 My friend Roger Boylan has sent me a very cool link, to a gallery of nearly 60 classic photographs of UFOs from the Daily Telegraph, dating back (no kidding) to a photo taken in New Hampshire in 1870. Most of them, though, are grainy, blurry, unsteady snapshots from the 1940s through the 1960s, most of them in black and white, and if you misspent your childhood like I did, reading grubby little paperbacks about UFOs, you've probably seen most of them before.
I still want to believe, of course, but I have to say, looking at them after all these years, a lot of these old favorites look pretty fake to me now; more than one of them looks like somebody flung a hubcap or a straw hat or a pie plate into the air while somebody else snapped a picture with a Brownie or a Polaroid. Then, smirking like mad, no doubt, they mailed it to their local newspaper, which probably published it under the unironic, pre-Onion headline, "Area Man Photographs Flying Disc." This one, which turned up in most of the UFO books of my childhood, looks to me now like a clumsy double exposure.
The main response these pictures provoke in me now, in fact, is nostalgia, for that row of paperbacks by Frank Edwards, John G. Fuller, and others whose names I don't remember any longer that occupied the bottom shelf of the bookcase over my bed, where I could reach them without having to lift my head from the pillow. I plowed through most of them more than once, provoking a good deal of eye-rolling from my very skeptical father and some flat-out disdain from my mother, who once told me I couldn't buy any more UFO books until I'd read Huckleberry Finn. Of course, I kept buying them anyway, and didn't end up reading Huck Finn until I was in my late 20s. More fool me, I know. I should (as always) have listened to my mother.
And I don't know what it is with the big British dailies this week, but yesterday I got a similar nostalgic thrill from this gallery of photos of the Loch Ness Monster in the Guardian. In this case, the nostalgia dates from later in my life, in 1982, to be exact, during my first trip to Scotland. I had just broken up with my first serious girlfriend, and like every other backpacker who ever lived, I was trying to walk it off in the remoter parts of the UK. In Inverness, I rented a bicycle from my youth hostel and cycled about ten miles down the side of Loch Ness on a cold, damp, overcast November day. Minus the monster, which of course I didn't see, the road alongside Loch Ness is pretty dreary, just a two-lane blacktop with a dank pine forest rising pretty much straight up a steep hillside on one side of the road, and the underachieving waves of the loch feebly slapping the stones of the shore on the other. If that wasn't depressing enough, the bike was too small for me and I was out of shape, so that by time I finally gave up and turned around, I was sore, damp, sweaty, and pissed off—and still had ten miles to go before I got back to the dank, overlit, and underheated youth hostel (where the warden, whose accent made him virtually incomprehensible, was always trying to pick a fight with me over Reagan and the Trident missile). The one virtue of the experience was that it finally transformed my sorrow and self-pity over my ex into a purgative anger, so that by time I pumped uphill into Inverness again near sundown (which is about 3 in the afternoon that time of year), it was her fault I was wet and cold, her fault my knees ached, and her fault that I cycled 20 fucking miles in the fucking rain on a fucking kiddie bike and didn't even see the fucking monster.
Which is also probably just as well. The most famous photo in the Guardian collection, the so-called "Surgeon's Photo," which was long considered the canonical photo of Nessie, has since been definitively revealed to be a hoax; it's a toy submarine with a lizardy neck and head stuck on.
Yet I still get a pleasant chill up my spine, even knowing it's a fake, probably because it's so blurry and grainy and crude. The same goes for all those smudgy photos of UFOs: the photo that would convince all the skeptics would have to be crystal clear and detailed and taken in front of a small army of witnesses. It's the dodgy nature of the photos—their clumsiness, their uncertain provenance, their risibility—that makes them so appealingly mysterious. I don't think a clear, hi-def photo or video of a UFO or Nessie would have anything like the power of these pictures, which are like something glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, or something from a dream. I suspect they still move people because they aren't convincing; you have to invest them with faith in the mysterious to make them work, and after you do that, of course, it doesn't matter how silly they look: they're lodged forever in that part of your subconscious that still jumps at things half seen in the dark.
I also suspect that apart from the Fox Mulders of the world and the guys on UFO Hunters, most of us don't want the mystery of UFOs or Loch Ness or Sasquatch cleared up; they're too much fun to look at on the web, or read about as a kid, or watch half-awake from the couch on the History Channel. The day the Zeta Reticulans actually land on the White House lawn, or a plesiosaur washes up in Inverness, or a Sasquatch wanders out of the Cascades and gets hit by a semi on Interstate 5, that day, all the fun will go out of them, and the world will be a little less mysterious, and hence, a little less interesting.
My lizard brain this morning is still pretty hysterical, but it's a happy kind of hysterical. I was up until 1:30 am last night, but set my alarm for 6 this morning so I could go out and get a New York Times before they were all gone. In the end, I woke up at 5, listened to the radio for a bit while I lounged in bed, then went out at 5:30 in search of a Times. I bought the only two copies they had at my local Walgreens—one for me and one for my wife, who asked me to get her one, too—then I went over to Randall's, my local 24-hour supermarket, and bought one there, too, to wrap in plastic and keep in the closet with my copy of the Times from September 12, 2001.
It's windy and overcast in Austin this morning, which is actually a lot like the weather in Michigan 28 years ago, the day after Ronald Reagan was elected. I still remember very distinctly my feeling of disbelief that day as I walked the streets of Ann Arbor in the chill, November gloom, just thinking over and over again, "Ronald Reagan just got elected president. How did that happen?" I really felt that I was sleeping through some kind of weird, slow-motion nightmare, and that any moment I'd wake up and it would turn out that Carter was still president and Reagan was still just a B-list actor. Today, under a similarly gloomy sky, I feel the mirror image of that disbelief—something giddier and happier, but no less surreal. My brother Mike in LA just sent me an e-mail that said "Pinch me," and that sort of sums up how I feel, too. This is too good to be true, right? Please let me know I'm not actually dreaming.
I took the day off work so I could enjoy this. But right now, I'm going back to bed.
 Today is Election Day, and I'm suffering from metaphor overload. My nerves are shredded. I'm as jumpy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I'm vibrating with anxiety like a tuning fork. My forebrain, and the poll numbers at Real Clear Politics, are telling me I shouldn't worry so much, but my shrill, hysterical, paranoid lizard brain is screaming constantly at a pitch only dogs can hear. I can't even claim to be unique: you can read all about my condition in the New York Times.
If I were calmer, I might take to heart John Marks' passionate defense of the spirit of Kum Ba Yah over at No Depression. But I'm not, so I can't. No today, anyway. All the caffeine I've had this morning doesn't help (I float through every morning on a sea of Diet Coke). And the fact that I watch Jon Stewart and Colbert right before I go to bed every night. And the fact that I've bookmarked not one, not two, not three, but four electoral maps, which I try not to look at more than once an hour.
I'm not completely out of control, though. In the evenings (before Stewart and Colbert, anyway) I've been trying to avoid watching the cable news channels, and have pretty successfully given myself a couple hours of respite by reading non-election-related stuff. I just got the new NYRB collection of Daphne Du Maurier's macabre fiction, Don't Look Now, selected and introduced by Patrick McGrath, and have been reading a couple stories a night with great pleasure. The title story didn't get to me the way I hoped it would, but that's mainly because it's a plot-driven story, and having seen the Nicholas Roeg film version already two or three times, the story has nothing new to offer. Du Maurier's story "The Birds," however, is a different matter. I've always loved Hitchcock's film version, but until two nights ago, I had never read the original, and was astonished and pleased to find that it's even better than the film—grittier and much, much darker. Hitchcock took only the basic conceit of the story and invented his own story (a middle-class psychodrama, basically), while Du Maurier's version features a rural working-class family living under siege from flocks of murderous birds. It's more elemental and scarier, not to mention more purely apocalyptic. The story is set in Cornwall, where Du Maurier lived much of her life, and her evocation of the sea and the stark landscape make the story a much more evocative and moodier experience that the film.
The other book I'm reading to distract myself from, um, current events, is David Michaelis' superb biography of Charles Schulz, Schulz and Peanuts. I've been wanting to read this book ever since the first reviews came out, and I just bought the paperback edition over the weekend. It turns out to be even more resonant than I thought it would be: Schulz was only a few years younger than my father (he was born in 1922, and my dad was born in 1918), and as I read about his life in the upper Midwest, in St. Paul, Minnesota, I can't help but think of my dad's childhood and young manhood in Michigan, in a small farming community just west of Lansing. There's not a point by point comparison between the lives of Schulz and my father, but Michaelis' evocation of Schulz's mix of keen intelligence, deep feeling, and ironclad Midwestern reticence ("Keep it to yourself," is the Midwesterner's motto) strikes a very deep chord in me, and brings the memory of my late father back to me very vividly. The struggles and complexities of men of that generation hit me especially hard as I sit spang dab in the middle of my own middle-age, and ponder just how much, and how little, things have changed from my father's generation.
And a third thing that caught my eye this morning, and briefly wooed me away from the electoral map: this article in today's Washington Post, about an English actor named Robert Lloyd Parry who's doing a one-man show as the great English ghost story writer, M. R. James, performing a couple of James' classic ghost stories by candlelight. Sounds wonderful. Wish I could go see it tonight, but instead I'll be enjoying the macabre thrills of Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann on MSNBC.
Happy Election Day! Calm down! Go vote!
 Well, maybe not terror, exactly. Another dose of melancholia, is more like it. Since I've got the list-making bug this Halloween, here's another one. I thought I'd do a quick top ten of some of my favorite pieces of Halloween mood music, but looking over the mix CDs I've compiled since I learned how to do mix CDs (not that long ago, actually), I see that most of them are pretty chestnut-heavy: you got your Night on Bald Mountain, you got got your Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (aka, the Theme from the Phantom of the Opera), you got your music from Psycho.
So instead, I'm making a list of Halloween waltzes—not all of which are waltzes, and most of which aren't particularly scary, but all of which have (at least to my ear) a certain gothicky melancholy to them. Or to put it rather more accurately, it's a list of minor key waltzes, heavy on the Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Or to put it more grandiosely, it's a list of waltzes that contain a hint of death and/or hysteria, on top of the usual three-quarter-time eros. Which may not seem as seasonal to you as it does to me, but think about it: if Halloween isn't about eros and death, then what is it about? Here they are, in no particular order:
1) "Waltz II," from the Jazz Suite No. 2, by Dmitri Shostakovich. You might recognize this as the music from the closing credits of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which was a pretty creepy movie, if not a flat-out horror film. If you know Shostakovich only from his loud, rather bombastic symphonies (as I did for a long time), his jazz suites (available on this terrific Naxos CD) are a real revelation, full of lovely, sly little melodies. He even orchestrated a version of, I kid you not, "Tea for Two."
2) "Gourmet Valse Tartare," by Klaus Badelt, from the soundtrack to Ridley Scott's Hannibal. This is a deliberately scary piece of music, for a film I never even watched all the way to the end. It's sort of a savage reimagining of "The Blue Danube" as the tafelmusik for a dinner party at Hannibal Lecter's. Badelt is a frequent musical collaborator with Hans Zimmer, who wrote most of the music for Hannibal.
3) "The Banker's Waltz," by Mr. Zimmer himself, from the soundtrack to Matchstick Men, which is not even remotely a scary movie. And the waltz isn't really creepy, but it is minor key and so lovely I'm including it anyway. It's my second favorite waltz, in fact.
4) "Happiness," by Sergey Prokofiev, from his ballet Cinderella. This, in case you were wondering, is my favorite waltz. Again, not overtly creepy, but it has a hint of hysteria to it that I've always loved. If you like the jokey-macabre music of Danny Elfman (as I do), then you'll love Prokofiev's waltzes. (It's no diminution of Mr. Elfman's considerable talents to say his orchestral music owes a lot to Prokofiev.) It's not likely anyone will ever make a movie out of my novella "Casting the Runes" from Publish and Perish, but in the imaginary movie version in my head, the entire film is scored with Prokofiev waltzes, and this one plays over the closing credits. There's a terrific Chandos CD of Prokofiev waltzes (CHAN 7076) if you like this sort of thing, performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Neeme Jarvi.
5) "Waltz Moderato," from the soundtrack to The Devil and Daniel Webster, by Bernard Herrmann. You didn't think that just because I'm leaving out Psycho that I wasn't going to include any Herrmann, did you? This is one of the most ghostly pieces of music I've ever heard.
6) "Danse Macabre," by Camille Saint-Saens. Here's a bona fide Halloween chestnut. So sue me.
7) "New Year's Eve Ball," by Prokofiev, from War and Peace. Another sweeping, erotic, melancholy waltz. He actually wrote a "Mephisto Waltz," but I don't think it's gloomy enough, so I'm not including it. Except that I just did. Damn.
8) "Dance of the Witches," by John Williams, from The Witches of Eastwick. This one isn't even a waltz, but it is a dance, so close enough, right? A great piece of macabre music.
9) "Vampire Hunters," by Wojciech Kilar, from the soundtrack to Coppola's Dracula. Again, not a waltz, but a scary, minor key march. It's either that, or I'm wedging in another Prokofiev march, and I'm aiming for variety here, rather than consistency. Which is the hobgoblin (ooh, scary!) of little minds.
10) "Prologue from Vampire Circus," by David Whitaker. This is the longest piece on the list, at nine minutes, and it only has a little bit of waltz in it. But it's one of my favorite pieces of scary music, from my favorite ever Hammer film, Vampire Circus. This is also probably the hardest piece on this list to find; I have it from a Silva compilation called Horror! Monsters, Witches & Vampires (STD 5013). The film's hard to find, too, an early 70s effort with no Christopher Lee and no Peter Cushing, but lots of blood and a fair amount of nudity. Low-budget, lurid, and slapdash in the Hammer manner, it's only borderline coherent, but much of it has the feel of a nightmare, and it contains scenes and situations that even now, in the debased age of Saw and Hostel, are genuinely shocking. I'd go on, but that's another list.
Once again, Happy Halloween!
 Here's another Halloween treat: my pal John Marks has interviewed Stephen King for Salon, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Stand. You can read the interview here, and listen to it here. It's pretty interesting stuff, all about the writing of the book, King's religious background, his current spiritual beliefs, the current election, and the end of the world. Not necessarily in that order.
 Courtesy of my brother Mike, here comes that monster from my id, right back atcha, only bigger and noisier than ever—it's the return of King Zor! Only he seems to have mellowed over the years—he's not fighting mad anymore. In fact, he seems, well, kinda...playful.
 On the other hand, maybe not. If you go here, you can watch him play with his food—to wit, a 1994 Honda Goldwing motorcycle. It's funny, but also kinda gruesome—imagine Wall-E with a serious attitude.
At any rate, it's called a T-Rex Attachment and you can buy one here (where you can also see some other amazing videos of this thing in action). It's only $5,250.00. Claw only; the vehicle isn't included.
Still, if it shoots ping pong balls, I want one for Christmas.
 It's Halloween again, my favorite holiday, and I'm trying to get in the mood, despite the fact that the scariest thing I can think of right now is Sarah Palin being elected to...well, anything, really. But I'm going to soldier on, in the spirit of the season. I thought I'd do a new version of the list of Halloween reading I did a couple of years ago for Maud Newton (which had some movies on it, too); at the time I told her that it was a pretty arbitrary list, that if she'd asked me on a different day, I'd probably do a completely different list. Well, it's a different day, so here's a different list.
I toyed with the idea of making this new effort a themed list: short stories that had been adapted for the Twilight Zone, or stories that had been published in the New Yorker, from the days when the magazine used to publish macabre stories by writers like John Collier and Roald Dahl, or stories from the Alfred Hitchcock anthologies I loved as a kid, which were my gateway drug, the very books that hooked me on horror even before I discovered M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and H. P. Lovecraft. But rather than limit myself to one of these themes, I've done a sort of mash-up of them all. Not all of them are ghost stories, some of them are borderline science fiction, and some of them are more unsettling than they are flat-out scary. Their one commonality, in fact, is that most of them are dark and melancholy rather than gut-wrenching in the manner of a contemporary torture porn or J-horror film.
The other commonality, I suppose, is nostalgia. Most of the following stories are from my favorite Hitchcock anthology, Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late at Night, or from an anthology Ray Bradbury put together in 1952, with the deeply misleading title Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow. (I was afraid both of them might be hard to come by, but you can find the Hitchcock for as cheap as a buck at AbeBooks; the Bradbury isn't hard to find, either.) I read both of these books, over and over again, in my childhood, in the mid-to-late 60s. In the introduction to Bradbury's book (which is still one of my favorite anthologies of the macabre), he writes, "many of the stories in this collection, directly or indirectly, will prove once again the essential mystery in everything, no matter what or how we know it. Scientists freely admit that they don't really know what electricity or gravity are, or why light rays travel as fast as they do, or what color is or what keeps the atom together or why the sun really shines. In all probability they won't ever know, for there is a certain place in any discussion of any one thing in existence where knowledge ends and the Great Vacuum extends on out into infinity."
There you have it, ladies and gentlemen—a bit of scripture for Samhain, when the membrane between daylight reality and the Great Vacuum gets porous. Some of the following stories may be hard to find, unless you have access to the same crumbling paperbacks I do, but some of them are pretty widely available. Here they are, my 2008 list of Halloween stories:
1) "It's a Good Life," by Jerome Bixby, who was also a screenwriter and TV writer, best known for a couple of good Star Trek episodes. Most people know this story from its superb Twilight Zone adaptation, starring a very young, very scary Billy Mumy. The story itself is a nasty slice of small-town gothic Americana, with a brilliantly bone-chilling sci-fi twist. It's still widely anthologized, I think, but I first read it in the Hitchcock anthology.
2) "Evening Primrose," by John Collier. Another great story from the Hitchcock anthology, which was filmed as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. This is the one about the secret society of people who live in a department store and who only come out at night. You'll never look at a mannequin the same way again. Collier was a British writer who today is best known for the diamond-hard and wittily cruel stories of the fantastic he wrote for the New Yorker; his anthology Fancies and Goodnights (which includes this story) is still in print (hooray for New York Review Books!).
3) "The Hour After Westerly," by Robert M. Coates, from the Bradbury anthology. This is one of the most unsettling stories I've ever read, and I'm not entirely sure why. It's not overtly supernatural—it's a very subtle riff on deja vu, basically—but I've remembered it for years, and even though I've read it half a dozen times over the years, I'm not sure I could explain how it works. But its effect (on me, anyway) is like opening a very familiar door and discovering that it leads someplace entirely new—a feeling that's both mysterious and melancholy. Not matter how many times I read it, it always gets to me. Until about ten minutes ago, I knew nothing about Coates, but (hooray for Wikipedia!) it turns out he was the author of three experimental novels and the New Yorker's art critic—he coined the term "abstract expressionism." If you can't turn up a copy of Timeless Stories, and you happen to have the complete run of the New Yorker on CD-ROM or whatever, it appeared in the issue of November 1, 1947.  4) "The Daemon Lover," by Shirley Jackson. Another story I first read in the Bradbury anthology. It didn't really stick with me as a kid, but when I reread it in Jackson's own collection, The Lottery and Other Stories, it creeped me out. You have to be an adult, and to have had your heart broken, to be scared by this story.
5) "The Demon Lover," by Elizabeth Bowen. A haunted house story from the great Anglo-Irish novelist. I first read it in her collected stories, but you can also find it in Brad Leithauser's fine anthology, The Norton Book of Ghost Stories, where he also includes two more Bowen ghost stories. Once upon a time, a lot of first-rate literary writers regularly wrote ghost stories—Henry James and Edith Wharton are the most obvious examples—but you don't see a lot of modern writers trying their hand at it. Or maybe they do, and I just haven't been paying attention.
6) "The Man Who Liked Dickens," by Evelyn Waugh. Not a supernatural story, but horrifying in the manner of Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," on which it is a very witty, and very cruel, variation. The story is a slightly different version of the penultimate chapter of Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust, and I first read it in the Hitchcock book.
 7) "The Small Assassin," by Ray Bradbury. When I was a kid reading Bradbury's science fiction, a colleague of my father's at Ferris State College in Big Rapids, Michigan, where I grew up, suggested that I get a copy of Bradbury's The October Country, which he said was better than Bradbury's sci fi. It's a revised version of his first book, Dark Carnival, which was first published by August Derleth's Arkham House (best known for keeping Lovecraft's reputation alive). Bradbury writes in his introduction that the stories in the book present a side to him most of his readers don't know, and a sort of story—i.e., horror—which he had rarely written since 1946. There's some really creepy stuff here, but this one is my favorite. If you have young children, you may want to avoid it. Then again, maybe you won't.
8) "La Grande Breteche," Honore de Balzac. I'm detecting another theme here, but I can't say why without giving away the story. This one comes from another classic anthology I practically lived in as a melancholy kid, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, a big fat Modern Library book I took out of the Big Rapids Library again and again and again. It's still in print, in a very handsome edition, and I have my own copy now. It's pure nostalgia, the book where I first read stories by M. R. James, Saki, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and H. P. Lovecraft, not to mention the first place I ever read Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and Hemingway's "The Killers," which the editors included in the Tales of Terror section of the book.
9) "The Willows," by Algernon Blackwood. Blackwood wrote a number of stories that evoked the mystery of the natural world in a rather sinister way, and this is the most famous one. Don't read it on a canoe trip, is my advice. Another good one, though harder to find, is "The Man Whom the Trees Loved." You can find "The Willows" here and here.
10) "The July Ghost," by A. S. Byatt. This is the newest story in this list—it was published in 1987—and the only one not to come from one of the ancient anthologies of my youth. But it's also one of the best ghost stories I've ever read, and widely anthologized; I have it in several different volumes, including the Leithauser anthology. It's also, if you know anything about A. S. Byatt's personal history, almost unbearably poignant.
So there you go—a list of Halloween reading heavy on the melancholy, with a chaser of poignancy. Perhaps that's how the holiday strikes me at middle-age—what seemed like wicked good fun when I was a kid is now yet another reminder of my mortality. Trust me, Halloween only gets scarier as you get older, as that membrane between the living and the dead only gets more porous. Someday, if I keep doing this blog, you may even get a reading list...from beyond!
Happy Halloween!
 Ladies and gentlemen, Mein Damen und Herren, mesdames et messieurs, welcome to the Weimar years of the American republic! Bankruptcy, unemployment, class resentment, wars and rumors of war—what better time for a little light entertainment! So here's a motley, magpie cabaret show for your viewing and listening pleasure. First, a sprightly opening number from our master and mistress of ceremonies, something that captures the essence of, the, the—oh, what's the word I'm looking for? The spirit of the age, something like that. Take it away, kids!
Wasn't that delightful? Edifying and entertaining. We're all feeling just a little richer after that, too, aren't we? And since cabaret is nothing if it's not topical, let's range a little further afield for our next number, with a few words from Randy Newman.
Zeitgeist! That's the word I was trying to think of earlier, and a handy word it is, too! And who knows the zeitgeist better than Tom Waits? But which zeit is he singing about the geist of?
Looking for something a little more ragged, a little more...raw? Our next artiste is so salt of the earth, he can't even afford a haircut! And my goodness, what's he so angry about? Ladies and gentlemen, Mein Damen und Herren, Mr. James McMurtry.
My! That was bracing, wasn't it? And since one bad turn deserves another, perhaps we can squeeze in just a bit more gloom and doom from the tomb from our next performer—you know him, you love him—Mr. Richard Thompson.
Oh dear, ladies and gentlemen, I fear I've abused your indulgence; I can see some of you are restless, some of you are already heading for the exits—please remember to tip your waitresses before you go!—but may I beg your patience for one more song? I'd hate to send you out into the night thinking dark thoughts, so let's bring back Mr. Newman for a charming finale. We can always count on him for a smile.
 Ah, I think we all feel better now. I know I do. Good night, guten nacht, bonsoir! Come again soon!
 Lord knows I love movies. Lord knows I love movies based on great novels, even ones that take enormous liberties with the original story—Peter Jackson and Viggo Mortenson's reimagining of Aragorn in Lord of the Rings as a tormented, reluctant hero is actually an improvement over Tolkien's more wooden conception of the character—or set the story in a completely different setting or era—for my money, Clueless is one of the best Jane Austen films, and I loved Ian McKellen's Fascist-era interpretation of Richard III. And lord knows I also love—way, way too much—big, dumb, over-the-top action-and-special-effects spectaculars. The first Matrix made me feel like I was fourteen years old again, and I mean that in a good way. Hey, when it first came out, I saw Point Break twice. In one week. So lord knows it's no surprise that I loved the latest movie by Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, Wanted, which was (in the manner of Point Break) simultaneously completely preposterous and enormously entertaining, and not just because it featured Angelina Jolie in high action figure mode. How can you not love a movie where an international secret society of super-assassins gets its instructions from (I'm not kidding) the Loom of Destiny, which works its magic in an abandoned factory on the west side of Chicago? So by some sort of transitive property, I ought to be looking forward to Bekmambetov's forthcoming film of Moby-Dick, right? Right?
I would that it were so, shipmates, but alas, I can protest all I like that I'm as hip and po-mo as the next guy, but the fact is, the idea behind this new version of Moby-Dick sounds awful. You can read the article about it in Variety by clicking on the link above, but here's the passage that got me going, with emendations:
Studio paid high six figures to Adam Cooper and Bill Collage to pen the screenplay [The previously produced work by this team consists of Accepted, a college comedy, and New York Minute, the Olsen twins movie].
The writers revere Melville’s original text [They haven't read it*], but their graphic novel-style version [Uh-oh] will change the structure [alter it beyond all recognition]. Gone is the first-person narration by the young seaman Ishmael ["Call me...nobody"], who observes how Ahab’s obsession with killing the great white whale overwhelms his good judgment as captain.
This change will allow them to depict the whale’s decimation of other ships prior to its encounter with Ahab’s Pequod [Because we all know the problem with whaling in the 19th century was the terrible toll whales took on whaling ships], and Ahab will be depicted more as a charismatic leader [Like, say, Bush going after Bin Laden?] than a brooding obsessive [And while we're at it, where's it written in stone that he has to have only one leg?].
"Our vision isn’t your grandfather’s Moby Dick," [Or Herman Melville's, either] Cooper said. "This is an opportunity to take a timeless classic [A recognizable cultural brand name] and capitalize [nuff said] on the advances in visual effects to tell what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story [Really, you can say the same thing about Hamlet, if you cut out all the boring speeches and just leave the swordfights]."
Okay, I realize my feeble disdain is making me sound like a cross between some prissy high school lit teacher from my youth and the kind of comic book geek who freaks out when Hollywood changes the slightest detail of, I dunno, Spider-Man's costume or something. But why film Moby-Dick if you're just going to turn it into something else? Why not just make your own action-picture version of the story and call it something else, like Peter Benchley and Spielberg did with Jaws (where Robert Shaw made a pretty good Ahab)? Basically, all you're getting by making up your own story and slapping the title of Moby-Dick on it is a little bit of brand recognition, and what does that matter, really, to the modern filmgoing demographic? The handful of actual readers of Moby-Dick who will go to see it will just be pissed off by the changes, and the vast majority of people who will go to see CGI whale sink ships with his mighty CGI tail and watch Viggo Mortensen (or whoever) as Ahab kick cetacean ass (or whatever) won't care. How many people who saw Peter Jackson's King Kong had ever seen or even heard of the original one? I'm just asking.
According to IMDb, there are half a dozen (at least) earlier film versions of Moby-Dick, including two good ones, John Huston's mostly faithful version (though I've never gotten used to Atticus Finch as Ahab), and a TV version with a superb Patrick Stewart as Ahab (considering that Melville's language owes everything to Shakespeare and the King James Bible, casting an actual Shakespearean to play Ahab was long overdue). But still, it's not as if Hollywood fucking with this particular "timeless classic" is a new thing. A couple of years ago, I saw on TCM the sublimely silly 1930 version of Moby-Dick, which dispenses with all that boring stuff about fate and nature and clocks in at a brisk 80 minutes. The film features John Barrymore as a jolly Ahab with a love interest (the pretty daughter of Father Mapple), and it ends (spoiler alert!) happily, with Ahab killing Moby-Dick and returning to the arms of his girlfriend.
And, of course, bottom line, Moby-Dick will survive whatever goofiness the movies inflict on it. Demi Moore's softcore version of The Scarlet Letter didn't ruin Hawthorne's reputation, after all, and Angelina Jolie's kitten-with-a-whip portrayal of Grendel's mother didn't sink Beowulf. And even if he did kill Moby-Dick, John Barrymore didn't kill Moby-Dick. But even so, Bekmambetov et al. may be tempting fate a bit by messing with one of the most iconic metaphors for implacable nature or the divine or hubris (take your pick) in the history of literature. Or, if you won't take it from me, shipmates, heed the words of Father Mapple:
Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation!
*Or maybe they have: I haven't seen Accepted, but according to IMDb, the main character, played by Justin Long, is named Bartleby Gaines. Perhaps I should give them the benefit of the doubt about Moby-Dick, but (and you saw this coming, didn't you?) I prefer not to.
In between bouts of rage at the return of Karl Rove, both figuratively and literally, to another American election cycle (he's about as easy to get rid of, apparently, as Christopher Lee in a Hammer Dracula film—motherfucker just keeps coming back), episodes of despair at the possibility of four more years of the last eight, and fits of bitter sarcasm about the commander-in-chief of the Alaska National Guard (insert your own Marge Gunderson/Annie Get Your Gun/Sexy Librarian joke here), I've found some intellectual solace in an article by Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, entitled "What Makes People Vote Republican?" I haven't read the responses to it yet—they go on for pages and pages and pages—but the article itself is extremely thought-provoking—and possibly not very cheering for those of us who want Obama to win. But however depressing the article may be, it's an original (at least to me) explanation of the underlying reasons for the current flare-up of the culture wars. It's also (without mentioning her by name, or, indeed, without mentioning the election at all) one of the shrewdest explanations of the appeal of Sarah Palin.
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