanstal that everyone is inclined to suffer a failure now and then: “Fortunately, Dr. Watson never writes about mine!”

Alas, Holmes is holding out, unable to quantify his unsettling affections for this femme fatale, but confirmed when Mycroft explains to von Hoffmanstal she is not bound for a British prison as anticipated; rather, to be traded for the release of a British spy captured in Prussia. She will return to Germany at once. In the film’s epilogue, we receive the ultimate confirmation of Holmes’ wounded heart: his unspoken sorrow after reading a letter from Mycroft, informing him von Hoffmanstal was captured by the Japanese while on another spy mission for Germany and summarily executed by a firing squad for her treason; Holmes reaching for Dr. Watson’s medical bag and his seven percent solution of cocaine to numb his roiling melancholia.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the most perfect movie ever made about this iconic detective.  Wilder’s reconceptualizing of Arthur Conan Doyle’s super sleuth predates Guy Ritchie’s mangling of Holmes as a bumbling ragamuffin by nearly 40 years. In eschewing Conan Doyle’s original stories for his own original concept, Billy Wilder assumes a monumental task: to capture the essential flavor of not only the period but also Doyle’s artful sleuth.  Also, to remain faithful to the Holmes already ensconced and fondly recalled in the movies co-starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. For the greater part of this endeavor, Wilder miraculously succeeds. He gives us Sherlock Holmes, quirks and all, a delicate balancing act that never stoops to debase the character; merely, to illustrate his humanizing imperfections.

No one could ever confuse Robert Stephens with Basil Rathbone.  He intersperses his character’s trademarked deductive logic with inspired tinges of Oscar Wilde, also Rex Harrison from My Fair Lady. And yet, Stephens manages a truthful, brooding and splendidly debonair Holmes, one fallible and unreservedly vulnerable in spots, although still able to validate his air of smug superiority where the legend is concerned. 

To his dying day, Billy Wilder chose never to reminisce about The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes which turned out to be one of his outright critical and financial failures. Although cut by more than 30 minutes, the film remains brightly satirical and imbued with a delicate sense of decaying intimacy. Here is a portrait of Conan Doyle’s peerless investigator, equally intriguing as he is amusing. Before The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes too few cinematic incarnations managed to rival this beloved literary character. Without a doubt, there have been no contenders since half as witty or worthy of the mantle of quality Wilder has wrought with this classy tale.

Alexander Trauner’s elephantine and sumptuous Victorian recreations of Baker Street would make even the likes of John DeCuir blush. Pinewood’s massive back lot was converted to façades, marking the epitome of London chic. The wholesale lopping off of Wilder’s tertiary storylines – short mystery sketches and a framing device, meant to augment the central narrative – remains lamentable. The movie still works. But what was left on the cutting room floor likely would have transformed this compelling minor classic into a rarified and much celebrated Wilder plat du jour.

Sadly, at 125-minutes, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is a coming attraction for a feature yet to be released.  The original prologue, the examination of the contents of Dr. Watson’s shelved personal effects, exhumed from a dusty storage locker some fifty years after the passing of both characters, was meant as Billy Wilder’s sour social commentary on the modern age. This has been distilled into a Maurice Binder montage of moments featured under the main titles, set to Miklos Rosza’s eloquent underscore. It works…sort of. Wilder’s approach would have been much more grand and grandly amusing, and this from a man who considered himself the purveyor of delicious shocks to the system, breaking taboos during the stringent era of Hollywood’s production code. Without the code to rail against, Wilder’s film forgoes shock value for charm, mostly of the old-fashioned ilk.

Arguably, the film’s most daring moment comes with Wilder’s inference that perhaps Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes shared more than an address.  Wilder’s tongue-in-cheek homoeroticism is believable, deliberate and quite funny, as the ballet master attempts to “fix up” Watson with various male dancers from the Ballet Russe. When Holmes refuses to take Watson’s indignation seriously, suggesting they can always meet “clandestinely on a bench in Hyde Park,” Watson’s probing query “I hope I’m not being presumptuous, but there have been women in your life?” is met with an even more naughty inference.  Wilder’s Holmes replies, “The answer is yes.  You’re being presumptuous!”

In years since, the general reputation of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes has been that it brilliantly succeeds at the start, becoming unhinged in its mid-section, then utterly falls apart in its last act. Rubbish! Wilder consistently maintains his verve for the central mystery. Moreover, he commands our attention with a fascinating sect of circumstances; the finale, a thoroughly thought-provoking flourish of Holmesian principles, imbued with an overwhelming sense of loss and personal tragedy.  Unfettered by the usual Americanized tripe about uppity British stoicism, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes translates, not only into good solid second tier Billy Wilder but magnificent Arthur Conan Doyle as well, neither to be lightly disregarded.

Wilder’s shifting affinity for the character gives us Sherlock Holmes, warts and all; a conflicted pragmatist, whose supreme adherence to deductive logic becomes a considerable liability and Holmes’ blind spot in the last act. Wilder’s Sherlock is the Holmes of our youth – deerstalker and magnifying glass (first made famous in Sidney Paget’s illustrations); Robert Stephens borrowing heavily from William Gillette’s (the first to immortalize Sherlock Holmes on the stage) dandyisms and menacing charisma. Yet, far from a deliberately condescending evaluation of Conan Doyle’s ensconced superman, Wilder’s reevaluation of Sherlock Holmes emerges as perhaps the most unvarnished and frankly clear-eyed critique of this enterprising specimen, brought down a peg or two to a level of humanity and compassion we can regularly admire and appreciate.

And Wilder’s own affinity for Holmes, as a man after his own heart, is poignantly illustrated in his astute assessments of Holmes’ intelligence contributing to his own isolationism. This Holmes can no more discover happiness than ignore his private failings or turn a blind eye to the duplicities of the world; forced into accepting his finely honed ego while simultaneously chagrined for possessing it.  In the final analysis, the character’s ambivalence is what sells The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes as a meticulous character study.  The movie is disinterested with its whodunit and becomes a superior deconstruction of Holmes’ own emotional fragility and genius.

Were that we could champion Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray release as brilliant. Alas, we get the same exceedingly tired old elements used to mint MGM’s DVD from 2002: at times, severely flawed, badly faded and suffering from imploding color balance, hints of vinegar syndrome, very weak contrast levels and a barrage of age-related artifacts scattered throughout: in short, a colossally disappointing visual presentation of a movie deserving so much better.  This 2.34:1 presentation is riddled with digital anomalies, harsh reel changes and a lot of built-in flicker. Christopher Challis’s soft-focused cinematography ought to have looked velvety smooth and dreamy. Instead, colors are muted, flesh tones adopting that unflattering piggy pink patina, the vividness in Julie Harris’ costumes and Alexandre Trauner’s period sets getting lost in the exaggerated film grain looking coarse with pockets of video noise.

Frankly, I am getting sick and tired of third-party distributors getting their hands on other studio’s vintage catalogs, only to slap together shoddy third-rate 1080p transfers and then think they’ve done everyone an immense favor, simply by making these discs – any discs – available to the consumer. Hello, fellas! Olive, Kino, Image, et al. Are you listening? Guess what? You haven’t done yourselves any favors. The public?  Well, judging by this transfer, quality control and consumer satisfaction were never pressing issues or top priority.

The 2.0 DTS audio is adequate – barely, with semi-crisp exchanges of dialogue. Miklos Rozsa’s score sounds just okay rather than exceptional.  Extras are all ported over from MGM’s DVD and include a featurette/interview with Christopher Lee that is badly out of sync, plus script pages to recreate the lost/deleted scenes and a badly worn theatrical trailer. Bottom line: we’ll still recommend this one for content. But you aren’t getting anything close to Blu-ray’s promise of perfection – or a reasonable facsimile of the way this movie looked in theaters back in 1970. Yuck!  And who really needs it? I’m still asking myself that same question!

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best) – 4.5
VIDEO/AUDIO – 1.5
EXTRAS – 2.5

Renowned for its lurid concoction of unrepentantly remorseless and ruinous characters, its startling brutality and its maggoty episodes of sexual betrayal, Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950) remains an explosive and exploitative excursion into London’s dodgy netherworld. The film was infamously decimated by famed NY Times critic Bosley Crowther as a “pointless trashy yarn” reveling in its “turgid pictorial grotesque(ness)”.  Crowther’s review, though unapologetically negative, nevertheless manages to tap into the essential “quality” of the piece since earmarking Night and the City as a cornerstone of film noir. We must recall the term “film noir” had no place in the American cinema-maker’s consciousness at the time such films were being made. Dassin, for example, did not set out to make film noir.  The term was introduced into critical discourse as early as 1946 by French critic Nino Frank, though it wasn’t embraced as part of the American lexicon until the 1960s: meant mostly to catalogue and more easily identify “the movement” after the fact, a decided departure from all those frothy light-hearted spectacles from the 1930s toward a more cynical mélange after 1940.

Too many theories about film noir have tried to classify it as a subconscious endeavor. Yet, perhaps, only when considering the rationing of the war years (that decidedly put a cap on Hollywood’s ability to produce spendthrift entertainments as they had done only ten years earlier), does the true impetus of noir style begin to seep into Hollywood’s collective output. Simplified: Consider how the woes of the Great Depression and WWII had made audiences more readily accessible to cynicism. But lest we forget that chiaroscuro lighting, a fog filter and great cinematography can do wonders for any film’s production values when there are no big and beautiful gleaning white sets to photograph. And nowhere is this absence better revealed than in the noir crime/detective thriller. For here is a realm populated by an assortment of distortedly unscrupulous, often vicious reprobates who lived, not in the aristocratic penthouses of the hoi poloi, but in the dank bowels, war-ravaged ratskellers and unseemly ramshackle of wooden huts dotting the perpetual murkiness of sea rot and worm-infested wharfs.

We get all this – and a lot more – in Dassin’s Night and the City: jolly-old London, given over to a post-war squalidness, haunted by urban decay. Jo Eisinger’s screenplay, based on Gerald Kersh’s novel of the same name, uses location to extol the stark wickedness of some truly evil people caught in a trap of their own design. There’s Francis L. Sullivan’s Phil Nosseross (as in “rhinoceros”), the perpetually sweat-sticky, portly proprietor of the Silver Fox, a hotbed for underworld espionage. His wife Helen (Googie Withers) is a hot-to-trot ex-showgirl (nee prostitute) given safe haven in trade for a tenuous favor-based marital relationship, since worn severely thin, despite the fact Phil really does love the viper he married. Helen, however, has never been satisfied with their arrangement and yearns to ditch her life as a kept woman to become the owner of her own house of ill-repute.  The Silver Fox is hardly above board.  The hired help has been coached by Helen in the ways of lightening their clientele’s purses once the lights have been turned down low. We also get Mike Mazurki, one of the undisputed criterions of noir – herein cast as “the Strangler”: a pro-wrestler misused by notorious racketeer, Kristo (Herbert Lom).  

Into this den of iniquity stumble two innocents: one marginally tainted small-time operator, Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark), who, despite possessing both intelligence and charm, is always pursuing the wrong dreams in his desperate desire to “become somebody” quick. We pause a moment here to tip our hats to Richard Widmark.  His tenure at 2oth Century-Fox begun playing raving psychotics like Tommy Udo, Alec Stiles and Jefty Robbins in Kiss of Death (1947), The Street With No Name (1948) and Road House (1948) before effortlessly crossing to the other side as a second-string leading man. It’s in Night and the City that Widmark’s film persona is in its most obvious transitional phase: the bone-chilling whack job from the aforementioned films leaning just this side of misguided. Harry Fabian is a loser, and not of the lovable ilk, but one toward whom we can feel a modicum of empathy.

The other novice of the piece is Harry’s careworn, yet eternally empathetic gal pal, Mary Bristol (Gene Tierney), who is in chronic damage-control mode to keep both she and Harry afloat financially. Alas, there’s just so much even this inherently good woman can do. Pity Gene Tierney, an actress whose talents, honed and willed by Darryl F. Zanuck, made her one of the studio’s most sought after leading ladies of the 1940s, but whose career experienced a cataclysmic downward slalom. Looking back on Tierney’s tragic private life beyond the movies, there always seemed to be another dimension of allure to all those sad-eyed vixens she brought to the screen, occasionally as the willful and self-destructing femme fatale with poison on her mind and venom in her heart – or, at least, occupying the hollow where a real woman’s heart ought to be.   

Night and the City really doesn’t give Tierney much of an opportunity to shine. She breezes in for a few choice scenes at the start, then all but vanishes until near the end, forced to crisscross the backdoor world of Suzy Wong in search of her wayward lover, earmarked for extinction by Kristo as revenge for the death of his own father, wrestling great, Gregorius (Stanislaus Zbyszko).  Interestingly, Night and the City isn’t entirely Richard Widmark’s picture either.  His presence merely essential to keep the machinations of Jo Eisinger’s plot moving along. If anything, the movie belongs to Jules Dassin, newly exiled after being labeled a Communist sympathizer by HUAC. In hindsight, the unpleasantness of that ordeal seems to have effectively soured Dassin on humankind in toto.  Dassin brings a modicum of more personalized bitterness to the movie’s already funereal patina. There isn’t one character among the lot who remains above it all, only varying degrees of villainy from this rogues gallery even the likes of a Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler would be hard-pressed to embrace. 

Night and the City works for two reasons: chiefly because it is an exquisitely produced, rancid and juicy slice of ambition given over to the devilry of desperation and vengeance. Also, because today’s topsy-turvy tumult and societal ambivalence toward heroes in general is more willing to embrace the inert and phlegmatic dictates of imperfect vipers and heavies, herein championed as merely par for the course of how the proverbial cookie crumbles in a world feeding upon itself to its own inevitable moral implosion. Particularly in its own time, Night and the City must have seemed foreign, for it doles out an astonishing amount of unalloyed animosity. But Night and the City is more than competently made. It is, in fact, a moody plat du jour for Dassin, working with cinematographer, Max Greene, who gives us a London unlike any we’ve seen before: a claustrophobic cityscape of congested flats and shabby shanties wedged in between Tower Bridge and Piccadilly Square, both prominently featured in the movie.

Our story begins appropriately with a chase, possible the greatest in any noir: Greene ripping a page out of cinematographer Gregg Toland’s manual on deep focus as a means to frame Harry Fabian’s escape down a narrow cobblestone byway in his attempts to elude yet another crony he desperately owes money. Harry bursts into the apartment he shares with live-in Mary Bristol, hurriedly searching the room for some quick disposable cash. Mary catches Harry rifling through her purse. He lies to her about wanting a cigarette. But Mary knows him too well for games. Moreover, she’s been down this road before with Harry. He wants too much – for himself, that is – and not nearly enough for the two of them as a couple.  He’s just a small-time hood who desperately needs to think of himself as the proverbial big man.

Unhappy chance that Mary doesn’t have any money either. Instead she lumps it up a flight to the cramped flat of Adam Dunne (Hugh Marlowe hopelessly miscast as a beatnik artist/sculptor with a surprisingly lucrative cash flow). The screenplay momentarily waffles as we find Adam in the process of burning yet another pot of spaghetti on his stove. Mary pinches him for the money Harry needs. Adam lends it willingly. But he also attempts to clarify for Mary, whom he transparently desires for his own (but who obviously is not yet willing to give up on her paramour), that Harry is an artist without an art. Confused, Mary asks Adam to explain, to which Adam reasons any man without genuine purpose in his life to get up in the morning is doomed to remain perpetually frustrated with life in general. Such philosophizing will prove very prophetic, indeed.

Harry rushes off to pay his debt, also to stop in at the Silver Fox, where he quietly observes Phil’s wife, Helen, going over trade secrets and the rules of the house – or, rather, the scam – with her girls: stiffing the clientele for some high-priced chocolates and pocketing the rest of their dough to feed her kitty. Phil is condescending toward Harry. After all, he can spot a rube from a mile away. Any way you slice him, Harry Fabian is a bad investment. Still, he’s a fairly competent con artist – Phil and Helen exploit Harry’s “talents” as to lure naïve, rich American tourists away from the more reputable clubs in town with the promise of female companionship and excitement in their money trap. Sending three new suckers to their doom after a “chance” cute meet at the American Club, Harry tries a similar ruse at the local fights, nearly booted out by the arena’s manager, but making the acquaintance of retired Greco-Roman wrestler, Gregorius and his protégé/son, Nicholas of Athens (Ken Richmond).

Harry cons Gregorius into thinking he still believes in the art of classical wrestling, something the notorious racketeer, Kristo, does not. In fact, Kristo, who also happens to be Gregorius’ son, has made a killing off  “The Strangler” and his more theatrical bouts. Harry strikes up a deal with Gregorius to resurrect and promote Greco-Roman wrestling in London. The self-promotion alone could lead to a very lucrative cash flow, as well as a perilous confrontation with Kristo. Hurrying back to Phil with his good news, Harry is disgusted by Phil’s lack of vision. Phil suggests if Harry can raise 200 quid he’ll match it, thereby giving him the necessary funds needed to launch his enterprise. But Phil is so condescending toward Harry the bargain immediately turns rancid between them.  Harry attempts in vain to tap every con in the city he knows for the money he needs, including Figler (James Hayter), the king of the beggars, Googin, the forger (Gibb McLaughlin) and black market seller, Anna O’Leary (Maureen Delaney). Each turns him down flat.

Appealing to Phil again, Harry is shot down, this time by Helen’s insistence: to invest in any of Harry’s schemes is tantamount to flushing it all away down the proverbial crapper. Helen has ulterior motives however, not the least of which is her own desires to rekindle a previous affair she carried on with Harry right under her husband’s nose.  Helen’s already pilfered 200 quid from the Silver Fox’s safe to give to Harry.  No, not for his venture, but for him to get Helen a nightclub license on the fly. Alas, Harry can use this money to bait Phil to ante up his half of the promised investment – all of it funneled back into Helen’s nightclub, the Flamingo.  Unfortunately for both Helen and Harry, Phil figures out where the money actually came from, but he allows Harry to continue with his ruse, while insisting that Fabian Promotions remain strictly Harry’s company with Phil as its silent partner.

Not long after Harry and Gregorius form their partnership. Kristo pays Harry a call with The Strangler in tow in order to get him to drop his interests in pro-wrestling…or else. Instead, Harry reveals to Kristo his own father has invested with him; the father/son rift growing into a bittersweet chasm. Kristo confronts Phil who openly confides that his plan is to see Harry Fabian destroy himself. Kristo assures Phil so long as Harry only promotes Greco-Roman wrestling his business is destined to fail. So, Phil promises to withdraw his hundred quid for the rental of the arena at the last possible moment, pretending to Harry he has merely had a change of heart about their joint venture. In the meantime, Harry lies to Helen about securing her a license to reopen the Flamingo. Instead, he’s had Googin forge a reasonable facsimile at a greatly reduced fee, pocketing the rest of the money to use for his wrestling enterprise. 

Harry now appeals to The Strangler’s manager, Mickey Beer (Charles Farrell), concocting a diabolical scheme to get The Strangler to challenge Gregorius’ son, Nicholas, sparking a grudge match. The Strangler is too stupid to figure out he’s being played as the patsy, and Gregorius, while infinitely more intelligent than the competition, is nevertheless blinded by his faith in Harry to see him for the small-time hood he truly is and will always remain. Elated by this turn of events, Harry rushes back to Phil, certain he will put up the necessary funds. Instead, Harry learns too late he has been duped by Phil, who telephones Kristo to explain about the match, believing Gregorius will never stand for it. When Harry informs Phil he has already gained Gregorius’ support on the matter, Phil is both chagrined and amused at once. For Phil has still won their battle of wits, this time, on a technicality. Harry hasn’t the money to rent the necessary venue to stage his match.

Frustrated, Harry elects to tap his easiest mark, Mary, yet again. Thanks to Adam’s intervention, Mary finds Harry trying to steal her money. She begs, pleads and implores Harry to reconsider the error of his ways. But it’s no use. Harry’s a lost cause and, as Phil has already wisely assessed, “a dead man”. Returning to the gym, Harry is confronted by The Strangler, who insists on satisfying the grudge match then and there. Nicholas and The Strangler begin to fight, The Strangler easily breaking Nicholas’s wrist in a few short rounds, thereby ruining Harry’s chances to put on the pro match and thus recoup his losses. As Kristo, Harry and Mickey helplessly look on, The Strangler and Gregorius begin to battle: the old master and the lumbering ox sparing like a pair of sweaty farm animals in a brutal no-holds-barred showdown. After an exhaustive bout, Gregorius is victorious in the ring, but collapses just beyond and is carried into Harry’s office where he dies with Kristo by his side. Kristo now demands blood for blood: Harry’s head on a platter. In the meantime, Helen discovers the license Harry obtained for her nightclub is a forgery. Her fate in question, she slinks back to Phil who may or may not be in a forgiving mood – at least not one without sacrifices yet to be made on Helen’s part.

Kristo puts out a hit. Harry’s fair-weather friends turn coat to satisfy their greed. Narrowly escaping a pair of Kristo’s goons, Harry ducks into Figler’s hideaway. To his face, Figler offers Harry safe refuge. Behind his back, he plots to alert Kristo of his whereabouts in order to collect the reward. Once more, Harry averts certain death, finding his way to Anna O’Leary’s dilapidated shanty on the Thames. She sincerely offers him a place to hide, and Mary turns up unexpectedly to encourage Harry to get out of London altogether before it’s too late. As something of an apology for all the grief he’s put her through, Harry tells Mary to turn him in to Kristo and collect the reward. If someone must, let it be Mary, the only woman who ever truly loved him. Mary refuses to entertain this notion. So Harry makes a spectacle of himself, chasing after Mary while shouting at the top of his lungs, drawing undue attention.  The Strangler, who is nearby, pummels Harry to death before tossing his lifeless remains into the Thames near the Tower Bridge as Mary helplessly looks on. From his place atop the bridge, Kristo looks on with a sinister glint of pure satisfaction, presumably with no intention of paying out anything to anyone.

From beginning to end, Night and the City is relentlessly bleak.  Director Jules Dassin tapped into the darkest parts of the human psyche. Few noir thrillers are as bereft of even the slightest emotional core. None of these characters, except perhaps Harry Fabian in the eleventh hour of his own mortality, exhibit even an ounce of compassion, much less remorse for their wicked, wicked ways. Richard Widmark gives us a pitiable derelict out for all he can get: cruel in his intentions, maniacally manipulating the variables, but without any real success achieved in the end. No, Harry Fabian will never be a “big man.”  At this point he isn’t even much of a human being, just desperate and hapless, bitter and tortured, a shell of something that is supposed to come with a conscience, but instead lacks even a sliver of decency as he drifts from pipedream to pipedream on the ether of his own ego. And Widmark gives a delicious performance herein, the quintessence of a beaten loner just arrogant and dumb enough to think he can pull himself from this bottomless pit.

A trifecta of stellar and blistering performances round out Night and the City.  Googie Withers’s heartless harpy, Francis L. Sullivan’s despicable schemer and Herbert Lom’s outright merciless hoodlum. The sexual relationship between Withers’s gadabout and Sullivan’s oily nightclub owner is bizarre, tasteless and ghastly.  Sullivan’s formidable bulk in constant danger of crushing Wither’s slender frame. At one point, Phil tempts Helen with a stylish mink in trade for just a kiss. She is given the briefest of moments to consider the offer before his abject frustration overtakes. The struggle that supervenes gives the audience a sample of what their sexual relations must be like; perverted – like watching a killer whale trying to mate with a pelican. Withers writhes in disgust while Sullivan locks her in his meaty fists and damn near squashes her against his bloated girth.

The last performance worth mentioning is Herbert Lom’s Kristo, an appetizingly unsparing heavy. Kristo has no soul, no stomach either, for doing the heavy lifting.  His pleasure is derived from quietly observing as his edicts are met with the most brutish reprisals inflicted by his small army of thug muscle. One senses a deeper frustration at play in Lom’s subtle exchanges with Stanislaus Zbyszko’s mountain of a man, the epitome of old world stalwartness.  Lom’s hard-boiled eyes casually ogle Ken Richmond’s more slender, if muscular pinup, his father’s rejection completing his own emasculation.

The real star of Night and the City is undeniably the phenomenal B&W cinematography from Max Greene: a formidable visual artist whose work spanned the early silent era to the mid-1960s. Night and the City is unequivocally Greene’s signature statement, possessing an odious allure. Every element of the plot, each subtle nuance of character development has the sword of Damocles hanging over it; Greene going well beyond mere mood lighting techniques. There’s a distinct and, by my mind, wholly unique style at play herein, a look of oppressiveness and claustrophobia permeating each and every frame, the scenes lacking an appropriate level of oxygen for these characters to survive within the same space.  Watching Night and the City for its visual flair alone (with the sound off) is like being subjected to the chaotic and distressing attributes of a carnival dark ride, our plummet into eerily lit and spookily concealed shadows given over to intoxicating pathos and hopelessness magnified to near lethal levels.

We can start to get excited about the German release of Night and the City; incorrectly advertised on Amazon.UK as a region 2 release in 1.77:1 aspect ratio, from Intergroove under their Pretty Gold Productions label, which appears to be sanctioned by 20th Century Fox. What Night and the City on Blu-ray actually is is a correctly framed 1.37:1 “region free” hi-def offering that will blow you away. Let’s start with the fact you can play this disc anywhere in the world: bonus! All of the menus are in German. However, choosing the English option allows you to view the movie sans subtitles in its original English format: bonus, again!

Now for the really good news: Night and the City in 1080p is a visual feast. With the exception of some extremely minor age-related dirt and speckles, this is a near pristine visual presentation with razor sharp crispness, no artificial enhancements, and with exceptional tonality to boot. We get perfectly pitched contrast levels and film grain accurately reproduced. The DTS 2.0 audio is remarkably aggressive.  Franz Waxman’s score, as example, is pronounced with a genuine sonic kick.  No extras, but we really won’t poo-poo that.

I’ve stated the obvious in the past, but will do so again herein.  Merely to reiterate releasing classic movies ONLY in the foreign markets is an extremely odd marketing decision. In North America we’re repeatedly told by the studios there is no market for a golden-age Hollywood product on Blu-ray, while Europe has been experiencing something of a renaissance and continues to reap the benefits of some truly aggressive classic movie output. I can’t imagine the market share for such releases would be greater over there than it is over here. And let’s be fair, as well as pragmatic, if these discs are being released “region free,” how much more expense could there be in simply issuing them globally with menus in English and English printed cover art? The hard work – the actual remastering of the original film elements in hi-def – has already been achieved. Well…enough said – for now. Night and the City comes very highly recommended on Blu-ray from Intergroove. This is a legitimately authorized 2oth Century-Fox transfer and it looks fabulous. Buy today. Treasure forever.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best) – 4
VIDEO/AUDIO – 4.5
EXTRAS – 0

Anyone attempting a critique of the stylistic elements that embody the classic film noir should begin and end their treatise with Jacque Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947), the quintessential crime drama: a textbook example of how all noir thrillers ought to be made.  It isn’t only Robert Mitchum’s laid-back garage mechanic, Jeff Markham (nee Bailey) or Jane Greer, whose kitten-faced damsel in distress, Kathie Moffat, turns out to be a bone-chilling/coldblooded femme fatale. Then there’s Kirk Douglas’s silken and sinister crime boss, Whit Sterling, and Paul Valentine’s smooth-operating killer, Joe Stefanos: each an exemplar of a certain archetype in the noir movement. Out of the Past has style – plus.  Nicholas Musuraca’s unnerving cinematography, matched by Daniel Mainwaring’s gripping screenplay that doesn’t miss a trick or waste a moment of the movie’s scant 97 minutes as we slip in then out of the past with ease and purpose, discovering along with our doe-eyed heroine, Ann Miller (Virginia Huston), that the man she thought she knew is actually somebody else, neither bad nor good as it were, but severely conflicted over his lingering feelings for the wicked vixen who, once under his skin, has poisoned his blood for all time.

Out of the Past is perhaps an unexpected noir, beginning as it does in the stark light of a brisk late autumn afternoon, in the out-of-the-way town of Bridgeport, California, a rare example where location work in a film and the actual location being depicted are one in the same. Musuraca’s cinematography is tinged in the same fatalist shimmer as Cat People (1942), which is hardly surprising, given Tourneur’s and Musuraca’s conspiratorial aspirations on the aforementioned Val Lewton classic. Albert S. D’Agostino’s and Jack Okey’s art direction takes us everywhere from San Francisco to Mexicali, a remote cabin in the woods, Lake Tahoe, and finally back to the relative banality of Bridgeport, only to be dragged into the mire of this moodily magnificent and moneyed retreat overlooking the lake. Out of the Past is more than a clever travelogue representing these varied locales as deviations on a central theme: each part of the same ever-constricting trap that will ultimately devour and destroy our ill-fated hero and blood-thirsty viper. You just can’t escape from the world that’s been created herein.  It’s suffocating yet strangely intoxicating in the same instance.

Out of the Past comes at a juncture in RKO’s history at the beginning of the death throws soon to snuff out the company from existence by 1957.  In its prime, RKO had fostered some unusual creative talents, gravitating rather unexpectedly from the light and frothy Astaire/Rogers confections a la Pandro S. Berman (very expensive to produce, but yielding spectacular returns) to the weightier films of Orson Welles (Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons), which lost money, then, doing an about-face with Val Lewton’s low-budget though high-functioning, uber-elegant horror classics.  Lewton’s spate of unexpectedly classy scare-fests temporarily saved RKO from bankruptcy).  And finally, RKO found its niche in hard-boiled B-grade crime/dramas. In many ways, RKO became the “house of noir” throughout the mid to late 1940s. Other studios with more capital and bigger names to headline tried to emulate the style – most notably, Warner Bros. and Fox from the late 40s into the early 50s, with MGM entering the field much too late to be considered a prominent contender.

Yet, only RKO seemed to consistently excel in the noir movement, perhaps because its low-man-on-the-totem-pole scrapper mentality fit best with the unsympathetic cruelty of the traditional noir antiheroes and villains. The suave Cary Grant, for example, could never be a noir hero, nor could Clark Gable or Gary Cooper for that matter. It fit Bogart to a tee, and helped to reinvent Dick Powell’s persona over at Warner. It even resurrected Joan Crawford’s sagging career for two decades, including her Oscar win for Mildred Pierce (1945) after her departure from MGM. Still, in retrospect, noir drama seems to have thrived on that certain autonomy at RKO shared by its less identifiable players.

Arguably, Out of the Past endures today because of Robert Mitchum, who was known then as something of the prototypical Hollywood “bad boy” after being busted (and sent to jail for 60 days) for possession of marijuana and being caught smoking a joint at a Laurel Canyon house party in 1948. Perceived as a career breaker at the time, in retrospect, Mitchum’s tenure in prison had little impact on his ability to procure more acting assignments in Hollywood. Debatably, it altered his on-screen persona, from heroism personified in The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) to playing severely flawed men of less altruistic pursuits, beginning with Out of the Past. Mitchum’s Jeff Bailey is a guy still striving to live up to his potential, though ultimately succumbing to the tainted elixir of evil. This, of course, is made attractive in the embodiment of a woman he cannot help but lust after.

Good guy/bad girl: a time-honored impetus in narrative fiction, always raising the ire, eyebrow and curiosity factor for an audience. After all, what could possibly make any man, who wants to live honestly, pursue a female who’s obviously up to no good? Well, sex appeal – duh! And perhaps the naiveté that somehow everything will work itself out in the end, though not even our hero is entirely convinced of it.  In retrospect, Out of the Past is the ideal showcase to reintroduce Mitchum to audiences after he’s taken his own tumble from grace. He’s utterly believable as the faded valentine still caught in Ann’s hopelessly innocent and starry-eyed stares. Things have become all tangled up inside his heart. Jeff Bailey wants to keep promises made; both to Ann and himself, to become that better man. But somehow, he’s unable to find the cure for that sexual sting left behind by the bad girl. 

Out of the Past may be light on sex (one toppled lamp in a rainstorm and a few shadows frantically groping at one another on the wall is about all we get) but there exists a palpable tawdriness to the affair between Jeff and Kathie.  Greer’s minx pleads with Mitchum’s laconic bad boy: “I didn’t know what I was doing. I, I didn’t know anything except how much I hated him. But I didn’t take anything. I didn’t, Jeff. Don’t you believe me?” He coolly replies: “Baby I don’t care.”  We can utterly believe that nothing really does matter except the way Kathie fits so perfectly between Jeff’s bed sheets.

We buy into Jeff’s investment in Kathie much more than his tepid fidelity to Ann, the girl who would willingly do anything for Jeff, not to him. That’s Kathie Moffat’s métier.  Good girls like Ann are hard to come by. But bad girls like Kathie are more fun in the moment. To coin an old Cole Porter lyric, what each “requires is the proper squire to fire her heart.” Ironically, Jeff’s not that guy, neither for Kathie nor Ann. He might have been – once – a long time ago. But things change, and so has Jeff over the course of our story. Arguably, Jeff was never as corrupt as Whit, who is Kathie’s male counterpart. But neither has Jeff been as pure as the driven snow since he started wearing long pants. When Kathie, feigning delicacy, whispers “Oh, Jeff, I don’t want to die,” he rather coolly explains, “Neither do I, baby…but if I have to I’m gonna die last.” Jeff’s truer intentions are, of course, to remain above it all, at least to survive this maelstrom he’s helped to perpetuate.

Repeatedly, Daniel Mainwaring’s screenplay does its level best to illustrate what a perfect pair Jeff and Kathie are in spite of Jeff’s protestations. And yet, we cannot help but empathize with Mitchum’s laconic loner. He wants out, or, at least, has done everything he can to convince himself of as much.  Greer’s diabolical hell-cat shows her real stripes mid-way through the story by shooting Jeff’s old partner, Jack Fisher (Steve Brodie), after he attempts to blackmail them at a remote cabin in the woods, thus sobering Jeff as to where he fits into Kathie’s scheme d’amour.  That’s some chick! She’d slit her own mother’s throat for a pair of diamond earrings. 

There are, of course, other performances worth noting in Out of the Past, chiefly Kirk Douglas, considerably evolved since his debut as the rather weak-kneed sob-sister in The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers (1946) the year before. In Out of the Past we get our first real taste of that larger-than-life Douglas persona soon to dazzle for many decades, reconstituted herein as the beady-eyed mobster, Whit Sterling. With a deliciously bedeviled grin, ominously laid back charm, and, pensive glint caught in his eye, Douglas is a fairly menacing presence, every inch in competition with Mitchum’s 6-feet-plus bulk – no small achievement considering Douglas is a comparatively diminutive 5 feet, 9 inches and more slender and fine-boned. Mitchum’s Jeff could mop the floor with Douglas’s Whit, physically speaking, if only Whit didn’t have the cunning edge on Jeff. 

For decades, Lauren Bacall has insisted she was largely responsible for bringing Douglas’s talents to the attention of star makers in Hollywood, a claim that’s quietly ignored, though never outright contested or denied by Douglas. Whatever the case, Out of the Past marks Douglas’s “real” movie debut as the take-charge powerhouse. Herein, he exudes a shifty charisma. Even when he’s nowhere to be seen, his Whit looms like a winged gargoyle over Kathie’s and Jeff’s affair. Whit’s machismo has been wounded – literally – by a superficial gunshot, Kathie’s parting gift.  She never expected him to live. Now, she’s afraid and with good reason. Whit’s an animal. His wickedness knows no bounds and once crossed he isn’t likely to forgive and forget. 

Last, but certainly not least, is Paul Valentine’s unscrupulously captivating hit man, Jo Stefanos. Frankly, it has always been something of a mystery, as well as a disappointment, that Valentine’s star never ascended the ranks of great noir villains and/or anti-heroes. With his square jaw, glistening dark pate and piercing eyes capable of interpolating moments of gleeful attractiveness and wicked magnetism at a moment’s notice, Valentine certainly had all the makings of a great character actor. Moreover, in his dark trench and half-cocked fedora, he matches Mitchum’s damaged detective muscle for muscle. If Out of the Past has any flaw it is the hasty dispatch of Stefanos in its third act;, taking a tumble off a craggy cliff. Still, the film is undeniably Valentine’s finest moment in a career much too brief and marred by substandard material, more often relegated to second-string support. What a waste!

Out of the Past opens with a magnificent tracking shot, the camera mounted on the back of Stefano’s open-top convertible. His car pulls into an out-of-the-way gas station/garage marked with the proprietor’s name, Jeff Bailey. Flicking his lit match from a cigarette at “the kid” (Dickie Moore), a deaf/mute who doesn’t realize at first that he’s even standing there, Stefanos goads the reluctant boy into giving up Jeff’s whereabouts. But there’s no hurry. Jeff isn’t going anywhere. And neither is Stefanos, taking his coffee at Marny’s roadside café across the street and avoiding sharp-shooter, Marny’s not-so-subtle inquiries. Like all busybodies out to learn what they can, Marny tells more than she hears. From her, we learn Jeff’s been seeing Ann, the girl who “belongs” to Jim (Richard Webb), the local deputy sheriff.

The scene shifts to Jeff and Ann spending some quality time together up by the lake. Ann’s desperately in love, but doesn’t really throw herself at Jeff. On the other hand, Jeff’s not entirely convinced he ought to be with Ann.  He loves her, sort of, and in spite of her parents’ rigid lack of acceptance. Too bad their date is interrupted by the kid, signaling to Jeff that trouble’s afoot back at the garage. Sending Ann home, Jeff meets Stefanos cordially, quickly learning this isn’t a social call. Turns out Whit has sent Stefanos on a knight’s errand, to bring back the one guy, Jeff, who could find Kathie Moffat and return her to him. Jeff tells Whit he ought to forget Kathie but it’s no good. Once Whit’s mind is set on something it’s best to get out of his way. The trouble is, getting out of Whit’s way this time means Jeff has to confront his own past.

On the car ride back to Ann’s, Jeff begins his true confession. His name isn’t Bailey, it’s Markham. He isn’t a nice guy but rather ex-thug muscle for a gangland kingpin who’s rehired him to go in search of the kitten-faced viper under both their skins. In true noir fashion, Jeff’s reflections kick off an extended flashback.  We see Jeff and his business partner, Jack Fisher, as a pair of New York PIs with a spurious reputation between them, hired by Whit to hunt down Kathie after she’s already shot him in the arm and run off with $40,000 of his cold hard cash. Jeff tells Whit to leave well enough alone. But Whit makes Jeff a promise: Kathie will not be harmed. Jeff doesn’t really believe this. Whit isn’t the “forgive and forget” type.

Sending Jack on a wild goose chase, Jeff tracks down an old friend of Kathie’s who suspiciously fluffs him off at first, then confides that Kathie was running away to some place with a lot of sun.  Florida maybe. As it turns out, Kathie hightailed to Acapulco. Jeff wastes no time taking the next flight out. For days he sits in a rather seedy café hoping for Kathie to turn up.  On the third day out, Jeff gets his wish. But you know what they say about being careful for what you wish for.  Kathy is standoffish and faintly sad. She’s coaxed from her shell by Jeff’s smooth operations, also by his easy-going male magnetism. What’s not to like? And Kathie has a sob story to go along with her pouty lips; one that appeals to Jeff’s tainted sense of chivalry, or, perhaps, merely tantalizes his lust.

The two become lovers, meeting in secluded places and the beach after dark, caught in the pouring rain and making love with the lights off in the middle of a violent thunderstorm. Jeff tells Kathie they have to disappear before it’s too late. It may already be later than either of them thinks. For who should appear at Jeff’s hotel room the next afternoon – and just as Jeff is about to pack for his getaway – but Stefanos and Whit. The pair baits Jeff with not terribly subtle hints regarding his deceptions. Jeff plays dumb (he’s fairly good at that) and gets riled when the questions are directly put to him. Whit pulls back from his inferences, encouraging Jeff to find Kathie with all speed. Jeff lies about Kathie gone to South America. Instead, Kathie and Jeff hurry north to San Francisco, living inconspicuously for a time and seemingly happy together.

Time passes and Kathie and Jeff grow complacent about blowing their cover, becoming comfortable in their new lives. Tragically, they bump into Jack at the race track, and Jeff instructs Kathie to go on without him. They’ll rendezvous much later at a secluded cabin in the woods. Jeff loses Jack, or so he thinks, arriving at the cabin very late. But Jack intrudes on their solitude, demanding money to keep his mouth shut. Kathie still insists she never took a dime from Whit, certainly not $40,000. Instead, Jeff takes a crack at Jack, the two old buddies fairly evenly matched as they spar around the room, knocking over furniture. Kathie’s gaze suddenly turns rotten, calculating the inevitable fallout as she reaches for Jeff’s gun and fires a few well-placed slugs into Jack’s back. Her unapologetic killing startles Jeff. Perhaps Kathie isn’t the girl he thought she was. And now he’s an accomplice to murder. What to do?  While Jeff contemplates covering up the crime, Kathie makes a break in her car, Jeff discovering Kathie’s discarded bankbook, clearly showing a $40,000 deposit. She’s lied to him – and not just once.

We return to the present, Jeff and Ann pulling into the semi-circular driveway of Whit’s country estate at Lake Tahoe. Jeff promises faithfully to reunite with her some time later, going into the lion’s den alone to face his former boss. Even more of a shocker, Kathie is there too, Whit’s girl all over again. Remarkably, Whit seems to harbor no ill will toward Kathie or Jeff. Perhaps she’s kept her mouth shut; at least, so Jeff hopes. Whit informs Jeff he is being blackmailed by ex-lawyer Leonard Eels (Ken Niles) who helped cover up a tax dodge, but is now using this information to extort money from Whit. It’s an obvious setup and Jeff knows it. Nevertheless, he finds himself attempting to warn Eels that Whit is on to him. Instead, Jeff discovers Eel’s lifeless body lying on the floor, an affidavit signed by Kathie claiming Jeff murdered Jack amongst the papers on Eel’s desk. Knowing he’s slipped into it up to his neck, Jeff makes a break for Bridgeport. Unbeknownst to Jeff or Whit, Kathie has instructed Stefanos to trail “the kid” who inadvertently leads him right to Jeff, hiding out at a secluded fishing spot near a rocky cliff.  As Stefanos draws his pistol and prepares to take dead aim, the kid hooks his fishing line into Stefanos’ pant leg, causing him to plummet to his death.

In town, Jim tries desperately to convince Ann that Jeff’s a bad egg. He’s suspected in a San Francisco murder. However, believing Jim to be jealous, Ann admonishes him almost immediately and flees to forewarn Jeff. Back at Lake Tahoe, Jeff confronts Whit with the truth: Kathie murdered Jack. Whit has no choice but to turn her over to the police or Jeff will do it for him. Whit admires Jeff’s ruthlessness, agreeing to the exchange so Jeff can run away with Ann and start his life over. Alas, it’s not to be. Hours later, Jeff returns to discover Whit shot through the heart and Kathie declaring she is now in control of their intertwined fates. She still wants Jeff for her own. Either he comes with her or she’ll see to it he goes up for Jack’s, Eel’s and Whit’s murders.

Jeff reluctantly agrees to Kathie’s plan, but telephones the police shortly before they depart Whit’s home. In response to his tip off, the police set up a roadblock at the front gates. Realizing she has been double-crossed, Kathie shoots Jeff, attempting to take control of the wheel. It’s no use. The car careens over the side of a steep ravine, killing Kathie and Jeff.  The police later recover a great deal of money in the trunk. Still unable to bring herself to believe the worst about Jeff, Ann asks the kid if he was lying to her.  Was he really going to run away with Kathie Moffat? The kid nods yes – thereby liberating Ann from her reservations. She’s free to love Jim, who clearly still loves her. As Jim and Ann drive off from the garage, the kid looks up at the placard bearing Jeff’s name, smiles, nods and walks away.

Arguably, Out of the Past remains the greatest film noir ever made. Usually, I avoid such overstatements. And undeniably, there are other noir thrillers in close proximity for this top spot – if, such a position actually exists: Double Indemnity,The Maltese Falcon, I Wake Up Screaming, Murder, My Sweet and Mildred Pierce. Yet Out of the Past just seems to click in a way these others can only guess at, or perhaps mimic is a more fitting word.  Its Samson and Delilah-esque plot, so close to the noir hallmarks that it becomes emblematic of the movement itself. Remarkably, the style never veers into cliché. Even more remarkable, Out of the Past has not aged or become an axiom for the noir movement in all the years (and all the many imitators) that have followed it since. 

Jacques Tourneur’s direction remains a prototype for the noir drama, while Robert Mitchum’s chain-smoking and insolent private dick cum grease monkey all but typifies the good dupe made a bad example by his own ill wind blowing him predictably closer to a twist of fate: the latter amply supplied by the quintessential femme fatale, Jane Greer. The other elements that make Out of the Past work have already been discussed herein. But the kernel of its enduring success really boils down to Mitchum and Greer, and the utterly toxic on-screen chemistry they share. One can as easily see them as the perversely hot-blooded lovers, passionately tearing a little of each other’s skin in the bedroom, as they convincingly mutate into our story’s darkly amused, but even more aberrant adversaries.  Tourneur’s direction never falters and neither does Daniel Mainwaring’s screenplay, which is so tightly woven around its central frame-up that one cannot imagine the movie any other way. No scene is wasted and no further explanation is required. Out of the Past is undiluted perfection, a total enrichment of the noir precepts.

Thank you, Warner Home Video for bringing Out of the Past…well…from out of the past in a restored and remastered hi-def Blu-ray. Prepare to be impressed. This hi-def transfer exhibits a superb image with solid grain and an impressively balanced gray scale, marked by equally impressive contrast levels. Age-related artifacts that were fairly prominent on the DVD have been greatly tempered, to all but eradicated on this Blu-ray. We still have a few fleeting light speckles here and there, but honestly, this is a pluperfect rendering that will surely not disappoint and a definite upgrade from your old DVD.  Out of the Past is only available as part of the Warner Archive, a decision, I must say, I generally approve of, since all Warner Archive hi-def discs support a very high bit rate.

The original mono audio has received a DTS upgrade and wow does it sound good – no, great! Alas, in keeping with the studio’s spendthrift policy, we get no new extras on this disc. But James Ursini’s audio commentary is fascinating and decidedly one of his best.

A quick heads up: it seems noted restoration expert Robert H. Harris has hinted 2015 will be a heady year for Warner Home Video with an aggressive push to release a lot of catalog to Blu-ray. We’ve been promised more Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart and three strip Technicolor restorations – always expensive and time-consuming.  (Hopefully we’ll see The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Anchors Aweigh and National Velvet among them.)  Perhaps this newly remastered Out of the Past and the upcoming release of The Great Race is a taste of what’s in store. I do sincerely hope so, because Warner has once more proven with this release when they want to they can and do release the best high end/hi-def product in the business. We’ll wait and see and hope for the best. So start saving now. Bottom line: Out of the Past is a quintessential part of American movie art. This Blu-ray comes very highly recommended!

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best) – 5+
VIDEO/AUDIO – 4.5
EXTRAS -1   

Nick Zegarac is a freelance writer/editor and graphics artist. He holds a Masters in Communications and an Honors B.A in Creative Lit from the University of Windsor. He is currently a freelance writer and has been a contributing editor for Black Moss Press and is a featured contributor to online’s Subtle Tea. He’s also had two screenplays under consideration in Hollywood.  Contact him via movieman@sympatico.ca.

This piece belongs to a book-in-the-making called Tesserae.

In the summer of ’69 I was driving a cab in Manhattan, from about 6 pm to about 4 in the morning. I averaged about 200 miles in a shift, about the distance from Queens to Woodstock. Often my right knee would ache from the stop-and-go traffic of the city. Few New Yorkers knew that there was continual “warfare” between the city buses and the cabbies, blocking one another, cutting across. The origin of that I did not know until I became enmeshed in the crossfire. It was a “secret,” like bus drivers hitting their air brakes – snort snort – if a big-assed or big-titted woman walked in front of them. It took me some time to realize what that was about. The women, I believe, for the most part, were oblivious to this sly automotive leering.

At night the summer city was infused by glaring neon, the air congested with soot, boiled over, like dry espresso, bitter to the smell. When early dawn hit during the summer and I went back to Queens over the 59^th Street Bridge, I felt refreshed in my Humvee, for driving a cab in the city is like driving in Iraq during hostilities. I was dressed simply every night: jeans, a T-shirt, sneakers and next to my side up front was a Te-Amo cigar box to hold change and my coin changer as well. I relied on a map book which gave all the avenues and exits on and ramps off the Eastside and Westside highways.  I counted on my little blue Baedecker to get across the transverses in Central Park, west side to east side, vice versa. If you missed a transverse, you headed uptown, and that meant Harlem – and fear to the passengers.

I’ve been informed that a cab driver in London is a lifelong occupation and one must pass rigorous tests to be given a license. In New York, after studying a while, I took a very simple test/quiz mostly about major avenues and streets and stations, such as Grand Central and Pennsylvania Station. Some cabbies went in on a mortgage and bought a medallion which was affixed to the hood. A medallion might guarantee you a lifetime business, although you always ran the risk of being held up, which I was, a gun pointed to the back of my head. I recall in the Fifties it was a relatively safe business to own a cab, but that had changed by the time I began driving.

Once my cab was rear-ended and a woman passenger had her face and chin thrown against the passenger side. I called, quite upset, to relate the details to the dispatcher (a lower form of Danny DeVito in Taxi) and a possible injury to the woman, and the dispatcher’s first words to me were “Is the cab all right?” After that, I knew my place in the pecking order. I was in a post-apocalyptic world.

I drove a pattern like most cabbies. I chose a safe one, the Upper East or West Side. I’d go down five or ten blocks, turn right or left, and go uptown, so that I was doing a rectangular or square grid. At times I’d pick up a fare that wanted to go to LaGuardia or Kennedy, which was a break from the routine. The cabbie is always looking for a return fare back to the city and sometimes I would get that. No one wanted to be pulled into Brooklyn, the streets were a maze. I didn’t mind Queens because it was my hunting ground. If I had to piss that could be handled well, but if a cabbie had to shit, that was another story, as New York had scarce facilities for that – still do! – and if you found one, it was much like the men’s room in a one-pump Texaco station on Route 66. Often I would just scoot over the 59^th Street Bridge to my Flushing apartment and relieve myself in familiar and hygienic surroundings.

As a cabbie there is much freedom. If you drove five hours instead of ten, if you took off time to see a movie (some did) or ate out for an hour or two, this was fine with the dispatcher, as long as you brought in what was considered a night’s “take” in the cab. Serendipitously I learned how to master the streets and avenues of New York, such stuff as Broadway being an “S” shaped street, Manhattan’s anaconda. You simply had to master Broadway, often through a vehicular repetition compulsion and the other being, for example, Fifth Avenue. All streets east of Fifth Avenue were counted in one way, and all streets west of Fifth ran another way. Figure out the lodestar purpose of Fifth Avenue and the directions east and west of that longitudinal divide became simple to comprehend, my astrolabe. With that in mind and on foot or in a cab, any address given to you by a fare could be figured out, long before GPS.  To this day when I visit the city I get a kick out of my mastery of the streets: Minetta Lane in the Village being the smallest street in all of Manhattan, in case you like such trivia. As to the subway system, that is much too arcane for me.

One muggy night in August, all windows opened, I don’t think I had air-conditioning at that time, I was cruising my grid, which at that time began at Central Park South with the famed Plaza Hotel at the corner. On 59^th Street the famed Reubens restaurant, now gone, was situated.  It was the creator of the Reuben sandwich, which is to die for. Uptown avenues had several Greek restaurants of note.  (More of that later.) It was here that I picked up the “Princess.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but she had been drinking and was somewhat tipsy. I opened the door for her, given her condition, and she literally fell into the back seat, and the back seat in the old Checker cabs was really big, often with two additional seats that had to be pulled down to occupy. Like all cabbies, we wanted to get the fare in and the fare out as soon as possible since time was crucial to make a night’s living.

When I asked her to tell me where she wanted to be dropped off, she replied, “Milch. I vant milch.” I knew then it was not going to be an easy fare – or night. And what was more disturbing was that the “Princess” wanted “milch” from a Greek restaurant, a Catch 22. And so I began to cruise for Greek restaurants.  I would double-park and go in, and often they didn’t have milk for sale. Whatever I recall from this adventure was that three restaurants in a row were out of cow juice. And when I reported this to her each time she became slightly surly and expressed her European annoyance at my failure to find her milk. I was dealing with resistance, she just wouldn’t get out of the cab.

So with my Greek princess in the back I just drove around until she made up her mind as to what she wanted to do next. I was fit to be tied. Clearly she didn’t want to get out of the cab, and she reminded me of a Gatsby-esque floozy on a tear. At last, probably out of some sense and sensibility, she asked me to drive over to Reubens, a few blocks off.  As I came to the restaurant and parked, she leaned over to talk to me. “I am sorry for all this. Let me treat you to a meal.” For some reason, which was later justified, I felt her to be a sad woman.

“You don’t have to do that, just pay the fare.”

“But I insist. I took you away from your job.”

I relented. I double-parked the car and was wearing by now a sweat-ridden T-shirt and jeans that felt like humid clouds about my legs. When she stepped out of the cab, I had my first real look at her, and it was striking. She was blond and bore an uncanny resemblance to Melina Mercouri, that’s it, Mercouri in Never on Sunday. Even standing still, she was flamboyant, an Art Nouveau sinuosity.  Dressed in a lovely silken dress, a kind of European sari, if you will, in the early light of city’s dawn it glistened, and I thought of Gustav Klimt’s women.

So slob with coin changer on his belt and a Greek Princess went into Reubens. Two waiters with cloths draped over their arms stood there, and I quickly observed how they thought they had sized us up, cab-driver gigolo with naïve European woman. When we were seated they asked me what I wanted, and since I was not eating well because of a lack of funds, I ordered a steak with a side. And it is here that the princess made a dramatic faux pas. Raising her hand and then the other she clapped both her hands as if a flamenco dancer and said very loudly, “Vaiter, I vant milch.”

I knew that was a majestic error in a Jewish restaurant and with these two Jewish waiters. Before my steak arrived, her milk came. It took everything not to break out laughing. Her milk was delivered in a small carton with a straw on a saucer. She did not know what was going on, a sublimely delivered “fuck you” by my kinsman, milk for the craven shiksa.

Recalling our conversation it was mostly about her life with her husband who was some kind of aristocrat in Greece, that she was here on a trip by herself, that not everything was honky dory in their relationship, and, above all, I could feel she was pained by being so alone and that I had served as her reluctant comrade for a crazy hour or so, about the amount of time it would take to get to the Tappan Bridge on the way to Woodstock. I do recall she wore on her finger a very large gemstone, opalescent, perhaps a moonstone set in rose gold. It bespoke of money, and I have not seen its kind since. (What memory decides to remember!) So I felt I was in the presence of considerable wealth. Returning to the cab I brought her back to the Plaza as the sun was coming up. She paid the fare, smiled at me and left the cab and walked through the brass doors of the side entrance to the Plaza.

Then she turned about, her dress in a swirl and walked back out again. I was watching all this and looked in the back seat in case she had left her purse. She put her head to the window and softly said to me, “756.7856.”And she walked back toward the Plaza.

When I have told this story to others, a follow up question is always asked: “Did you call her, the princess?”

I have no reply to give.



Matt is a writer who lives in Nevada.  He’s the author of The i Tetralogy, Down to a Sunless Sea, This Mobius Strip of Ifs and I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust.  Visit his blog. His major works are now available in Kindle format.

published 2014 by Sybaritic Press 
188 pages
order a copy here

Learn and run.  – Dawn

(The actual review follows this section.)
 

Finding Octavia

Anybody who grew up with Star Wars should be a science fiction fan. The adult intellectual in me appreciates the mixtures of Kurosawa, Flash Gordon and archetypal mythology in original trilogy, but the evergreen child in me still thrills at the ultra-exoticism, dashing heroes and ultimately doomed villains. Next to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars has become the sci-fi nucleus for cinema, and my adoration of films such as Alien, Solaris (1972), Vanilla Sky, Europa Report, Gravity and the Matrix trilogy stems from that original childhood fascination.

As for sci-fi/speculative literature, I’m not an especial fan, and though I’ve stuff by Robert Asprin, Alan Dean Foster, A.C. Crispin, Isaac Asimov, Tim Sullivan, William Gibson, Philip K. Dick, Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven (The Mote in God’s Eye is a masterpiece) and Arthur C. Clarke under my belt, my few favorites have been, are and always will be Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and Michael Moorcock. From now on Octavia Butler will be included in that few. A huge honorable mention goes to C.S. Lewis’ underrated space trilogy, which includes Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength.  In fact, much of Butler’s imagery and tone brought Perelandra to my mind more than a few times.

Though I’m familiar with works of some black writers who contributed to the sci-fi genre (including W.E.B. DuBois’ “The Comet” in Darkwater, Virginia Hamilton’s The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl, Sam Delany’s books, and even George Schuyler’s Black No More – which could have inspired Dr. Seuss’ The Sneetches), I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m relatively new to Octavia Butler. Many may blame this on her unlikely gender and race in a literary genre that tends to be manned by, well, men – and many who happen to be non-black.  I don’t think so, but nor do I care. However, in order to have more authority to even think of writing a review of Near Kin, I insisted on familiarizing myself with Butler’s books, including Kindred, Survivor (the novel Butler herself repudiated), Parable of the Talents, Fledgling and Dawn. During my power-reading I also watched and read Butler interviews, as well as explored some related criticism. Needless to say, I was quite impressed, not to mention predisposed to be able to listen to her voice for three week’s straight if ever necessary. And her face. Butler had a remarkable face.

I picked Kindred as my virgin voyage since I’m a fool for almost anything to do with time travel. Back to the Future is my mini-religion, and Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys continues to fascinate me. I’m even one of the few goofballs on this planet who love that 1994 Van Damme stinker, Time Cop.  Kindred is up there with books such as Jack Finney’s Time and Again and Time After Time (of which Butler’s book reminds me), Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand, and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (which had to have been partly influenced by Butler’s novel).  It cleverly and bravely takes time-travel literature to a different level by locating the main (and only) past location in the pre-Civil War South, smack-dab in the midst of American slavery, one of the most atrocious stains on U.S. history, not to mention world history. 

The central protagonist, Dana, is torn from the 1970s to 1815 Maryland every time Rufus, the son of a plantation/slave owner, is in mortal danger as he matures from boy to man. Dana learns that Rufus’s existence is crucial to her own existence, since he eventually impregnates Alice, a slave, with a daughter who Dana’s key maternal ancestor. This is one of many examples of Butler’s interest in symbiosis rather than black-and-white (so to speak) user/used dichotomy. Like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, Dana must act in her own ultimate self-interest: set up the eventuality of her own birth. She does succeed – with a price. Aside from learning first-hand that whites and blacks are inexorable in U.S. history, she literally leaves part of herself in that sinful, horrible era, and that era marks her with the truth of that past for the rest of her days. On the final return from the past, her arm becomes fused with a wall and must be amputated for removal.

Which brings us to the elephant that seems to be in every room in which books by black authors are read: race. Honestly, like John Coltrane, I like to judge an artist by his or her “sound” rather than skin color or heritage, and I’ve long since grown bored with the artistic segregation of so-called black literature, no matter how good the intentions for such a categorization are. Black History Month is twelve months long.

There shall be and should be no forgetting of American slavery, but there are those who question how long society should wear its sackcloth in morose memory of that mass sin. That question oversimplifies the matter. Kindred’s Dana says to her husband at one point: “You’d think I would have had enough of the past,” but as she becomes more and more immersed in the real history of her doomed ancestors, she realizes that it’s not necessarily a one-sided decision. As the line goes in P.T. Anderson’s film masterpiece, Magnolia, “we may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.” “I want to suggest that history is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history” James Baldwin write in “Black English: A Dishonest Argument.” Atrocity stains deeply; it cries from the soil. This is why Faulkner was obsessed with his Southern heritage that belonged to both free whites and captive blacks.

While Sori, the female protagonist in Fledgling, Butler’s vampire novel, seeks to restore the lost memory of her past, Dana’s ancestral past is forced on her by inexplicable circumstances. With her direct experience and undeniable knowledge of such barbarism, she is no longer content in her relatively civilized, sanitized present:

“You might be able to go through this whole experience as an observer…But now and then…I can’t maintain the distance.  I’m drawn all the way into eighteen nineteen, and I don’t know what to do.  I ought to be doing something.  I know that.”

The sin of slavery (which was once Earth’s norm, and is still aching in the human heart to reign again) is as worthy of reiteration and analysis as the Shoah, but there shouldn’t be some unwritten rule that black writers must always address the “black experience” in her or his works any more than every Jewish writer needs to write a Holocaust book. Yes, “racial” writers often pigeonhole themselves, but narrowing Octavia Butler’s awesome contribution to science fiction down to the rarity of her race and gender in the sci-fi field just sucks. “Black history” is inexorable from American history; “black art” is inexorable from American art; Butlerian sci-fi is inexorable from American sci-fi. Butler certainly tends to focus on race both literally and symbolically in her work, but her overall theme is humanity and what it is to be human – and this takes place in particular individuals rather than representative masses. When Joan Fry wondered about using the term “black” or “African American” in an interview with Butler, Butler exclaimed, “Oh, Lord!  Labels again!” Her primary goal was to write a good story, but her work has more than one level, and some of those levels certainly play with issues of being black and the history of the Atlantic Slave Trade. “I have no idea who picks up on them and who doesn’t,” Butler said. “I think some of the academics do, because they expect you to do things like that.”

In a 1963 interview Ralph Ellison said that “all novels are about certain minorities; the individual is a minority.” Ayn Rand said as much in her famous “The smallest minority on earth is the individual” line. “If the Negro, or any other writer, is going to do what is expected of him,” Ellison went on to say, “he’s lost the battle before he takes the field.” He also summed up what I’ve come to believe and what Kindred and many of Butler’s other books seem to imply: “One ironic witness to the beauty and universality of this art is the fact that the descendants of the very men who enslaved us can now sing the spirituals and find in the singing an exaltation of their own humanity.” This is why nobody owns the blues and everybody owns the blues. And why jazz (that messiah of the prophet blues), is as ubiquitously American as superhero comic books.

A very refreshing aspect of Butler’s insight into race is her fairness about who can exhibit racist or, at least, prejudicial behavior. We tend to always hear about white people who find interracial dating and marriage odious, but what’s behind closed doors of the black family is rarely revealed. Often, what both old-fashioned white and black fathers can agree on for sure is that they don’t want their kids hooking up with each other. In Kindred, Dana, a black woman, asks Kevin, a white man, what his sister thinks of the prospect of their matrimony.  He admits that she, despite her liberal sensibilities, disapproves – but soon we learn that so does Dana’s uncle and, to a lesser degree, her aunt:

“She doesn’t care much for white people, but she prefers light-skinned blacks.  Figure that out.  Anyway, she ‘forgives’ me for you.  But my uncle doesn’t…He wants me to marry someone like him – someone who looks like him.  A black man.”

This honest revelation reminds me of the black side of the conflict in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. John Prentice, Jr., played by Sidney Poitier, rejects his father’s old-fashioned prejudice against his loving and wanting to marry a white woman – and self-prejudice: “You think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man.”

In a critical essay on Kindred, Robert Crossley (University of Massachusetts at Boston) does a brief but worthy study of the book.However, he loses me when he says things such as this: “Some of [science fiction in the 1940s and 1950s] was provocatively racist, including Robert Heinlein’s The Sixth Column (1949), whose protagonist in a future race war was unsubtly named Whitey.” First of all, a scholar spieling about sci-fi literature should be a little more nuanced and less obtuse. Secondly, I think it’s ironic that Butler probably owes a lot to Heinlein. I almost refuse to doubt that she read his Methuselah’s Children, for instance. The controversial Farnham’s Freehold (1965) was not his story to begin with. Rather, it was a cleanup job for a story called “All” by science-fiction editor John W. Campbell, who undeniably had some pretty problematic views on race and blacks in particular. Far from originating a racist tale, Heinlein actually reformed the story in order to flush out a lot of racist elements. The race stuff that’s left shows bigotry on both the heroes’ and enemies’ sides, particularly on the part of the PanAsians who consider themselves the superior race and view white folks as slaves. Politically incorrect by today’s standards, the characters’ epithets and jingoism (again, from both sides) can be offensive, but this was published during World War II, while suspicion of the Chinese and Japanese was high and, ironically, shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor fulfilled a surprise attack by Asians that the book prefigured.

Heinlein was very conscientious about racism, and a lot of his positive characters were of non-white descent (Rico, the Filipino of the popularly misunderstood Starship Troopers, to name one). Farnham’s Freehold, which reiterates the Sixth Column theme of an enemy that thinks it’s the superior race, is often slammed for emphasizing racist stereotypes despite its apparent anti-racist premise. A manmade cataclysm causes a warp in time that relocates Hugh Farnham and his family about 2,000 years in the future. A dystopia in which whites (called “savages”) are victims of oppressive racism is run by a regime made up of a conglomeration of non-Caucasian races, the Chosen, who inherited the world whites destroyed (an ironic prefigurement of Manson’s warped Helter Skelter eschatology).

Some critics point to the cannibalism of the Chosen to be racist in its echoing of black-as-savage paranoia. (My mind goes to the misinterpretation of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, which satirized aristocratic white liberals rather than denigrated African natives.) One of the points of the book is that humanity at large tends to slip into such madness when power corrupts; the violent and abusive wheel turns. I’d bet that many of the folks who disdain Farnham’s Freehold wouldn’t be so fastidious about, say, Darius James’ rather insane Negrophobia, or by Bernardine Evaristo’s re-imaging of American slavery in Blonde Roots (2010), a novel that depicts whites being kidnapped and taken to the made-up continent of Aphrika to be enslaved and dehumanized in every way Africans were during the real thing. The female protagonist is branded with “KKK” (for Kaga Konata Katamba, her black master’s name) and forced to serve as a “house wigger.”

Consider the female protagonist in Heinlein’s masterful Friday (1982). Friday is an Artificial Person (AP), probably genetically engineered, who is an agent fulfilling clandestine missions for a wisecracking old genius known to her as Boss. She’s indistinguishable from actual humans except in physical prowess, resistance to pain, deadliness and mental acuity. The question of what is human and who is equal pops up again and again throughout the novel, and Friday becomes rather sensitive about implied and overt discrimination against APs as the story progresses. When her secret is revealed to her human polygamist family, one of a few sister wives castigates Friday for deceiving them: “I’ve never had to deal with a creature not of God’s Law before…[U]nder our laws…a nonhuman cannot enter into a marriage contract with human beings.” Before this blowup, Friday defends a stepdaughter’s decision to marry a Tongan man. Sister-wife Vicki states her case plainly: “Mixing the races is always a bad idea.” And Friday, deflated, replies: “You don’t know any better. You’ve never been anywhere and you probably soaked up racism with your mother’s milk.”

I can’t help but think of a similar passage from Octavia Butler’s Survivor, in which a character named Bea suggests that Neila, the stepmother of mixed-race protagonist Alanna, should consider allowing the child to be raised by “her own kind.” Neila, of course, is appalled.

The older woman sighed. “Oh, my. I knew this was going to be difficult. But, Neila, the girl isn’t white.”

“She’s Afro-Asian from what she says of her parents. Black father, Asian mother.”…

…”I thought that after you’d had a few days with the girl, you might… reconsider.”

There was the sound of Neila’s laughter. “Come to my senses, you mean.”

“That’s exactly what I mean!” snapped the older woman. “Several of us feel that you and Jules ought to be setting a better example for the young people here – not encouraging them to mix…”

In the world of Heinlein’s Friday, human suspicion of Artificial Persons serves as a metaphor for racism, obviously, but, more importantly, Boss’s repeated admonishments against Friday’s self-consciousness of artificiality are an excellent example of science fiction’s – certainly Octavia Butler’s – tendency to kick at basic traditional foundations to the point of extending “humanity” beyond “homo sapiens.” When Boss makes a comment about Friday’s birthright, she corrects him:

“Birthright.”  Don’t make jokes, Boss…‘My mother was a test tube, my father was a knife.’”

“You are being foolishly self-conscious over an impediment that was removed years ago.”

“Am I?  The courts say I can’t be a citizen; the churches say I don’t have a soul.  I’m not ‘man born of woman,’ at least not in the eyes of the law.”

“’The law is an ass’…You are not only as human as Mother Eve, you are an enhanced human, as nearly perfect as your designers could manage.”

Again and again questions of the essence of humanity, genetics, cross-breeding, evolution and tension between the familiar and the Other dominate most science fiction, often with the intensity and radicalism found in, say, Donna Haraway’s breakthrough posthumanist essay, A Cyborg Manifesto. Another very successful and ingenious science-fiction author, Samuel Delany (whose novels Octavia Butler could never get into, by the way), takes these themes to the nth degree in his complex novel The Einstein Intersection (1967): genetically dynamic and volatilely mutating aliens take over a humanless Earth and try their damnedest to reach and maintain some sort of “normal” physical form and society, in emulation of the long-gone humans and their cultural scraps. This results in exploration of difference, the Other, assimilation, humanity, and the weird drama of DNA. As in Butler’s books, and perhaps more so, these themes needn’t be relegated to the black/white dichotomy. Believe it or not, more than black writers are concerned with these things. Humans are concerned with these things.

Butler has some pretty stark pet themes in her novels: problematic religions, captivity, pivotal female characters, characters raging against impossible odds and so on. But the problem of familiar versus Other (usually human versus superhuman or alien and explored through the literal and symbolic act of miscegenation, which dear William Faulkner beat almost to death in his wonderful masterpieces and less-worthy works) seems to be the deepest theme. Nikanj, a key alien in Dawn, the first novel in Butler’s Xenogensis series, says that “different is threatening to most species. Different is dangerous. It might kill you.”

Obviously the theme of the Other is prime ground for addressing racial barriers, and there have been many books that involve characters of the black and white races role-reversing in order to reveal something about what it’s like to be the Other, usually for the sake of imparting empathy and tolerance – even love – if not just holding a mirror up to what’s considered to be a self-blind racist society. Several examples include Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson (1894), James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931), John Griffin’s true-life Black Like Me (1961), and Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots (2010).

I must admit that Butler’s attention to color, kind, insider/outsider, etc., borders on tiresome but never really elicits more than a half-humorous eye roll. Oh, Shori is the only black vampire among the Ina kind in Fledgling? And Ina are otherwise invariably chalk-white and blonde? What a surprise. The more interesting thing is that Sori must be told she is black, similarly to how Adam and Eve are said to have not known their own nakedness in Eden until the Serpent spilled the beans. A passage from Fledgling:

He started to leave, then turned back, frowning. “Ordinary sun exposure burns your skin even though you’re black?”

“I’m…” I stopped. I had been about to protest that I was brown, not black, but before I could speak, I understood what he meant.

Days of Future Passed by Cacy Forgenie

Much to my delight, it seems that Butler is too wisely pessimistic to believe in utopia as curative for human ills such as race-based prejudice.  Instead, she acknowledges more genuine and palatable microcosmic healing rather than macrocosmic schemes.  “It’s safer for people to overcome the feeling on an individual basis than as members of a large group,” said Ralph Ellison. How true. The breakdown of societal walls happens bit by bit and episode by episode. More generally, sincere love between humans happens on a heart-to-heart basis rather than by lofty edict. Neighborhoods on the sides of railroad tracks will always self-isolate while the brave and curious individuals who dare walk across those tracks will find that neighborhoods also can be neighbors.

Such microcosmic success is shown in the sexual intercourse between and marriage of human Lanna and alien Diut in Survivor. I always say that miscegenation is one of the keys to dampening racism, and here it is analogized in the love between different species. Aside from the hateful rivalry between two communities of the Kohn species (Garkohn and Tehkohn), tribal intractability is overtly shown in tension between Lanna and her Missionary foster father, Jules.  Lanna reveals her coupling with Diut, and, despite his basic kindness and goodwill, Jules can’t justify these things with his Missionary religion. He questions the existential worth of the Tehkohn in general. In response Lanna insists on the “humanity” of her husband’s kind: “You know how human they are.” And Octavia Butler’s recurring problem with monotheism is evident in Jules’s reply:

“Physically humanlike, perhaps.  But spiritually…what god do they worship?”

“…none.”

“On Earth, even the most primitive savages recognize some supreme being or beings, some power higher than themselves.”

“That might be true – on Earth.”

“Only animals were completely without spiritual beliefs.”

“On Earth!”

In Dawn protagonist Lilith is horrified by a master plan of joint procreation of hybrid children between captive humans and captor aliens. (The consequences of this master plan are shown in Adulthood Rites and Imago, and the Patternist series and Fledgling, also involve the theme of genetic manipulation and human evolution.) Loss of true humanity is what Lilith fears while her alien counterpart, Nikanj, thrills at the intended result:

“Our children will be better than either of us…Our children won’t destroy themselves in a war, and if they need to regrow a limb or to change themselves in some other way they’ll be able to do it.”

Lilith speaks for every anti-utopian when she replies:

“But they won’t be human. That’s what matters. You can’t understand, but that is what matters.”

As Nikanj observed earlier in the novel, humans “are horror and beauty in rare combination.” (I’m reminded of something Dmitri says in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”) This sums up the basic catch-22 that arises in all worthy dystopian works: the folly of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in the quest for perfection, absolute equality, and peace. In A Clockwork Orange, Alex’s Skinnerian/Pavlovian conditioning squeezes out his love of music, particularly Beethoven. In the superior 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers film love is the bathwater baby. Consider the eerie assurance of body-snatched Dr. Kibner: “We don’t hate you.  There’s no need for hate now. Or love… Don’t be trapped by old concepts, Matthew, you’re evolving into a new life-form.” Even if some type of conditioning or deep sacrifice of human nature could vanquish racism Butler would reject it. “Ridiculous” was the word she used to describe utopias, and she admitted that perfect societies not only require perfect people but they’d be boring if achieved.

Of course, racists see race mixture as something just as extreme and traumatic as body-snatching. Consider many of the Nazis’ obsession with blood and eugenics, or Nation of Islam founder Fard’s tale of mad-scientist Yakub and the lab-originated white-devil race. The old “one-drop rule” is still alive and well in the world, particularly in America, and its “positive” mask hardly hides the basic racism. All racial chauvinism is poison.

It takes no genius to realize that Butler’s work tends to bring to mind the slave-narrative tradition. Characters face and work through captivity; some are even actual slaves. Novels such as Mind of My Mind, Survivor and The Parable of the Talents recapitulate the author’s fascination and concern with oppression, power and control. The recent film adaptation of 12 Years a Slave, Solomon Northup’s factual account of his kidnapping and unlawful sale into Southern slavery back in the 1850s, pleased me very much with its accuracy and near-verbatim treatment of the author’s confounding and deeply touching testimony. Reading of Kindred’s Dana’s struggle to get a letter that could lead to her manumission reminded me of the Northup book. And Butler’s Parable of the Talents (whose obnoxious journal format and monotony had me trudging uphill to its ending) deals with a future slavery rather than a past one. 

Lauren Oya Olamina, co-narrator of the book (along with her daughter many years later), “hyperempath,” ex-Baptist (like Butler herself) and founder of a philosophy/religion called Earthseed, keeps a secret account during her people’s captivity under the fanatical (and annoyingly caricatured) Christian Crusade in a manner similar to Solomon Northup’s clandestine letter-writing:  “I’ve hidden my writing paper, pens and pencils away in our prison room.” (Captive Lilith in Dawn also lobbies strongly for writing materials.) Olamina voices the general anguish of enslaved people and the particular injustice of violently amputating Africans’ heritage after bringing them to the so-called New World:

We’re expected to feed ourselves and our captors.  They eat better than we do, of course…They’ve burned all that they could find of our past.  It’s all ungodly trash, they say.

The imagined sci-fi future echoes and speaks for the real-world past, and Olamina reveals the deep price for both manumission and diaspora:

But we’re not slaves anymore…I’ve done this: I’ve sent my people away. We survived slavery together, but I didn’t believe that we could survive freedom together. I broke up the Earthseed community and sent its parts in all directions. I believe it was the right thing to do, but I can hardly bear to think about it…I’ve torn a huge hole in myself.

This figurative hole reminds me of the figurative and literal maiming of Dana at the end of Kindred. Butler explained her choice to have Dana lose her arm:

I couldn’t really let her come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole.

There is no total solution to the insoluble fact of atrocity and humans’ inhumanity to humans. And, as far as Butler is concerned, without a doubt, the answer certainly doesn’t lie in monotheistic religion, Christianity in particular. (Robert Heinlein also tends to sneer at religious fundamentalism, especially in Revolt in 2100, which features a dictatorial regime called the Theocracy.) Though her Baptist past informs her and a lot of her criticism of organized religion is right on and inarguable, much of Butler’s characterizations strike me as oversimplified and hackneyed. An odious creep named Andrew Jarrett – who’s from Texas, of course – embodies the Christian Crusade, a regime that is extremely oppressive and self-righteous as much as self-blind, an extreme and meaner version of Survivor’s Missionary sect. 

The religion (non-religion?) of Earthseed, which is in tune with the natural unfolding of things and therefore right (a notion that is a distant cousin to de Sade’s nihilistic determinism, really) is pitted against the rather sophomoric Christian-chauvinist dystopia that has about as little real-world possibility as do Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Alan Moore’s V For Vendetta. “God is Change” sums up the credo of Earthseed, and a lot of bubblegum religiosity and what I call Zen-lite flows from that.  Earthseed encourages adherents to help give shape to constant change, and doubters or Christians are seen as dumb dams butting up against creative rivers. Tellingly, Olamina negatively recalls a sermon from her childhood that hailed Jesus, who is “the same yesterday, today, and forever.” In Earthseed terms, the static Jesus is the opposite of God.

Olamina’s condescending brother protests: “You can follow Earthseed, build your way to go to the stars, fall down into chaos, and wind up in hell! Or you can follow the will of God.” And her friend Dan typifies the closed-minded, condescending Christian dogmatist: “It isn’t really religious – your service, I mean.  You guys don’t believe in God or anything.” Personally, I shy away from both dogmatism and naturalism. I appreciate – need, can’t help but be both an agent and subject of – change, but I’m a willy-nilly child who doesn’t wish to have a willy-nilly parent, a wobbly wheel that wants a stable drivetrain. Improved civil rights is change, yes, but so are cataclysm and cancer.

G.K. Chesterton wrote that “satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.” Can’t that be applied to just about anything? Can change be change without a flux-resistant thing or concept? In a similar vein G.K. wrote: “[Y]ou cannot praise an action because it shows will; for to say that is merely to say that it is an action.” If God is change and change is God, then I’d hate to meet the devil.

I don’t want my personal thumbs down to ruin my praise for Octavia Butler, however. She belongs on the bookshelves of anyone who loves good science fiction and excellent literature in general. As author DL Warner says in Near Kin, “[Butler] presented universal themes on a down-to-earth level.” That’s Butler’s greatest strength, I think.  The bottom (bottomless?) line for Butler is the question of humanity. What constitutes a human? What makes certain types of humans “worth more” than others? What happens when “human” is a judgment call made by beings – human or not – in power or with more power? In a sense, these are the same questions involved in thinking through the age-old institution of slavery – and I dare say that no eras of that once worldwide institution have been written of and studied more than the American one. This is just another reason to consider Butler a dyed-in-the-wool American writer, and a darn important one at that.

Near Kin

To be honest, I’m usually not a fan of tribute anthologies.  Here’s what I wrote at the beginning of my review of From the Four-Chambered Heart: In Tribute to Anais Nin (another anthology published by Sybaritic Press):

Having heard and been disappointed by my share of tribute music albums, I often approach tribute literature with a grain of salt in one hand and keep the other hand free just in case I have to yawn.  Maybe this attitude stems from my lifelong indifference to dressing up for Halloween, and emulous songs or writings seem like costumes rather than unique ensembles.

However, I ended up appreciating that book and speaking very highly of it, and I’m pleased to do the same for Near Kin: A Collection of Words and Art Inspired by Octavia Estelle Butler.  The book is the only of its kind, as far as I can tell.  When I first heard of the book, I wondered who the heck came up with the idea to do such an unlikely tribute.  But that’s just what Near Kin’s charm is: someone showed due respect to Octavia Butler, and it’s about damn time! 

Marie Lecrivain, poet, author, editor-in-chief of poeticdiversity and “editrix” of Sybaritic Press, edited the anthology and wrote its foreword in which she praises “[Butler’s] scary and wonderful worlds” and “her vision, bravery, artistry, and…her wish to fashion a better world than the one we live in now.”  Mentioning Butler’s accomplishment of becoming the first black woman to win a MacArthur Genius grant, Marie makes sure to emphasize the author’s expertise rather over her genetic makeup: “I briefly pondered Butler’s racial origin, then cast it aside…I loved her writing!”  This calls to my mind something that Ralph Ellison wrote in “The World and the Jug”: “While I am without a doubt a Negro, and a writer, I am also an American writer.”  Marie reveals that Dawn is the book that inspired her to explore more of Butler’s work.  I can see why.  The book is extraordinary.  (I am disappointed, however, that Marie didn’t include her own work in this collection.)

As with the Nin anthology, I can take or leave the interspersed illustrations and photographs in Near Kin – which is not to say that I don’t dig them.  My favorites include Cacy Forgenie’s Days of Future Past and Justus (the front-cover image), Lance Tooks’ Kindred (taken from the front cover of his graphic-novel adaptation of the novel), Fabiola Jean-Louis’ lovely Balance and Birth of the Seed (which is on the cover of the Kindle edition of the book) and Marissa Lafferty’s Space Lady (which looks like a sci-fi version of Josephine Baker).   I do think that I’d be more partial to the inclusion of the visual art if color printing and/or glossiness had been feasible or affordable.  Fabiola’s paintings could have especially shined.

Though I liked some pieces more than others in Near Kin, I must congratulate every contributor for her or his enthusiasm and care for the inspiring author.  Octavia Butler deserves both the admiration and emulation.  The works range from intentionally derivative to very vague (as far as reference to Butlerian writing goes), and I have to say that perhaps I appreciated the stuff in between those poles. 

The prose piece that impressed me the most is Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ “A Litany for Survivor: The Book That Octavia Didn’t Want Us to Remember,” the text of a presentation done at UC Riverside’s Critical Ethnic Studies: Settler Colonialism and the Future of Genocide in 2011.  The essay, on the whole, is excellent, though I diverge from some of its core notions.  Gumbs shares some theories on why Butler ended up repudiating Survivor and wanted it to fade away.  Her first guess is that the author shied away from the premise of humans living among “a somewhat humanoid species of folks who are hairy, and deep blue, or green.”  Then she reiterates what is probably the most popular theory (since Butler herself expressed it): that the author was ashamed of the “little green man in outer space” cliché.  Finally Gumbs builds on the initial theory and wonders if Butler feared “danger in a racist society” in response to depicting the communal, “very hairy” and “darkest blue people had the most power.” 

First of all, I can’t accept Butler’s own “little green man” rationale.  It’s so weak and unsubstantiated, since so many of her books star the equivalents of little green men, and so does the science-fiction tradition in general.  And the basic things that save any sci-fi work from failure due to the “little green man” cliché are a good story and good writing.  Butler had both of those locked.

I also reject the fear that a majority of white society (“vastly racist” is problematic) would scorn or, at least, ignore, a science-fiction novel in which the most endowed beings have a lot of hair and dark colors.  Here’s how Gumbs puts it: “[Butler] feared the blacker-the-berry logic she employed would be misinterpreted.”  On the contrary, I doubt that, by the time of Survivor’s publication, the majority of contemporary readers, particularly sci-fi fans, were so meticulously bigoted as to be insulted that gorilla-like beings that constantly change colors (note: including bright ones) were physically stronger and more savvy than white colonists on another planet in some fantastic existence.  That’s a stretch I can’t accept.  (The popular Planet of the Apes movies had just culminated five years earlier, after all.)  If anything, wouldn’t the scenario of a black woman repeatedly saving, castigating and eventually killing a white man incense racist whites and also render the Kindred novel unsavory in Butler’s eyes?  I just don’t think she had such a weakness in her.  (And I think hairiness occurs among both blacks and whites.)

However, I’m somewhat in accord with Gumbs’ thoughts about “commodification of black women’s creativity” and her note that Butler herself worried about being “tokenized.”  (Humorous aside for Survivor fans: one might say that Alanna wasTehkohnized.)  Gumbs points out that Butler was frustrated by apparently being “the only black woman science fiction writer” and encouraged others like her to get into the genre.  That’s understandable, but I think too much of a big deal is made about quantification of kinds in different fields.   Not every low count is an unjust or undue dearth.  Often it’s a matter of cultural patterns.  Why does there seem to be a preponderance of Jewish people in comedy?  Why are there so many Hispanic males and so relatively few women in comic-book art?  And, at the risk of flippancy, I ask: why else are there so few hockey players of Asian descent?  

Gumbs does go into the chronic tragedy of an alarming number of black women being slain in their own communities back in the 1970s, particularly in 1972 Boston, as well as the 1979 Atlanta Child Murders.  She ties the outrage and ignited activism of many black women to the term “survivor” and wonders if the connotation of that word soured Butler to the very title of her novel.  The word is justifiably more important to Gumbs and black female activists, I think, because in a racial context it not only defines those who stand against and live in spite of racial oppression, but, as Gumbs says:

By claiming my survival, and my survivorhood, I’m placing my life in the context of our collective dead whom genocide sought, and seeks to destroy, but cannot erase, because I’m here continuing to witness our dead by saying, I am a survivor.  Saying “I am a survivor,” is a ritual that invites the dead to continue participating in the creation of the present moment, and the future.

A powerful thought indeed.  Butler didn’t think that blacks had made peace with themselves, and whites still had yet to make peace with blacks, but, as Gumbs admits, Butler isn’t on record as addressing this angle in regard to her apparent disdain for Survivor at all.  However, there is one thing Butler said that comes close to what Gumbs posits.  While discussing the irresponsible behavior of the black man who’s paired with Lilith for sexual intercourse by the Oankali, she explained that “his situation is reminis­cent of the survival characteristics that black people developed as a result of slavery, characteristics that were useful in slavery but detrimental later.”  Perhaps the old but persistent and now negative modes of survival ruin “survivor” as a positive term?

I’m in line perfectly with Gumbs when it comes to desiring that others read Survivor though its author wouldn’t want them to.  Of this artistic violation we are both complicit.  Do we know better than Butler?  Is Gumbs seeing the novel’s worth in regard to black heritage and “keep on keeping on” in the face of hatred and obliteration, while I see so much more than a Star Trek novel and think that Survivor is an integral piece of the Butlerian puzzle?  Whatever, Survivor survived death, even after its very creator tried to kill it.  And now the book continues as a witness to the deceased author, inviting her to participate “in the creation of the present moment, and the future,” as Gumbs puts it.  Similar to Dana’s wall-fused arm in Kindred, it seems that the novel stays with us despite its artistic amputation by the author.

(By the way, I also agree with Gumbs when she says “I really don’t think the way she writes dialogue is all that convincing, or great.”  This was particularly strong for me in the speech of the characters from 1815 in Kindred.)

Another favorite piece in Near Kin is DL Warner’s “Identity,” which is a brief essay on how Octavia Butler inspired embracement of her identity and to apply that identity honestly and fearlessly to her own writing.  Warner is always outspoken about her belief that well-written erotica deserves more respect than it gets.  I agree with her wholeheartedly.  While explicit violence is overlooked or justified in the critical world, explicit and unconventional sexuality tends to be shunned or minimized as pornography. 

Comic-book maestro Alan Moore and feminist artist Melinda Gebbie collaborated on the epic graphic-novel series, Lost Girls, in order to counter the prejudice against erotic art in both the written and visual fields.  X-rated and then some, the result is a delicious, surreal and mores-traumatizing explosion: literary, contextual and high-quality, which is what Moore and Gebbie intended, and what DL Warner also intends.

Warner relates an incident that happened while Warner participated on a Star Trek panel in which a snooty sci-fi novelist objected to her calling the Trek universe on its frigidity, its lack of sexuality.  When he quipped that injecting sex into science fiction didn’t make her “a second rate Octavia Butler,” she replied that just as “being brown, female and a sci-fi writer” didn’t necessarily warrant identification with Butler, “his being pale and doughy [didn’t make] him Alfred Hitchcock.”  I hope she took a bow after that one!  However, Pasty Doughboy unwittingly emboldened her trust in her art. Considering Butler’s pride in her subject matter, Warner decided to forge ahead without shame or shyness about her own work: “Thus, I stepped out of the shadows, assumed my true identity and hid my erotica no longer…I am forever grateful to Octavia Butler for that freedom.”

Well, DL Warner has to like M. Justine Gerard’s very erotic “Small Talk,” which is one of my two favorite fiction pieces in Near Kin.  It’s a subtle sci-fi story that takes place in a society that puts a premium on speech.  Yes, speech.  Forget the saying “Look but don’t touch.”  This story involves “Look, touch – but don’t talk.”  A man named Niall propositions a reluctant prostitute named Benaya, and the reader eventually learns that in this society citizens can tongue-kiss and engage in oral, anal and any other kind of sex – but conduct no conversation.  This law isn’t obvious until the end of the story, which makes its assault on our talkative sensibilities that much more impactful.  For example, not knowing the clever gimmick until later, one might be both confused and curious during the preliminary “interview” between Benaya and Niall:

“Kiss?”

“Yes.”

“Tongue?”

“Yes.”

“Blow-job?”

“Condom.”

“Anal?”

“Condom.”

“Bare-back?”

“Condom!”

He smiled.  She realized Niall was teasing her.

“Words?”

Red flag.  Benaya raised an eyebrow.

“No,” she declared.

If Niall had asked “Talk?” there wouldn’t have been as much mystery, since it’d be understandable that a prostitute would want to avoid much verbal involvement.  But “Words?” is an odder request.  Niall might be interested in tongue-kissing and both oral and anal sex, but he requests words specifically – without joking.  In fact, the request worries Benaya.  Why?  The no-words concept is quite clever in its playing with prostitutes’ mythical “no kissing” rule (which was probably popularized by Pretty Woman) and its turning “Talk is cheap” on its head.  Imagine how much we take words for granted, let alone the luxury of open-ended discussions or even ecstatic exclamations during great sex.  Much to both her dismay and delight, Benaya learns quickly that Niall is not only well-hung but he can deliver the goods.  She avoids alcohol because it loosens the tongue and might waste precious words in a talk-regulating world, but it’s next to impossible to stay mum when a lover hits the spot.

Benaya moaned.  Niall was massive.  She bit her lip and did her best to keep silent.  Clearly, he can tell how much I like this.  Fuck, I have to keep my mouth shut!

 Niall flexed inside her.  Surprised, Benaya opened her mouth.

“Ohg…”

I love how Banaya suppresses even the during-sex cliché of “Oh God!”  What would make people so afraid to talk – or even moan words ecstatically – freely?  How did such self-censorship – worse: self-silencing – become such powerful policy?  Gerard doesn’t explain, and I’m pleased that she doesn’t.  As far as we know it just is, like the sudden time-travel in Octavia Butler’s Kindred or the worldwide stoppage of male sperm count in P.D. James’s Children of Men.

After some mind-blowing fucking the Benaya and Niall fall asleep together.  When they’re both awake Niall presses her on his forbidden request again:

“Say something to me.  Please.  Say anything.”

Benaya cringed.  She felt trapped.  This was not part of their agreement.  Quickly, she jumped out of bed, grabbed her dress and her shoes…

…“I need to speak.  More than I need art, food, sex, money.  I need to save myself from the silence.  Please, speak to me!”

“No!”

“Why?”

“Death!”

Interestingly and tellingly, the last – and probably most poignant – word Benaya says to Niall before fleeing is “sorry.”

“Small Talk” is a splendid example of what DL Warner spoke about in “Identity”: “erotica [as] a valid subject to explore artistically.” Gerard incorporates rock-solid (I can attest!) erotica, which is explicit enough to be called pornographia, into a solid science-fiction story.  The formula works.

My other favorite fiction piece is Alex Hernandez’s “A Thing of Soft Bonds,” out-and-out science fiction without a doubt.  It has the smoothness and technical elaboration of Robert Heinlein and the feminist/metamorphosis tropes of Octavia Butler.  (Both writers tended toward ethnodecentralization, and the characters in this story have a good handful of diverse names: Villaneuva, Chen, Puig, Sousa-Cruz, Foluke, Jackson and Rodriguez.)  If I had to teach a class about what makes a good short story in general I’d probably use this one as one of the primary examples.

“A Thing of Soft Bonds” contains all the goodies: a spaceship in distress, a crew at the point of no return to safety (in this case a space station), an outside threat (in this case a violently horny all-male penal colony), dystopian desperation (in this case a shortage of women), mind versus might (in this case a geneticist against a brutish General), the primitive consuming the so-called civilized (in this case overstimulated neurotransmitters enslaving an enemy), science’s fine line between help and harm (in this case knowledge of and experimentation with biology and genes giving otherwise helpless women a chance at survival), and gender-bending and tampering with what it is to be homo sapien (in this case a “man” without a Y-chromosome and a female-to-male transgendered man, as well as…well, you’ll see).

The spaceship Ashaba is under assault by the leading General of the penal-colony planet because he wants to commandeer any women on board for recreational rape to serve as a pressure valve for the prisoners.  While the leading men of the Ashaba are fatalistic about the inevitable horrors the ship’s women must face, Barbara Villaneuva, Chief Scientist of the mission, immediately starts to brainstorm an alternative to either gang rape or execution once they’re overwhelmed and taken down to the criminal planet.  The ship’s captain commits suicide, and there are no weapons with which to defend the crew. 

The very Butlerian feature of the story is the central reason for the space mission: collection of alien tetradecapodal animals.  With all the odder-than-oddness of Butler’s Oankali, each one of these creatures looks “like a furry, arboreal octopus with fourteen arms.”  And each one is not really a one but “a colony organism, made up of fifteen individual-but-connected specimens.”  See, the species’ immobile female, who is all brain and sensory organs – “and fourteen clasping vaginas,” eventually drives fourteen males into a “mindless, writhing” state with her mature scent so that they are driven “into on orgy that would forever bind them in perfect union.”  This symbiotic relationship provides the female with strength and the ability to ambulate “with the nimble elegance of [a] gibbon[.]”  What can Barbara do with no weapons and nothing but her alien specimens and laboratory?

You see where this is going.  With a marvelous deftness and lexicon Hernandez presents a surprisingly believable (though not necessarily fully understood) gambit thought up by the quite resourceful and brave Barbara: she decides to use available genomes and nano-bacterium (I think) to concoct a biochemical defense against the approaching threat.  After injecting herself with chromosomes containing “genomic snippets from bees, ants, termites, naked mole rats” for a few weeks, Barbara’s appearance and body chemistry changes drastically, to say the least.

The athletic body she had prided herself in was no avocado-shaped and glistening with perspiration…Stretch marks split her brown skin like lightning…

…“What is that smell?”  Helen Chen froze at the entrance, aghast.  “It smells like rotten meat and stale piss in here!”

 “That’s me,” Barbara said, facing the ship’s coordinator…

Barbara then explains to Chen – and us – the logic in her seemingly mad experiment:

“My endocrine system is quite extraordinary now.  I’m secreting powerful messenger chemicals – it’s what you’re smelling – they elicit the over-production of neurotransmitters in men: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin and others.  To their unsuspecting minds, I exist both as loving mother and magnificent lover.”

Barbara’s reek, while seeming to be repellent at first, is really an attractant.  And it comforts her students, who have voluntarily accepted transgenic modifications in order to have a chance at being spared rape or death by the coming prisoners.  The students’ changes aren’t as evident as Barbara’s but if separated from her and her comforting scent, they too will become the enormous, “curvy” being that takes the fertile rotundity of Paleolithic Venuses to a whole new level.  Barbara wants the rest of the crew, including the questionably gendered Rodriguez and the female-to-male Jackson, to inject her blood in order to complete the clever standoff.  Later, Jackson participates enthusiastically, but Rodriguez refuses, echoing a protest that is usually likely to come from an Octavia Butler character, not to mention countless characters in sci-fi/speculative literature.  And he learns another of Barbara’s…enhancements:

“So my choices are to live like a subhuman or become something less than human?  Fuck that!  I choose to be my own person!  Even if that means dying.”  He took a swing at Barbara, but she easily caught his wrist.  He struggled and tried to pull away, but the muscles beneath her flab were now incredibly dense.  She was twice as strong as any man, even a carefully crafted one.

Eventually the men led by scumbag Sousa-Cruz breach the Ashaba.  Gushing with stinky sweat, Barbara simply reveals her mountainous naked body: “Everything slowed as biology took over.” 

Barbara only stood there, enthralled by the sight of the men swaying like blades of grass in a breeze.  They literally vacillated with anticipation, their gun barrels wavering from their mark. 

Does Barbara’s plan succeed?  Sniff, sniff, sniff…

A lot, if not all, of the other Butler-inspired fiction in Near Kin is pretty good.  Some titles that surface when I think of it are “Waking Dr. Wexler” by Angel Uriel Perales (a wonderfully written story that seems to involve a sort of time travel, at least via madness or dementia), “No More Stories” by Jordan Alam (in which characters experiment with a device that allows for the virtual piggybacking on other people’s dreams), “In the Beginning” by Meghan Elison (which seems to be an excerpt from or an offshoot of her dystopia novel, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife), “Sweet Autumn” by Charie D. Le Marr (which involves empaths, probably in honor of Butler’s The Parable of the Sower/Talents), and “Saint of the Unknown Universe” by Linda Ravenswood (in which a woman kills her abusive man, discovers that he was a robot all the while, and wonders how she’d ever become pregnant).

Balance by Fabiola Jean-Louis

Much of Near Kin’s poetry is very worthy as well.  “Dreams of the Slave” is written by Walidah Imarisha, a teacher, writer, spoken-word artist, “historian at heart, reporter by (w)right [and] rebel by reason” (her words). The format of the poem is quite…vertical, which helps one imagine it being performed by the author.  The narration is full of slave imagery and the plaintive patterns of the oppressed; the narrator mourns the loss of her sold love.  She remembers his wise words of hope and assurance, but in the absence of her love she wants “the night sky to go black./Suck up the light/and leave only darkness.”  Her despair turns to joyous rejuvenation when her love directs her toward freedom, symbolically pointing North and evoking the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman and the bravery of both escapees and the whites and blacks who pitched in despite the great risk. That freedom was earned in part by the slaves whose blood was shed and still cries from the ground, and it seems to be symbolized in what I interpret as a vision of an old ex-slave woman who holds out her hands to show scarred wrists but no chains, a sort of transfiguration.

The weight of hope
is crushing me,
and I no longer
care to struggle
for breath.
But when I look to the heavens
my love is there.
Smiles,
teeth pinpricks of light.
My love
points north,
and I see
the stars take another shape:
round face
intense eyes –
hair growing like
untamed cotton.

Her broad lips
the shape of freedom.
I look at her wrists:
No chains –
There are scars
but no chains…

…And I heard the whisper:
It was not in vain.
Nothing was in vain…

…You
will not
be lost…

Sticking with the subject of slavery, Sherese Francis had Kindred as her inspiration for “Give Me Your Hand”:

You pull me
back in need of saving
But I am pulled
for me and you…

Your survival
hinged on my back,
and I have the leathery scars
to remember
our strange symbiosis…

There are many kinds of slaves, of course.  As we saw earlier, slavery can result from biochemical perfect storms, as it was posited in Alex Hernandez’s “A Thing of Soft Bonds.”  Michelle Angelini unwittingly sings Hernandez’s tune in her poem “On Becoming Part of the Crowd”:

I transition
as if turning from a teenager
to an adult with a more
intensive hormonal overdose,
It is exquisite torment – too much…too much…
Will I survive going through it?

I belong
Now I’m inside the circle and have power
over others.  They are slaves without
knowledge and I gained
a unique power.
What will it be?…

“There Is Nothing Inconsistent” by David Scriven is deceptively simple but resonates (how I hate that term!) long after it’s read.  At once surreal, animistic and metaphysical, it has a slight Octavia Butler feel: weirdness, nature, the ever-present threat of death, the grayness rather than stark contrasts of the human heart.

…There is nothing inconsistent
About believing that
The smell of rotting flesh
Tells the presence of a ghost…

…There is nothing inconsistent
About believing that
A man is evil,
Or good,
Or that words cannot hurt you.

Julia Stein indirectly celebrates Butler’s feminism in a poem called “1996.”  She reveres women protesting a clothing business propped by Thai sweatshop workers, martyred union-activist Fannie Sellins, Russian-born unionizer Sara Plotkin, whose championing of laborers once touched the steel industry of Pittsburgh, my hometown.  Female activism is viewed as a suprabiological family, a maternal heritage that paves the road for each new wave of collective praxis:

They whispered to use their secrets, handed them down,
mother to daughter.  We have their courage as their inheritance.
Just as our mothers walked across the coal fields
we have begun to walk across the land.

Interestingly, in spite of Butler’s celebrated feminism, she has been criticized (perhaps most notably by feminist Dorothy Allison) for not adequately transcending patriarchy and domesticity, and for having her female protagonists identify with or assimilate to the agents of the power structure or dominant culture.

Reviewer Cherry Wilder included Survivor in what she saw as a negative fantastic trend in science fiction:  “The female fantasy that is currently gathering momentum seems to run as follows: ‘I was the chosen mate of a large, alien-looking male.’”  And, in another contemporary review of the novel, Geraldine Morse bashed what she saw as the basic implication in the unlikely coupling of Alanna and Diut:

If you enjoyed Mandingo, that titillating tear-jerker about the lust of a white plantation mistress for her black slave, you’ll probably enjoy Survivor, which raises the tension at least theoretically by introducing a pleasant bestiality in the male partner, who would closely resemble a six foot tall blue gorilla if such a thing existed.  Survivor isn’t a bad book, and the ploy of miscegenation perks up an otherwise uneventful story, but with apologies to the gorilla, there’s no real meat in it.

What all the authors and artists in Near Kin share is a fundamental appreciation and reverence for Octavia Butler, and some of the poetry addresses this directly.  Wanda Smith’s “Octavia’s Brood and Vision” evokes Ray Bradbury, who seems to be an obvious influence in Butler.  Smith parallels their careers, praising Butler for her more complex characters, and ending the poem with this magnificent imagined scene:

Up among stars on the Milky Way Ray Bradbury
looks around and blinks.
Octavia E. Butler throws him a kiss and winks.

Smith also wrote “Octavia and Playboy,” which addresses the inclusion of such sci-fi giants as Heinlein and Bradbury in the pages of Playboy in the 1960s, and how Butler and other female writers never made it “on pages/between the bunnies,” let alone the Playboy Book of Science Fiction.  Smith produces yet another great imaginary afterlife encounter to close the poem:

If Octavia and Hef do meet among stars in the heavens
she will probably ask, “Hugh who?”

Tara Betts’ “A Sonnet for Octavia Butler” (which I like far more than her other poem, “God is Change”) is biographical:

[S]he burrowed into books – other worlds.
This was one way to speak, a slight curve
toward a future only she could write…

Ink continued to bite
teeth marks into her pages, where change
became God and women felt the past’s lash
and collared futures that echoed the bleak
lives of so many, like her mother, smashed
beneath nightmares that poverty often wreaks…

Perhaps the most powerful tribute to the honored author is in Cat Angelique McIntire’s “Haiku for Octavia Butler,” which has an imaginary Butler as narrator:

don’t look so damn smug –
you’ll all be compared to me.
few will measure up.

– David Herrle, 10/2014

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I read contemporary fiction very rarely these days, so I’d better be damned impressed when I do.  As a sucker for titles, I was curious about Kerry Dunn’s Joe Peace right off the bat.  Wary after seeing that the book was a crime story told in first-person narrative, I started reading, hoping not to have to endure half-baked (half-boiled?) Nicholas Pileggi or Chandler/Hammett fare.  My fears faded after only the first couple pages.  First of all, I’m much more partial to Mickey Spillane than Raymond and Dashiell, so Dunn’s quick-witted but rough-edged style for the narrating protagonist felt like home – without being annoyingly derivative.  Instead, the lingo (clever similes and street-/pop-culture-wise metaphorizing) is respectfully emulous of the hardboiled tradition, showing off Dunn’s good ear for inner and outer speech.

The author also has balls, because Kingpin in Decline is about as threadbare as Cop Gets Into Deep Investigation or A Deadly Mess Right Before Retirement.  The cloth holds together, however.  Plots are secondary to me.  It’s the presentation that impresses, and Dunn does that with skill. But don’t fret, plot people.  You’ll enjoy a tragic love story that’s revealed gradually in tastefully paced flashbacks and made relevant by a certain special someone who shows up in the first third of the novel.  (Attention: no spoilers!)  How Peace and this certain special someone interact, and who she is, rocks his already well-rocked world, reminding me of vintage Spillane: “This girl was twenty and threw daggers.  I felt sorry for the poor bastard, somewhere down the road, who fell in love with her.  He’d have to learn to love the cuts, along with the woman who provided them.”  Also, just the right helping of sentimentalism satisfied this old softie’s heartstring-pulling quota.  Publishers Weekly is right on by describing the book as “an exciting gang story and heartbreaking tale of relationships.”

Joe Peace used to be a cop.  A lousy cop.  A drug-addicted cop trying to maintain a relationship with an upstanding woman who sometimes worked Narcotics Division.  Who makes a better criminal than a former man of the law?  Whether one is a police officer or an attorney, the fall from grace can be that much more intense and deep, thanks to close proximity to the dark side.  Isn’t it obvious that lawmakers are a hair’s breadth away from being lawbreakers – and more primed than laymen to make the easy but drastic transition?  When do-gooders realize that reward comes more quickly and abundantly to do-badders (at least at first), temptation pulls ferociously.  As the narration goes in Joe Peace: “It’s easy to turn to a life of crime.  You just roll over.”

I can’t help but think of the Kleinfeld character in Brian de Palma’s underrated film, Carlito’s Way: a lawyer who has defended and cavorted with high-level criminals so much that he becomes like them.  The film is De Palma’s “answer” to his earlier Scarface, whose lead character, Tony Montana, is a brazen, hasty, vain, coked-out creep.  Carlito is the older, wiser, penitent possible future of the roughshod Montana.  I mention these films because Dunn’s protagonist seems to be on the same trajectory (from Montana’s recklessness to Carlito’s remorse): doing his desperate best to atone for and clear the future path of his degradation, drug abuse and brutal sins – the greatest of which was sacrificing the love of his life to a lucrative and debauched death-culture: “To get what I wanted, I had to give up what I loved.”

Though Peace can be a real scumbag, and not every aspect of the character impresses me, there’s enough introspection, eclectic knowledge, sense of humor and irony to make him charming without risking incredulity (though his mindrobatics could be considered too slick by some readers).  His desire to balance out the stupid and ruthless decisions he’s made in his hollow life, his intense reverence for his lost love, and his pursuit of atonement and redemption are the stuff of heroes.

Not that his redemptive methods are those of a Joe Friday or a white-hatted Ranger.  “To get away clean, you have to play dirty” goes the cheesy-but-true tagline for the action flick Parker (yet another movie in which Jason Statham plays Jason Statham).  Sometimes rules need to be bent to get things straight.  For you sticklers of just deserts, Dunn provides his conflicted character with an indirect, rather banal comeuppance (which underscores Peace’s progressive shedding of blinding, selfish pride), but I won’t reveal what that is.

I think Dunn’s novel essentially illustrates the doom referred to in the New Testament spiel about gaining the whole world at the expense of one’s soul.  After one of the flashbacks about the love of his life, Peace admits: “I’d give everything up, my house, my cars, my money, if I could rewrite history.  But I guess the only reason people want things to be different is because they aren’t.”  The truth is that he never really bought his kingpin role:

I was always aware of the tectonic plates in my head, shifting around…[S]ometimes huge fissures would erupt, and echoes like buildings collapsing to rubble shook my foundation.

Every good rags-to-riches-to-roaches story illustrates the futility of grasping the Real object of Joy and the inevitable failure to obtain utopia, even a criminal one.  Not so deep down we know that we’re on a dead-end road when all we desire is desire itself.  There’s always a sense of loss and unrest.  Even Joe Peace’s surname hints at this (with all the subtlety of a grand piano), evoking the Jewish-bible line about saying “Peace, peace” when there is no peace.

The ultimate lesson after a life of crime and self-destructiveness?  Hell is not necessarily other people.  It’s often yourself. And home may be where the hurt is, but it’s also where the heart is.  As the final line in the book goes: “It’s where the people you love reside.”  To continue my lousy punning, I say give Joe Peace a chance.

review by David Herrle, December 2013

Some of my favorite lines in the book follow.

“We were dining at Mogini’s, an Italian place known for its veal and six-month waiting list, even though the place has been only been open two months.”

“And if motherhood is a fact, fatherhood, when you get right down to it, is a hypothesis.  Now, I ask you, who the fuck wants to be a fucking hypothesis?”

“His dark coat…swallowed him like a great sin.”

“He was one of those dudes who, if you were in a good mood, brought out compassion.  In a bad mood, you could kill the bastard.”

“Nothing put me in a dim frame of mind faster than effluvia all over me.”

On the band R.E.M.: “I liked those guys better when I couldn’t understand a goddamn word they said.”

“Her strawberry-blond hair framed a serene face in a way that suggested she worked on it…But nothing about her was soft.”

“I glanced at my watch, thinking, I just had sex with my watch on.”

“He patted my knee like a psychotic grandmother.”

Other Nick reviews: here and here

Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee and Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Impossible

I recall so well the braggadocious accolades that accompanied the 2005 “restoration” of Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee (1965), the much-maligned Western drama unceremoniously dumped on the market where it instantly became something of a colossal flop. Peckinpah had run into opposition from Columbia (the studio footing the bills) and non-compliance from his producer Jerry Bresler (a yes man for the front office). But in 2005, some seventeen years after Peckingpah’s death, critics like Boston’s Chris Fujwara and The Washington Post’s Steven Hunter were falling all over themselves with superlatives extolling the restored version as “magnificent…a unique piece of threatening…alcoholic cinema” with “high-end adult” themes and “a better grade of savagery,” carrying with it the ballast of “actual ideas…back in all the fractured glory and confidence.”

I would just like to go on record as saying that the only thing “fractured” herein is the movie, either in its theatrical or restored cut, the latter an approximation of what Peckinpah might have hoped for had his own steady hand been on the Moviola.  Yet I cannot even lay as much claim or faith in Peckinpah’s personal aspirations for Major Dundee, having begun it, as he did, without a finished script and basically shooting with only a very fragmented vision of the end result bouncing around in his head.  In hindsight, Peckinpah’s  unwillingness to revisit the film years later seems to attest to his own painful divorce from this artistic implosion of ‘high-end savagery’: a film that, doubtless, Peckinpah found nearly impossible to reappraise honestly without nursing a very large bottle of scotch.

Peckinpah had initially assigned the script writing duties to Harry Julian Fink, a middling writer (at best) who had been more prolific in television than movies. Dissatisfied with Fink’s prose (at 163 pages, it tended to ramble on – and on), Peckinpah undertook to edit down the material himself with assistance from Oscar Saul, who was by no means a heavy hitter but had more movie credits to his name. Yet, the results of all this perpetual tinkering seem to have given way to the old adage about “too many cooks spoiling the broth.” While Peckinpah had ambitions to create a sweeping epic masterpiece in the Western genre, comparable to David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (Peckinpah’s favorite movie) from 1962, what he ultimately succeeded in resurrecting was the modest Monogram B-programmer with an A-list roster and production values that nearly sank the studio. 

Major Dundee is an intimate Western drama. Yet, in casting Charlton Heston as his title character, Peckinpah all but diffuses the ill-fated chimerical saga into one where its larger-than-life protagonist is unable to part the wilderness and lead his people onward without sacrificing his own powers as a major star. Heston championed Peckinpah’s vision for the movie when no one else seemed even mildly interested in making it. But he was to regret this decision when the director embarked upon his own irascible odyssey for perfection. Heston’s towering performance – however subtly nuanced – is nevertheless working against type. Not that Heston ever played a steely-eyed bastard before. In fact, he’d convincingly done so for William Wyler in another Western, The Big Country (1958).

But Charlton Heston and Major Amos Charles Dundee just don’t seem to go together. Heston gives a very credible performance, only the starch in those army britches is just too stiff, and the character never evolves beyond a very cold-hearted martinet who briefly loses himself in the arms of a Hispanic prostitute (Aurora Clavell).  This after having already seduced the top-heavy Teresa Santiago (Senta Berger) during an afternoon swim. The inability of the screenplay to give us even an ounce of sympathy for this cruel taskmaster, and Heston’s unapologetic adherence to the character as written, yields a characterization dangerously close to becoming the villain of the piece. Indeed, by the last act the audience is more apt to root for the doomed southern Captain Benjamin Tyreen (Richard Harris), who meets with a vicious if heroic fate, than the unrepentant Dundee, who is still willing to sacrifice every last man in his detail to save his own face by apprehending the blood-thirsty Apache marauder, Sierra Charriba (Michael Pate).

Harris’ performance is the standout in the film, full of contempt for Dundee’s methods but not without more than a modicum of self-loathing that challenges the audience to dig a bit deeper into his motivations and ultimately come to respect Tyreen’s sacrifice. The others in the cast, Jim Hutton as the regimented Lieutenant Graham, Michael Anderson Jr. as bugler Tim Ryan (on whose surviving diaries the film’s narrative is supposedly based), and particularly James Coburn’s masterful rendering of the one-armed native guide, Samuel Potts, offer the briefest of reprieves and escape from Dundee’s oppressions. But in the end they’re not enough to make us forget what a terrific monument to the damned Dundee is: a polarizing force who maintains the flimsiest tyrannical control over his men using nothing greater than the art of intimidation to keep them resentful, but also, regrettably, in line.

Adding to Peckinpah’s woes, Columbia chose to slash the film’s budget by a million and cut his shooting schedule down by fifteen days, just two days before principal photography was about to begin.  Peckinpah’s ability to work under such conditions bears out his commitment not simply to the actors or the film, but to will a finished product more finely wrought than the average fair of its day, yet painfully out of step with what the paying public wanted to see. The other great sin foisted upon the production, after Columbia executives decided to oust Peckinpah from the director’s chair and recut the movie themselves, is its jaunty Daniele Amfiteatrof score, full of rousing marches and other rambunctious orchestrations better suited for a Mexican fiesta on Olivera Street than the somber depiction of one man’s spiral into a kind of self-imposed purgatory.  For the 2005 “restoration” a new score was commissioned from Christopher Caliendo, more in keeping with Peckinpah’s vision for the film.

Yet that vision remains myopic at best. The story hardly improved by the added 14 minutes of “lost” footage placed into the film. There’s simply more to consider and – unfortunately – less to admire.  Howard Kunin, William A. Lyon and Donald W. Starling’s editing retreats into a series of visually overlapping montages. We are exposed to Sam Leavitt’s breathtaking cinematography: the sprawling Mexican landscapes imperfectly cut down into snippets awkwardly running into each other like jigsaw puzzle pieces that don’t fit but are being forcibly made to give the appearance of a perfect interlock.    

The story, such as it is, involves Union cavalry officer Major Amos Charles Dundee, mildly disgraced at the Battle of Gettysburg and relegated to the wilds of New Mexico where he micro-manages a prisoner of war camp. Prior to the main title sequence we witness the blood-thirsty Apache leader, Sierra Charriba, and his men massacre a small village of ranchers (men, women and female children, as well as Union cavalry sent there to protect them). Hence, when Dundee arrives with guide Samuel Potts he is committed to digging a mass grave. Upon returning to the camp Dundee decides to enlist as many of his prisoners for a special detail to hunt down Charriba. But Dundee’s motives are hardly altruistic or even in service of achieving justice for the fallen. Instead, his is an enterprising plan to rebuild his own tarnished reputation as a great military man and hopefully to elevate the army’s opinion of him from these currently abysmal circumstances.

Captain Benjamin Tyreen is hardly fooled by Dundee. Yet he remains chivalrous to a fault. Tyreen’s innate hatred of Dundee stems from an incident before the war when the Major cast his deciding vote in Tyreen’s court-martial from the U.S. Army for participating in a duel. In the theatrical cut our first encounter with Tyreen occurs after Dundee has already returned to base camp. He admonishes Tyreen’s refusal, and that of his fellow Confederates, to enlist in the cause of murdering Charriba. In the extended cut we meet Tyreen and these men as they strike a guard in their feeble escape attempt. Apprehended by Dundee and brought back in chains Tyreen and his men are informed that the guard they meant to merely wound has died of his injuries. Having been told by Tyreen that he would rather hang than serve, Dundee accepts Tyreen’s terms and begins to build his gallows. This stalemate is eventually broken by Tyreen, who physically assaults Dundee while still in chains and confers on him the terms for his complicity in the plot. Tyreen and his men will hunt until the last Apache is dead, but with the understanding of a full pardon awaiting them at the other end.

Although Dundee never actually agrees to these conditions he does not outwardly reject them either. Tyreen also promises that when the war against the Apache has ended his own private war against Dundee will result in the Major’s execution. Begrudgingly valued for his soldiering, as well as his gumption, a weird détente occurs between Dundee and Tyreen – tenuous at best, and infrequently threatening to break under pressure. Still, when push comes to shove, both men represent a united front that adheres to the mark of valor ascribed true military men. This is one of the oddities of the screenplay, for Tyreen repeatedly tells Dundee that he has no country after the civil war and seemingly zero loyalties to the newly formed United States of America.   

The strained alliance between the men is divided along lines of class (cavalry vs. prisoners), further splintered by North vs. South and colored vs. white. When these factions are not busy warring with each other they infrequently engage the Apache in several disastrous battles that brutalize the men and inflict many casualties. Charriba and his posse retreat to Mexico, garrisoned by French troops loyal to Emperor Maximilian. Knowing that to cross the border means a direct confrontation, Dundee nevertheless orders his men across the Rio Grande, into a small impoverished town overseen by Teresa Santiago, whose husband was executed for supporting Benito Juárez’s rebels.  

In a previous altercation with Charriba, Dundee lost most of his garrisons’ supplies, badly needed foodstuffs he was hoping to recoup in the village. Instead, Dundee shares what little remains with the impoverished villagers, allowing French forces to escape for backup. When these do indeed return to the village Dundee ambushes them by night, taking his lion’s share of badly needed supplies. Although Tyreen is cordial to Teresa, it is Dundee who conquers her heart – albeit very briefly. In an unguarded moment Dundee is wounded in the leg by Charriba’s arrow and forced to hold up in the French-occupied village of Durango – presumably for weeks – while Tyreen moves the men onward in search of this Apache viper. Losing himself in drink and self-pity, Dundee is discovered in the arms of a Spanish prostitute Melinche by Teresa who abruptly ends their vacuous affair, telling Dundee that for some men “the war will never be over.”

Tyreen returns with boastful swagger, challenging and humiliating Dundee in order to shake him loose of his inner regrets. A reformed Dundee returns to his men, feigning a sudden loss of desire to apprehend Charriba. The Apache leader falls for the rouse and plans his final attack, determined to murder Dundee and his men. Affectingly, Charriba’s arrival is met with a clever ambush instead. Bugler Tim Ryan, who has “become a man”  by losing his virginity to a Spanish girl, fires the fatal shot that puts a period to Charriba’s reign of terror. Their mission completed, Dundee and his men are outflanked by the French at the Rio Grande, making repeated valiant charges to cross it but incurring massive casualties, including Tyreen, who, wounded but still bitter, defies death to delay a second detachment of French cavalry singlehandedly. Dundee and his fragmented forces cross the river and head for home.

In either its extended or truncated form, Major Dundee remains a curious flop. Its ascribed epic quality useful perhaps only to describe the way the film persistently misfires at every conceivable turn and on practically every artistic level – and this, despite Peckinpah’s rather obvious attempts to will a silk purse from its sow’s ear. The strangeness of this artistic implosion is that Major Dundee never catches even the tail fire from some weighty performers giving it their all, coupled with its vistas and straggly landscapes meticulously lensed by Sam Leavitt but rendered muddy and dull in Pathe’s flawed Eastman color process. These invoke world-weariness all too readily apparent in Heston’s mellifluous performance as the dower Dundee, but regrettably do not equate to, foreshadow or even infer a looming sense of foreboding and grand tragedy that Peckinpah hoped for.  The…uh…romance between Teresa and Dundee is more dulcet than juicy and all but eclipsed by another: the fiery “bromance” between Tyreen and Dundee, two men who clearly share more than a mutual admiration beneath their outward derision of one another. 

I’ve set aside my own admiration for Peckinpah herein; a film maker elsewhere revered. But in all honesty, Peckinpah has made it all too easy for me to disregard and dislike Major Dundee. The flaw is not entirely his to bear. But in the final analysis, the film is little more than a major blunder, resurrected to prominence by its renewed resurgence on home video, though not to any greater level of artistic poignancy that one would have anticipated. I dislike being overly critical of movies in general. Even the bad one’s take time and ingenuity to make. But Major Dundee is a film that had a lot going for it at the start. That all its attributes combined come to more gumbo than glory left me feeling cheated from my viewing experience. 

And I watched it twice, first in its newly restored director’s cut, then again in its original theatrical cut. I will say this: for me, at least, the extended version just seemed like too much of a bad thing, the prolonged scenes never enhancing my understanding of the story. The pacing of the theatrical cut played much more “clean” in its narrative approach and to the point, at least, in my opinion. Regrettably, the essential tension is all but ruined in the theatrical cut by Daniele Amfitheatrof’s brutally buoyant underscore, laughingly making some of the visuals play like a badly blunted operetta rather than a Western epic. Christopher Caliendo’s 2005 score parallels and punctuates the action far more astutely.

Major Dundee has been released by Sony exclusively through Twilight Time/Screen Archives. We’ve been given the rare opportunity to watch both cuts, each on a separate disc with varying extra features. The 1080p image has been consistently rendered, illustrating the shortcomings of Pathe Eastman color film stocks. The image is very thick. Blue skies flicker purplish brown. I also have to say that the sequences shot at night are much too dark, particularly in the extended cut. Our introduction to Tyreen, being captured in his attempted escape from the camp, is a sea of blackness from which only Richard Harris’ wan face occasionally emerges from the murkiness as a disembodied head.

Flesh tones are more ruddy orange, though infrequently they look fairly accurate. Grain has been accurately reproduced. Again, the Eastman stock translates most of the outdoor landscapes into an indistinguishable brownish earthy tone. Trees are muddy grayish green rather than vibrant. Blue skies tend to appear washed out. These are not – I repeat – areb not a flaw in the mastering process. Sony has done their utmost to preserve the original look of the film. The audio on both cuts is 5.1 DTS but sounds infinitely more refined on the 2005 extended cut, perhaps because effects and dialogue had to be remixed with the newly recorded Caliendo underscore.  Extras are somewhat satisfying. We get both scores on an isolated track. On the extended cut we also get an audio commentary by Nick Redman, Paul Seydor, Garner Simmons and David Weddle. There’s also a litany of extended outtakes and deleted scenes, the original trailer and its 2005 reissue, plus an exhibitor’s reel.  Overall, I like what Sony and Twilight Time have done on this title. I just wish the material they had to work with – namely, the film – was more deserving of their hard efforts. Bottom line: not recommended.

Few natural disasters are as ingrained in my mind as the 2004 tsunami that decimated the coastal retreat of Khao Lak, Thailand, an event of such mind-boggling devastation its total comprehension is virtually impossible to fathom for those of us who were not there. The shaky images captured by terrified tourists on their iPhones and other home video recording devices flashing across our television screens were significant only in presenting the paralytic moment of impact and its immediate aftermath. But the overhead shots of earthy-colored rising tides consuming the coastline were strangely surreal, or perhaps even artificial, like a spectacular CGI effect created by Hollywood artisans instead of a raw and eviscerating act of Mother Nature.

I must confess to a naiveté. Until 2004 I don’t think I ever even heard the word “tsunami” before, or perhaps had but chose not to register it consciously as anything more than a big wave knocking over a few trees. Certainly, I had never seen one broadcast in real time and, God willing, hope to never experience such a cataclysm in my own life. But in the days and weeks that followed, survivor testimonies began to filter through the media outlets. These were not merely heart-wrenching but crystalized the experience as terrific and as awe-inspiring as any apocalyptic “end of the world” scenario Hollywood could concoct. Most definitely it must have seemed this way for Maria Belon and her family, come to the newly inaugurated Golden Palace Hotel for a little R&R over the Christmas holidays and looking forward to nothing more substantial than a week of lazy lounging on Khao Lak’s ivory sands.

This vacation, however, was to turn deadly for 230,000 people, a loss of human life so staggering that to discover even one survivor from this perilous afternoon seems more a miracle now than it perhaps did then. To learn of five – all in one family – is a phenomenon, as well as the subject of Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Impossible (2012). Bayona tells the tale from Maria’s perspective, albeit with one minor artistic flub: the Spanish Belon family has been morphed into a decidedly Caucasian/British brood headlined by Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor. Otherwise, The Impossible quickly acquires artistic integrity as an unrelenting portrait of heroism despite overwhelming tragedy. Its triumph of the human spirit genuine and satisfying.  

Bayona and his screenwriter, Sergio G. Sánchez have managed an extraordinary feat: to tell a true story in a compelling narrative without embellishing or twisting the facts. By Maria’s own harrowing account, we experience the epic wrath of the huge black wall of sea water smashing into bungalows, counterbalanced by excruciating moments of gut-wrenching fear racing through our protagonists’ minds. The drowning sensation Maria herself has described as “like being in a spin dryer” is realized for the audience in all its heart-palpating, nerve-jangling dread. The Impossible is not an easy film to watch – and not chiefly because we know the event being depicted actually happened, but rather because the performances given by Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor and Tom Holland seem so “of the moment” and “in the zone” of the close-knit Belons suddenly torn asunder by this swirling maelstrom.

Most disaster movies brutalize the audience, placating our morbid desire for catharsis. We are able to survive fires, floods and the proverbial gnashing of teeth all from the comfort of our plush theater seats or cozily snuggled up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and favorite soft drink in hand. But The Impossible is different somehow,  almost documentarian in its approach, and it forces us to live through the nightmare moment by moment. The drama yields to an even more unquantifiable appreciation. By the end of the first reel we have completely set aside the premise that these are actors assuming just another role in their ever-expanding repertoires. Watts, McGregor and Holland manage no minor coup when they all but disappear from our collective consciousness, replaced by a haunted verisimilitude that gets under our skin and rattles a deepening trepidation with the even more daunting realization of finding loved ones still alive – if, in fact, at all – after the repercussion from those subsiding tides.

Our story begins predictably enough with the Bennett family’s arrival to the Golden Palace, a picturesque Thai resort newly opened to the public. Physician Maria Bennett (Watts), husband Henry (McGregor) and their three sons Lucas (Holland), Tomas (Samuel Joslin) and Simon (Oaklee Pendergast) have been looking forward to this getaway – particularly Henry, who fears that his job at a Japanese firm is about to be terminated. Director Bayona resists the urge to simply jump right into the thick of things. Instead, he conscientious sets up the story with a few choice scenes that establish the special loving nature of this close-knit family: Henry and Maria’s devotedness to one another and Lucas’ selfishness in his inability to understand Tomas’ fear of flying.

Bayona does an exceptional job recreating the relaxed cadence preceding the deluge. We observe the resorts’ guests partaking in a moonlight candlelit balloon launch, the sun-filled beaches a resplendent tropical paradise beckoning Henry and his sons to go snorkeling, the entire family submitting to a retirement from their worldly cares. Regrettably, this respite will be short-lived. For on the next day, as Maria prepares to curl up in her deck chair with a good book and Henry and the boys frolic in the pool, an unexpected shift in the breeze and the scattering gulls overhead mark fateful seconds of quiet repose before the disaster unfurls. 

Triggered by a cataclysmic earthquake in the Indian Ocean miles away, the initial tidal wave unleashes its fury: uprooting trees, tearing apart bungalows and flooding the resort with a mountain of murky salt water that consumes everything and everyone in its path. Maria and Lucas are swept away. Henry is unable to get out of the pool with either Tomas or Simon, presumed to have fallen under the crushing weight of the ocean. Director Bayona does a fairly brave thing with these scenes, silencing the soundtrack repeatedly as Maria’s head periodically slips beneath the raging waters – in effect, realizing the sensation of being drowned for the audience.

Against all odds Maria and Lucas manage to reunite, perilously clinging to floating debris until at last they are propelled far enough inland where the waters have receded, leaving behind their path of unbridled destruction. Compositing CGI with full-scale dump tanks and miniatures of the resort, Bayona manages to effectively recreate this incalculable annihilation while never once allowing it to anesthetize the audience in their complacency for more special effects. Maria’s leg is badly injured. Without proper medical attention she will surely die of infection.

Lucas and Maria discover a small child, Daniel (Johan Sundberg), who is separated from his family and trapped beneath debris. These three climb into a tree to relative safety to await rescue.  A local Thai father and son (La-Orng Thongruang and Tor Klathaley) find Maria, Lucas and Daniel and drag Maria – literally – to a nearby makeshift hospital where, due to a mix-up, Maria is labeled with another survivor’s name. Thus, after being encouraged to go and assist the others, Lucas returns to find Maria’s bed empty and told by the Red Cross Nurse (Jomjaoi Sae-Limh) that his mother has died.

We shift focus back to the waterlogged remnants of the Golden Palace where Henry, Tomas and Simon have survived. Henry entrusts seven-year-old Tomas to Simon’s care and sends his boys on ahead in a truck bound for the hospital while he sets out on foot to learn what has become of Maria and Lucas.  Injured by falling debris, Henry is taken to an evacuation center where various survivors share their stories. At first Henry is understandably numb. But when another man, Karl (Sönke Möhring), desperate for news of what has become of his own family, willingly offers Henry a chance to call home using his cell phone to explain what has happened, Henry is overwrought with crippling anxiety and hopelessness. Enough cannot be said of Ewan McGregor’s performance in this scene.  It’s so lyrically heart-breaking, so utterly true to the moment in its unraveling of his composure.

Bayona counterbalances this absolutely tremendous moment of realization with another – more understated, but nonetheless graceful. We see Tomas, having arrived at a rest stop for the night, quietly observing the twinkling stars in the night sky as Simon sleeps by his side. A kindly old woman (Geraldine Chaplin) approaches, asking if she may sit with him for a while. To this inquiry Tomas responds as any child might: “How old are you?” To which the woman replies: “Seventy-four. How old are you?” “Seven,” Tomas admits. In this single scene Bayona has captured the essence of the tragedy, impactful to both young and old, sparing no one, yet bringing everyone together.  

Now, Bayona telescopes his narrative into its ultimate reunion for the Bennett family. Lucas learns that Maria is alive, having survived surgery on her chest but still very weak and facing an even more arduous operation on her leg. Through a whim of fate the rescue truck with Tomas and Simon has stopped for a moment on the outskirts of the hospital, and Henry – his own search for Maria thus far come to naught – has also found his way into the wards.  Maria sees Henry through the heavy gauze of her curtain but is unable to call to him. Meanwhile, Simon, needing to use the bathroom, jumps from the back of the truck to relieve himself on the side of the road. Lucas, who has glimpsed Henry leaving the ward but has now lost sight of him, instead finds Tomas and Simon. Their tearful reunion is heard by Henry who cannot believe his great good fortune. Karl instructs the driver of their truck to move on. Lucas takes Henry to Maria’s bedside and after another successful surgery on her leg the family is ushered by their insurance provider aboard an airplane bound for Singapore – their ordeal at last at an end.     

The Impossible is perfect storytelling, not because it seeks to transform its narrative catastrophe into high art, but rather because it uses the visualized narrative fiction to humanize a story we only thought we knew from newsworthy accounts.  Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor give career-defining performances. The word “performance” usually defines the artifice in acting. But herein I use the term merely as a reminder of how seamless both Watts and McGregor are in resurrecting that raw emotional center of the piece, undeniably the movie’s greatest strength. Tom Holland is an old soul in a boy’s body, absorbing the character of Lucas as part of his DNA and taking on more ballast than one might expect, but never in a way that seems beyond the character’s years. 

Fernando Velázquez score is appropriately subdued and reverent. We get none of the deafening groundswells generally associated with this type of underscoring but rather a quiet, understated and all together effective bit or musical foreshadowing. Dídac Bono, Lek Chaiyan Chunsuttiwat and Marina Pozanco’s production design works its own minor miracle on a budget. The film’s singular flaw is Óscar Faura’s cinematography. I’ve stated before my zero tolerance threshold for shaky handheld camerawork. Faura’s is among the most equilibrium upsetting in recent years. There are other – better – ways to create visual tension. Masking your actors by constantly moving the imagery around doesn’t equate to creating visual art. It never does. It never will. Otherwise, at 114 minutes The Impossible is a succinct drama. It takes us on a terrible journey, but one that is ultimately life-affirming.

Eone and Summit Films have assumed the distribution for The Impossible in North America. Their Blu-ray delivers the hi-def goods, revealing the finer details in Óscar Faura’s copper-toned cinematography. The 1080p image is sharp without appearing to suffer from digital manipulations. The stylized contrast, boosted to bleach out whites, is well represented. The 5.1 DTS audio will give your speakers a workout, but dialogue early on seems thin and lacking in spatiality.  Extras are abysmally bad: two featurettes (each under ten minutes long) in which impressions made by principal cast and crew are distilled into mere snippets inserted between truncated scenes from the film. The audio commentary by Bayona, Sanchez and Maria Belon is far more astute and comprehensive at putting the pieces together for us. We also get a few scant deleted scenes and the original theatrical trailer. Bottom line: highly recommended!

Nick Zegarac is a freelance writer/editor and graphics artist. He holds a Masters in Communications and an Honors B.A in Creative Lit from the University of Windsor. He is currently a freelance writer and has been a contributing editor for Black Moss Press and is a featured contributor to online’s Subtle Tea. He’s also had two screenplays under consideration in Hollywood.  Contact him via movieman@sympatico.ca.

In the past 90 days or so I have had difficulties getting a good night’s sleep. For me that means at least about five to six hours uninterrupted by bathroom visits. As time went on the amount of sleep was gradually reduced to about one or two hours, and then 45 minutes of restlessness: watching TV, reading, feeling anxious and unsettled emotionally. Eventually I was feeling sleep deprived during the day. I greeted too many dawns fully awake.

One particular night was an insomniac’s fare: sleeplessness punctuated by tossing and turning, walking about the house as if a nomad, worrying about what this experience was and what it meant. I surveyed what had happened or what was happening to me, and the following factors loomed large. Of course, I was the last to know.

I had been sitting in on a course on grief which I felt was creeping into my mind in a way that, apparently, was not healthy for me. When the instructor’s child had died at the age of six, she chose to wash down her daughter’s body before the coroner got to her. Unnerving, odd, peculiar, if not creepy in this day and age – or is there such a thing as this day and age when it comes to human beings and their behaviors? I was also struggling with a second reading of Becker’s The Denial of Death, whose implications were unnerving intellectually and psychologically, essentially that we are all caught between a fear of living and a fear of dying, often more obsessed by the latter than the former. I don’t deny death, for each day is adieu to who I am. I know that and more so at 73 as I near my end. All death and dying is imminent if we give it a moment’s consideration.

I had recently returned to psychotherapy after four decades with the express self-purpose of attaining support for all kinds of issues, one of which was to find solace or “comfort” as I stumbled into oblivion. Consciously I was seeking a friend, a companion, to keep me company as I teeter on the fathomless abyss. Apparently I was obsessing over the years left to me and how was I to use them without resorting to a panicked-filled bucket list, Americana at its most strident. In this Duck Dynasty nation we don’t relate to one another. What we do is sell off parts of ourselves like so many dry goods each moment of the day. I was living in fear, drenched in it.

All of these concerns combined, I believe, served to keep me up through the night at subliminal levels, barely conscious to myself until I began to ask questions. One day I expressed all this to my wife, Jane, and I felt some relief later on as if something had lifted or eased, but not too much so. Nevertheless, after checking with a pharmacist I settled upon an over-the-counter supplement, Melatonin, as something that might ease my nightly sleeplessness. It didn’t work. Thinking about all this, I called my physician’s assistant, made it clear to her that my sleeplessness had an undercurrent to it of anxiety and asked if she could ask the doctor for a non-addictive medication. I am glad I fully expressed the anxiety part of it and did not hold back.

He prescribed Trazodone, “an antidepressant used to treat depression [that] may also be used for relief of an anxiety disorder (e.g. sleeplessness, tension), chronic pain  and other conditions…” (It is the first time in my life I have ever had to take such a drug for such a condition.) So the medication seemed on target. I’ve been on it for fewer than three days, and some relief has been given – but not a full night’s sleep. The prescription information says “it may take 1 to 4 weeks to work.” Well, it hasn’t kicked in as yet, but I hope it does. I must wait.

As I think over and reconsider the cumulative weight of worry all these past weeks, wreaked upon me by myself, I observe how fog creeping into me like Sandburg’s cat  paws gnawed at my inner self, shrouding me, making me unclear to my own self. I was self-depressing myself. I was making myself anxious. Somewhere, unconsciously, I chose to somatize these mental tensions through sleeplessness. And latent stresses were telling my unknowledgeable self that I was not awake, not aware of what was occurring in me. So sleeplessness was a telegram to myself, a symptom. What is keeping me awake? If you stay awake, you might defer and delay dying, at least for this one night. Perhaps. I am morbidly amused.

About a year ago in a different medical situation, a nurse practitioner asked me if I was generally an anxious person. I quickly said no defensively, as if it implied an imperfection in myself. I lied to her. I am an anxious person, and a worrier. The fear is that the personal idiosyncracies of my very own special death and dying will not be controlled in any way — that high anxiety will win out and flood me, as I lie dying, serving doubly to compound the process itself making it even harder on myself, a constituent of my personality, in any case.

To die is the final loss of control, as if we have ever controlled anything in life. I imagine my fear is that I will be blown apart, disparate selves, atomically unglued and unhinged when I “allow” death to have its way with me. That is the great fear in me, the loss of control. And that, I think, creates whirlpools of anxiety in me. I don’t want to lose my grip on things. I have been that way all my life. Something had happened to me so very young that control was the lifeboat, the charade I clung on to for all of my life.

For me it is a great fear to die explosively, to become particulates, to burst asunder and to be no more. I suffer from dread.

I cannot say more. I experience dread, the all-consuming, all-devouring primal anxiety. I don’t want to hear an observation, be asked a question, be given an answer or proffered a therapeutically astute interpretation. Primally, I want to be held by my mother, in her arms, like a young child, as I pass through. Motherly attachment might ease my cowardice.  There, there, child, just hold me.




© Mathias B. Freese

Matt is a writer who lives in Nevada.  He’s the author of The i Tetralogy, Down to a Sunless Sea and This Mobius Strip of Ifs.  Visit his blog. His major works are now available in Kindle format.