Spontaneous Pool

~Ted Worthington

I don’t get out much with my buddies anymore. Time marches on, they say. It just seems more and more difficult these days to coordinate. In fact, it’s a rare event indeed when my friends Julian and Greg can get their dates to line up. They don’t always agree. It is not that they are antagonistic to each other, but I guess you could say they just see the world from different perspectives. Julian, a tall guy with dark curly hair and a Roman nose, can be at times pompous, even a bit self-righteous; while Greg, much shorter and balding like a monk, is more practical and flexible; he can move dates around if necessary. Julian is older and won’t let Greg forget it. Greg is often solemn and spends a lot of time by himself, but still enjoys verbal sparring and likes to bait Julian whenever he can. I tend to just watch and listen because their conversations are usually pretty lively.

After mechanically circling the Old Town we found ourselves, by accident—but what is an accident anyway?—at our favorite basement bar, the Little Hand, situated under a fancy restaurant in that part of town where the wet, worn cobblestones shine like twinkling lights in the dark of night. A curled steel railing, cool and wet to the touch, led to a dark concrete stairway that descended past faded and damp posters of concerts few people attended. The massive wooden door at the bottom stood open like a maw, a portal to some distant place or time. Somewhere in the back a jukebox hammered out music; the dance floor was tightly packed, the atmosphere dim, though the feeling of energy rippled through the air. We settled into a table, certain of a good evening, a night out to fulfill that deep-seated desire for a chaotic universe.

“Where does the time go?” Julian said, staring fixedly at his freshly delivered beer bottle.

“The better question would be why,” Greg said, after setting down his already half-full bottle.

“Ugh.” Julian frowned and I smiled. Greg was trying to upstage him.

“No,” he said, waving it off. Then he began speaking in a rhetorical tone that demanded no interruption. “Time – what is it?” he mused. “Is it some long slender thread that ties us all together, endlessly looping around us, binding us together forever? Is it linear; is it circular? Can we cut it? Can we untwine it? Separate it into elemental parts?”

He paused for a moment; his words quickly drowned and swept away by the noise. Before Greg could answer, he resumed. “Others say it flows like a river; it rushes in flood, but must it always flow in one direction? Is Time like the slow accumulation of an hourglass, will it end?

“What,” I asked, “are you afraid of dying?”

“No, no, no. That’s not what I’m getting at. I am talking about Time, in general. Will it run out someday? Or can it flow back and forth? Endlessly refilling and emptying the hourglass?”

Greg, who had been fidgeting during Julian’s rant, finally burst in. “How is time supposed to look?” His eyes challenged his adversary. “Honestly, Julian. Are we here to talk or relax? I know you. Your head is filled with all sorts of mathematical equations and theorems. You see fractals all over the place. You spout probabilities and limits; positives and negatives, irrationals and infinities. You want to transform energy and matter into some sort of fate and destiny as if that were some kind of help. Time just is. Let it be.”

“Are you saying it doesn’t matter,” I asked.

“Precisely,” he said turning to me. “Time, whether it runs forward or back, is what you make of it. I’m just here for the fun.”

In the dim light, I could see Julian’s jaw clench. I knew what would come next. Their conversation was not over, not by a long shot. I guess I felt more like Greg at the moment, though I wasn’t really in the mood for a long discussion. My attention was soon drawn by a young woman at the next table. She was there with two of her friends, all three leaning over a large caldron of margarita, containing tiny paper umbrellas and three long straws. She had a pretty way about her, eyeing me with just the lift of an eyebrow. I knew right away she was not ordinary. Now, logic suggests that life is simply an unbroken chain of future occurrences. But, I could see she never played it safe. She knew.

I stood up almost without knowing it and walked over to her table. Nodding politely to her two companions, my focus was nonetheless clear. I spoke to her with a firmness that gave pause to my friends.

“You and I will play some pool,” I said.

Without hesitation, she got up and walked to the tables in the back, twisting through the network of bodies. “But, I get to go first,” she said with a smile over her shoulder as she slowly swept her long, disorderly brown hair from her eyes and strolled up to the table. The green felt looked so vast, so void, as her fingers ran lightly along the bumpers, which in the dim light looked a slightly deeper shade of green than the table. The bare skin of her arm glowed with a mesmerizing affect. Her movements were soft, yet deliberate. Her every action caused a sensation in me that gave me no choice. I knew how this would end.

From the rack on the side wall she carelessly chose a cue and glided along the edge of table, trailing her fingers across the felt, catching the cue ball softly in her hand. At the far end of the now empty table, she placed the shining white cue ball back on the felt with a studied look. I have to say there is nothing like watching an attractive woman play pool.

Choosing her shot carefully, aiming at this pocket or that, she slid the cue back and forth slowly between her fingers; her hair reached nearly to the felt surface, as she leaned over the table, one leg slightly bent.

She gave the ball a sharp jolt to start the game, sending it nearly the length of the table, toward the left side pocket where you knew the ball had no choice but to leap to attention, spring from the pocket and meet the cue ball with a resounding crack. The balls careened away from each other and came to rest at opposite ends of the table. This is how the game is played. Choose a corner or a side pocket, it didn’t really matter, but whichever you picked, you were locked into the game until the end. The chain of events was laid out in advance; all you had to do was anxiously wait for what you knew was your destiny.

“My name is Anthony,” I felt compelled to say.

“I know.”

For her next shot, she tried to pull the four ball out of the side, though she couldn’t get it to pop up. She gave me a playful sneer with her bright eyes and her lips slightly pursed, then it was my turn. I rolled the cue ball slowly down the along the bumper until the eleven ball drew it more quickly to the hole, until that point where the two balls joined just outside the lip, if only for a moment, and the eleven was freed again, returned to the order of the green felt. Its action carried the cue ball across the side of the table where I could use it again to free the ten ball with my next shot. I sent the cue ball to the corner where it pulled up the twelve and caused the ten to roll closer to the point where they were nearly touching.

“Beautiful shot,” she said, genuinely surprised as each striped ball drew so close to the other. She obviously could tell I wasn’t half bad. I felt a bit cocky and tried to bring a third ball into their sphere but missed. The shot down the length of the table only managed to force the ten and the eleven, at the other end, to drift back toward the cue ball. Again, she flashed a cruel little smile, and then took the easy opportunity to quickly return the one and the two balls to the table. You could see it in her stare; she was eyeing that chance to bring order to this chaos, to dispense with the formality of her solids for that all-important chance to make the rack. But I was desperate to be the one not only fill the table, but to return order to it first. That was, after all, the natural way of all things.

 Thankfully, she missed her shot, and I swept in to bring all my balls to the table, at which point I could start thinking about how I could make my final shot. Each move I made seemed to bring the balls closer together. I was even able to draw up one of her balls. I was getting close. I thought I had it planned out perfectly; I thought I knew where to line up my shots, how to get the cue ball to affect the movements of all the other balls, to make them all come together. I was close, though one miscalculation, one stupid mistake on my part and my nucleus was shattered. It was her turn.

She picked up her last ball and, in two more shots, it was clear to everyone at the bar that she would win. With a final flourish, she gave the cue ball that extra energy she needed, and all I could do was watch in feigned anguish as the balls responded to their heightened energy, shooting off the various bumpers simultaneously as if in an apoplectic shudder to make the satisfying clack that brought everything together into perfect order, sending the cue rolling back to the far side of the table.

After two more games, we placed our sticks back on the wall, spit beer into bottles back at the bar, and went to her place. And broke up. Twice.

The Tryout

~Ted Worthington

Sixteen-year-old Henry Fong pulled a black baseball cap from the bottom of his book bag and slapped it on his head. Standing at the door of the library, he adjusted the hat like he had seen other kids at school do it. He looked right, down the arching walkway, a tunnel straight to the parking lot where his mother would pick him up. Nope, he seemed to say to himself. He swung the heavy bag over his slender shoulder like a sailor with his duffel and walked left, out toward the baseball field that he could see from the library window. For more than a year now, since he came to the US, he had watched the boys gather on the grassy field. In the fall it was football, a thoroughly confusing game to him. But in spring the boys would flock to the baseball diamond in the afternoon sunshine. These activities, though, were closed to him. Yet, Henry wanted to be included; he needed to be included. Being alone, being separated from others nagged at him everyday as he looked out the window, maybe harder than his mother’s insistence that he study in the library after school.

The hot Oklahoma sun warmed the back of his neck, producing a pleasant acrid sweetness where the black strap pressed over his short-sleeved dress shirt. His dress shoes and khakis were fine for the library, but it did not occur to him that they would look out of place at the ball field. That was just it, looking out of place. What more could a sixteen-year-old kid from China look like in an American high school? In the aluminum grandstands the girls sipped their sodas, tossed their hair and pulled at their chewing gum—some things he would never adapt to. Surely they would laugh at him when they weren’t talking on their cell phones and waving to their boyfriends.

Henry walked up to the large group of boys wearing baseball pants, spikes and white cotton baseball shirts. The boys, chattering like a pod of sweating monkeys, clustered beneath a large yellow cardboard sign that said “Baseball Tryouts Today” on the backstop. The lettering had a certain feminine touch Henry could see. Girls in America—no doubt the girls with their sodas—had a way of making their letters express more than what they said. This little trick fascinated him. Like hanzi characters, each stroke of the pen—or in this case, black permanent marker—showed inflexion, whether it was just a tiny heart over the “i” or the B in baseball on the sign morphing into a little fielder with a cap on his head and stubby little feet. The boys’ handwriting, he noticed, lacked this effect, showing they cared little for such things. Instead their writing was dominated by a casual slovenliness, a freedom from rigid form so unique in America, which he immediately adopted because the last thing he wanted to do was stand out.

So he waited patiently as the other boys jostled their way to the front of the registration table. He did not want to cause a scene. When it was his turn, he picked up the stubby pencil with no eraser, certainly stolen from the library, and wrote his name in blocky, somewhat drab letters, though the signing itself was not without some sense of independence on his part. It was true beginning of this new life in America, that point where he might be able to say he was, or could be American.

“You realize tryouts are right now?” said the young man sitting behind the table. He looked older than the high schoolers, his face redder and fuller than the rest. His jersey had the name “Josh” stitched on it.

Henry looked at him puzzled.

“Ain’t you got a glove? No spikes?”

Henry’s head sunk a little as he said no.

“Go on home, kid, don’t waste our time.”

Henry stood firm and spoke in halting English. “I heard tryouts were open to anyone.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Henry stood motionless and as tall as he could. Just as tall as the other boys, he imagined his feet were planted in the ground and he, a sturdy-yet-yielding bamboo shoot, could withstand any force of wind. An older man, obviously the coach, stepped up behind his assistant. “Josh, give the kid a chance.”

“Why? I’m just saving us the trouble. He’s not gonna be able to cut it,” he said looking up over his shoulder.

“Let him in,” the coach said.

Henry walked away from the table feeling a sense of unexpected excitement. He had not thought the coach would be so accommodating, but this was America, after all. This was a real baseball team. Not the television. He stood beside the bleachers, still somewhat apart from the boys, waiting to begin. Oh, he had met many people like Josh since coming here. They didn’t like his kind. Henry had grown to spot people like Josh quickly and avoid them as much as possible. You could see it in the forehead, that space between the eyebrows where the skin pressed together to form tiny folds, like paper after it got wet.

“Gather ‘round boys. I’m Coach Stevenson. First thing we’re gonna do is run the bases. If you can’t make it around in 22 seconds, you are out—you go home.”

Henry watched the boys, one by one, stand at the plate until Josh, stopwatch in hand, sent them careening off in exaggerated arcs around the bases. They each sprinted across the plate panting like thoroughbreds. So far, everyone made the route successfully until up stood a heavy-set teenager, his baseball pants filled with flesh. Josh made a crack which Henry couldn’t make out from where he stood, but the rest of the boys laughed. Then the boy was off. He loped off the plate like a circus bear unsteady on two feet. He too took the first base in a circular arc before his lumbering body began to pick up speed. In the end, he touched the plate just as Josh snapped at the stopwatch and called out, “24.8 seconds.”

Josh trotted up to the sweating boy and said, “I’m sorry, son.” The fat kid gathered his things and left the field as Coach Stevenson called out, “Henry Fong, you’re next.”

Henry walked up to the plate in his leather shoes. The book bag still hung from his shoulder. Josh stared at him a moment. “Gonna take the books around the bases with ya?”

Henry felt stupid and tossed his books in the grass. The textbooks slid out of the bag. Any other time that would have made Henry panic. His mother revered books. To her, they were sacred. One would never throw a book, much less on to the grass.

When Henry returned to the plate, Josh yelled “Go!”

Henry’s second step slipped uselessly in the silty dirt. By the third step he was off and running. Unlike the other boys he reached first base and took a hard turn, nearly coming to a stop as he changed direction. He looked more comfortable running to second, taking the base in full stride, but then his feet slipped from under him and he went down into the dust, his cap rolling away.

Josh nodded to Coach Stevenson, “See.”

Panic shot through Henry’s body like electric shock. His opportunity at this was ticking away. He could see in his mind the seconds rush by. Henry got up and sprinted, the dust trailing behind him like a comet. Taking the arc of third perfectly, he shot past home plate, stopping at the chain link backstop.

“22.5 seconds,” hollered Josh, who grinned, raised an eyebrow, and nodded to the others looking on as if to say I told you so.

He shuffled over toward the backstop. “I’m sorry, kid.”

Henry, his head pressed against the metal fence, felt ashamed. He had failed. Something so simple. He swatted at his trousers in a useless attempt to eradicate the dust, to remove the stain of defeat. This dream of his—to play American baseball—was a joke. He could just go back to his books, lying there in the moist grass. He could just pick them up and go home.

Coach Stevenson approached Josh, just a few feet from Henry. “Wait.”

“Coach, he didn’t make it,” Josh said, with his eyebrows clenched.

“And he’da made it easily if he hadn’t fallen.”

“But,” Josh said.

“Let him stay.”

“Why don’t I go get the fat kid while you’re at it?”

“Can it.”

Henry felt puzzled again. What exactly was going on? The other boys in groups were talking low, talking about him. This wasn’t the way to fit in. How could he break in, but without being seen? There was just no way. The situation seemed hopeless, a paradox. To become one of the crowd, this new crowd, in a new land, he had to stand alone and demand admission. In the meantime, the coach tossed him an extra glove, and called out to the boys, “Next is fielding.”

The boys lined up behind shortstop and Henry followed after. The object, it seemed to him, was to field grounders and throw them to Josh at first base. Henry stood back, last in line. When it came to his turn, the coach tossed up the baseball and hit it sharply to his right. Rather than backhanding the ball, Henry moved right and gloved it awkwardly beside his right leg. The throw, though, arced high in the air and bounced twice before rolling to a stop six feet from Josh, who stood there with his arms wide as if to say this is ridiculous. The rest of the boys laughed.

“Give it a rest, Josh,” Coach said.

Henry was less confident after trying to catch fly balls in the outfield. He was sure one of those balls was going to hit him right on the head. What business was he doing out here trying to play baseball? Maybe it just isn’t a game for a guy like Henry. He never thought it would be this difficult. Watching the other kids, baseball looked so effortless, graceful in a uniquely American way. It was precisely this fluidity, this natural action that appealed to him. What would be better than to play this game, a game where each member of the team acted individually yet in concert?

Coach rallied the boys together saying it was time for batting. “Josh is gonna throw you some pitches.”

This time Henry watched more closely. He watched the way each boy stood in the batter’s box, the way they each held the bat, juggling it around like some martial arts weapon. Henry had little to compare it to. It wasn’t like playing the piano, with your arms stretched out on the ivory keys, or like wielding a bow playing his violin. Each ballplayer stepped to the plate and went through a little routine, swinging the bat, adjusting their helmet, digging in with their feet. They did it with a sense of purpose and concentration; their eyes squinting as the first pitch sailed in. That focus was the only thing Henry could relate to, it was the only thing he could understand, because it was the focus that his parents urged him to master everyday. It didn’t matter if it was a school day or not, they kept after him to concentrate on what was important. To his mother, this was studying. But, Henry had other ideas.

Next it was Henry’s turn. Josh looked over at the coach, raising his eyebrows. Coach nodded back.

The first pitch came in fast, with a sharp pop in the catcher’s glove. Henry swung and missed. Josh eyed the coach again. Henry swung hard at the second pitch, which was way outside, and missed again.

“Give him something to hit, dammit. Stop toying with him,” Coach said.

The third pitch, a hard fastball, Henry fouled it straight back. Henry let the fourth pitch, a nasty curveball in the dirt, go by. “Come on, Josh. We want to see him hit, not you pitch,” Coach said.

Henry readjusted himself in the box, grinding in with his dark leather shoes. He still struck a funny sight, standing there erect as a flagpole in slacks and a collared shirt. But, he took a long tug at his baseball hat and stared right at the pitcher.

Josh went into his motion and delivered another fastball right down the middle of the plate. Henry uncoiled on it and sent the ball deep to left field. Everyone behind the backstop watched it as it flew, clearing the eight-foot fence by a few inches.

Determined to make a fool of Henry, the next pitch sailed high and tight, narrowly missing his ducking helmet. The next pitch, a change-up, meant to throw off Henry’s timing, promptly landed over the centerfield fence. Josh threw six more pitches—a slider, two curveballs and a few letter-high fastballs—all of which landed beyond the fence before Coach Stevenson stopped it, saying “I’ve seen enough. Troy, you’re next.”

“What the hell was that?” Josh said, stepping off the mound.

Henry grinned, filled with a euphoria he seldom felt. Most of the boys looked stunned by what they had just seen. Henry walked back toward the dugout, when the next batter lowered his bat and tripped Henry into the grass.

“That still doesn’t make you a ballplayer. Go back to study hall,” said the boy named Troy.

Coach Stevenson, consulting with Josh, didn’t witness what happened, but saw Troy standing over Henry with several others caught between laughter and amazement. Coach turned and yelled out, “What’s going on here? If I see any funny business, I’ll toss each one of you off the team.”

Trotting from the mound, he helped Henry to his feet. “So you’ve never played baseball, huh?”

“No, sir.”

“I’m Coach, not sir, okay.”

“No, coach.”

“Why do you want to play ball?”

“I want to be American,” Henry said.

“Where you from? What brings you to Oklahoma?”

“My parents move here from Beijing last year.”

“Ever seen a game before?”

“In Olympics.”

Coach Stevenson put his arm around Henry and said, “With a little extra help I think we can make you into quite a good American ballplayer.”

He walked Henry toward the dugout. “Now, I just need to show you some of the basics. I think I might even get our assistant coach Josh to help you.”

But before Coach Stevenson could continue, a woman marched quickly onto the field from the direction of the library. “Henry Jian Fu, you come here right away. What are you doing here? I was supposed to meet you in parking lot half hour ago. You come home with me right now.”

Her face looked hard and crisp. She stomped through the grass without looking at anyone but Henry. She walked up to him, the top of her head barely reaching his armpit, and grabbed his arm and began leading him away. Henry was mortified. His eyes darted from the boys snickering at his situation back to the coach.

“Excuse me, ma’am. Are you Henry’s mother?” the coach said stepping forward.

“You no ma’am me. How dare you try to get my son to play your silly game.”

Henry finally spoke up, but could only muster, “Mother.”

She turned to him and spoke sharply. “No, you stay out of this. Go get your books.”

“But, Mrs. Fong. You don’t understand. Henry’s good. He could be a good player,” the coach said.

“He no be good player. He need go home and study. He going to be doctor. You ask him?”

“No,” the coach said.

“Henry want be doctor. Ever since little boy.”

With that, she walked away, dragging Henry by the arm. All he could do was look over his shoulder.

Tears of the Dragon: A Review

Xavier Greene is a high-level assassin for a worldwide secret organization–The Citadel–that operates the levers of the power behind the scenes. Known as ‘The Silencer’ he is known for his ability to go undetected through even the biggest jobs: political coups, counterterrorism, assassinations. His face is in no personnel system, no facial recognition can place him: He’s a ghost drifting through the floating world of modern political play where transnational political actors create destructive encounters, Realpolitik games, with little regard for loss of life. Xavier has tired of his work, retired to a remote monastery, and takes jobs intermittently as he contemplates enlightenment alongside complete retirement.

Then, a new job appears. A terrorist organization known as The Brotherhood has recently received a strong, financial backer. With their help, The Brotherhood have developed a contagion called “Tears of the Dragon.” They plan to release it at a large event within the week and to wipe out most human life on the planet in the process to prompt a hard reset of the unjust systems of power of the world: to fight political injustice with apocalypse. The allure of The Brotherhood is immediately apparent to all dissidents who read Ryan McGinnis’s debut novel. You can’t fight power within the system because it has always already co-opted its members and will rapidly absorb destabilizing tendencies to prevent the system from toppling. The only option left is economic or real violence. Despite The Brotherhood’s subversive appeal, Xavier’s actions and the narrator’s handling of The Brotherhood seem to respond no to both options: working within the system and working to destroy the system. Rather than engaging in political angst, in Nietzschean ressentiment, Xavier remains a counterterrorist and thwarts a factional uprising within The Citadel to restore this latter organization to its proper institutional spirit and to save the world.

“Tears of the Dragon,” the contagion, is derived from the venom of the vampire bat: a substance touted for the past few years for its medicinal properties and potential usage in the development of drugs to combat diseases. However, with each new development there are negative externalities, downsides that the developers of the tech could not have foreseen. In Tears of the Dragon, The Brotherhood has developed a kind of blood coagulant that can be spread quickly and effectively worldwide with just one vial. Writing often mirrors life in unexpected ways and the parallel between the development of an apocalyptic pathogen with the apparently accidental mutation of a world-upsetting virus that led to our own pandemic is not lost on this reader.

Finally, as in all of McGinnis’s writing hitherto, dreams play an important role throughout the novel. At many crucial points in the text, Xavier dreams, day dreams, or hallucinates visions of the dragon. At times he tries to contain its power and it burns him, at others he seems to have a strong emotional connection and is warming up to the dragon. It is both his nemesis and a very attractive mystical object, which could bring him untold riches or power if he chose to keep it. All told, the novel is reflective but mostly active. The reader gets good doses of spy intrigue, political machinations, helicopter chases, firefights, and even a very compelling duel to the death between two of The Citadel’s most legendary assassins. Tears of the Dragon is a fun, riveting, on the edge of your seat kind of novel and a good first novel that bodes well for McGinnis’s future work.

To learn more about Tears of the Dragon or to purchase a copy follow the link here. To read about McGinnis’s short fiction follow these rabbit holes: Sketch and A Good Night’s Sleep.

“A Good Night’s Sleep” is Hard to Find

(See my previous review of Ryan McGinnis’s fiction here)

Sam and Kevin Woodworth are a well-adjusted, suburban couple in the final stages of the adoption process. Their domestic life includes an altruistic relationship with an elderly widower, Agnes, in their neighborhood; a good work-life balance; and a loving-lovable terrier Max who keeps them company. Domestic bliss seems inevitable with the arrival of their new daughter Lily. However, Max seems afraid of the little girl no matter how long she chases him around and vies for his affection. And in a small case, she keeps a set of dolls–one male, one female–whose appearance echoes her biological parents that disappeared under mysterious circumstances. When Sam and Kevin begin having night terrors, sleep paralysis, and experiencing other unsettling nighttime events, they begin to suspect that something is amiss in their would-be domestic tableau.

As with much good horror fiction, the fears and anxieties at the core of “A Good Night’s Sleep” (eBook available for free by joining the Ryan McGinnis mailing list here) are contemporary while simultaneously hearkening back to older, more primal notions of the self. There is first, the classic fear of the adopted child whose genes and past history are alien to the foster parents: the child who appears with a kind of psychic baggage it is the perceived job of the foster parents to absolve, to correct, to fix, or to come to terms with. What happened to the child’s parents? What trauma did the child experience through their loss? Can we really help the child? These kinds of anxieties can lead to self-doubt and fears of failure in parenting that are amplified for foster parents. In “A Good Night’s Sleep,” Sam and Kevin’s fears are internalized and received subconsciously through dream visions of a man who stands at the edge of the room or right outside the window: a man who beckons to follow. Or they are externalized by visions of Lily’s midnight wandering through the house or constricting nightmares of suffocation.

The Self is at its most peaceful when its surface, the conscious person, hides or abjects those things that pull at and create tension within the self. The dream of a domestic space of peace and tranquility and simplicity is aided by a self-formation that is limited, that does not reflect openly on the darker aspects of the self. Here, the fears of failure and of the dark past of the orphaned child bring to surface the multiplicity of the self with its abyssal, fragmentary, and self-destructive capabilities. A large change in life calls for a requisite and equal change of Self, which is self-dislocating, anxiety-producing, and terrifying, though necessary. In “A Good Night’s Sleep,” McGinnis reflects these fears in a narrative where the worst of them is actualized and the self is destroyed in the process of change and the foster parent becomes little more than a doll in a child’s scheme for their own self-formation: essentialized, always present, and nothing more than an object of the child’s will. In horror, our deepest fears are made real and that is definitely the case in McGinnis’s short story.

Read my review of McGinnis’s novel Tears of the Dragon next.

Ruminations on a “Sketch”

In “Sketch” (published online at Mandatory Midnight), North Carolina native and Brownsville, Texas denizen Ryan McGinnis crafts a sinister, Lovecraftian vision of cerebral horror befitting a New Weird moniker. In an introductory blurb we learn that Sarah, an aspiring sketch artist of landscapes and gothic architecture, has recently suffered from a hard breakup. Her friend Tracy attempts to help her by managing and staging an art exhibit of Sarah’s work on gothic castles from her travels in Europe. Sarah takes to the work well, at first, as she drafts image after image with her expressionist style of deep shadows and chiaroscuro contrast with attendant surrealist motifs and unsettling smudge-work. However, when an image of a man appears and then disappears of its own volition within her frames, Sarah experiences abject fear and her friends believe she is going insane. Half-horror, half-edge-of-your-seat-fugue-state, this tale draws parallels to the texts of Junji Ito. It’s gothic fixations remind one of the imaginative power of Mervyn Peake or Jorge Luis Borges.

As a sketch, “Sketch” is the beginnings of a larger body of work: One in development and one I will be reviewing for the next few weeks here. The narrative style is simple and unadorned third-person narration from a relatively invisible narrator with direct access to the interiority of Sarah’s mind. The writing is straightforward, which aids the reader in clipping along quickly and building the sense of tension. Its central idea of note is the question of how our creative works can absorb us as artists? In Sarah’s case, she is offered the vertiginous possibility of her creative work bringing new life into the world and through her fears and anxieties she is unable to do so. Instead, Sarah stifles her greatest creative achievement (freeing the spectre of the gothic castle) and is, in a sense, consumed by her inaction.

The idea here is that creative endeavor is voidal, abyssal, aporetic by its very nature. That in the process of writing, the writer changes, evolves, and becomes a more complex entity. The attendant fear of psychological disintegration is so strong that it may block the writer from ever truly engaging a project or putting it out into the world through submission or private publishing. Yet, by not letting the creative work live and emerge into the real world, the writer risks a far more pernicious spectre’s birth: Regret, a beast much more able to consume the artist totally in the final analysis. In “Sketch,” the anxieties of a beginning writer are veiled through an engaging piece of horror short fiction that is harrowing, both metaphysically and on the gut level.

For more information about Ryan McGinnis and to receive a free ebook and access to his writings, please peruse his personal website here. (Check out my review of “A Good Night’s Sleep” next)

Child of God

(Check out my previous film review in this series here: All The Pretty Horses)

Before I jump back into reviewing straightforward Westerns, I’ve got a few genre-bending numbers in the week ahead, as well as this review of the 2013 arthouse Southern Gothic film Child of God. The film is an adaptation of American author Cormac McCarthy’s 1973 novel of the same name, and like most of his works (and especially his earliest works) it is especially gruesome, bloody, nihilistic, subversive, and artistically daring. Through this story of an asocial idiot who becomes increasingly isolated from those around him and falls into a life of crime and taboo behavior, McCarthy works to press the patience of facile Christians who must call even this disgusting being a ‘child of god’ and a ‘brother’ to be totally consistent with their doctrines, despite one’s visceral response to the contrary.

The result is to make intellectually honest Christians aware of a core hypocrisy within the character of themselves, and by extension, of a diametrical opposition between the nature of the world as it is and the sugarcoated fables of religion, which tell us that all people have moral worth and ought to be treated fairly. The gut reaction to the character of Lester Ballard is to either morally support the town’s lynch mob attempt to wipe him off of the face of the earth or to hope to hell the lawman Sheriff Fate (Tim Blake Nelson) catches the guy and is able to lock him away and throw away the key.

Helmed by actor, director, producer, writer James Franco, the film was his second work in the medium of film to recognize and champion the literary heritage of the United States. The first work entitled The Broken Tower, and released in 2011, was a biopic on the life of Hart Crane in which Franco played the man himself. In the years following Child of God, Franco has directed two adaptations of classic novels by William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying, The Sound and The Fury), and an adaptation of a little known novel entitled In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck. Franco has also portrayed the great American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in the 2010 experimental film Howl, centering around the book’s obscenity trial in 1957, and is currently directing and writing a film chronicling the early life the American gutter poet (and one my top five favorite authors of all time) Charles Bukowski simply entitled Bukowski. Franco’s work in cinema is certainly setting himself up as something of an obscene, gritty James Ivory. And a large Criterion Collection release ought to be somewhere on the horizon despite (and possibly because) most of his films in this vein being critically divisive.

Child of God is set in the 1950s in Sevier County, Tennessee. The elder Ballard’s wife leaves him behind with his teenage son to raise on his own. Her departure is mysterious and not explained in the film and ultimately drives the elder Ballard to taking his own life out of emotional pain and desperation. Lester remains at home, not knowing how to pay bills or make a living, as he is a bit touched (as my grandparents generation in Appalachia might’ve quipped) . Eventually, the bank forecloses on his family’s home and land. Ballard gets a job digging post holes until he can afford a rifle and then commences to threaten all those who attempt to buy or sell the home at gunpoint. He grows increasingly mad and eventually loses his home.

Over the course of the film, we watch Ballard roam about the woods and countryside as if in some arthouse nature documentary chronicling the exploits of an incensed God-man, now unhinged and capable of extreme violence at any moment. He happens upon a woman in the woods who has been raped and left behind by someone else. At least, this is seemingly what has happened. The woman makes fun of Ballard, and in response, he steals the last tatters of her clothing and lopes off into the woods, leaving her naked and exposed to the elements as punishment for her rude behavior. When she later turns up at the police department, she claims that Ballard raped her (and is obviously thereby protecting the real criminal). Ballard is taken into custody by Sheriff Fate, and as the fates would have it, after an extensive stay in the jailhouse, Ballard is freed after Fate figures out that the woman lied.

Ballard moves through the world like an animal with no concern about morality or law as these are social forces only and are not present in the state of nature. This brute man finds that he is attracted to women and has an innate need to procreate after stumbling upon a couple copulating in their car on a dirt road late at night. As such, when he runs across a suicided couple within their car on the same road a few weeks later, he takes advantage of the young woman’s corpse inside, and even later returns to take her photograph and some money from the young deceased man’s wallet inside, before also hauling off the corpse of the girl to store and bone in the remote hunting cabin he occupies out in the forest.

The grotesque horror of this man’s very existence and the fact that none of his evil is perpetrated for the sake of evil, but by the ignorance inherent within so-called innocents (in truth, persons outside of socialization and thereby more natural men and women than those around them), gives viewers an attempt to stare directly into the abyss, if willing to do so. The world stripped of the social impulse, the world of true libertarianism, both devoid of religion and of the common human experience: a husk of life left without morality as either a social or a metaphysical impulse, which reveals why either one or both of these forces (religion and social solidarity) are necessary for society to function, lest we become brutes like Ballard. The Ayn Randian pursuit of individualism for its own sake is important to the development of worthwhile human beings and personas, but without being balanced by social conventions life is not worth living at all.

The proper response to narratives of idiots, to serial killers, or to soldiers fighting in aimless wars is to recognize the abyss of nihilism and the lack of meaning and morality beneath all of the social world we have built as a species. And to then champion the structures in place and to work constantly to make them safer, stronger, more inclusive, and less subject to manipulation by psychotic businessman and politicians. Oh, and to realize that inclusivity cannot and must not preclude locking up those types, as well as the aforementioned like Ballard, who are irredeemable, and though not deserving of it (deserving being a metaphysical concept that has no real place in a good social system), must nevertheless be separated from civil society. Permanently.

 

Cody Ward

byNWR Beta Launch!

Last year, and into the beginning of this year, I reviewed every single feature film ever directed by Nicolas Winding Refn (Find the beginning of that series here) as well as a number of documentaries on the man’s life and work. I developed an intense interest in this artist whose personal creative inspirations come primarily from kitsch filmmaking and Criterion classics, like my own. Who is color blind like myself, but manages to use color in novel, interesting, and thematic ways in his films. A man prone to oscillation between self-deprecation and grandiose statements about his own creative genius.

Towards the end of this period, I found out that he was in the beginning stages of launching a new streaming platform for films of a rare nature. Films that are hard to find, but legendary, films that express something poignant about the psychical chaos hidden deep within the American psyche. Southern Gothics, American Neo-realism, Independent films, Exploitation cinema, Hellfire and Brimstone pieces and Godsploitation, and works of undefinable genre. The unearthing of these works, which he has collected the rights to and fought to restore and preserve were a revelation to me. As such, I spent a month reviewing a number of these prospective titles.

Shanty Tramp and Hot Thrills and Warm Chills. Night Tide and The Exiles. If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? and The Burning Hell. And now, I’m excited to announce, that as of today, byNWR, Refn’s new free streaming film archive, interview and essay compendium has made its Beta debut. I suggest you go check it out and spend a few weeks digging deep into the core of what it means to be American through these tales of crime, of passion, of the exuberance of life lived authentically as an engagement into the existential quest of finding what it is that makes you who you are.

In a time when political life is a shit show and the news serves only to provoke anxiety, fear, and disillusionment, a retreat into the past might be just what is called for. Because without that perspective, our art is barren. In the words of Devo: ‘We need art to again be an affirmation of life and values in the face of the corporate boot coming down and kicking you in the head.” byNWR is just one new step that could lead you and I toward that direction, and thereby toward a much-needed revivification of a culture that has been forced to repeat itself over and over, producing nothing new of note or import, since the late 1970s.

Now is the time. Go forward bravely and fight to carve life into art before the alabaster dwindles to nothing!

 

A Manifesto, and an update,

Cody Ward

All The Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy is an author close to my heart. His prose has the muscular quality of top-form Hemingway, the occasional irreverence of Bukowski, the mythic nature of Faulkner, and a surreal or postmodern underpinning always threatening to emerge and engulf his readers in incredulity at the absurdity of the nihilistic worlds he fashions together in his own symbolic West, which is ultimately a stage for the conflict of intellectual traditions. First of foremost of that conflict between the Western intellectual tradition of rationality and supposed human epistemic omnipotence, and newer forms of uncertainty and mysticism arising constantly as the logical consequences of this former intellectual project.

Those who undertake to create film adaptations of McCarthy’s novels or plays are typically those with an intellectual or artistic bent who do so because they value his work and understand it at a deep level. Some past cases of films like these that I had seen were the masterful Coen Brother’s adaptation of No Country For Old Men in 2007, the classic dystopian metaphysical horror film The Road in 2009, and Ridley Scott’s amoral adaptation of the play The Counselor in 2013. As such, I had high hopes for the first major film adaptation of a McCarthy work in 2000’s All The Pretty Horses, based on his 1992 novel of the same name.

The film was directed by Billy Bob Thornton after the break away success of his Southern Gothic classic Sling Blade in 1996. The original cut of All The Pretty Horses came in at over 3 hours in length, had a slow, methodical, epic pace and was reportedly extremely well suited to the style of McCarthy’s writing. The story, set in 1949, the definitive death of the frontier and a move into Industrial America, Electric Music, and pop culture, was accompanied by a spare guitar score played on era-correct instruments. And the entire affair was set to be a great follow up to Thornton’s previous film, and could have established him as something of a promising visionary director at the time. Instead, the film’s producer Harvey Weinstein (known for raping films well before the current allegations about his sexual misconduct) forced Thornton to cut the film down to less than 2 hours in length, and also replaced the score without the director’s approval with a more conventional piece. The result was a picture maligned by most critics that made back only $18 million USD on its more than $50 million USD budget, and brought Thornton’s directorial career to a halt (he only directed a couple pictures over the next two decades).

Despite the film’s truncated form, the kernel of what Thornton had envisioned for the picture is still there within it. The focus on metaphysically and generally philosophically charged language verbalized in a brute, terse manner is maintained throughout the film, which consequently almost borders on presenting the audience with mere types instead of characters. Some critics find this approach to storytelling abstruse and obscure, but those men and women are also the kinds of readers who would likewise champion the use of types in classic works by Dostoevsky, Kafka, or Nietzsche. In other words, they are typically hypocrites who might find the value of such an approach in the novels of Cormac McCarthy with his Kid and Judge archetypes running throughout All the Pretty Horses, and then somehow fault it when these types are the symbolic trade of the celluloid medium, which is possibly even more suited to their use. After all, cinema is an art form first and foremost that can do anything paintings, photography, music, art installation, or literature can do. And before the advent of sound to the medium, character development was the last thing in artists of the medium’s minds, as it should be today.

And again, despite the critiques of fools and backbiters and those without a real critical bone in their bodies, the film does manage to develop the character of the Kid. John Grady Cole (played by Matt Damon) has dreamt of taking over his grandfather’s ranch for the entirety of his childhood. But times are changing and the old frontier lands will yield significantly higher profits for the family if sold to oil barons instead of toiling away raising cattle on them for the next fifty years. As such, when Cole’s grandfather passes away, his mother quickly decides to sell the land and thereby destroys all of Cole’s hopes for a life on the range. The death of these hopes is visually symbolized by the corpse of the grandfather Cole, who appears visually similar to the great Western character actor Slim Pickens (though Pickens passed away almost 20 years prior, in 1983). The death of the Western genre, the death of the West, and the end of all romanticism for Cole in the hopes of working the land upon which his grandfather, and his grandfather, worked their entire lives.

Cole decides to leave the ranch and head south past the Rio Grande and into Mexico where a real frontier still exists and one can find steady work as a cowboy. He takes along with him his trusty friend Lacey Rawlins as well as two horses they steal from the ranch i the dead of night and on they go. Along the journey, they run into a young boy named Jimmy Blevins who has likewise stolen a horse, as well as his stepfather’s gun and some supplies in the hopes of making it down in Mexico, and escaping constant beatings at the hands of the man. Blevins has obviously had a difficult life, which has turned him into a good shot as well as a youth prone to outbursts of violence. This tendency within the boy will later prove his downfall. Rawlins and Cole will not escape its repercussions unscathed either.

Over the course of the film, Rawlins and Cole make it to their destination and meet a woman along the way who owns a small bar. She is, notably, the same actress as Bennie’s girl in Sam Peckinpah’s magnum opus Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. The two men find a ranch and impress the biggest tycoon (Ruben Blades) around by breaking in over a dozen wild horses in a week. Cole falls for the man’s daughter (Penelope Cruz). Loves begin, crimes catch up to their perpetrators, and lovers are forcibly wrenched apart. By the end of the film, Cole has realized that there is no place on Earth coincident with his romanticism, no place that measures up to his ideal type of Paradise. The Kid becomes The Man, develops into a disillusioned soul who is by no means completed by film’s end. One can imagine his past traumas developing into alcoholism or drug use. That he will have his share of women, but will experience a dearth of truly good times for the remainder of his days. And that he accepts this begrudgingly and will remain a haunted man like his father Cole (Robert Patrick) before him: a Tennessee Williams type, divorced, down and out, drunk, and jaded by the hand he’s been dealt in life, and the knowledge that there is no better hand to be had. Except death’s sweet release and the hope that things will be better once he returns to the wellspring of his being, to the womb, the mother, the vacuum of Being, to the void.

 

Cody Ward

 

[Next up: Child of God]

 

 

The Lord of the Rings

(Check out my previous Ralph Bakshi animated feature film review here: Wizards)

By late 1977, Ralph Bakshi had shown himself to once again be a profitable director of animated features. His 1977 film Wizards had turned a profit in a pretty big way despite the previous feature Coonskin being a controversial picture that resulted in a box office flop. Bakshi was still interested in creating more fantasy films at this time. So when he heard that the live-action fantasy director John Boorman had just written a script for an adaptation of Lord of the Rings, and that the project was in production hell and would probably never be produced, he talked to the studio heads at United Artists and had them buy the property from Boorman for $3 million USD.

Bakshi then secured a financing deal for an animated film trilogy of the Lord of the Rings cycle for which he would produce all three collectively for $8 million USD. After some deliberation, the studio decided that Bakshi should only make two films instead, but with the same budget. The first being called Lord of the Rings Part 1 and being based upon The Fellowship of the Ring and the first half of The Two Towers. The second would be based upon the second half of The Two Towers and all of the Return of the King. However, the studio objected to the film being called part one as they believed no one would come out to the theaters to watch half of a movie, and as such, the first film was called merely The Lord of the Rings. 

Bakshi used a novel approach to animating on his second fantasy film. He had experimented previously with rotoscoping, but decided this time to rotoscope almost all of the human characters in the film. As a result, Bakshi went to Spain to film almost all of the scenes in the film with real actors, who were then animated over to give them an extremely life-like performance. These shots were overlayed on top of either experimental footage and psychedelic backgrounds, or, for the majority of the film, traditionally animated cels as backdrops and scenarios. The process was almost the exact opposite of Bakshi’s methods on his film Heavy Traffic where he animated his characters and placed them within real-world backgrounds from photographs that had been underexposed and copied multiple times to give them a real, lived-in look.

The total rotoscoping approach had never been tried at the same scale as it usually yielded extremely ugly animation and wasn’t particularly liked by audiences. However, Bakshi managed to change the entire formula by directing his actors to act as naturally as possible instead of acting broadly and cartoony as in the Fleischer Brother’s rotoscoped film Gulliver’s Travels some forty years prior. The result is a very natural rotoscoping, which creates beautiful performances often indistinguishable from traditional animation. However, rotoscoping is much cheaper and had the added benefit of saving time and money in the process. Don Bluth would later use this same approach to masterful effect on his 1997 film Anastasia. 

The rotoscoping in Lord of the Rings also allowed Ralph Bakshi to do what is normally impossible in an animated film: create battle sequences with dozens or even hundreds of people. Typically, this approach is functionally impossible through traditional animation as each person has dozens of separate key animation frames for any thirty second sequence. Further, in-between frames must be made in the dozens to connect the actions from frame to frame. One or two animators could work on such a sequence for just a few characters and keep each action in mind without confusing anything in the process. But one or two people creating a battle sequence of hundreds of characters strains credulity and is virtually impossible. And when dozens or hundreds of animators are employed on such a sequence, the budget begins to bloat, inconsistencies run rampant, and the whole sequence is bound to turn into a shit show. Through rotoscoping, the actions and key frames and in-between actions are all already completed, and the process is much simpler. As such, Bakshi was able to create the largest battle sequences in any animated film until the CGI age (which suffers from a flaw Bakshi’s film does not: repetitiveness of characters).

Rotoscoping also made the sequences with Orcs and Wraiths particularly frightening and akin to the demons from Wizards. This adds some continuity between the two films and makes them into a perfect pair for a cult film viewing with friends, Bakshi fans, fantasy junkies, and cinephiles.

The voice actors in the film are mostly British film actors and include great performances from John Hurt as Aragorn and Anthony Daniels (C-3PO) as Legolas. The production was a star work that critics and film writers latched onto from the start and which attracted all kinds of people to it, including Mick Jagger, who wanted to provide a voice for the film, but was turned down by Bakshi. The film’s score is noteworthy not for the orchestral score that eventually made it into the film, but for the original plan of Bakshi’s to include Led Zeppelin music throughout. And although admittedly not the biggest Led Zeppelin fan, I can imagine how amazing a Lord of the Rings battle scene would be when accompanied by Immigrant Song.

Ultimately, the film was a box office success and made back $30.5 million USD on a $4 million budget. It was Bakshi’s biggest success in this regard since his feature film debut as director on Fritz the Cat. Though the idea of the studio to release the film as The Lord of the Rings, and not as The Lord of the Rings Part 1 backfired and ended in the film garnering many bad reviews. Viewers thought the film was meant to encompass all of the Lord of the Rings cycle, and when it didn’t, they often became confused and annoyed that someone would choose to only adapt half of it and call the entire work Lord of the Rings. Misunderstood critical backlash to the film made the studio wary of financing its sequel, and consequently none was ever made, except if you count its spiritual successors in the Rankin/Bass animated films The Hobbit and The Return of the King.

For all of the grandiose, epic quality of the 2000s Peter Jackson version of The Lord of the Rings, I would still call Bakshi’s film my favorite of all the film adaptations of the epic fantasy property. Peter S. Beagle, author of The Last Unicorn, did an amazing job condensing The Lord of the Rings down to less than two and half hours length in his screenplay for the film. I could rationalize and debate constantly about why this version is my favorite, but at the end of the day it’s probably mostly because of the nostalgia with which I hold it in high regard as the first version I ever saw of the classic Tolkien trilogy. The one that sparked my interest in Middle Earth, motivated me to later read the books, and to finally read books within the fantasy genre broadly (C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia was a major influence as well). I just wish Bakshi made the sequel.

 

Cody Ward

[Next up: American Pop]

Strangers on a Train

(Check out my previous film noir essay here: Beat The Devil. Or my previous Hitchcock essay here: Foreign Correspondent)

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 psychological thriller film noir Strangers on a Train really begins the classic period of American Hitchcock filmography from the early 50s to the mid-60s when he directed his greatest works. The transformative potential of this film in particular is notable due to Hitch’s cinematographic collaborator on the film, a Hollywood staple named Robert Burks. Strangers on a Train would be Burks’ first film for Hitchcock in what would become a 14-year working relationship during which Burks provided cinematography on I Confess, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Trouble with Harry, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North By Northwest, The Birds, and finally, Marnie in 1964.

Their close working relationship during this time, which included every Hitchcock film from 1950-1964 except for Psycho, developed an iconography of signs and metaphors, of visual cues and expressions that produced Hitch’s most symbolically-laden imagery to date. And practically every film they worked on together are either classics of Hitch’s film output (e.g. Rear Window, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and The Birds) or critical classics that showed Hitch similarly at the height of his powers.

On the production end of things, Strangers on a Train is important for another interesting reason: it’s script process. The film is an adaptation of the first novel by Patricia Highsmith who was put on the map by it’s adaptation as a major film by Hitchcock and through the Hollywood system. She would later become known as something of a mistress of the dark for her ability to write great thrillers from existentialist and psychoanalytic angles, low-brow fiction from a high-brow perspective that was unafraid to broach the evil at the heart of all people and its latent potential for brimming over from the unconscious locus of possibility into the light of the day, into reality. She was later given the moniker of ‘the poet of apprehension’ by Graham Greene for her ability to construct a taut thriller akin to the level, at least, of Hitch’s own renowned ability in film, to create complex stories that could keep the average reader on the edge of his/her seat.

After acquiring rights to the book’s film adaptation (for a low-ball $7,500 USD, which Hitch managed to swing by keeping his name out of negotiations, as the knowledge of his attachment to the project would have run up the cost significantly), Hitch hired Whitfield Cook to create a treatment. Cook’s major contribution was the heightening of the latent homosexuality of the book’s protagonist Bruno Antony, which managed to make it into the film in a veiled manner. After Cook’s job was finished, the production began searching for a ‘name’ writer to attach to the project in the role of principal screenwriter.

An extensive search began in which the offer was flatly rejected by John Steinbeck and Thornton Wilder along with five others,. Dashiell Hammett was in talks for a time to do the job before he too pulled out. Finally, the acclaimed hard-boiled author Raymond Chandler was broached by the production and accepted their offer to adapt the screenplay alongside Hitchcock. But the two famously butted heads regarding method as Hitch enjoyed talking about themes and motifs ancillary to the job of actually writing the script, often taking hours to do so. Chandler was as hard-boiled and straight-forward as the protagonists in his own works and as such, rebelled openly against Hitch’s methods and wanted nothing more than to get down to the nitty gritty of writing, and of finishing the script. After making a crack about Hitch’s weight and spending some weeks unable to accomplish anything on the script, Chandler was fired from the production.

A search for a new screenwriter began and was quickly found as the studio recommended Czenzi Ormonde. She proved up to the task and began work on the script just at the same moment that Hitch began shooting scenes in Washington D.C. Alongside the associate producer Barbara Keon and Hitch’s wife Alma Reville, Ormond worked on the script, only finishing the final scenes days before they were shot. In the end, much of the film was shot off the cuff and the ending sequence wasn’t decided upon until the very last minute. All of which, I believe, adds a certain kinetic force to the filmmaking. Hitch couldn’t, as he was characteristically won’t to do, storyboard every last sequence, and as such, Robert Burks had more power of creative input. As a result, the film is more traditionally expressionist than the typical Hitchcock film and incorporates more techniques with experimental force than on almost anything since his breakthrough film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, in 1927.

The film is the story of a pair of men who are, in a sense, doubles or doppelgangers of one another. It opens with two men leaving two separate taxis, both men wear nice suits and carry briefcases, they both enter the same train, the same passenger car, and sit across from one another. The light character in this play of opposite doubles is Guy Haines, a rising tennis star (tennis being a common Hitchcockian trope) on the amateur circuit with designs on a new woman, a new wife named Anne Morton, the daughter of a Senator who could catapult the young man into a future career as a politician. His shadow, Bruno Antony, a psychotic man with a flamboyant demeanor who suffers from a complex derived, no doubt in large part, to an overbearing and overly protective mother (as is so common in the cast of characters within a Hitchcock film).

Bruno hates his rich father who, quite logically and rightly, wants his son to work to gain his keep and build his own fortune. The old man refuses to give Bruno a large stipend with which to while away his time and insists that the middle-aged man work for a living and develop himself in the process. Bruno wants to bump off the old man, but he wants to do so without being caught. So he has tracked down Haines in an attempt to make him an offer. Bruno will knock off Haines’ current wife if Haines kills Bruno’s father. This way, Bruno reasons, both of them will have an alibi as they can arrange to be elsewhere when the murders are committed. Second, since the two of them have no connection to one another, the real murderer in each case cannot be identified as the suspect by the police (unless someone makes a grave mistake in the process and leaves themselves open to being caught on grounds of some strong material evidence). In a few words: the perfect murder (another trope common to Hitchcock’s films).

Haines views the offer with suspicion and pegs Bruno from what he is: an insane man. He leaves the train and stops off in his hometown of Metcalf to arrange his divorce from his wife Miriam. We find that not only is she an extremely promiscuous harlot who has pushed Guy into moving on to Anne Morton by seeing another man and becoming pregnant by him, but Miriam has also found out about Guy’s D.C. aspirations (which hinge on his marriage to Anne) and has decided to make him into an even bigger cuckold. She blackmails Guy into not filing for a divorce with the information that she will claim the child is his and that he is unjustly leaving her, which will damage his reputation and his chances in Washington. She wants Guy to bring her to D.C. with her and continue their marriage, though she has no plans on aborting the child, or becoming faithful to him once they move.

Guy is incensed, as he should be. Miriam had been asking him for a divorce for months and finally, once he has gained the funds to go through with the paperwork to do so, she is now blackmailing him. Miriam deserves to die. Guy shows his anger in public against her, handling her physically and trying to coerce her into signing the divorce papers she had agreed upon, indeed insisted upon, mere days prior by telephone. Later, on the phone with Anne, he tells her that he could just strangle Miriam. So, when Bruno goes through with his side of what he thought was an agreement and strangles Miriam to death at a local fair in a secluded spot known as ‘Magic Isle’, Guy is an immediate suspect.

But he has an alibi, he thinks. When returning to D.C. from Metcalf, he met a man on the train who was a professor. The man spoke with Guy about mathematics and told him where he taught. However, the man was drunk and when called upon the next day for verification that he met Guy on the train at the time the murder took place elsewhere, he doesn’t remember Guy at all. Guy is under suspicion of the crime and will be followed by undercover officers for the remainder of the film as the psychotic Bruno increasingly impedes upon Guy’s private life and promises to ruin Guy if he doesn’t kill Bruno’s father.

We have here a classic Hitchcockian set-up with Guy as the Wrong Man (who also happens to be an ordinary person: another Hitchcockian trope), all evidence pointing to him as the murderer in a crime he didn’t commit, but is nevertheless ideologically guilty for as he would have committed it if he had a stronger will. The cultured villain appears as the upper-class, well-read, and eminently moral (though psychotic) Bruno. Bruno gains an item of Guy’s while on the train with him: Guy’s lighter, engraved From A to G (From Anne to Guy). Bruno also fits the trope of charming sociopath, which is connected to the concept of the cultured villain. This serves as a playing chip in Bruno’s leverage over Guy, but is also a MacGuffin that reappears throughout the film: first in Bruno’s lifting of the object, later in his dropping of the object at the crime scene and his return to grab it, and finally in his attempt to place it back at the place of the murder to incriminate Guy with hard evidence.

The Lighter MacGuffin functions to drive the plot forward as an item with power over circumstances, which incites desire in both Guy’s and the police department’s wish to acquire it within the right context (Guy’s context of owning it once again to prevent Bruno from incriminating him any further and the police’s context of finding it on ‘Magic Isle’ as a tool to incriminate Guy and call to a close the case). Also crucial to the definition of a MacGuffin is the innocuousness of the item and relative unimportance of its particular characteristics. The lighter could have been another existing object that linked the crime scene to Guy like a piece of identification in a wallet, or a piece of clothing belonging to Guy, for example.

In the novel, the parallel between Guy and Bruno as doubles, and of Bruno as Guy’s dark eternal opposite, is even stronger as Guy goes through on his end of the bargain. Hitchcock establishes them as doubles only through mutual guilt. Bruno has the guilt of killing Miriam, while Guy has a different guilt through his association with Bruno after the fact, their many back-alley dealings that make them, at least seemingly, accomplices, and Guy’s real desire to kill his wife. All of these things produce a guilt in Guy not associated with Christian morality (as is so often common in Hitch’s narratives), but more strongly with the Freudian psychoanalytic concept of transference of guilt that Guy gains through collaborating in the secret of how the murder was accomplished.

This secret is what draws the ordinary person qua wrong man into the domain of ideological collaboration with the cultured villain/charming sociopath, which illustrates the point of Highsmith’s original novel: that within each person lies the ability to become monstrous, to come to terms with the abyss that is the primal Ground of Being by accepting it. That anyone can become horrible through understanding the Real of traumatic experience always on the threshold, the Real of total freedom ceded us in the postmodern age through the death of god. The total freedom that at once opens up new vistas of action it calls upon moral creatures to recognize and respect. The domains of action today’s cultural conservatives believe each person too stupid and corrupt to properly negotiate. Except for themselves that is.

 

Cody Ward

[Next up: The Chase]