The Horror of Star Power

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In MassAdvertising as Social Forecast, Jib Fowles, a professor of communications at the University of Houston, identifies three “stylistic features” of ads that influence “the way a basic appeal is presented”: humor, celebrities, and images of the past and present. This post concerns how horror novels and movies use celebrities as a way to enhance horror.

Of course, almost every movie features celebrities—the actors who star in the film. However, the use of the celebrities “stylistic feature” Fowles identifies could be interpreted as referring to actors who play celebrities in horror movies. In other words, one or more of the characters in the film is a famous person. Such is the case, for example, with fictional actress Ann Darrow, played by actual actress Fay Wray, who appears in King Kong. It is in thus sense that Fowles's celebrities 'stylistic feature” is understood in this post.

By being identified as a celebrity, a character receives an elevated status, because, in the United States and elsewhere, celebrities are revered; for many, they are the equivalent, in the world of popular entertainment, to royalty, and this is true not only of actors, but of other performers, including singers, athletes, comedians, bestselling authors, politicians, and other entertainers and public figures.

Not only do such characters have fame (and often fortune), but they're also typically regarded as glamorous and charismatic, living the types of lives many believe they themselves would enjoy living. They are treated with adulation by fans, but, at the same time, they may be envied, and their fall, if their careers should fail for some reason, is often as intriguing as their rise.

Horror movies that include fictional celebrities among their casts of characters include, in addition to King Kong, Misery, and I Know What You Did Last Summer.

In King Kong, Darrow's celebrity as an actress allows her to represent Beauty in a way and on a scale denied to ordinary women, despite the beauty many of them undoubtedly possess. As a celebrity, she is herself a representative of the beautiful woman, of Beauty personified. She is both a flesh-and-blood woman and a type, or idea, of woman, the ideal woman, the Beautiful Woman. It is because of her that Carl Denham, the man who hopes to produce a documentary film, has a star who can deliver the box office appeal he needs to market his production.

Darrow also contrasts with Kong: she is a beautiful woman, while he is a gigantic ape. The colossal gorilla's wild nature and prodigious strength makes Darrow's helplessness all the more apparent, as she frequently struggles in his grasp. He takes her where he will, pursues her like a bestial stalker, and finally, according to Denham, at least, dies because of the pint-size femme fatale: “It was Beauty killed the Beast.”

As a human being, Darrow is also obviously a representative of humanity. As such, it is with her plight that moviegoers will identify. Through their identification with her, they will feel her helplessness and her terror. In Kong's hand, they will be grasped as the gigantic ape navigates the jungle on Skull Island. From her vantage point atop cliffs and in caves, where Kong deposits her temporarily for safekeeping, as he battles dinosaurs, she will witness Kong's titanic struggles. The audience will see Kong's pursuit by Darrow's defenders as the gigantic beast views the chase. They will ascend the Empire State Building, in Kong's hand, as he climbs the skyscraper, clutching the actress in his immense, furry fist. From her perspective atop the edifice, they will witness the airplanes' attacks.

When Kong succumbs to technology, falling, mortally wounded, from the building upon which he took his last stand in defense of Darrow as much as himself, audiences will see the difference between Beauty and the Beast and be reminded that, despite certain similarities between the human human and the lower animals, despite their kinship, there is also a huge chasm between the two, an abyss that cannot be overcome. Darrow, despite her “courtship” by Kong, remains a human being, and the two, human and animal, must ever remain distinct.

Paul Sheldon, the bestselling romance writer in Stephen King's Misery, is also a celebrity character. His romance series has made him famous, if not immensely wealthy; his success as a popular writer has set him apart from others. However, his success is predicated upon the interests of his readers. If they sour on his work, he can quickly become a has-been or, as Misery makes clear, a victim of his formerly “number one fan.”

Of course, King's notion that a fan would capture, assault, and attempt to kill a writer simply for killing off a favorite fictional character is over the top. Most fantastic literature, whether of the horror or another genre, is, by definition, exaggerated, which is why Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of the need for a reader to “suspend” his or her 'disbelief” as a condition for enjoying such literature.

Annie Wilkes, the psychotic serial killer-cum-nurse who rescues Sheldon after crashing while driving during a snowstorm, attempts to force the writer to resurrect Misery Chastain, the character whom Sheldon killed off in the last novel of his romance series, which he has abandoned in the hope of becoming a serious writer. The presence in the novel of a celebrity character affords King the opportunity of commenting upon relationship between a famous writer and his or her fans—a relationship which, in Misery, becomes more predatory than symbiotic.

According to Grady Hendrix, King's own fans reacted negatively to the novel, seeing it as an expression of King's “contempt” for his readers, and some see the novel as, indeed, a “love/hate letter to his fans.” King apparently tried to mend fences with his “outraged fans” during a “publicity tour” for the book, but it's hard to imagine he succeeded given the fact that he describes the psychotic Wilkes, his self-described “number one fan” as a soulless monster who literally reeks.

The portrait of King's fans is nothing if not ambiguous and begs the question, What sort of writer writes for such admirers? The answer appears to be Sheldon, but how much of the fictional bestselling romance author is a true likeness of King himself? There are similarities: both writers, the real and the imagined, suffered shattered legs; both became prescription pain killer addicts; and both apparently have ambiguous, “love/hate” relationships with their fans. As Hendrix observes,

King has said numerous times, the fans put food on his table. He hates them, but he owes them his life. And there are moments when Paul is waiting for Annie to react to something in the manuscript he’s writing that he knows will thrill her, or upset her, when it feels like her reaction is vital for his continued existence. He imagines her reaction and then revels in it when it comes, and one can imagine this is how King felt too. He has written for his readers (Constant reader as he calls them in his introductions) for so long that to some extent his books are collaborative: if a book is released to the public and no one reads it, does it even exist at all?

Although there are exceptions, celebrities don't typically start life as celebrities. Like everything else, fame must usually be earned. The biographies of most famous people show they paid their dues. Michael Landon, a star of the television series Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie, and Highway to Heaven, not to mention the movie I Was a Teenage Werewolf, began his career as an extra. Clint Eastwood started out as a laboratory technician in Revenge of the Creature. Although they may have appeared in earlier films, many actresses, including Fay Wray (King Kong), Janet Leigh (Psycho), Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween), Jennifer Love Hewitt (I Know What You Did Last Summer), and Kate Beckinsale (Underworld: Evolution), established their Hollywood careers “scream queens.”

In I Know What You Did Last Summer, Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a “D”-list celebrity, local beauty queen Helen Shivers, who hopes to leave her small town and establish herself in New York City as a major player in the entertainment industry. She finds fame elusive, and returns to her hometown, Southport, North Carolina, where she must settle for work as a “fragrance girl” in her father's department store, her show business aspirations confined to the local beauty pageant and a master of ceremonies spot for the Croaker Queen Pageant. She meets her death at the hands of the serial killer who stalks her and her friends. As far as her part in the film is concerned, the movie seems to suggest that small-town girls typically remain small-town girls, despite their hopes and dreams for something bigger and better than the lives they live as, well, small-town girls.

As with most other aspects of life in horror fiction, celebrity isn't all it's cracked up to be. For one thing, it makes a character stand out from the crowd, and that can be dangerous, indeed. Coming to the attention of—becoming, in fact, the center of attention for—a giant gorilla, a psychotic “fan,” or a serial killer bent on gruesome revenge isn't likely to promote one's career, whether as an actress, a bestselling author, or a beauty queen who wants to break out, both in the theater and from her small-town life. In fact, celebrity, in horror fiction, is likely to be brief, ending in a painful, violent, and bloody death. It's better, perhaps, to be a “nobody” than a Somebody, or, as military personnel learn, in their struggles to survive, to “keep a low profile.”

Inference and Implication as the Language of Film

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

A rule of thumb is that one page of a screenplay equals one minute of screen time. The cost of filming is expensive, so, ideally, each foot of film is vital to the story. It helps to set the scene, establishes the mood, introduces a character, presents a significant conflict, symbolizes or underscores the theme, or otherwise advances the plot or the movie's overall purpose.

Of course, the opening scene* of a motion picture also bears the burden of “hooking” the audience, of capturing their interest, of making them want to see the rest of the movie.

The primary language of film is imagery, the organized sequences of pictures that appear on the screen. Imagery is often supplemented and complemented by sound, including dialogue. The language of film is rich and powerful, primal and rousing, but it is also limited. Written language can tap more than sight and sound; it can get inside readers' minds, evoke (or represent) thought, reflection, and consensus or disagreement between characters (or between characters and readers), as well as characters' and readers' emotions. Although movies may occasionally awaken the mind, motion pictures mostly elicit feelings. They're directed, first and foremost, at the heart.

The language of film—image and sound—is limited in another way as well. It relies almost entirely upon suggestion, or implication. Unless a director resorts to a rather heavy-handed use of exposition, telling audiences, rather than showing them, what something means or how action should be understood, all a movie can do is to show images, have actors comment upon events, and leave it to audiences to put two and two together (and to read between the lines, so to speak) in order to infer the meanings of the images and sounds presented to them. Written narratives can and do use exposition (although they do so less frequently today than in the past). Sometimes exposition is provided for pages at a time. By this means, omniscient narrators go directly inside characters' heads or explain the meanings of incidents, scenes, or, in some cases, entire short stories or novels.

It's important to remember that the language of film requires directors to imply and audiences to infer. With this in mind, let's take a look at the opening scene of a well-known slasher flick.

First, we describe the action shown to us by the camera. Then, in blue font, we provide an inference or two to represent those which are likely to be made by audiences who see and hear each sequence of images. In our examples, viewers mostly see, rather than hear, what follows.
 

Halloween (approximately five minutes of screen time)

As our eyes travel from left to right across the front of a porch, we see the white wall of the front of a clapboard suburban house, the front door, vague human shapes moving behind a window curtain, and a Jack-o-lantern on a porch rail, among dense, dark foliage. The foliage ends, its leaves casting shadows upon the house's wall.

It's Halloween. Who are the people inside the house? What are they doing? Are they residents? Home invaders? Cat burglars?

Inside the house, through the window, we see a young couple. The girl is seated on a couch, the boy sitting beside her. She holds him around the waist, as he kisses her, his hands holding the sides of her head. Hearing something, they pause and listen. The boy lifts a mask to his face, pressing it into the girl's face as he kisses her. She shoves him away, and he removes the mask, grinning at her. We have become—or have been made to become—voyeurs. We watch the young couple make out on the couch.

Whose house are they in? Probably hers. What have they heard? Despite having heard something, their playfulness suggests they're unconcerned about the sound or noise they heard a moment ago.

They embrace, kiss again, and the boy leaps to his feet. The girl joins him, and they leave the room, dashing upstairs together.

The couple probably plan to make love.

Outside, the porch flashes past, from left to right. We see the Jack-o-lantern on the porch rail among dense, dark foliage, the white wall of the front of the clapboard suburban house, two windows fronting the porch—our gaze rises; above the eaves, we see a pair of lit windows on the right; the pair on the left are dark. The light in the windows on the right go out. We are not the only voyeurs. The point of view, resumed a second time, as the observer retraces his or her steps, indicates that there is a watcher present.

The unseen watcher is interested in the lit window of the room into which the young couple appear to have retreated to make love.

We see the porch sweep past, we turn a corner, and we spot the open back door. Entering the kitchen, we see shelves, cabinets, a mixer. A light comes on, and we see the stove; the sink; a vertical rack of dishtowels, an orange one at the front; the tile floor.

The observer has found an entrance to the house and entered the residence. He or she moves through the kitchen.

Because the camera represents the invader's point of view, in watching him or her, we accompany this person.

An arm clad in the sleeve of a camouflage shirt is extended; its hand grips the handle of a butcher's knife, removing it from the drawer. Decorative plates hang on the wall near the stove. To their left, a doorway leads into the dining room: table braced with chairs and set with a linen tablecloth and silver candlesticks bearing long, slender tapers; a side table; a silver tureen on the doily atop the side table; pictures on the wall above the side table. The invader, knife in hand, enters the dining room.

His or her targets are likely to be the young couple making love upstairs.

Another doorway leads into the living room: a television, a rocking chair, a pole lamp, a sofa, a painting on the wall—the same room in which the young couple were necking. 

The invader seems intent on following the path of the young couple. The knife he or she has acquired suggests harm is intended.

Another doorway leads into a hallway, where a staircase banister appears. There's a ceiling lamp, and, on the wall above the staircase, a painting. Near the top of the stairs, a boy, tugging a shirt down his naked torso. He bounds down the stairs—the same boy who was making out with the girl on the couch a few moments ago. At the front door, he pauses, looks back, says goodbye to someone—the girl, we assume. The door closes.

As the invader starts to enter the hallway, the teenage boy who was necking with the girl on the living room couch runs down the stairs, pulling on a shirt. He says goodbye before leaving.

He and the girl have finished making love. He's going home. The girl is alone in the house, unaware of the invader.

Into the hallway and up the stairs, past the painting, into the darkness. At the top of the stairs, a hallway. A right turn. A hand reaches into the hallway to pick up a toy. Clothes and a bag on a bed. The invader does not pursue the boy.

He or she is after the girl.

Our conclusion is borne out by the fact that he climbs the stairs.

At a vanity, the girl, naked but for her panties, brushes her hair. Her bed is rumpled. The girl, sensing she is not alone, turns, shocked and frightened. She covers her breasts, ducking away.

The half-naked girl is startled by the invader's arrival.

As the eye holes of a mask look into the room, at the girl, we see the room and the girl from the invader's point of view.

The intruder is masked.

A flashing knife stabs downward, again and again. The girl falls, lying still on her back.

He or she has killed the girl.

The eye holes look back and forth.

The killer searches the room.

The staircase. The front door, seen through the eye holes.

He or she is going downstairs.

The door opens. Darkness. Night.

The killer is intent upon escape.

A car's headlights. A dark car. A man and a woman exit the vehicle. The man lifts a mask from a boy dressed as a clown and holding a knife—the same knife as stabbed the girl. He blinks. The knife is bloody. The killer is unmasked; we see the action from an objective, omniscient point of view. The killer is a child, dressed as a clown.

As we've made clear, moviemakers are restricted to images and sound; with these tools, they must imply meanings, which audiences must then infer. Short story writers and novelists can describe sights and sounds, but they can also appeal to the senses of touch, smell, and taste. In addition, by using interior monologues and narrative exposition, among other techniques, short story writers and novelists can also directly represent characters' thoughts, feelings, attitudes, beliefs, values, and other subjective states and qualities, without the need to have readers infer much of anything. What such writers gain is offset by the loss of the directness of communication typical of imagery and sound, which create the impression that events are actually transpiring before the audience's very eyes (and ears). There's always a distance between short story writers or novelists and their readers—the distance of the written word.

There are a few ways by which writers can approximate the directness with which movies communicate with their audiences:

Describe what a camera shows. The camera can be a video recorder, the source of “found footage,” as in The Blair Witch Project, or surveillance cameras that have recorded crimes or otherwise unsettling behavior or events, as in 13 Cameras. Such footage may also be provided by videos taken of vacation trips or by home movies.

Describe the images in a dream as the dream occurs. A Nightmare on Elm Street takes this approach, although, of course, the film shows the dream images directly, rather than describing them. 

If the horror movie also involves science fiction, a person's consciousness, projected as images on a screen, through a brain-computer or other interface, could be described. (This may become an actual reality in the near future!)

Describe the imagery transmitted by a camera mounted on a drone.

Describe what a sniper sees as he or she trails a target through his or her weapon's scope.

None of these techniques will provide the directness that a motion picture camera provides; at best, each is merely an approximation of such directness. Nevertheless, such techniques are likely to make the communication between the writer (or his or her narrator) and readers more direct than it would be otherwise.

* * *

For Edgar Allan Poe, the short story's form is superior to that of the novel, because the former's compact structure, greater unity, and better coherence results in a greater emotional effect on readers than the latter's longer, less unified and less coherent development. In a short story, which, according to The Annotated Poe, Poe defines as taking no longer than an hour to read, all narrative elements contribute to the payoff at the end of the tale, making the story's conclusion, whether that of the comedy's denouement or that of the tragedy's catastrophe, seem inevitable, given what has transpired before it.

According to the Internet Movie database (IMDb), in 2010, feature-length films were, on the average, approximately 130 minutes long (Halloween is 129 minutes long), which is about 2.15 times longer than the optimum length Poe names for the 60-minute short story. Halloween's opening scene lasts about five minutes, which is about 3.9 percent of the movie's overall length. At the same ratio, the comparative length of time for a 60-minute short story would be about 2.34 minutes.

According to Forbes, reading speed increases with education and (presumably) experience, but the “average adult” reads at a rate of about 300 words per minute. In 2.34 minutes, therefore, the average adult reader reads about 702 words, or about 2.81 pages if each 6 x 9-inch printed page bears 250 words) or 2.55 pages (if each 6 x 9-inch printed page bears 275 words). In other words, if we base our calculations on 275 words per page, a short story writer or a novelist has about 2.55 pages, or 701 words, in which to accomplish the task that Halloween's director, John Carpenter, accomplishes in the five minutes of his film's opening scene.

*However, the film's opening scene does not comprise the whole of the movie's beginning, which is significantly longer and more complex. For a more accurate contrast of the differences between cinematographic and linguistic modes of communication, the actual beginning of the movie and the beginning of a short story or a novel should be considered in detail. As defined here, the beginning of a film, short story, or novel, using Gustav Freytag's model of dramatic structure, would consist of the first act, the exposition, which begins with the start of the story and ends with the inciting moment that initiates the rising action, or the second of the five acts of the story, during which the basic conflict is complicated.

For the movie Halloween, the beginning of the story runs to Michael Myers's escape from the sanitarium to which he was confined after stabbing his sister, Judith, to death. His escape, which occurs at about 10 minutes and 41 seconds, or about 8.5 percent, into the 129-minute film. (It is Judith whom he saw, as a boy, making out with her boyfriend in the living room of their home while his parents were away.) By comparison, 8.5 percent of the 166-page novel Halloween, which is based on the movie, equals about 14 pages.

The Death of a Beautiful Woman

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Poe did write this, in his essay, “The Philosophy of Composition”—but what did he mean by it?

Some critics might contend that he was merely creating a pithy defense for “The Raven,” which concerns the speaker of the poem's grief for an unnamed woman who had died, a grief which has driven him insane with despair at the thought that he shall see her “nevermore.” If “the death . . . of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” and Poe's poem deals with this theme, obviously the work concerns the most elevated theme possible, which supports the idea that “The Raven” is itself likely to be one of the most poetic poems ever written.

In any case, horror movies and, quite often, novels frequently include the death of a beautiful woman. In fact, they often feature the deaths of any number of beautiful women. In horror movies, slashers, in particular, beautiful women are killed with abandon.

Some of the reasons for horror writers' bias in favor of female victims are fairly obvious. Typically, women are physically weaker than men and are, therefore, less able to defend themselves. Watching them as they are stalked by a suitably powerful, often grotesque and relentless, monster is likely to make viewers or readers who identify with them (and, yes, research shows that either sex is able to identify with its own or the opposite sex) feel that much more helpless.

Beautiful women do not always die, of course. Sometimes, they are rescued. According to evolutionary psychologists, men may be hard-wired, genetically, to risk their lives in the defense of beautiful damsels in distress, even when the men do not know the damsels personally; men are less likely, perhaps, to do the same for male strangers. Men's motives may not be entirely altruistic; often, in fiction, if not in “real life,” women reward heroes with more than just a thank you and a shake of the hand. Yes, such a subtext is sexist, but sexism, as such, doesn't necessarily make such a plot ineffective, as there is much tension in romance, regardless of its nature or source.

In addition to experiencing the terror of a damsel in distress, male audience members or readers can also vicariously enjoy the accolades and rewards of the victorious hero who rescues the distressed damsel. Most men don't get a chance to be a white knight in their everyday lives, or at least not in as dramatic a fashion as a horror story permits. Being allowed to experience the pride and self-esteem that such a role confers—as well as the rescued damsel's hand—is a perk hard to resist.

A female audience member or reader, on the other hand, can feel special. After all, her predicament—and her beauty—as represented by her stand-in, the story's beautiful damsel in distress, has caused a man to risk his life to save her. That's quite a testament to her charms! Then, should she care to express her gratitude in a “physical” fashion, she again demonstrates the power of her beauty by “conquering” the man who conquered the monster that tried to kill her. If the monster-slayer is powerful, how much more so is she, whose beauty conquers his strength. If he is Samson, she is Delilah.

The human species could survive with relatively few men, as long as there are a sufficiently large number of women. Theoretically, one man can impregnate millions upon millions of women over his lifetime. (In reality, in an extreme situation, he might actually impregnate a few thousand.) However, a woman can bear relatively few children before she is past her childbearing years. Each woman who is killed lessens the chance of the species' survival far more so than each man who is killed. For this reason, women symbolize life more frequently than men do; we speak of Mother Nature, after all, relegating men to the representation of mere Time. It makes more sense, from an evolutionary perspective, to rescue women (and children) before rescuing men. Therefore, we are likely to view as more horrible a woman's life at risk than we are to view a man's life at risk.

Today, male victims are increasingly shown, although there are still fewer of them than there are of female victims. Often, in fact, the last man standing (so to speak) isn't a male character at all, but the “final girl.” As originally conceived by Carol Clover, in her book Men, Women, andChainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992), the final girl was viewed “as a stereotype of the pure, virginal sole survivor in 1980’s slasher films such as TexasChainsaw Massacre and Halloween.” Sometimes, as in Backcountry, the male (Alex, in this case) is killed, despite his macho posturing, because of the poor judgments he makes, while the female (Jenn, in this instance) survives because of her greater maturity and common sense:

Alex's Errors in Judgment

Mistake	Type	Reason for Mistake	Consequence
Alex refuses ranger's offer of a park map.	Judgment	Alex's overconfidence; he seeks to impress Jenn with his woodcraft.	Jenn and Alex become lost and have no guidance out of the woods. His behavior could endanger their lives.
Alex secretly leaves Jenn's cell phone in their car	Judgment; deceit	The lack of a prevents Jenn from communicating with others, focusing her attention on camping trip (and on Alex).	Without a phone, Alex and Jenn have no way to call for help. His behavior could endanger their lives.
Alex leaves Jenn alone when he goes to chop wood.	Judgment	Unclear	The stranger, Brad, who happens upon Jenn could be dangerous: he might have raped or killed Jenn. His behavior could endanger their lives.
Alex does not tell Jenn about the presence of a bear in the area.	Judgment; deceit	Alex wants their trip to continue. He hopes to impress Jenn with his woodcraft and intends to ask her to marry him.	Jenn has bear spray and a traffic flare that they could use against the bear, but she is unaware of its presence. The bear could (and, later, does) kill someone. His behavior could endanger their lives.
Although he is uncertain of the correct path to the lake, Alex continues their trek through the forest.	Judgment; deceit	Alex wants their trip to continue. He hopes to impress Jenn with his woodcraft and intends to ask her to marry him.	Alex and Jenn may be lost. His behavior could endanger their lives.
Alex does not leave the woods after seeing a bear print.	Judgment	Alex wants their trip to continue. He hopes to impress Jenn with his woodcraft and intends to ask her to marry him.	Jenn has bear spray and a traffic flare that they could use against the bear, but she is unaware of its presence. The bear could (and, later, does) kill someone. His behavior could endanger their lives.
Without investigating, Alex tells Jenn sounds she hears are merely acorns falling from the trees, onto their tent.	Judgment; possible deceit	Alex wants their trip to continue. He hopes to impress Jenn with his woodcraft and intends to ask her to marry him. He may believe the sounds are the effects of falling acorns, as he says, or he may not want Jenn to think the sounds are caused by a bear, whether to keep her from being afraid or to prevent her from wanting to leave, in which case he is also being deceitful.	Jenn has bear spray and a traffic flare that they could use against the bear, but she is unaware of its presence. The bear could (and, later, does) kill someone. His behavior could endanger their lives.
Even after hearing the sounds of what might be a bear, instead of falling acorns, Alex refuses to leave the park.	Judgment	Alex wants their trip to continue. He hopes to impress Jenn with his woodcraft and intends to ask her to marry him.	His behavior could endanger their lives.
Even after seeing a broken tree branch indicative of a bear's nearby presence, Alex refuses to leave the park.	Judgment	Alex wants their trip to continue. He hopes to impress Jenn with his woodcraft and intends to ask her to marry him.	His behavior could endanger their lives.
Even after seeing the carcass of a dead deer indicating the presence of a bear—and of a bear that is both starving (bears, otherwise, don't eat meat—and predatory)—Alex refuses to leave the park.	Judgment	Alex wants their trip to continue. He hopes to impress Jenn with his woodcraft and intends to ask her to marry him.	His behavior could endanger their lives.
Even after the bear visits their campsite, Alex refuses to leave the park.	Judgment	Alex wants their trip to continue. He hopes to impress Jenn with his woodcraft and intends to ask her to marry him.	His behavior could endanger their lives.
Alex leaves his axe outside the tent.	Carelessness		With his axe inside the tent, Alex would have had a weapon with which to fight off the attacking bear; without it, he has nothing but his hands and feet. His behavior could endanger their lives.

Jenn's Errors in Judgment

Mistake	Type	Reason for Mistake	Consequence
Jenn did not insist that Alex accept a park map from the ranger or accept one herself.	Judgment	Jenn probably did not want to embarrass Alex by casting doubts on his knowledge of the park.	Alex and Jenn may be lost. Her behavior could endanger their lives.
In Alex's absence, Jenn invites Brad onto their campsite.	Judgment	Jenn is being friendly.	Since she does not know Brad, Jenn could be endangering her and Alex's lives and could be putting herself in danger of being raped.
Jenn does not insist that Alex make sure the “acorns” he says are falling on their tent really are acorns.	Judgment	Jenn probably did not want to embarrass Alex by casting doubts on his knowledge of the park.	Her behavior could endanger their lives.
Jenn does not insist that Alex take her home after she sees evidence of the nearby presence of a bear.	Judgment	Jenn allows Alex to persuade her to stay because she has feelings for him and may feel sorry for him.	Her behavior could endanger their lives.
Jenn returns to their campsite after the bear has killed Alex so she can retrieve the engagement ring he has shown her.	Judgment	Jenn, who had feelings for Alex, wants a memento of his love for her.	Her behavior could endanger her life. lives.

Note: Although Jenn, like Alex, makes mistakes in judgment, she is not a woodman and the couple's survival is not primarily her responsibility. In addition, she is not deceitful toward Alex, as he is to her. When she is alone, after Alex's death, her decisions are wise, allowing her to survive the bear and the wilderness.

Female characters have come a long way since the days of King Kong's Ann Darrow. Today, many are as kick-ass as Buffy the VampireSlayer. Pity the poor monster that attacks one of these “damsels in distress.”

Bits & Pieces: The Travel Channel’s Tour of "Scariest Places"

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Cheesman Park's acropolis

It’s October, and, in anticipation of Halloween, The Travel Channel is broadcasting a series concerning The Scariest Places in America. A recent installment included Denver’s Chessman Park, which was built atop a cemetery of 4,000. Some of the bodies were buried in “term graves.” These were temporary burial places; interment in them required that the remains be moved to permanent graves when they became available, and E. P. McGovern was hired to relocate the bodies. He provided the coffins, for which he received approximately two dollars each. Instead of using adult-size boxes, he used children’s coffins, breaking the corpses apart and casketing them indiscriminately. Those who believe that the present-day park is haunted believe that the mistreatment of the dead by McGovern is the cause of their ghosts’ unrest, and several visitors to the park claim to have seen the specters.

Resurrection Cemetery:  who wouldn't want to "live" here?

Fort Mifflin, near Philadelphia, Philadelphia; a devil’s tree; Manresa Castle, near Port Townsend, Washington; Pawtucket, Rhode Island’s Slater Mill; Resurrection Mary, the hitchhiking ghost who, trying to find her way to her relocated grave in Resurrection Cemetery in Justice, Illinois, seeks to thumb a ride along Archer Avenue; Chet’s Melody Lounge, also in Justice; and the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts (the place was once the actual home of the infamous Lizzie Borden) are the other “scariest places” featured on the show.

The official website of the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast summarizes the events of the double murder: “August 4, 1892. A wealthy businessman and his wife are found brutally murdered in their Victorian home in Fall River, Massachusetts. The Accused: the youngest daughter, Lizzie. The Verdict: Not Guilty!” According to a séance conducted for the show, a man named “Joseph” killed Lizzie’s parents--and that information comes directly from the ghost of the murdered matriarch herself , according to the psychic who conducted the séance.

The whole hour, from the story of Cheesman Park to the story of Lizzie Borden, is cheesy and, for that reason, more than worth watching.

Beside. It’s almost Halloween!

Tyranny and Solidarity "Under the Dome"

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Romeo (“Rommie”) Burpie visits his department store, telling his clerks that he is conducting inventory. Instead, he loads up shopping carts with the radiation-protection items that Rusty Everett has requested for use in his pending visit to Black Ridge, where Joe McClatchey and his friends, Norrie Calvert and Benny Drake, believe the dome generator is located. His clerks wear blue armbands, which makes Rommie believe that they have been sworn in as special deputies. They assure him that they have not; the armbands are merely intended to show “solidarity” with the local firefighting and police departments. Rommie decides that he and Rusty should wear these bands, too, as “camouflage,” so Big Jim and his supporters will falsely assume that Rommie and Rusty, too, support him. After gathering the equipment that Rusty has requested, Rommie also hides several rifles in his store’s safe, in case Big Jim rounds up all the citizens’ weapons.

Meanwhile, Big Jim Rennie refuses to surrender his authority to Andrea Grinell, as Colonel Cox suggests when the Army officer makes contact with the selectman via telephone, even after Cox lets Big Jim know that the Army knows about his manufacture and dsitribuion of illegal drugs and promises not to prosecute the politician if he agrees to do so. Big Jim adopts Carter Thibodeau as his personal bodyguard, dispatching him with a message to Chief Randolph: fire Deputy Wettington. Big Jim also orders Thibodeau to instruct Deputy Stacey Moggin to assemble “every officer we’ve got on our roster” at Food Town supermarket, where Big Jim plans to deliver “another speech” in which he will “wind them up like Granddad’s pocketwatch [sic]”(707).

Fired, Jackie commiserates with the Reverend Piper Libby, and the two women compare notes, Jackie telling Piper about Rusty’s visit to the funeral home and his determination that a baseball was used to kill the Reverend Lester Coggins and that someone broke Brenda Perkins’ neck. (In an earlier scene, Rommie, who is quite the womanizer, vowed to avenge himself upon whoever killed Brenda, who was former girlfriend of his.) Jackie also notifies Piper of her plan to break Barbie out of jail. Jackie asks Piper to allow a meeting between eight trusted citizens who oppose Big Jim and Chief Police Pete Randolph at her parsonage that night. Among the invited are librarian Lssa Jamieson and retired Food Town manager Ernie Calvert. They complete their discussion as Helen Roux, Georgia’s mother, arrives at Piper's house for counseling concerning her daughter Georgia’s death at the hands of Georgia’s victim, Samantha Bushey.

Just as Big Jim’s enemies are choosing followers, Deputy Henry Morrison believes that Big Jim likewise plans to assemble a cadre of trusted lieutenants, eliminating Jackie and other officers whom the selectman thinks may be loyal to the former chief of police rather than to Police Chief Randolph and himself. Henry believes that he will be the next to be fired and that others who will be terminated will likely include Linda Everett and Stacey Moggin. As Linda Everett told her husband, Rusty, earlier, “There are sides, and you need to think about which one you’re on” (527). Both Big Jim and his enemies are clearly doing just this, preparing for war.

Except for an occasional mention of the depletion of gasoline and propane reserves, Stephen King does not devote much attention to the need to conserve natural resources, and, apart from a few brief mentions of pollution and environmental destruction, King does not belabor this theme of his novel. Plants and trees, his characters learn, are dying. The atmosphere inside the dome seems to be affected adversely by the presence of the barrier, to the outer side of which particulates of pollution cling. The air inside the dome is stale. Children (and a few adults) have seizures and hallucinate, perhaps as a result of the dome’s influence upon them. Animals seem to kill themselves for no discernable cause. A few of the residents of Chester’s Mill (Junior and his father, Big Jim Rennie, included), seem to be losing their minds. Additionally, King’s omniscient narrator clearly associates the dome with pollution and its effects as Rusty, Rommie, Joe McClatchey, Norrie Calvert, and Benny Drake approach the site at which the children believe the dome’s generator is positioned:

But even away from the [dead, maggot-ridden] bear, the world smelled bad: smoky and heavy, as if the entire town of Chester’s Mill had become a large closed room. In addition to the odors of smoke and decaying animal, he [Rusty] could smell rotting plant life and a swampy stench that no doubt arose from the drying bed of the Prestile [Stream]. If only there was a wind, he thought, but there was just an occasional pallid puff of breeze that brought more bad smells. To the far west there were clouds--it was probably raining. . . over in New Hampshire--but when they reached the Dome, the clouds parted like a river dividing at a large outcropping of rock. Rusty had become increasingly doubtful about the possibility of rain under the Dome. . . (720).

This paragraph helps to reinforce the novel’s concern about the Earth’s pollution.

In investigating the site, Rusty and the others determine that the dome’s effect upon children (and some adults) in causing seizures and hallucinations works “like chickenpox” in the sense that it resembles a “mild sickness mostly suffered by children, who only” catch “it once” (721). As Rusty drives further into the orchard, he feels faint, and a strange change in perception overtakes him as he feels “as if his head were a telescope and he could see anything he wanted to see, no matter how far”; he sees “the dirt road perfectly well. Divinely well. Every stone and chip of mica,” and then, in the middle of the road, he sees a “skinny” man. . . made taller by an absurd red, white and blue stovepipe hat, comically crooked,” who wears “jeans and a tee-shirt that read SWEET HOME ALABAMA PLAY THAT DEAD BAND SONG.” The thought occurs to Rusty that he is seeing “not a man,” but “a Halloween dummy” with “green garden trowels for hands and a burlap head” with “stitched white crosses for eyes,” and then the hallucination, or vision, vanishes and all that remains are “just the road, the ridge, and the purple light, flashing at fifteen-second intervals, seeming to say Come on, come on, come on” (722).

The oddity of the scene keeps the reader reading, as does the repeated connection of such bizarre events to Halloween.

Outfitted in his makeshift radiation suit, Rusty leaves the others behind as he makes his way toward the radiation source.

In one of the novel’s more chilling scenes, Deputy Morrison comes across Junior Rennie, who has wet his pants. Junior is sitting on the curb, “rocking and back and forth” and talking what seems to be gibberish. (Actually, he is lamenting the deaths of his “girlfriends,“ Angie McCain and Dodee Sanders, whom he has killed: “They were my goolfreds,“ he says, adding, “I shilled them so I could fill them”) (727). Deputy Morrison, “alarmed as well as disgusted,” tries to get Junior on his feet so that the special deputy can accompany him back to the police station and sober up. However, once he sees Junior up close, Deputy Morrison is certain that, whatever Junior’s problem may be, it’s much worse than intoxication and that “Junior didn’t need to go to the station for coffee,” but “to the hospital”:

This time Junior turned, and Henry saw he wasn’t drunk. His left eye was bright red. Its pupil was too big. The left side of his mouth was pulled down, exposing some of his teeth. That frozen glare made Henry think momentarily of Mr. Sardonicus, a movie that had scared him as a kid (727).

Deputy Morrison seems to suspect that Junior may have confessed to having assaulted a woman, or worse, when Junior mutters “She just made me so franning mad!. . . I hit her with my knee to shed her ump, and she frew a tit!” However, rather than follow up on his suspicion, Deputy Morrison decides “he wouldn’t go there,” for “he had problems enough” (728). The deputy appears to lack the intestinal fortitude that, in Stephen King’s world, makes a character a hero. He is a moral coward whose failure to pursue his suspicions--suspicions concerning a police officer and not merely a civilian--are tantamount to criminal negligence since a possible crime is involved and its perpetrator, if perpetrator Junior had proved to be, is obviously a madman who may harm others yet again. Such dereliction of duty harms, not helps, others. Therefore, by King’s standards, Deputy Morrison, despite former chief of police Howard (“Duke”) Perkins’ high estimation of him, is one of the story’s villains.

As Rusty closes in on the suspected dome generator, the scene shifts to East Street Grammar School, where sisters Judy and Janelle Everett, snacking outdoors with their friend Deanna Carver, witness a bizarre sight--one similar to the sight that Rusty had seen during the momentary shift in perspective he’d experienced when he’d approached the site of the suspected dome generator, a dummy that librarian Lissa Jamieson put together as a Halloween lawn decoration:

The head was burlap with eyes that were white crosses made from thread. The hat was like the one the cat wore in the Dr. Seuss story. It had garden trowels for
hands (bad old clutchy-grabby hands, Janelle thought) and a shirt with something written on it. She didn’t understand what it meant, bust she could read the words: SWEET HOME ALABAMA PLAY THAT DEAD BAND SONG.

The children, already frightened of Halloween because of the nightmares and hallucinations they’ve had in which they have seen and heard dire warnings that “something bad was going to happen, something with a fire in it,” and there would be “no treats, only tricks” which are “mean” and bad,” are afraid that “it’s Halloween already” (735).

By tying the children’s nightmares and dreams of Halloween and the dummy that Lissa makes to the hallucinatory, possibly prophetic visions that Rusty has had (and to Phil [“The Chef’s”] claim that, on Halloween, he’s making an appearance as an angry Jesus), King creates a sense of imminent and widespread evil and suffering in which neither adult nor child will be safe. He closes out this scene with a bit of foreshadowing. To take her sister’s mind off the unsettling sight of the dummy and their memories of their dark visions concerning Halloween, Janelle suggests that she, Judy, and their friend go inside the schoolhouse and sing songs. “That’ll be nice,“ she declares. King’s omniscient narrator disagrees: “It usually was, but not that day. Even before the big bang in the sky, it wasn’t nice. Janelle kept thinking about the dummy with the white-cross eyes. And the somehow awful shirt: PLAY THE DEAD BAND SONG” (734).

There is definitely a sense of foreboding.

Medicine for Melancholy “Under the Dome”

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Andy Sanders goes to the Holy Redeemer Church to notify Phil (“The Chef”) Bushey that his wife, Samantha, committed suicide after killing two police officers. The selectman makes no mention of the fact that the police officers were responsible for her beating and rape: “even in his grief” over the loss of his daughter wife Claudette and his daughter Dorothy (“Dodee”), “Andy had no intention of bringing up the rape accusation” (670). Instead, Andy tells The Chef that Samantha probably killed the special deputies because “she was upset about the Dome” (670). They discuss the methamphetamine operation in which they have been involved with Big Jim Rennie, the late (murdered Reverend Lester Coggins), and others. The Chef shares Andy’s opinion that selling the illegal drug is wrong, although, The Chef says, making it “is God’s will” because “meth is medicine for melancholy” (670). The Chef invites the selectman to accompany him, saying “I’m going to change your life” (671).

In this scene, King offers some insights into the character of Andy Sanders. Like most of the town’s other power brokers, Andy is evil, despite his affable manner and his facile optimism. His evil lies in his willingness to go along to get along. Andy has few moral values. Andy explains to The Chef that, although Samantha has killed herself, all is not lost for The Chef, for his son by Samantha, Little Walter, survives. The omniscient narrator informs the reader that “even in his despair, Andy Sanders was a glass-half-full person” (669). Such optimism may seem admirable at first, but, upon consideration, it is superficial, given the circumstances (a double murder followed by a suicide and the leaving of a motherless child behind). His insistence upon seeing the good as well as the bad in this case is condescending; it is also evasive. Evil demands to be seen for what it is, without sugarcoating it by considering other, peripheral facts or incidents. It is good that Little Walter is “fine,” but his wellbeing has no real bearing upon Samantha’s having been beaten and raped or her murder of her attackers, followed by her suicide. Furthermore, Andy’s willingness to follow Big Jim’s lead, even when his colleague proposes or commits immoral or criminal acts results, in large measure, from Andy’s eagerness to please others--in this instance, Big Jim. One suspects that Andy likes to please others because doing so is the least demanding alternative; certainly, it would be much easier than standing up to as brash and bold a person as Big Jim.

The reader isn’t made privy to whether or not Andy was a good husband or a good father, but chances are that he was as agreeable to Claudette as he was permissive to Dodee, because Andy’s defining characteristics are his easygoingness, affability, and eagerness to please. Had he taken a stand more often, he probably wouldn’t have come to the bitter end in which he finds himself as a childless widower who has become the political rubber stamp for, and a criminal cohort of, Big Jim. His life’s choices and lack of principled action, his going along to get along, has brought him to a state of despair in which he was prepared to commit suicide, as his daughter did (albeit nonviolently, with pills, rather than with a handgun, which was Dodee‘s method of choice); to the point at which he must tell The Chef that he “can’t say” whether he wants The Chef to kill him; and to the point at which, it seems, he may be willing for The Chef to “change” his life (by introducing him to the sweet release of methamphetamine). In short, Andy Sanders is weak, both morally and in willpower. Being weak is not in itself evil, perhaps, but it becomes evil when it ends in the course of action that Andy has chosen for himself and, as a public official, indirectly for the people of the town he helps to govern.

For the same reason, The Chef is evil He cares about Samantha not because he loved her or even because he was married to her, but because she was proficient in making love “when she was stoned” (670). Even the news that his infant son is “fine” means nothing to him. When Andy gives him “the comforting news that ‘the child’ was fine,” “Chef “waved away Little Walter’s wellbeing” (669). During their talk, as they get high, The Chef connects Halloween to the second coming of Christ, providing a possible link (albeit a vague one) to the hallucinations the town’s children had while they were experiencing seizures, presumably due to the influence of the dome.

After smoking meth, Andy drives The Chef to the hospital, where he retrieves the body of his wife, taking it back to the Holy Redeemer Church, where he believes Jesus will make his return on Halloween, raising Samantha from the dead. Confused as the result of his long-term, hallucinatory addiction to methamphetamine, The Chef also says that he himself is “coming as Jesus,” on Halloween, and, as such, he adds, he is “pissed” (673).

Deputy Jackie Wettington resolves to break Colonel Dale (“Barbie”) Barbara out of jail the next night, and she delivers this message to him in a bowl of cereal. Later, Second Selectman Big Jim Rennie visits Barbie, trying to persuade him into signing a false confession, admitting to the beatings, rapes, and murders with which he is charged. Instead, Barbie informs Big Jim that he is aware of, and has evidence to prove, that Big Jim has been involved in the manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine on a grand scale. If Big Jim waterboards Barbie to extract the confession , as the selectman threatens to do, Barbie will implicate him in this illegal activity and divulge the location of the files that former Police Chief Howard (“Duke”) Perkins had compiled concerning the selectman’s criminal activity. Their meeting ends in a stalemate.

This scene reminds the reader of the flimsiness of the plot in regard to Barbie’s continued incarceration. More clear than ever, to Big Jim, is the threat that Barbie poses. It seems obviously wiser for Big Jim to have his prisoner shot as Barbie supposedly seeks to escape from custody than it is to allow his existence to continue to threaten the selectman. Wagering that he can bring matters to a close with a trial in which the innocent Barbie can be convicted and sentenced to death is a risk that is both foolish and unnecessary to take. Indeed, King’s omniscient narrator suggests as much in sharing Barbie’s thoughts on the matter with the reader: “He [Big Jim] left. They all left. Barbie sat on his bunk, sweating. He knew how close to the edge he was. Rennie had reasons to keep him alive, but not strong ones . . .” (686).

Another point that bothers the reader is the fact that, for someone whose past includes, as the novel hints, special operations experience, hand-to-hand fighting and probably martial arts instruction, and survivalist training, Barbie seems to be a rather passive protagonist. Although he was able to hold his own in a vicious street fight with Frank DeLesseps, Junior Rennie, Melvin Searles, and Carter Thibodeau in the parking lot of Dipper’s, the local discotheque, he has been a prisoner in the Chester’s Mill police station since page 533. Other than managing to hide his pocket knife inside his mattress and drinking from his toilet bowl, Barbie has done nothing but receive beatings, threats, and insults while the other townspeople go about the business of helping one another and seeking a way to shut off the generator that, they believe, has created and sustains the dome. One of the female deputies, Jackie Wettington, is willing to risk her own life to free Barbie, but Barbie, for his own part, is able to do nothing more than wait to be rescued. It seems unlikely that such a man would be the choice of the president of the United States to take charge of the situation under the dome, as the novel’s fictional version of Barrack Hussein Obama has done--unless, of course, the president wants Barbie to fail for political purposes of his own. Is the United States itself behind the appearance of the dome, as some of the citizens of Chester’s Mill believe? Another possibility is that Barbie himself has secret plans that necessitate his continued incarceration, but, even if he does, his imprisonment doesn’t depend upon him, but upon Big Jim Rennie, who controls the town, including the police and his incarceration is, therefore, undependable. Indeed, Big Jim has more reason, it seems, to kill Barbie than to keep him in jail. In any case, Barbie’s passivity becomes itself not only annoying but hard to believe. If his continued incarceration does have a purpose beyond Jim Rennie’s hope to conduct a “show trial,” King should provide a few hints, in the interest of verisimilitude, by way of foreshadowing; that he doesn’t do so suggests that there is no such plan.