the accidental memory

This is how it goes sometimes.

My friend Fred came by the other night for dinner. Fred's about a dozen years older than I am, and he likes to talk about old movies, TV shows and radio tunes with me because I'm one of the few people who gets what he's talking about. But what he likes best is when I do his remembering for him.

"I remember there used to be this guy," he was saying, "who was on all the old variety shows. He was sort of dumpy, had a really low-key delivery, and always talked about how shitty his life was."

"Jackie Vernon," I said.

"Who?"

"Um, Jackie Vernon?"

"My god, that's it." Fred said. "I've been trying to remember that guy's name for years. Jackie Vernon. Christ. How in hell do you remember that?"

It's a really good question, and the answer is I really don't know. But it happens every once in a while. Somebody says something about somebody they saw on something years ago, they begin to describe that somebody, and boom! I come up with the name.

Often it's just as surprising to me as it is to the person struggling for the name. I've done that with songs, band names, TV theme songs, comic characters, Saturday morning cartoons shows, and more TV and movie actors than I'd like to admit. The weird thing is, the answer tends to come rolling out of my mind and off my tongue like ping pong ball at a bingo game. Most of the time, I'm not even aware that I remembered the name until I blurt it out. It's like I forget I remembered, if you know what I mean.

A couple of thoughts occur about this. First of all, the fact that it's always otherwise useless pop cultural ephemera that suddenly springs from my mental vaults probably says as much about those storage facilities as it does what they store. How is it I can remember stuff like the theme from Top Cat cartoons and the entire cast of Petticoat Junction and not my parents' wedding anniversary? (That, by the way, is not a joke. The very same week I coughed up the Jackie Vernon nugget my father reminded me that the next day was his wedding anniversary. "I figured I'd tell you so you could call your mother," he added.)

What kind of brain prioritizes the retention of half-century old junk TV over family milestones? Or remembers the specific theatre in which it first encountered Count Yorga, Vampire but not how many years its brother has been married? Mine. My kind of brain.

I mean, I realize that this stuff has a power to insinuate itself deeply in the pliant human cortex, but my brain sucks it up like Bounty ("The quicker picker upper!"). I can't tell you who my best friend was in grade two, but I remember what time Crusader Rabbit was on. Leave me alone for a while and I'll come up with the channel.

For reasons that probably qualify as psychotherapeutically treatable, my mind has always glommed onto the most insanely trivial pop cultural effluvia. Some it is stored, remembered and summoned consciously -- like all those directors, bands, comic artists and TV shows -- but a lot of it gets stored away without any conscious effort. These are the things that lay like little data-mines in my memory, waiting for somebody like Fred to come along and detonate them. They just lie there, waiting to be tripped. And when they are, I always wonder the same thing: "How much stuff is there that will never be sprung? That just sits there like unfertilized milkweed seeds? And why, why do I remember that shit?"

But I do, and when I do it usually leads to this: I not only remember Jackie Vernon, I remember what he looked and sounded like, the little trumpet he used to carry as an odd little prop, the low whiny New York monotone he used to affect. And I remember laughing. I remember I used to love Jackie Vernon, and that I'd always perk up when I heard he was going to be on somebody's variety show. My dad loved him to. We'd both laugh like crazy.

I looked up Jackie Vernon on Wikipedia, and the entry included some typical Vernon stuff, like the story he used to tell about his sad campaign to make a house pet of a watermelon, the time he went to the Grand Canyon only to find it was closed, and how he once went to a fistfight that broke into a hockey game.

Pained self-deprecation was Vernon's schtick, but unlike, say, Rodney Dangerfield, he wasn't frantic. Where Dangerfield always struck a spark of righteous resistance against the forces marshalled to make him miserable (that's why he sweat so much), Vernon was way more philosophically resigned to his fate. He was part Eeyore, part Borscht Belt existentialist, and part Jackie Gleason on downers. He'd walk on stage like a man who'd just been hit twice by the same bus, look out at the audience, and begin: "To look at me now, it's hard to believe I used to be considered a dull guy..."

Like I said, the guy cracked me up. And I almost completely forgot about him until Fred came along and dislodged that particular pebble from my mental asphalt. And then I remembered a lot, and I got to wondering, you know, whatever happened to Jackie Vernon? I mean, he was everywhere in those days when standup was as much a fixture of variety shows as folks who spun plates, women who sang in sparkly evening gowns, circus acts, and thick-banged teen acts "for the youngsters". Along with George Carlin, Bob Newhart, Don Rickles, Henny Youngman, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, Jonathan Winters, Joan Rivers, the Smothers Brothers and dozens of others, Vernon was part of that constant rotation of comedians who passed through prime time in those days.

(And I must say this: it served a comic much better to be in variety show context -- say between the Dave Clark Five and the June Taylor Dancers -- than one of those wall-to-wall standup shows you see today. That much standup comedy just makes you feel how aggressively, nakedly needy most comics actually are.)

Anyway, Vernon stood out from all these by playing it so quietly. (Newhart was close, but Vernon was way more schlubby and miserable.) When everyone else was whooping and hollering for your attention, he just sat there with his trumpet -- which, as I recall, he almost never played -- and waited to fill the silence with the wheezy sound of his own grief. And it was a riot.

Anyway, Jackie Vernon died in 1987, and these days he's best remembered as the guy who provided the voice of Frosty the Snowman in the Rankin-Bass Christmas specials that still get annual holiday rotation.   There's a part of me that wishes he was remembered for more than that, but there's also a part of me that remembers that I forgot too. But at least my mind stored the memory in that bizarre pop cult time-release capsule manner it has, and along comes Fred to flick it loose. It's the next best thing to remembering.

magnificent obsession

A conspicuous number of my favourite movies are about men driven, usually over the brink, by obsession: James Stewart in Vertigo, Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, Lee Marvin in Point Blank, Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Then there's John Wayne in The Searchers, a movie which is kind of the Moby Dick of movies about obsession. (And what's Moby Dick about? Yup, you go it: a guy completely crazed by that white whale.) With Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese made what is perhaps the ultimate movie trilogy about obsession: Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The King of Comedy.

Going back much further, you can trace the damp footprints of movie obsession at least as far as Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, Dana Andrews in Laura, Glenn Ford in The Big Heat. Nabokov's Lolita. Just about every western than James Stewart made with Anthony Mann -- The Man From Laramie, Winchester '73, The Far Country, The Naked Spur, Bend of the River -- is about a man driven to the frontiers of sanity by the need to get even. But those are westerns, and since westerns are largely about rationalizing violence, there's no motivator like revenge, and nothing primes the fuel pump of obsession quite like the desire to see your enemies -- who have shot you, beaten you, stolen your horse and left you for dead -- choking on the dirt they're about to be buried in.

But revenge is obsession boiled to its essence, and there have been some terrific movies -- not all of them westerns -- about men who unhinge themselves to get what they think is justified. This is Lee Marvin in Point Blank. Sprung from prison and hellbent on getting those who double-crossed and set him up, he'll stop at nothing, including the gradually dawning realization that he's never going to get the satisfaction of fulfillment. But here's the thing, by which I mean the thing that makes obsession so compelling in the first place: he keeps going anyway. He's got no choice.

That's what I find so deeply, irresistibly, seductively compelling about these movies. They're ultimately about passion pushed to the point of insanity. Think of John Wayne's thunderous racist anger in The Searchers, Dreyfuss's lunatic, family-shattering pursuit of an extraterrestrial vision in Close Encounters, Brando's seething pain in Last Tango, or the gradual psychotic storm brewing inside Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. Aptly then, it was Martin Scorsese who once said something about moviemaking as the art of making your audience every bit as obsessed with a story as you are. Once you've done that, you can take them anywhere.

The best movies about obsession take us way out of our comfort zone. They do this by permitting us to experience the protagonist's drive from both the outside and the inside. So while we grow quite naturally nervous as De Niro's Travis Bickle begins to take on more and more indications of imminent internal apocalypse in Taxi Driver, you're still more than a little sympathetic toward this sadsack, maladroit loser -- and Vietnam vet -- who's really just trying to find a way to fit in. Same thing with Stewart -- whose consistent brilliance in borderline nutjob roles is way too under-appreciated -- as Scotty in Vertigo. At first you feel for the guy -- I mean, he's Jimmy Stewart for chrissakes -- but then a crack starts to open between us and him, and it only widens as the movie goes on. His pursuit of a dead woman, and his re-making of a living one in her image (both played by Kim Novak), is hardly the stuff of conventional romantic love. It's delusional, cruel and flat-out, full-on crazy.

By necessity if not by nature, these movies are all about loners, or at least men who become so as their particular pathology entrenches itself more deeply in their being. Although he's managed to bring the girl, kidnapped by Comanche warriors he despises so intensely, home without killing her -- which remains a highly likely possibility right up until the last moment -- Wayne's character in The Searchers turns back toward the frontier before the door closes on him. You can't let him and he knows it. This guy is fundamentally dangerous and beyond domestication, and must be sent back into the wilderness from whence he came. That smile on Brando's face at the end of Last Tango gives away the relief he probably feels at being gutshot. After all, we've already seen the depths of his rage, resentment, misathropy and self-loathing, and it's been a whole lot more riveting than pretty. When Maria Schneider's gun discharges into Brando's stomach, he's saved the bother of killing himself.

So it should come as not surprise that I loved David Fincher's Zodiac a couple of years ago. Not only was it about the pursuit of a real-life serial killer -- in itself a rather obsessive sort of hobby -- but it focused on the ultimately bottomless vortex of clues, rumours, riddles, tips and dead end alleys the killers' pursuers are ultimately, irreversibly and fruitlessly pulled into. The further they go with their investigation the more obsessed they become, despite the fact, and very likely even because of it, they're never going to catch their killer. Zodiac is about professional dedication as a kind of pathology, the endless pursuit of the un-capturable prey. They're chasing a ghost.

Bleak? Well, I guess so, but bleak is as bleak does. I happen to love these movies, and what I love about them is the way they follow the dead-end logic of their characters as far as they do. Because that's what separates real obsession from just a passing spasm of intemperate fascination or fleeting infatuation: it takes you beyond reason and it cannot be fulfilled. It ultimately becomes the thing itself, far greater and more powerful than its object. It takes over, adjusts the rearview, and begins to drive.

It helps, of course, that I'm an obsessive type myself. Always have been, probably always will be. For better or worse, my relationship to most things has tended to fall in one of two categories: they're either entirely transfixing or of no interest whatsoever. There is no in between. Well, there is -- and that's what keeps me just this side of crazy -- but you get the point. Because when I do get fixated on something, it simply will not let go. It's all I think about, all I want to read about, all I want to write about. Indeed, it's why I do what I do, and what has given a weird kind of direction and momentum to my life. So when I watch these movies they have a built in, doubly irresistible allure: by identifying with the obsession of these characters, I immerse myself in the films' depths like someone sinking into a warm pool. Glub, glub, glub...

Here's just a random list of some of things I've gone overboard for -- and by that, I mean totally preoccupied with -- over the years: The Monkees, Batman comics, Peanuts, Pogo, Planet of the Apes, the Rolling Stones, W.C. Fields, Mad, Planet of the Apes, David Bowie, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Frank Frazetta paperback covers, The Godfather I & II, records, cd, videocassette and DVD collecting, Hank Williams, Converse high-tops, Muhammad Ali, motorcycle jackets, Miles Davis, Richard Nixon, the JFK assassination, the Black Donnellys, Alvin Karpis, Ted Bundy (and other much written about serial killers, who are the creepiest obsessives of them all), Norman Mailer, Frank Sinatra, punk, soul, funk, country and western,  '60s garage/psychedelic comps, Warner Brothers cartoons, power pop, film noir, Twin Peaks, The Sopranos, The Wire...


So I get these guys, and god knows they get to me. Obsession movies are a magnificent obsession, but only if they follow the logic all the way to the only possible revelation: you never really get what you want, and it doesn't really matter. The desire, the hunger, the appetite, the drive, the need itself. That's the thing.

who's your daddy, luke?

I saw Star Wars a second time the summer of 1977 because I didn't get it the first time. I also wanted to give the movie, which was quickly gaining on full-blown phenomenon status, a fair shake. After all, the first time I'd seen it at a drive-in, and everyone I knew who loved it told me it must be appreciated in a theatre.

I doubted that. The reasons I was underwhelmed had little to do with the venue, which after all had facilitated precisely the kind of pharmaceutical indulgence that one might expect render the movie amazing under just about any circumstances. No, it was the vision of the future -- or past, or whatever it was -- that bugged me. It just seemed, well, dumb.

Let me step back here. I had actually been kind of cranked to see it. Some months previously, Star Wars had been featured in a science fiction/fantasy/horror magazine called Cinefantastique, and the production images and drawing boards included in the story made it look amazing. As technologically ravishing as 2001, it seemed, but with way more violence. How could that go wrong?

But here's what, under a starry sky that summer of '77, I saw: a movie with a Saturday morning cartoon plot, a riot of bad costumes, blow-dryed hair jobs, dorky-looking fuzzball aliens, cardboard-thick performances, Flash Gordon-level dialogue and some of the most asinine character names I'd heard of this side of a Mel Brooks movie. A lone wolf rebel hero named Han Solo? A golden boy space hero named Luke Skywalker? A heavy-breathing black-caped intergalactic death-dealer named -- I kid you not -- Darth Vader? I mean, what the christ was this?

What made the whole thing seem even dumber was the fact that it was, especially for its day, so technically ravishing. It was as though somebody had given Stanley Kubrick's vision-making toolbox to a twelve-year old.

To hopefully bolster my case, we also must consider context. If you were, as I most indisputably was, a movie-fixated nineteen year-old who had just dropped out of journalism school to study film full time -- not all that common an academic pursuit in those days -- you probably would have seen a lot of the movies I had that year. Annie Hall was also released in '77, but so were New York, New York, William Friedkin's Sorcerer, Don Siegel's Telefon, Eraserhead, George Romero's Martin, John Frankenheimer's Black Sunday and Altman's 3 Women. Cassavetes released Opening Night, Alain Resnais made Providence, Satyajit Ray finished The Chess Players and Wim Wenders sprung The American Friend. The Taviani brothers' Padre Padrone arrived, and so did Andrzej Wajda's Man of Iron. And all of these -- I mean every single one of them -- opened and played at commercial theatres. I'm still kind of stunned to think about it.

However snobbish though I may have been, I should stress that I wasn't averse to taking in, nor enjoying, anything simply because it was a success. Far from it. I thought Saturday Night Fever was terrific (and still do), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind was sufficiently mesmerizing to me to qualify as a kind of obsession. (I've probably seen that one about twelve times since.) No, I was perfectly okay with popular provided it was also interesting. And that, when you get right down to it, was what Star Wars wasn't -- at least not at the time. It just wasn't interesting.

But everybody loved it, so I went again.

The result was the same, so I stood by with more than a little amazement in the coming months as George Lucas's movie proceeded to pretty much change the entire game. People were going multiple times, merchandise was selling in stratospheric numbers, anticipation for sequels was surging, and just about every studio was scrambling to produce its own version of a blockbusting space opera. The fuss simply eluded me. For the life of me, I could not understand why people were getting so worked up.

The rest of the story you know, at least the George Lucas vs. Hollywood version of it: Star Wars goes on to break all existing box office records, spawn equally record-breaking sequels (which I dutifully but unenthusiastically went to see). It re-writes the books on merchandizing, rollout strategies and opening-weekend numbers, signals the ultimate last gasp of the studio era (it was, after all, an independent production), and generates the most rabidly keen fan base anyone had seen since Star Trek. Indeed, it was as much the success of Star Wars as the relentless lobbying of the Trekkers that ultimately led to the re-launching of the Enterprise. Most importantly, Star Wars confirms the action-fantasy future of the movies, and thus the end of Hollywood's brief spasm as a producer of author-driven art movies. In a word, it changes everything.

So let's leap ahead a couple of decades, and smack into the future Star Wars makes possible. By then, the first movie has become a kind of generational touchstone, perhaps the movie most often cited by an entire generation of moviegoers (and filmmakers) as the one that first planted the bug. In 1997, the trilogy is being re-released by Lucas with new footage, and my ten-year old daughter, who has already seen the movies on videocassette, is practically panting at the idea of seeing the movies on the big screen.

By this time, I'd already begun to reconsider. In seeing how my kid -- whom absolutely everybody knows is uncommonly brilliant -- had taken to the movies, I realized that, in a very simple and uncomplicated way, I was just too old for Star Wars to appreciate it. I had gone in with expectations of a grownup science fiction movie -- of which there was no shortage in the '70s -- and was predictably unimpressed by a high-tech Saturday afternoon serial for kids.

After seeing the re-released trilogy, my daughter's passion only intensified. She started reading Star Wars  books, playing Star Wars games, collecting Star Wars comics and toys, making her own Star Wars-inspired art. And she did so for years. She was deeply immersed in the entire culture of Star Wars and therefore qualified as something I never was and never fully appreciated: a fan.

Finally, I started to get it. Star Wars wasn't just a movie. It wasn't even three movies. It was, so to speak, an entire universe, and one's full appreciation of it also required a full immersion: in the books, in the games, in the comics. In the life. Eventually, I even came to appreciate that, for fans like my kid, the movies were really only a small part of the whole thing. An element of a much larger enterprise. The real Star Wars experience involved the whole multi-media shebang. It was all in or nothing.

When the franchise was finally revived for the CGI-era, I went with my daughter to see both The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. I found them almost unendurably dull, cold and painful. Funny thing is, my kid's feelings weren't all that different. But her disappointment was diluted by the then almost incidental nature of the movies. The fictional universe of Star Wars, which had well begun to expand into cyberspace, was much, much bigger than these moribund megaplex fillers. So when she didn't like the movies much, it didn't really matter. If anything, they at least introduced a whole cast of new characters and situations that, she knew, would be far more satisfactorily expanded upon and fleshed out in alternate official Star Wars fictional worlds.

So while I still don't really enjoy Star Wars, I've certainly developed a healthy respect and understanding of it. And I've also some to understand something about fandom that's only becoming more pervasive in the age of globally networked, actively engaged, multiply-mediated, web-circuited fandom. Fandom, like the things that ignite it, can take many different forms, and Star Wars fandom tends to take a form that's just different from my own. My enthusiasms tended to toward singular experiences: a particular movie, a particular book, a particular comic or band. Star Wars, like Star Trek or Lord of the Rings or Frank Herbert's Dune books, was about entire worlds. Same for Harry Potter, another fictional experience that otherwise completely eludes me. (It doesn't help, I've come to realize, that I also have absolutely no interest in games, which by now have become an absolutely key component of so many pop culture franchises.) The thrill came from their integration and connection, the incremental expansion of their narratives into every more complex epic dimensions. In this, it was visionary in much more than the industry-transforming sense. It anticipated the fan world of the digital era.

But I still think that movie's pretty dumb. But I thank George Lucas, whom I interviewed once and graciously autographed a Star Wars comic book for my daughter, for helping me understand there are other ways to get obsessed than my own. The Force may not be with me, but I'm just a speck in the universe anyway.

the comic thief

Two passages in the past several months compelled me to face up to my criminal past. It was the late Frank Frazetta's paperback cover art that initially drove me into the frontier beyond the law, and the late Harvey Pekar who helped me understand I couldn't help myself. I was an obsessive-compulsive collector -- what one might indelicately call a geek, nerd or fanboy today -- and the only way to feed the habit back in those days was by getting a little Clyde Barrow now and then.

Psychologically, it worked like this. I'd buy, say, a comic, and I'd like it. (Actually, I never just 'liked' anything. It either stoked the fires of my obsessive soul or it didn't matter for shit. That was me.) Having experienced a positive hormonal response from the acquiring, reading and careful filing of the comic, I'd want more. Until I could get more, all I could do was think about getting more: I'd brood about the next comic in class, sketch primitive approximations of the comic art on my notebooks, daydream about it at the dinner table, then lie awake thinking about it until I fell asleep. Whereupon I'd dream about it.

Practically, it worked like this. If my need to acquire a certain comic -- like it was ever just one -- exceeded my monetary means to do so, I'd either steal the money -- from, gulp, my mom's purse or dad's change jar --- or, eliminating the middle man, just steal the comic. It wasn't hard: comics were often racked or binned in the back of corner stores in those days, and you could easily pilfer a few without being noticed provided you took the necessary precautions: greeted the store owner on your way in, dawdled at the candy bar display until another customer came in, then stuffed the goods in your shorts while another transaction was in progress. If you were really cool, you'd grab -- and pay for -- a Caramilk on the way out.

Comics were the gateway substance. From there I graduated to paperbacks. Anything with covers painted by the God-on-earth Frazetta, anything related to movies or that contained collected comic strips. I pilfered a copy of Don Siegel: Director from a shopping mall Coles because it had Clint Eastwood on the cover -- didn't really know who Siegel was at the time, but I learned -- and copies of The Rolling Stone Record Reviews, The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Renaissance of the Film from my high school library. (That rationalization was easy: these losers didn't deserve these books.) From a university library, where I'd go to browse movie books I couldn't find anywhere, I lifted a bound copy of an entire year's worth of Films and Filming. And so it went. The only thing that kept me from hoisting albums -- my great obsession from the age of thirteen or so on -- was the difficulty in concealing them in a pair of jeans.

It's not like I never acquired anything by legal means, I did, but it's just that there was never enough. Never, ever, ever enough. My mania for collecting manifested itself as an itch that could never really be reached. It was a drive, a compulsion, a mania. An obsession. (This is where Pekar helped: his American Splendor strips on his own jazz album habit were almost painfully on the money.) But one of the things that made it so -- apart, that is, from some kind of neurological cross-wiring -- was the sheer scarcity of cool stuff in those days. If you saw a choice Frazetta cover, if you stumbled across a book about horror movies or a collection of Al Capp comic strips, you knew there was a really good chance you might never see the thing again. You had to act now, and by whatever means necessary.

That's a rationalization of course, but that's what guys like me did: we justified our extra-legal activities by harnessing them to the higher purpose of saving these junk culture artifacts from an uncaring and uncool world. We were like outlaw preservationists of doomed cultural marginalia. Ours was not mania. It was a mission.

I don't steal any more. I wish I could say it's all about maturity and civic responsibility, but the truth is, not quite all. I just don't need to anymore. These days you can get anything you want any time you want. The days where I once travelled to cities like New York and Chicago to troll for rare books, records and videocassettes are long gone. All I need is Amazon.

So here's my question. Despite the fact that pop cultural passion has gone fully legit -- universities are now full of professors who once had boxes of numerically filed Green Lantern comics -- and notwithstanding the fact that it's become something of a badge of  hip-status reverse honour to declare oneself a fan, fanboy, nerd or geek, you've got to wonder what happens to these creatures when they no longer have to feed their habit through sheer hunger. When they're no longer driven to basements by their solitary fixations, when they don't have to worry they'll never get that copy of Tommy James's Crimson and Clover if they don't grab the sucker and run. When they can sleep knowing that DVD of collected Lawrence Tierney movies is arriving in the mail tomorrow. If obsessiveness is the engine that drove pop junkies like me, and if the fixes were so rare you had to resort to thievery as the only reasonable resort, what becomes of the collector?

I mean, scarcity was the thing. Scarcity was what gave the habit urgency, and solitude -- precisely the state needed to perform such acrobatic feats of moral contortion -- was what drove the adventure. The hunt for that month's equivalent of the Holy Grail, the endless pursuit, tracking, sniffing, digging, pavement-pounding and dusty record bin-flipping -- that was an instrumental part of it all. And that's what gave the ultimate acquisition of the cherished object, no matter the means by which you acquired it, an almost orgasmic kind of rapture. The chase was every bit as sweet as the kill. It's what made it sweet. Alone in my room, savouring those Frazetta cover or boning up on Don Siegel, I was a kind of punk outlaw.

Actually, I was just a sorry teenage dink, but you get the idea. What I'm saying is that fans -- who tend to also blur into collectors, obsessives and monomaniacal single-trackers -- can now bond into communities for god's sake. Communities. They can find thousands of like-minded maladjusted in an instant, and they can order up the the material objects of their desire in a hastened heartbeat. They can read books by esteemed academic fellow fans and engage in endless online debate about the most arcane junk culture ephemera. They can feel they belong to something greater. They can join the club. They're no longer alone.

The way I see it, the intemperate pop cultural enthusiast becomes a fundamentally different creature when you take away his or her solitude. For someone of my vintage and inclination, the very idea of a fan community is something like joining a support group for psychopaths. I mean, the whole point was feeling like you were the only one who got it. The only one who really understood. The only deserving soul on the planet, and thus a law unto oneself.

Of course, I did occasionally stumble across like-minded losers, and sometimes it resulted in a kind of on-the-spot criminal alliance: "You distract the guy at the counter. I'll grab that copy of Bran Mak Morn." But it was kind of like when outlaws cross paths in the desert in a western. You might share some grub and trade some stories, but you were always wary of anyone too much like you. After all, they might steal your shit.

this is the west, son

For my tenth birthday, I got an Ottawa Rough Riders helmet, a football and a movie. The first two gifts were odd, considering how indifferent I've always been to sports, but I suppose they do conform to my equally lifelong fixation on iconography and the image. I just thought it might be cool to have a helmet for my hometown team. (Which I wore around a lot, although never in an actual game.)

The movie was Rough Night in Jericho, a western featuring George Peppard as a good guy squaring off Dean Martin as the town's tyrannical boss. (This was a rare dastardly turn for Dino, and no doubt the movie's primary box office hook. ) I don't remember much of it -- although I've intended for years to take another look -- but I do remember this much: seeing a western with my father on my birthday seemed as natural as breathing, and certainly a wagonload or two more so than than the helmet and football.

Westerns infiltrated my imagination at an early stage. Perhaps even pre-natal, if you figure in the fact that my father was sent home from the hospital -- as many men of his day were -- when my mother was admitted for the delivery of her first baby. As I was born, Dad was at home watching Richard Boone in Have Gun Will Travel.

Have Gun Will Travel was simply one of scores of TV westerns that plugged the primetime landscape in the late fifties and early sixties. Indeed, something eight of the top-ten rated series between 1958 and '60 were westerns. That's a lot of guys on horses when you think about it.

Like I would, my father had grown up with westerns, although the westerns of his generation tended to be kid stuff: cheap programmers featuring guys like Johnny Mack Brown, Ken Maynard and Harry Carey. By the time I cottoned on their rough pleasures, the western had morphed into an adult genre, a comic book genre, a toy merchandizing boon, and all those TV shows: Sugarfoot, Rawhide, Wagon Train, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Wanted Dead or Alive and, of course, the swaggeringly popular and enduring Gunsmoke and Bonanza.

My father would watch anything that rode into town -- or directly into the living room -- on horseback. And I was his principle sidekick in the process. Like a lot of women, my mother never really took much to stories about men, guns, horses and landscape, and it now seems more than a little significant that, after my father took her to see The Wild Bunch in 1969 -- he had no idea it was anything more than another conventional oater -- she swore off seeing any movies for years. Meanwhile, my father and I spent a lot of time side by side observing gunplay.

It now seems almost inconceivable to consider how ubiquitous cowboy culture was for kids who grew up anywhere in the first seventy-five years of the twentieth century. After all, it's a pretty restricted little genre: restricted in terms of its narrative elements, its historical and geographic setting, and and certainly in its arcane but indispensable use of highly specific rituals.

But it's also that very specificity that, for decades that it dominated popular culture, gave it such endurance and paradoxical versatility. First of all, it dealt with pretty primal dramatic material: masculinity, the establishment of society, the causes, effects and morality of violence, racism, and the very ambiguous nature of honour and heroism.

It was, in other words, simple in form but infinitely rich in expression. Although the greatest bulk of western popular culture was set during the relative blink of the two decades from the end of the Civil War to the closing of the American frontier, this historical and geographical corral in no way prevented it from speaking relevantly to any present moment that produced it. While my Dad's era of westerns provided childlike escape fantasies for Depression kids, the postwar western ideally contained all the anxiety and contradictions of a generation of men coming home and attempting to re-domesticate. By the 1960s, when the western had entered it's so-called 'revisionist' stage, it had become all about apocalypse, revolution, remorse and death.

Although it might be considered the most cinematic of movie genres -- horses and men galloping through  rugged landscape -- it also fit very neatly into the square dimensions of TV. That's because the western was every bit as intimate and psychologically dramatic as it was visually epic. This very versatility, combined with its deeply-embedded cultural codes and adaptability to the present, is why you couldn't go anywhere at the time without stepping in some fresh new horse droppings.

So why did it die? (And it is, despite periodic attempts -- like 3:10 to Yuma, the wonderful Assassination of Jesse James and The Appaloosa -- to nudge it back in the saddle.) Obviously because this versatility spent itself: the codes and rituals of the western no longer suited the exploration of issues like violence, racism and masculinity, which found other genres -- science fiction, action, horror -- to call home. And a genre's lifetime has just as much to do with its usefulness as its popularity. Indeed, it's popularity is based on its usefulness. As a coda, I'll take Unforgiven as an especially eloquent last word. Not because it's uniformly brilliant and perfect, but because it ruefully demonstrates the futility of thinking that violence will ever be put to pasture, and because it features the very last Hollywood actor to become a superstar by riding so handsomely on a horse.

So I never expect it come back, and I hope to dear god this doesn't seem like just more long-in-the-tooth boomer retro-wallowing. I just think back now how incredibly present the western was in my life, and how it provided not only entertainment, but an ideal context for father-son bonding, a framework for the later appreciation of genre, filmmakers and filming, and a huge appreciation for ambiguity. Anyone who tells you the western was about any one thing -- violence, racism, male aggression -- obviously hasn't watched very closely. The western provided a kind of folk context in which to ask all kinds of questions about those things. To justify them, rationalize them, criticize  and generally address them. While it rode tall, it was a one form-fits-all kind of movie.

banshees

Further to that dream thing.

Sometime around 1993, I sat down with my six year-old daughter to watch a Disney movie on videotape that I was sure I'd never seen before. It was called Darby O'Gill and the Little People, made in 1959, and all I really knew about it was the fact it had leprechauns and a pre-007 Sean Connery in it. As I said, even though it had been in release several times -- as Disney movies often were -- and probably even anthologized on Walt's TV show, I was convinced this viewing with my daughter was a green as the Disney studio fantasy of the Emerald Isle.

I sat and watched with my customary mix -- for adult supervision purposes -- of attention and distraction, probably with a magazine or newspaper on my lap, roused intermittently to full attention by one of my daughter's endless stream of questions. So while there's much of Darby O'Gill I didn't see, I did look up long enough catch the banshee -- as they called it in the movie -- flying up to the window.

Holy shit, I thought.


That's it. That's the image. This is where it came from.


See, ever since childhood I'd been plagued not so much by a recurring nightmare as a recurring image: something ghostly -- trailing tatters, with snarled white hair and a shrivelled screaming face --  flying toward my bedroom window, me struggling to get the shutter closed before the damned thing got in and got me. Soon as the terrible face filled the window, I'd wake up. Bejeezus scared.

I must have had that damned dream twenty times, and now I knew where it came from. I had seen Darby O'Gill and the Little People and nothing remained of it in my conscious memory.

My unconscious memory was another matter. It had absorbed that movie -- or at least that image from it -- as a potent, primally effective nightmare fodder. Absorbed it, stored and, every once in a while, as anxiety and nocturnal turbulence demanded, deployed it to scare the poop out of me. And there it was, over thirty years later, on my basement TV screen.

I wish I could say that ended it, that I'd never seen the banshee in the window again. But I did. More than once. But in different form. Might not be a window, and it might not be the same tattered shrieker, but the drill was identical: a frightening face rushing toward a window or mirror, me desperate to escape before it reached me. And then I wake up. Still do. Never fails.

And it's funny. It didn't scare my kid one bit.

primal

Let's begin with a dream.

It occurred some time in April, 1968, the same month that Martin Luther King was killed and Planet of the Apes opened. I was ten years old, and I'd seen Charlton Heston appear on The Ed Sullivan Show to talk up his new movie. A clip ran. It was, as I very dimly recall, a minute or two from the cornfield chase sequence, in which Heston's astronaut Taylor and his fellow crash-landees first glimpse what's caused such screeching panic among the loin-clothed tribe of humanoids the spacemen have stumbled upon.

Gorillas. On horseback. With guns. All dressed in leather. Like, holy cow.

I made my father promise to take me as soon as it opened. Which he did. I don't recall exactly when the movie finally made it to a theatre near me -- we lived, at the time, in London, Ontario -- but I do know that Planet of the Apes literally debuted the day before King was shot in Memphis. This I mention for two reasons. First, because the news was in no way as impressive to me as the fact that the apes would soon be riding right into my neighbourhood bijou. And second because, in hindsight, Planet of the Apes is a movie that's all about race, violence, bigotry and revolt.

At the time, it was simply cool. Maybe the coolest movie I'd ever seen. And I'd already seen a lot of movies. By ten, my destiny as a pop cultural obsessive was already paved and locked in. On TV, The Monkees were cool and Batman was cool, and god knew Paul Newman was cool in Cool Hand Luke.

But Planet of the Apes? It was a whole new level of cool. It was cool from the ground up, cool from beginning to end, cool from the inside out. As soon as I'd seen it once, I began conniving to see it again.

Which I did, maybe four times in the next year. (Movies would kick around that way in those days. POTA had its first run as a stand-alone, came around later on a drive-in double bill, returned to theatres hitched oddly to Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, and yet again as part of a two-fer with its sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Quickly, it not only became my ten year-old standard by which all movies were judged, but according to which all experience was judged. It was simply the greatest event that had ever occurred in human history. Nothing else even came close.

But here's the thing. The night after I'd seen it the first time, after I'd recounted my favourite scenes ad nauseum with my dad, after I'd asked him somewhere around 468 questions I had -- "Why were the chimps good?" "Why didn't the apes drive cars?" "Did the apes rule the whole world?" "Will they becoming after Taylor?", etc., etc. -- I went to sleep to find myself in that cornfield with Chuck Heston.

We were running like crazy, Chuck and I, both dressed in loincloths and pounding our way furiously through the dense foliage. The gorillas were behind us. It seems to me we actually had our own heart-pumping soundtrack in the dream, but maybe not. But what I do remember is that at one point we burst through a wall of cornstalks only to be met by an ape whose horse reared up right in front of us.

That's pretty much all I remember, but I remember that as vividly as just about any dream I've ever had. (These days, I dream like crazy, but the details fade almost as quickly as my eyelids open.) Funny thing is, it wasn't the first time I'd dreamed myself into a movie I'd liked -- I remember as especially heartbreaking experience dreaming that I lived in a wooded glen with The Nine Lives of Thomasina's good witch Susan Hampshire -- and it definitely wouldn't be the last.

But it tells me something not only about insinuating power of movies, but about my own susceptibility to insinuation. I remember other kids talking about POTA, and they thought it was cool all right, but I was simply crazed. I drew the apes all over my schoolbooks, collected all the cards, tracked down a copy of Pierre Boulle's source-novel in the library. (It was kind of cool, but in a very different way. In a George Orwell-ish, political satire kind of way. Cool in a way I didn't really get, in other words.) I'd lie in bed thinking about the movie and what I'd do if I had crash-landed there, and waited in vain for the dream to resume itself.

It never did, of course. You can't order dreams around, and you certainly can't order them delivered on demand. At least I can't. That's one of the reasons why you have to go back, over and over. If the dream means anything to me now, it's as a symbol of just how deeply a movie -- or a song, or a TV show, or a comic, or a book -- could embed itself in the little humming engine of  my existence, mingle with the raw materials lying around therein and, ultimately and quickly, take the form of a full-blown obsession. It's pretty much the relationship of pop culture I've had ever since: all or nothing. Total passion or complete indifference. Death before disinterest.

One final thing, a kind of coda, I suppose. Over twenty years later, I found myself attending a reception at the Atlantic Film Festival in Halifax when in walked Chuck Heston. He was there to help promote a Disney-produced little movie he'd appeared in called -- I think -- The Little Criminals. Like a pro, he began making his way around the room to with outstretched hand, leaving a little of his old-school Hollywood stardust on moist Canadian palms. As he came my way -- and he was stooped as a result of back surgery -- I pondered giving him the line the instant he took my hand. You know the one: "Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!"

I didn't. I figured it would be more awkward than funny, and I also figured Chuck had probably heard that one at least fifty thousand times since April, 1968. But it was cool to meet him and see him up close once again. First time since that dream.