#ShePersisted: Run Lola Run(!)

In Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (1998; German title, Lola Rennt), the plot is set in motion when the fledgling criminal Manni -- Lola's lover -- bleeps up a drug deal and consequently has only 20 minutes to come up with 100,000 marks before the "bad dudes" duct tape him to the bottom of das u-boot. And it's up to Lola to get it for him. She has no money and no transportation, hence the running.

She knows she can't do this alone. The odds are against her. She has no prayer. Before she can help Manni, then, she needs someone to help her.

To whom does she turn? Faces of her friends and family flash before her as she becomes the lonely axis of an indifferent world revolving around her (by way of special effects is what I'm saying).

She persisted.

The spinning wheel stops on "Papa," whose face appears on screen, and Lola races down a spiral staircase before she can see him shake his head, "No. Don't look to me for help."

I can relate.

The world is an uncaring place, really, and I am its hub, as are you, while it stubbornly turns in obedience to Nature's laws, one of which -- gravity -- assures us that we can race up or down any number of spiral staircases looking for help or a Better Place, but we ain't going nowhere.

And even if I could leave, there is no place to rest my weary, fearful head. 

But that's just me, us, that's just now, this troubling epoch we find ourselves in in the Year of Our Lord 2017 when countless calls to seemingly reasonable leaders, our trusted shepherds, fall on deaf ears. (Scholars have given these non-responders the Latin title dubious rubious.)

God help us, we lift up our eyes only to see the Heavenless heavens, hosts only to tiny dots of light racing toward us and away from their long dead source at roughly 186,000 miles per second.

No one would help this guy, either: Marshall Will Kane (Gary Cooper) in High Noon (1952)

Our great-great-great-etc.-grandmothers, too, heard this eternal note of sadness and were forced to look behind the Veil, chiefly due to the Victorian Era geologists' poking their noses into fossils and such, and beginning to suspect the planet was much, much older than the 6,000 years postulated by Bishop Ussher.

A sense of abandonment, then, pervades the great and voluminous literature of the Victorian Age, reflecting a huge chunk of the population's fear that their Father had gone away -- shaking his head, as it were -- or, worse, had never existed in the first place.

But the Victorians persisted, endured and, in their own BBC-period-piece way, prevailed.

A few centuries before Run Lola Run, another tale about a desperate German girl circulated among the menschen, and we know it as "Hansel and Gretel." 

That story, like many of Jesus' parables, utilizes the rhetorical strategy of "typification and reversal," as they call it on the streets: The teller begins with familiar types -- plots, characters, tropes, etc. -- that suggest an obvious, well-worn, comforting moral, then "reverses the anticipated destinies of the characters," thereby dashing the listener's expectations and replacing their carpet of complacency with one that flies.*

Early in Hansel and Gretel's quest, for example, the girl is the crybaby and the boy is the comforter, telling her repeatedly, "Do not cry. . . . The good God will not forsake us." We know what's coming: The courageous male will save the weak female.

Left to right: Hansel, Kellyanne Conway, Gretel

But by the end -- spoiler alert -- Gretel is the savior, pushing the witch into an oven, then helping her navigationally challenged brother get back home, teaching him in the process that it was no longer possible for the both of them to ride on a duck's back. 

So choose one: God did not forsake them; he worked through Gretel to save them. Or, God did not hear their cries, so Gretel took matters into her hands. Or God heard their cries, but . . . 

Lola is a 20th-century Gretel: a damsel in distress, she is also figuratively an orphan: her mother's primary allegiances are to alcohol, her telephone and television, and maybe her hair ("SHAMpoo!"), and her father tells Lola he isn't her father. Here, Hansel and Gretel's parents are reversed: Lola has a wicked stepfather and an ineffectual mother.

The enigmatic bank guard refers to Lola as "our little princess," facetiously telling her "Courtesy and composure are the queen's jewels," evoking more familiar fairy-tale images. 

Furthermore, she and Manni have no Fairy Godmother, no Wise Old Man as a mentor or a guide. 

Lola's quest-driven plot, like Hansel and Gretel's, begins in scarcity, and ends in abundance. It's probably too much to claim that the "Hansel and Gretel" allusion is reinforced by Manni's trying to save them by robbing a grocery store -- a house of food? Right?

Lola, like Gretel, has to do the dirty work. Manni is neither her Prince Charming nor her Knight in Shining Armor. Like most men, he is an adolescent boy: impetuous, immature, half-cocked and self-centered. He is weak in faith. Not the stuff of heroes, my brothers! 

Her victory comes from her will, her refuse-to-lose mentality, generated from her love (inexplicable, as always) for Manni. Does he believe in her? No.Trust her? No. Thank her? No. Since she loves him, does any of that matter? Hell no!

Her power comes to her incrementally, her three mad dashes creating an upward spiral (the film's dominant image). After her first run, she resurrects herself in the interest of unfinished business. In a scene set God knows where (Lola's hair isn't red, but the lighting is), she tells Manni, "I think I have to make a decision. . . . I don't want to leave. Stop!" And her second run begins. (And this time she knows how to work the safety on a handgun.)

A narrator tells us life is just fact and theory. Lola's interlude scenes (above) are theory. Note the spiral.

A similar scene before the final run closes with Lola telling the dying Manni, "You haven't died yet," and off she goes. 

Having just used a Vertigo shot, Tykwer pays homage to the film AND reinforces his spiral motif.

In the "third time is a charm" run, Lola's power first reveals itself when, hitching a ride in an ambulance, she revives the dying bank guard, stunning the med who failed at resuscitating him. There is something telling about the way the she holds his hand, the way he can't take his eyes off her. 

And then . . .

Still desperate, still clueless, time flying at her back, Lola runs, her eyes closed, and in a voice-over we hear her say to an unnamed auditor, "Come on. Help me. Please. I'll just keep on running, okay? I'm waiting. I'm waiting. I'm waiting. I'm waiting." And still she runs. We know what Hansel would tell her: "The good God will not forsake us."

Yet another story here

Running is not waiting, not entirely, and it leads her into and out of the path of a German redneck truck driver and into a casino where she wills Dame Fortune -- maybe her Fairy Godmother after all -- to be on her side. Her power is manifested in her scream, a woman's scream, capable of breaking clocks and changing Fate.

Like Gretel, she brings the jewels back home -- to a crossroads, actually. (The life-saving loot is in a golden bag. The one from the grocery-store heist was red; the one from the bank job was green. Discuss.)

I'm too sophisticated to draw a moral from this. And if yours is "It's simple: God helps those who help themselves," I reject it. No, Run Lola Run is a work of art, I'm sure of it, so it settles for telling the truth, and that's enough, and my friend Oscar Wilde told me "The truth is rarely pure and never simple."

Lola is an immoral outsider, a misfit, a loser, a huge disappointment to her parents, if they took the time to notice.  Manni deals in illegal drugs. Neither are clean enough to sit at the table of respectability, let alone become legislators or bishops.

"After the game is before the game."

But grace comes to them anyway, chiefly because a sweaty woman with her hair on fire, who isn't much of a runner, and who has no connections, persists any damn way, refusing to give up because she can't afford to.

Whether anyone is listening or not. 

*For more info on this rhetorical device, see Robert W. Funk's Honest to Jesus and Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride."

Film & Faith: Ten Commandments

"So let it be written, so let it be done."

-- Ramses, repeatedly, in The Ten Commandments

ABC-TV will once more gobble up some good ratings by showing Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 version of The Ten Commandments some time during Easter weekend.

For its relevance to Easter, you need to watch it on Blu-Ray where the images are so vivid that in one scene, if you hit pause and look very carefully, you can see a bunny in the background.

Bunny or not, this film was one of the first to make me ponder my relationship with the Creator of the Universe. By "relationship," I mean something like "are we on speaking terms?" or "are you really like they say you are?"

It began when I heard one of my aunts call The Ten Commandments "a wonderful sermon." Another said it had "a deep spiritual message." I didn't know what they could possibly mean by that, but I knew I could use these testimonials to talk my parents into taking me to it. Who can say "no" to an 8-year old boy who actually begs to sit through a 3-hour, 39-minute sermon?

It took forever for the film to get to Madison, but it was a big deal when it got there.

Moses before the burning bush.

The day I saw Ten Commandments (hereafter, 10C), the delight in crossing the boundary from life to more-than-life grew in intensity the way, I suppose, attending a Christmas midnight mass makes a garden-variety church service seem banal.

As I settled into my floor-level seat (the Woodard's balcony was still reserved for black people), my feverish anticipation made my popcorn and milk duds difficult to enjoy. 

After at least a couple of days, the heavy red curtains opened with a series of squeaks, revealing a thinner, transparent curtain (a scrim, I guess), and as it opened, the lights dimmed, and I prepared to be whisked from Madison directly into the pages of Exodus, the stories of which I had heard many, many times.

To my great disappointment, 10C actually began with DeMille himself, in front of a curtained backdrop, telling us how to feel about the film, but after that . . .

It was really exciting to watch the film-long transformation of a young Charlton Heston from an Egyptian prince wearing a side pony tail like Napoleon Dynamite's girl friend, to a heroic runaway slave exiled by a scowling Ramses (Yul Brynner) and then to the drastic makeover after his conversation with the burning bush.

First we hear Yvonne de Carlo's Sephora (also called Zipporah), Moses' wife, say, "He's seen the face of God," then we are shown Moses with his hair and beard freshly moussed and frosted, walking toward her, his eyes gazing heavenward. It was a great look, and my sister assured me that people who saw God really did change like that.

Moses after the burning bush.

The scene where Moses talks to the bush (it's actually God) contains some dazzling special effects for its time, especially once the bush starts inscribing the commandments on a boulder by hurling fire balls at it.

And when God speaks from the bush, He sounds suspiciously like Charlton Heston with a severe head cold. But this was my response at the time: "So that's how God sounds." My sister said, yes, that was exactly how He sounded.

Turning staffs and spears into snakes, and Moses's snake eating the Egyptian snakes, all the plagues, the parting and unparting of the Red Sea -- all of it, what a feast for my young, impressionable eyes!

Seeing Pharaoh's entire army, chariots included, floating underwater -- what a joy to see these powerful villains sinking to such depths, caught off guard by the underdogs and sent to sleep forever with whatever fish then called the Red Sea home.

And, looking back, I can honestly say I have never again seen so many Egyptians drowning at one time.

Far too soon, the film reached its sad ending (spoiler alert!) in which Moses cannot cross over to the Promised Land. This felt like a raw deal to me. All he had gone through, having to channel all those deadly miracles onto Egypt because God kept hardening Ramses's heart; the stress of tolerating and herding the thick-headed, whiny children of Israel by now coloring his long, long beard a snowy white; and for what?

To let Joshua enjoy the fruits of his labor? Played by John Derek who would eventually marry Bo Derek? No fair!

I was so mesmerized by this film, I even enjoyed the Intermission. And, being a young boy, it wasn't necessary to use the 10 minutes to relieve my bladder in the already sketchy theater men's room, where one of the local bad boys occasionally enjoyed flushing a cherry bomb down the toilet which would then resound like a sonic boom as moviegoers were, for example, just about to enjoy a chaste kiss between the professional virgin Doris Day and the still closeted Rock Hudson.

And the score of 10C! You could walk by the theater and hear it emanating from the cinder-block walls:

Y
Sure, watching the movie now I realize it contains arguably some of the worst acting in film history outside of Ed Wood's laughable efforts at becoming the next Orson Welles. But there's no arguing with DeMille's showmanship, his passion for spectacle, and his ability to slip scantily clad dancing ladies into every bible-based film he ever made.

You gotta love Ramses' badass blue hat.

After seeing it the first time (I saw it several more times before I entered my Age of Reason), I really did feel like I had just heard a wonderful sermon, the only wonderful one I'd ever heard.

It reiterated all that I had heard about God speaking to people (he personally "called" men to the ministry and gave personal advice to job hunters and car buyers) and about the power of faith (with even as much as a mustard seed, people could move mountains), and somehow DeMille had made it all seem more likely.

Even though most of his shots looked like only slightly animated pictures cut from a Sunday-school booklet, his set was realistic, and it was filmed in Egypt, and those were real people with actual sweat and such.

I felt lifted. I had had a child's mini-religious experience.(I distinctly remember having another of those as a young adult when I was driving back from Tallahassee after seeing The Exorcist.) While still under its influence, I decided to put my now fortified faith to work.

I went into the woods and trimmed the twigs off a fallen oak branch. Then I walked a quarter of a mile to a large pond called Lake Francis (it still exists, just off Highway 53 as you enter Madison from the I-10 exit).   

Good luck with this one, Moses!

I waited till I was convinced no one could see me. What I was about to do wasn't for entertainment, it was just for me. I looked out over the pond, took a deep breath and mustered up as much faith as I possibly could, then spread my arms, the oak branch in my right hand.

I took one last quick look around, saw no one, then closed my eyes and "faithed" with all my might. 

It was just a pond, for God's sake, how hard could it be?! Using King James English, God's own language, I begged the Lord to help: "Show forth thy power, O Lord, and parteth this pond for thy glory and in thy name!"

I stood there for a good while, hardly moving a muscle, just occasionally partially opening one eye to check for progress. Once I saw some slight movement at my feet, but it was only a water bug mindlessly darting across the surface. I closed my eyes tighter and gritted my teeth. I was running out of ways to faith up.

After a while, I heard a car coming, and, even with the miracle so close at hand, I didn't want to risk looking like a complete idiot, so I opened my eyes and used my rod and my staff to poke around in the mud as if I were searching for something.

Finally, I acknowledged that my faith was smaller than a mustard seed and Lake Francis was going to remain unparted.(I was in Madison just a few weeks ago, and Lake Francis was still fully intact, one stupid little pond with no excitement whatsoever.)

Before I allowed my staff to go back to being just an oak branch, I tried for a quick consolation prize. I dipped the staff into the water and tried to turn it into blood. I probably don't have to tell you it didn't work.

**********
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Free Ten Commandments extras:

Trivia: The baby actor who played the infant Moses was Charlton Heston's son Fraser, who grew up to direct the film version of Stephen King's Needful Things.

The troublemaker Dathan was played by Edward G. Robinson near the end of a career devoted chiefly to playing mobsters and tough guys. The voice of Chief Wiggins in The Simpsons is an imitation of Robinson's.

Yvonne De Carlo, who plays Moses's wife, would later play Herman Munster's wife, Lily.

Vincent Price, one of film's greatest horror actors, plays Egyptian bad guy Baka.

Here is the original NY Times review of Ten Commandments when it was released in 1956.

Finally, the NY Times review of the recently released Blu-Ray version.

Good God, Y'all! Bring Us a War!

More than a decade before I received my draft notice during the Vietnam War, Hollywood was busy programming my psyche for the big moment. Maybe their intention was simply to make millions selling entertainment to a grateful, relieved nation, still craving cinematic celebrations of escaping the evil clutches of the Demonic Triad: Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini (our generation's Snoke, Kylo Ren and Darth Vader). 

But in the process, they might as well have laced our polio vaccinations with a testestoronic cocktail that would blossom into a relentless desire to become patriotic warriors  -- for a while, anyway.

So Hollywood is where we'll start a reminiscence of the crappiest mail day of my life.

All those American World War II movies I saw as a kid in the late 1950s and early '60s -- what did they teach me?

They taught me that war might be hell, but it was a glorious one. 

And speaking of hell, they might've caused me, for the first time in my life, to understand the conditional or selective or relative nature of religion. My ethos had been pretty much defined by Southern Baptist teachings by then, so I would've already memorized and taken to heart the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Jesus.

So I knew about "thou shalt not kill," "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," "love thy enemy," "turn the other cheek" and "blessed are the peacemakers." I'd also seen Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments and saw how the commandments came to be and what God sounded like when he inscribed them in a fantastic way on the side of a mountain. (He sounded like a 45-rpm recording of Charlton Heston's voice played at 33-rpm.)

When I saw so many people getting killed in that film, I sort of let it go, because I had already learned not to hold biblical standards too tightly to the standards of literary realism.

There was so much killing and looting approved by God in the Old Testament (which my dad read aloud to me almost nightly), a sensitive little guy like me had little choice but to accept the bible as art not to be taken literally. 

How else could I look forward to a life wandering around on a planet where its Creator might at any time choose to smite the snot out of me and my family?

But in those WWII films (in which God tended to play a less significant role, in fact, rarely showing up except for those times when a strategically placed bible kept a Jap bullet from killing Corporal Johnson from Arkansas), I saw regular old non-King-James-English-speaking men shooting each other like hunters peppering a covey of quails with bird-shot.

And they did it with no remorse and with no one in the movie or the theater yelling out "Hey! Thou shalt not kill! You're going to hell for that! I'm telling! God sees everything!"

So lesson learned: "Thou shalt not kill, more or less. But when someone threatens your country, you can shoot their sorry selves, and you won't be charged with it."

And, of course, I also watched western movies, so: "Thou shalt not kill unless you're trying to turn a huge continent into the new Promised Land or the new Eden or the City on the Hill, and you're slowed down by an indigenous population who, never having invited you in the first place, are now trying, in their primitive way of communicating, to kill you." 

So killing in war was like scoring points in basketball, and war, too, was a team game, so you had plenty of guy buddies, even Yankees, that you initially didn't like, but with whom you eventually bonded, so much so that when the Krauts blew up Petrocelli with a hand grenade, you actually cried and tried to give him a final drag on your cigarette before he took his last breath. 

Then you'd go all Achilles on Jerry (slang for Germans) and wipe out an entire squadron as payback for the death of a guy you couldn't stand back in boot camp.

"Thou shalt not kill," my ass! Killing could be a good thing. The audience cheered. And the young guys in the theater, hopped up on Zero candy bars and Pepsi and having adjusted their respective moral codes (except for the psychopaths, of course), became impatient for their own time to come around at last, so they too could demonstrate their love for the United States -- which didn't even include Hawaii or Alaska, for crying out loud -- in a savagely violent but socially acceptable way.

The weird moral moratorium on "Thou shalt not kill" spread like the plagues of Egypt over other issues. Amputations, for example, became a sign of heroism and not a massive inconvenience for the amputee. Young men dying was not tragic, because they were soldiers and their deaths led to a good thing, an American victory. 

In an eerie, subliminal, insidious way, this cinematically sanitized red-white-and-blue view made these military fathers, brothers and sons expendable. Anyway, they would soon return as the names of streets and field-houses and parks and such. And poor Billy from a Wisconsin dairy farm, who was run over by a tank, is now up there with the angels, smiling down on the country whose freedom he protected. 

All of it, all the butchering and martyring and dismembering, was not only okay, it was good. God looked at it, and saw that it was good.

All of this I learned, not from history or any detailed knowledge of what that bastard Hitler was up to, but from some of the lousiest, cheesiest, phoniest movies ever made. My dad, who served during that war, but avoided combat because he was blind in one eye, couldn't stand most of them, not for moral reasons, but for their inauthenticity. People didn't talk out loud in theaters back then, but he would lean over and whisper to me, "That is not how you salute," "You don't salute sergeants," "You can't hit nothing holding a weapon like that," and so on.

And he would never go see WWII movies that featured John Wayne because it steamed my dad's onions that "the Duke" could basically replace George Washington as the father of our country without ever serving it, never squeezing a trigger with his faux heroic index finger.

But boys my age gobbled it all up like candy. We had not seen Rashomon yet (God forbid! It was Japanese), so we didn't know movies could "lie." And the few movies that tried to depict the numerous obstacles of transitioning from combatant to civilian were nothing young boys would go see. The finest of them, The Best Years of Our Lives, came out in 1946, a bit before our time, and we would've never sat through all three hours of it anyway.

We only digested the romanticized guts'n'glory part of war. And, like fried chicken and biscuits, once digested it became part of us. We longed for it, craved those green helmets and the heroic burden of machine guns, belts of ammo, a canteen -- even as we saw in real life a veteran with his wooden leg, another with paralyzed legs who got around with those shiny crutches that clasp your arms, a teacher who had a colostomy bag, and many men with thousand-yard stares before we'd ever heard of the term.

Primed by the endless fare of sanitized Victory Parades, we lived our little insignificant snotty-nosed lives and waited for the next war.

By God, we would be ready, and we would answer the call.

Holiday Wishes for Amy Winehouse

"He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise."
                           -- William Blake

Dear Amy,

We really miss your voice, and it is difficult not to think of you while we celebrate this time of giving gifts to show our love for family and friends.

We don't know if you loved us, but your voice was a gift of gold, and we loved it so much we destroyed it in our rush to open the package.

So we have a lot of explaining to do. We owe you condolences and apologies.

First, we are sorry that nature gave you a body with a proclivity for attacking itself. By all reports, it cursed you with a a deadly eating disorder and a vulnerability to addictions. And we're sorry that your own father used you as publicity bait and even provided the inspiration for your heartbreaking, wrongheaded ballad "Rehab." Many of us knew as soon as we heard that song that your life would be short, your songs few.

In Amy, the documentary about your tremendous gift, your rise to fame, your descent into celebrity and your destruction by alcohol and heroin, we heard one of your friends say, "We were always there to help Amy when she asked us," or words to that effect. 

But how many addicts who live only to use their chemical of choice would ask for help? An addict's heart must be more than broken, must be nearly finished beating, before she cries out to us. We're sorry your friends didn't know that.

We're sorry you fell in love with and married a heroin addict, so maybe you were never sure whether it was him or the highs you loved.

But most of all, we're sorry we were so dazzled by your gift, we weren't sure how to receive it. We were confused by its emanating from a broken, but striking body. Your voice expressed a kind of knowing anguish, nothing speculative or artificial about it; your voice articulated the agony and depth of what we simply call "heartbreak"; it sang of a timeless pain, of a person grown old from suffering and disappointment, who could turn her public mourning into the sound of angels weeping.

Young Amy

How were we to remember that the singer was just a vulnerable little Jewish girl from a poor background? No wonder we handled you so roughly. 

We can be such brutes sometimes, Amy. What's wrong with us? We were listening to "Back to Black" and "Love Is a Losing Game" this morning, and we were reminded of the long trail we've littered with the bodies of great talent, and of Don McLean's lament for one in particular, Vincent Van Gogh:

Now I think I know what you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they're not listening still
Perhaps they never will.

And we thought of poor Dylan Thomas and his thunderous (but often drunken) public readings, dying at 39. The poet Donald Hall, who knew Thomas, believed that "In our culture an artist's self-destructiveness is counted admirable, praiseworthy . . . . that it is natural to want to destroy yourself." 

Amy at rest

This assumption, Hall argues, "expresses only middle-class culture's self-hatred. Death and destruction are enemies to art . . . . gas and sleeping pills kill poets; drink and drugs kill poets more slowly, but on the way to killing the poet they kill the poems." 

And we're sure not going to get any more poems from you, Amy.

We wish we could see talent as something to be cherished, honored, nurtured, protected -- like a newborn baby, for example. Something as delicate and lovely as Laura Wingfield's glass unicorn but with the healing power of the Grail.

Instead, in its presence we regress to toddlers so taken with a butterfly's beauty that we grasp it tightly and wind up with no beauty at all, just butterfly guts and dust in our palms.

And I'm really sorry that when you began to crumble and fade, as we knew you would, we felt the need to watch. Just as Mitch in Streetcar had to see Blanche at the mercy of the harsh light of reality, we fought to see your flesh fall away, your mascara mask running down your cheeks, your inability to sing a single note at a concert.

Blanche in the light

Conventional wisdom asserts that ultimately we want our heroes and heroines to be mere mortals like us, but it's worse than that. Our needs are more vampiric. We need to drain them entirely, esp.of that which is too great for us to understand. We send in the paparazzi to record their humiliation, not their humanity.
  
It's all gone now, isn't it, Amy, both the body and the gift.

We're really sorry. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. 

We hope you have returned to the source of all Art, where the holiday spirit of giving lasts year round. So enjoy the holidays, Amy, while we enjoy the little piece of Eternity you left behind.

With much love,
Those Who Watch

Very human handwriting . . . but listen: 

Literary Virtues of Stephen King's It . . . So Far

My favorite It cover

Because I am retired and like to read, I decided to reread one of my favorites, Charles Dickens' Bleak House, and also to try to find out why so many people cite It as their favorite Stephen King novel. I read a little from each work every day and, as I near the halfway mark of both, I'd like to point out some of the literary merits of It.

Dickens' virtues, of course, are well chronicled and need no help from me, while King continues to have a band of hecklers and detractors, hence my decision to come to his rescue once more so he will not feel so bad about the billions of dollars he's earned by writing in the lowly horror genre.

Here are a few of the qualities that make It a terrific read:

1. Even though the Signet edition is 1090 pages, King doesn't dilly-dally for 100 pages or so creating a creepy atmosphere. It begins with this sentence: "The terror, which would not end for another 28 years -- if it ever did -- began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain." I love this blending of immediacy and uncertainty. "Terror" is the only thing the third-person narrator can be sure of. He has no origin story, really, and can't be sure the terror will ever end. Furthermore, even as the teller, he is not sure the story can be told, that It can be put into words (but, man, he sure tries).

 

2. King is the king of evoking genuine, as opposed to sentimental, nostalgia. The word comes from the Greek for "returning-home pain," and King's nostalgia, in It and elsewhere, is poignant, spilling over into painful. He knows that reflecting on the "good ol' days," if done honestly, hurts a lot, partly because those days were only good in certain respects, and you, you imperfect dimwit, were already you, and also because, good or not, those days are not coming back, and you can neither revise nor revive them. His description, for example, of an adult returning to the home of his youth (even if that home is Derry, Maine) is so vivid we can all see the destruction of our own hometowns, where Billy Joe's Five and Dime has transmogrified into a Wal-Mart.

It terrifies me when Beasley does this.

3. There are times King seems to pad his giant door-stopper novels, and the discerning reader is encouraged to start skimming until King is ready to get back to his story. I felt some of this while reading Under the Dome. So far (I'm on p. 494) there is none of that in the gargantuan It. Instead, the pages are filled with fresh stories (a good example is Mike Hanlon listening to his terminally ill father relate the tragic history of The Black Spot and Maine's version of the KKK) that ultimately matter and would be intriguing even they didn't. Or, like Charles Dickens, he'll invent and develop a new character well past the point where most writers are already finished and are out on a book tour.

4.  And finally, so I can get back to the book, It goes big like a real piece of literature that means to remain relevant and make the reader squirm in the face of reality (a word rarely used to praise the King). Because I am a grownup who is somewhat rational, It doesn't give me nightmares about gutters and clowns. Rather, it troubles my sleep with the knowledge that Derry is an Everyplace, and the clown Pennywise is the evil that seeps into it and makes itself at home there.

It rises from the plumbing in every house that makes a home for child and spouse abuse, greed, racism, cruelty to gays and bullying in all its repugnant forms. In Derry, evil is in the soil, the water, the air, as it is in every town. So the only part of the plot that crosses over to the fantastical or implausible is that children -- now adults -- who have survived this evil, return to save their community from It's grip.

Most communities aren't that fortunate.

Just as an aside, King is playful enough to wink at his literary-snob, guilty-pleasure readers by naming three of his minor characters after major ones from Noble-Prize winner William Faulkner: Snopes, Sartoris and McCaslin. In the best of all possible worlds, some snob (like me) would be hiding It behind The Sound and the Fury when he sees those names. Somehow that strikes me as a kind of "gotcha" moment.

Well, back to It. I think I know how it's going to end, but I won't skip a single word on my way there.

Overlord: A True War Story (Revised)

My favorite film of all time is a war film. It's called Overlord and it's a British film made by Stuart Cooper in 1975.

Take away the stock footage of World War II courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, and you have a very short story -- essentially a biography -- of Tom Beddows, a simple, decent, well-meaning, gentle, witty young man. He is called up during the war and is sent various places to train for the invasion of Normandy (for which "Overlord" is a code word).

Add the stock footage (37 minutes worth, to be exact), used to greater advantage than any I've seen before, and you have a poignant, melancholy, intimate merging of one little life with the mind-boggling, mammoth, two-headed War Machine, one part Hitler, one part Allies. As you can imagine, the little guy, good-spirited as he may be, is no match for the Juggernaut.

Director Cooper doesn't need much time to characterize Tom and his relationship to the war. He is nowhere to be seen for the first three minutes: The film begins with a black screen and the sound of men, horses and trucks, then cuts to archival footage shot (by Germans) from planes. Near the segment's end, Hitler is shown looking out the window of a plane, apparently admiring the accomplishments of his luftwaffe. Still no Tom.

Brian Sterner as Tom Beddows

The next shot pans left to right on the faces of British soldiers on a landing craft, but, though we learn later that this is Tom's outfit, Tom is not among them. Next is a cut to a grainy, unfocused shot of a soldier running toward us; he is shot, his weapon flying from his hand. Before that image can sink in, it is graphically matched to pre-war Tom running toward us.

He is supposed to be catching a bus to his basic training (or induction), but he's racing back home to pick up a copy of David Copperfield and to say good-bye to Tina, his pet spaniel.

Because of this delay, Tom has to catch a later bus, misses his train, and reaches his destination late and alone. Anyone who has ever been in the military or has seen bad movies about it, already knows this guy is in "a world of shit,"  and is about to get torn a new one, as the vulgar expression goes. 

Don't we know Tom by now? Haven't we met people like this? How would they do, storming the beaches of Normandy? What chance would they have?

Tom is made of the same stuff as Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, Tim O'Brien's Tim O'Brien, and the young narrator of Randall Jarrell's "Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner" (see below). Whatever that stuff is, it was not made for war.

He knows from the start he will die, and part of the confusion of first-time viewers of the film is that Cooper shows us Tom's premonitions of his demise, his death fantasies. Because he is a young man with a lively but immature imagination, his premonitions are romantic, glorious, heroic. So, throughout the film, don't be confused when you see him gunned down -- his premonitions of his death and the events leading up to it are just one of the film's three realities.

Admittedly, there is no such thing as "objective reality," but World War II itself is the closest Overlord comes to that elusive concept, because it is presented through "objective," "nonfictional" footage. It is loud (the sound has been added in almost every instance), disturbing and terrifying, while simultaneously horrifyingly beautiful or, maybe, beautifully horrifying. like footage of an F-5 tornado. 

The damn thing has a personality. It is a monster we humans have created in order to protect ourselves and our interests. Heartless, but not brainless, it is our human-made Vortex into which millions, even good-natured little Tom, get sucked up into. As one writer from the Vietnam War said, "War degrades every thing and every person it touches."

As the war footage continually reminded me of this truth, I thought back to how such footage was used in those awful WWII films of my youth. Mainly, they were intercut with shots of, say, John Wayne aiming his weapon at the japs or jerries to make it look like he was actually in the war, which of course he was not. In short, even to a kid, it looked rigged.

Not so in Overlord. It actually follows and, in a sense I can't quite explain, maps out poor Tom's journey to Normandy. Not one frame of it is wasted. Not one frame leaves the viewer untouched by its power.  

So this is the film's "real" "reality." To reiterate, its "film reality" is Tom's training for D-Day and his eventual landing. And finally there is the non-chronological externalizing of Tom's premonitions. This will all become mostly clear to you on re-watching this jewel.

Another war film tradition is the little lady back home, the Cheerleader Motif as someone calls it (actually, I call it that). Overlord, like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, turns that convention inside out. The only girl Tom has back home is a literal "bitch" (his spaniel Tina) as is made clear in a bit of wordplay between him and his friend. But, in his imagination, at least, he establishes a relationship with a character known only as The Girl, and this is depicted in just a few short scenes, only one of which is "real."

The most touching scene between Tom and The Girl is too much of a spoiler for me to describe, other than to say it is masterfully filmed, perfectly demonstrating Tom's blurring of romantic love and romantic death. If I weren't writing this, I'd go watch it again right now.

Does all this attention to Tom's humanity, to his childlike, playful, vulnerable nature make Overlord an antiwar film? This war was a successful effort to save the rest of us from Hitler and his kind, so it's hard to be against that. But Cooper certainly refuses to romanticize it. No one is going to name a street or building after Tom Beddows or any other character in this film. Tom is no more heroic than you or I, regardless of how he dies (if he does die).

Truthfully depicting war and its consequences is probably about as antiwar as a filmmaker can get. Overlord is honest in its portrayal of Tom and the war. The former has a face in which we see his humanity; the latter is faceless -- you know, "boots on the ground," etc. As a true war story, it doesn't have a moral, doesn't make you proud, doesn't really make you want to salute anything.   

There is much more to say about this film, but you'd be better off finding yourself a copy of the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray edition, listening to director Stuart Cooper and actor Brian Sterner (Tom) discuss its filming, and reading the enclosed booklet written by film scholar Kent Jones. This edition also has tons of information about how footage from the Imperial War Museum was put to use in the film.

"The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
                              -- Randall Jarrell

Night of the Hunter: Dark, Light Classic

All moviegoers should be required to watch Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955) before they’re allowed to label a film great, beautiful, creepy, or strange. They should also be required to watch it by themselves, a with lights dimmed, on a screen no smaller than 42 inches with everything else unplugged.

For literary types, think Mark Twain, with his belief that humans are dimwitted, rapacious, conniving, hypocritical bandwagonners, married to Flannery O’Connor, the Catholic writer who believed people's heads are screwed on so backwards they have to be gored by a bull in order to have a shot at redemption. 

But don’t think about that too long.

For film students and budding critics, think David Lynch's Blue Velvet stirred in with Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade. And keep in mind these odd couplings are taking place during the post-war Eisenhower years, an era of such cinematic prudishness it has come to be known (by me) as America’s Victorian Age.

Charles Laughton

So naturally a real critical and commercial bust when it first came out, this fine brew has aged extraordinarily well. Check out these credentials:

The prestigious French film journal Cahiers du Cinema ranked it as the second most beautiful film ever made. The film’s villain, Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum at his absolute best) is No. 29 in AFI’s top 100 film villains. The late Roger Ebert called it “one of the most frightening of movies with one of the most unforgettable of villains.”

The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1992 and, most importantly, it is among my top-five favorite films of all time. So do not, in the name of all that is cinematically holy, let the fact that Night of the Hunter is in black and white keep you from enjoying this stunning film or, for that matter, from enjoying this somewhat well-written commentary on it.

On the surface, this seems to be a simple Southern gothic yarn about Harry Powell, a psychopathic killer, and his effort to find $10,000 left behind by executed killer Ben Harper for his two little children, Pearl and John, who, sadly, are in the incapable hands of their scatterbrained mom, Willa, played by a young, very trim Shelley Winters.

Laughton after critics bashed Night of the Hunter

But thanks to Laughton and screenwriter James Agee, it becomes a disturbing fairy tale-dark fable about a battle between good and evil played out on the rickety stage of an obscure little Depression Era bible-belt community in West Virginia.

Like so many works of art, the film derives its beauty and power from the tension between opposites, contraries, paradox and incongruities. Take that bible-belt community, for example. These people pretty clearly practice that old-time religion (the “old-time” brand, by the way, actually began roughly the time this film was set), but the story’s pervading conflict is between harsh, deranged, manipulative, conniving religious hooey and genuine Christian charity.

Viewers would not yet have greased their fingers with buttered popcorn before seeing these opposing forces on the screen.

Night of the Hunter opens with credits appearing and dissolving against a pitch-black starry-skied backdrop and a jarring, ominous score that my musically inclined colleague calls a kind of dark fanfare made up of timpani, low brass, probably including trombone, and maybe a trumpet, with either a string instrument or high woodwind tossed in for good measure. 

In less than a minute, this unsettling opening transitions into a mellow, but not altogether soothing lullaby sung by children’s choir. Here are the lyrics:

Dream, little one, dream,
Dream, little one, dream.
Oh, the hunter in the night
Fills your childish heart with fright.
Fear is only a dream,
So dream, little one, dream.

I find this the least comforting bedtime poem since the "If-I-should-die-before-I-wake" prayer that had me reflecting on my mortality well into the night back when I was a wee lad. Just to paraphrase: "The night hunter frightens your childish heart, but that's okay because fear is just a dream, so go to sleep where you can dream, which is where fear and Freddy Kruger and Harry Powell dwell. Sleep well, little one!"

Lillian Gish as Mrs. Cooper

The opening credits end with the last word ("dream") of the lullaby, but the starry sky stays, and an unidentified older woman, from the waist up, now appears against this backdrop. So with no earthly setting, she begins to review what she has told some children "last Sunday." 

Now the faces of five children appear out of the firmament as they hear the woman remind them of the beauty of the lilies of the field, and how we are not to judge lest we be judged, and how we must beware of false prophets who, though they appear in sheep's clothing, "inwardly . . . are ravening wolves."

With the woman still speaking from the heavens, a quick dissolve gives us a God's-eye view (likely shot from a helicopter) of a river cutting through farmland. She continues to speak while three cuts and another quick dissolve take us to a little boy's discovery of a dead woman's body lying on stairs descending into a cellar.

As John and Pearl first see Harry Powell

As the woman in the sky utters her final words, "by their fruits ye shall know them," the camera cuts to another God's-eye view, this time of a man in a black hat riding his 1920s-era convertible down a country road. 

While he drives, he converses with God, with whom he seems to be on intimate terms. Incidentally, we don't hear God's side of the conversation. We soon know this is Harry Powell, the villain. And I will argue later that he isn't.

First, let's recap what Laughton has done with his first 3 minutes: He's counterpointed a sinister opening fanfare almost immediately with a children's lullaby; said lullaby, however, is sinister in its own right; an angelic figure shares spiritual wisdom and warnings to children, all of them apparently up above the earth so high, but in a very dark sky; he then juxtaposes the dark with a view from above that is shot in hard, midday light, but which takes us literally underground (the cellar), then figuratively into the Underworld with the appearance of Harry.

Anyone dizzy yet? Destabilized? It gets worse. Or better.

The film's  most fearsome creature is not the villain, even if he is the 29th best villain in American film history. There is, rather, a collective villain: the numb-skulled, intellectually challenged, gullible, and, to quote my friend Karl Isberg, "micro-cephalic mental midgets" who inhabit the film's community. 

They bring to mind the king's observation in Huck Finn: "Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?"

The real wolf in sheep's clothing is the town's Queen Bee church Lady, Icey Spoon (Evelyn Varden) who, with little exaggeration, could be called Willa Harper's mentor from hell. When Harry arrives in town to find the $10,000, Icey believes it's a sign of God, and "that man of God . . . is just achin' to settle down with some nice woman and make a home for himself."

There is no evidence of that, of course, but once Icey plays the God card, the very dense Willa gives her hand in marriage to Harry, thereby sending her children forth into the Dark Forest with a voracious, relentless -- and occasionally buffoonish -- beast sniffing out their trail like the Hound of Hell.

Much of the remainder of the film takes place as John and Pearl light out on the river in search of a safe haven, and here again it toys with our sensibility and, as far as I know, breaks new ground. Laughton and cinematographer Stanley Cortez combine breathtaking photography with soothing music as we watch completely vulnerable children in flight from a man who would happily torture and murder them. The most scholarly way I can put this is that such incongruity messes with our brain and heart. 

We want to gaze at and savor the moon-dappled river and the little things on the skiff and the foregrounded bunny on the shore, and we want our hearts to be soothed by little Pearl's soft song, while at the same time we're seeing small human beings at the mercy of nature, in a dark and seemingly hostile world.

Pearl and John all, all alone

By now, perhaps we've forgotten all about the woman who spoke from the heavens about wolves in sheep's clothing and such. Well, the kids eventually wash up on her shore, so to speak, and she suffers them to come unto her. A true embodiment of charity and compassion, she (her name is Mrs. Cooper) provides a stark contrast to the numb-skulled hypocrites and doofuses back in the town.

When the two refugees show up at her place, she already has a house full of them, but she recognizes the little Harpers as "the least of these my children," and welcomes them to their new home.

The film's climactic scene is a beauty. When Harry's ominous shadow first covers the wall of the kid's bedroom, he is singing the old hymn "Everlasting Arms." We hear him sing it again when he's on their trail. When he arrives at Mrs. Cooper's place, he sings it again.

Then in what surely won an Oscar in 1955 for Most Incongruous Images and Sounds Juxtaposed in a Single Scene, this fearless, wise, loving mother sings it with him, and we're back to the opening. Watch this:

Like so much else in the film, this grinds the gears of my small(ish) brain. The good shepherdess (armed, as you saw) watching over her flock, harmonizes with the fox in the hen house. For Harry, the song is just more of his malarkey-filled pitch to the unsuspecting masses; for Mrs. Cooper, it's true -- but now it's one song, the voices blending. But even in this scene, regardless of her vigilance, it's clear she can't save them all: While Mrs. Cooper keeps Harry at bay, an owl makes dinner out of a bunny.

As she says later, it is, indeed, "a hard world for little things."

In closing, here is a brief look at some other eye-catching or quirky or thought-provoking scenes that helped turn Laughton's work into a classic: 

Harry listening to God

Early in the film after asking the Lord who he should kill next ("Your book is full of killin,'" Harry reminds him), Harry stops for a striptease performance, knowing already that God hates "perfume-smelling things, lacy things"; he initially has a look of pure disgust at what this filthy woman is doing, but suddenly her dancing causes his switchblade to go off in his coat pocket, ripping its way out, giving us all uncomfortable Freudian flashbacks. Then his expression softens noticeably and he begins a new chat with The Creator of the Universe.

[Spoiler alert] The film's style swings back and forth from realism to expressionism. The latter is in full force in a scene which takes place in Harry and Willa's bedroom. Light and shadow have transformed the room into a chapel, while Willa, the blissful stupid martyr, awaits her fate with all the serenity and acceptance of Desdemona. Harry stands bathed in light next to a window appearing to be receiving more instructions from God.

Bedroom or chapel?

Once he has them, with his trusty switchblade in hand, he moves toward Willa, and the rest of the scene, stylized and mannered, could easily be a dance, a setting for a portrait, or a theatrical blocking rehearsal.

[Another spoiler] Shortly after this scene, we find how Harry disposes of Willa. With her hair floating out behind her like tall grass in flood water, her foolishness is gone (she's certainly no longer shallow) and she is eerily beautiful in her final convertible ride.

Combine this image with music director Walter Schumann's mellow, dreamy score, giving way to Harry crooning "Everlasting Arms" just before the cut, and the result borders on black humor. It's hard not to laugh in the face of horror, and that's not right. 

Willa's last ride

Finally, I can't help sharing Icey Spoon's take on marriage and sex. Remember: You're hearing this in 1955. While she's trying to hook up Willa with Harry, Icey dismisses Willa's first marriage to the handsome Ben (Peter Graves) as "shilly-shally." 

"That wasn't love," she says, "that was just flapdoodle. When you've been married for 40 years, you know all of that don't amount to a hill of beans. I've been married to my Walt that long and I swear in all that time I just lie there thinkin' about my canning." I can't believe they got away with that line, and I'm not going to comment on it.

As I've written this piece, I've watched and re-watched Night of the Hunter until my eyes have grown bleary, and I love it more with every viewing. Consequently, I have discovered a succinct definition of a classic movie: "unoverwatchable."