Secret Motivations

 Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Often, in horror stories and films, a secret, past or present, drives and directs protagonists' or antagonists' actions:

Schizophrenia (Norman Bates [Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film adaptation of Robert Bloch's 1959 novel Psycho], Brian De Palma's 1980 film Dressed to Kill, and David Calloway [John Polson's 2005 film Hide and Seek]);

crimes of various kinds (Marion Crane's adultery and theft and Norman Bates's murder in Psycho; Grace Newman's murders in Alejandr Amenábar's 2001 film The Others; Freddy Kreuger's murders in Wes Craven's 1984 film A Nightmare on Elm Street; the teenage friends' murder in Jim Gillespie's 1997 film adaptation of Lois Duncan's 1973 novel I Know What You Did Last Summer; Horrocks's wife's adultery with Raut in H. G. Wells's 1895 short story “The Cone”;

deceit or betrayal (Marion Crane's adultery and her theft of her employer's money in Psycho; the adultery of Horrocks's wife and lover Raut in “The Cone”; the teenage characters' attempt to cover up what they believed to be their killing of a man in I Know What You Did Last Summer);

sexual deviance (voyeurism in Michael Powell's 1960 film Peeping Tom, Victor Zarcoff's 2016 film 13 Cameras, and Psycho; lesbianism in Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel Rebecca and Shirley Jackson's 1959 Gothic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House; transvestism in Hitchcock's Psycho, Brian De Palma's 1980 film Dressed to Kill, Jonathan Deeme's 1991 film adaption of Thomas Harris's 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs; and transgenderism in Robert Hiltzik's 1983 film Sleepaway Camp; and sadism (Robert Harmon's 1986 film The Hitcher);

past psychological trauma (the denial of Angela Baker true sex and gender in Sleepaway Camp and Carrie White's victimization by high school bullies in Stephen King's 1979 novel Carrie and Brian De Palma's 1974 film adaptation of the book);

vengeance (many horror stories and movies, including Edgar Allan Poe's 1846 short story “The Cask of the Amontillado,” “The Cone,” A Nightmare on Elm Street, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and a host of others); and

suggestibility (the narrator-protagonits's runaway imagination in H. G. Wells's 1894 short story “The Red Room” and, possibly, the protagonist of Bram Stoker's 1891 short story “The Judge's House” and his 1914 short story “Dracula's Guest”).

As we can see, the same story or film may contain multiple instances of secret motivators: Hitchcock's Psycho contains two characters, Marion Crane and Norman Bates, who, between them, are driven by no fewer than four types of secrets: schizophrenia, crime (murder), sexual deviance (voyeurism) (Bates) and deceit or betrayal (adultery), and crime (theft) (Crane).

On the surface, such characters appear to be normal and to be motivated by ordinary drives, such as the need to nurture, the pursuit of profit, affiliation, pleasure, leisure, generosity, and kindness. The normal, apparent motivations of these characters seem to “explain” them; in reality, however, they merely disguise their true desires, aims, and purposes; they are red herrings, not clues, to the nature of the characters, fictitious personas that allow the characters to act without arousing suspicion. Marion Crane is a thief, but she poses as a traveler. The protagonist of Peeping Tom and the landlord in 13 Cameras are both voyeurs and murderers, but the former poses as a photographer, the latter as nothing more than a landlord. Horrocks, in “The Cone,” is a vengeful victim of adultery, but he poses as a tour guide of sorts. The schizophrenic in Hide and Seek poses as a nothing more than a psychiatrist who has his daughter Emily's psychological welfare at heart.

The disguise of normality is also disarming. It suggests that dangerous characters are either harmless of beneficial: a motel owner, teenage friends, scientists, a camper, a mother, a doctor. The disguise of normality makes it easier for such characters to stalk and slay their prey. Indeed, such characters can even appear to be the victim, rather than the victimizer, to him- or herself, if not to the public (although they often appear to be the victim to the public as well, at least for a time): David Calloway and Grace Newman are examples.

Stories and films in which a secret is at the heart of one or more characters, whether protagonist or antagonist or both, suggest a threefold division of plot: Part I: Appearance is maintained through the adopted persona; Part II: the character's secret is discovered or revealed; and Part III: reality is exhibited as the character's true identity is perceived.

The Three Lessons of the Watchbirds and the Hawks

Copyright 202 by Gary L. Pullman

The fabulous short story “Watchbird” in The Robert Sheckley Megapack: 15 Classic Science Fiction Stories (a true bargain at only 99 cents for the Amazon Kindle version) is a masterful satire concerning logic, linguistics, and morality.

In a futuristic setting, the brainwaves and glandular processes of potential murderers tip off high-tech, flying guardians, alerting these “watchbirds” of impending murder. The watchbirds then swoop down to shock would-be killers into submission. If multiple shocks are necessary, so be it: the watchbirds' first rule is to protect potential victims, regardless of the cost. By using them as their enforcers, the government hopes to stem a rising tide of violence and save lives.

At first, things go even better than officials had hoped, and the murder rate plummets drastically. However, one of the manufacturers of these drone-like guardians is concerned that human beings shouldn't shove off their duties and responsibilities onto machines. His protests are all but ignored. Meanwhile, by regularly sharing “new information, methods, and definitions” with each other, the watchbirds become more and more effective at policing the public.

The definition of terms is a key concern of the story. Initially, murder is defined as “an act of violence, consisting of breaking, mangling, maltreating, or otherwise stopping the functions of a living organism by another organism,” as opposed to a more traditional understanding of the concept, such as “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.” The definition programmed into the watchbirds may seem clear, detailed, and exhaustive, but it contains some odd wording. It is not often, if ever, that a killer “breaks” or “mangles” another person. The engineer's definition (and, therefore, the watchbirds', into which the definition is programmed) is also too broad, specifying “living organisms,” rather than the traditional definition's “human being.” In formulating the definition, Sheckley lays the groundwork for much of the conflict and suspense that the remainder of the story generates, maintains, and heightens.

Based on their experience (the watchbirds are conscious and rational, but unemotional), the mechanical guardians, which are able both to learn and to think, modify and amend the original definition of both “murder” and “living organism.” Their actions follow from their revisions of these concepts. First, a slaughterhouse employee is knocked out with a high-voltage blast because, as the wingbirds understand the it (and the act), murder occurs whenever any “living organism,” human or animal, is killed. For the same reason, fishermen and a hunter are dealt with, as is a man who attempts to kill a fly. A surgeon is shocked when he starts to operate on his patient, with the result that the patient dies.

A driver is shocked when he tries to turn off his car (an organism's attempt to stop “the functions of a living organism” constitutes murder, and the watchbirds now consider automobiles to be “living organisms”). Thanks to the watchbirds themselves, the murder rate begins to skyrocket. People get the message and begin to modify their behavior so as not to become watchbird targets.

However, life itself is also at risk, as farmers are prevented from plowing the earth, since the watchbirds have come to regard the planet itself as a “living organism.” Farmers cannot cut hay to feed their cattle, which starve to death. Industries are crippled. Even a radio is a living organism and, like cars, may not be turned off, since doing so is the same as murdering the device. Rabbits are slain because they eat vegetables. A butterfly is dispatched for “outraging a rose.” The watchbirds are unable to appreciate, as the narrator states, that there is a close relationship between the living and the dead; nor do the machines comprehend that, for the watchbirds' creators, at least, there is a hierarchy of value where “living organisms” are concerned, with human beings at the top and other life forms on progressively lower levels of significance.

Clearly, something must be done!

The answer is to build a better machine, one that's faster, stronger, and deadlier, one that will be able to hunt and kill the watchbirds. The new mechanical slayer is called the hawk, and, before long, there's a multitude of the ferocious predators in the sky, making short work of their prey. Unfortunately, the engineers didn't learn their lesson from the watchbirds fiasco. Not only do they assign human duties and responsibilities to the new, and improved machines, but their makers deliberately refrain from installing “restricting circuits” that would limit the Hawks' targets. There just wasn't time to include these regulators. Instead, the engineers and manufacturers simply release the hawks.

After killing most of the pesky watchbirds, the hawks decide that humans constitute another type of prey, and the problems that homo sapiens had with the watchbirds pale in comparison to those involving these new predators.

The story's themes seem threefold.

First, death is necessary for life's continuance, but “no one has told the watchbirds that all life depends on carefully balanced murders,” even that of the alpha predator among machines, the hawk, which may need humans to maintain and repair it, as the watchbird had. The watchbirds have thoroughly destroyed the equilibrium between the living and the dead, the consumers and the providers, totally disrupting their fragile relationship.

Second, humans cannot pass on their responsibility to machines, or, as the narrator puts it, “pass a human problem into the hands of a machine” that has been assigned, by humans, to enforce human laws. Robots do not have emotions, nor have they accumulated centuries of human experience (nor are they able to do so). Machines lack human respective and understanding. They cannot perceive, analyze, evaluate, or understand life from any perspective but that which is based upon algorithms and memory and microchips and processing units and programming. Despite their artificial intelligence, which can be brilliant, computers are severely limited. To forget these two simple truths is to be in danger of creating “guardians” like the watchbirds and hawks to police the mechanical police.

Third, neither the watchbirds nor the hawks can understand that the lives of some creatures have a higher value than the lives of other, “lesser” animals. A whale, an impala, a cow, a dog, a cat, a garden slug, even a flea or a cockroach, is all well and good, in its way, but human beings are the species that can remember, through books and databases, the events and circumstances of centuries; can manipulate time and space; can transform the world, building cities and hospitals and prisons and airplanes and automobiles and trains and ships; can put men and women into space and, perhaps some day soon, on other worlds; can plumb the depths of the ocean and climb to the top of mountains; can create art and culture, producing Michelangelo and Leonardo and Shakespeare and Dante; can commune with nature and with God. True, the depths to which humans can fall are just as incredible as the heights they can achieve, as such "accomplishments" as the atomic bomb, the Holocaust, and two World Wars, among many others, indicate, but the point is that, whether it is used for good or evil, human beings have these great abilities, abilities that far outstrip those of any other animal. In fact, these abilities are not only remarkable among the creatures of nature, but they are transcendent to nature itself as well. Human abilities reflect not mere animal existence, but also a spark of the divine. Although all men may be created equal, all animals are not. The failure to make such distinctions is, perhaps a form of insanity, for it is madness to equate a maggot with a man, a butterfly with a woman, or an earthworm with a child. Machines, even artificially intelligent ones, by such a measure, are mad—or would be . . . if they were human. Instead, they are merely machines. Their very character as such constitutes their true “restrictive circuits.”

What would be the likely end of a situation such as that which Sheckley lays out in “Watchbirds”? The author himself suggests the probable outcome: more and more capable machines would be created to eliminate the less-capable previous generation, and the situation, for humans, would get worse and worse until they were completely exterminated. Then, one by one, the machines would fail, for there would be no one to maintain or to repair them or, for that matter, to manufacture them—at least, not yet.

FREE short story introducing Bane Messenger, Bounty Hunter, the protagonist of the Western series An Adventure of the Old West!

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"The Man Who Was Used Up" by Edgar Allan Poe: Analysis and Commentary

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

As his satirical short stories indicate, Edgar Allan Poe has a decidedly peculiar sense of humor. His lampoons invariably feature grotesque characters whose actions suggest humorous, if not charitable, interpretations of the characters themselves.

“The Man Who Was Used Up” follows this same pattern. The narrator is determined to learn more about the Kickapoo Campaign (April 1839) and the part that wounded Brevet Brigadier General A. B. C. Smith played in this military action. (Mexican officials had given them land in what would become Texas; after the Texas Revolution, the Kickapoo were “forcibly evicted in 1839.”)

Although some readers believe that Smith is a stand-in for General (later President) Andrew Jackson, who was wounded during the Seminole and Creek Indian removal campaigns (1816-1858), critics generally agree that Smith is a caricature of Jackson's vice-president, Richard Johnson.

Johnson, who is credited with having killed the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, was wounded during the Kickapoo tribe's removal. (The Bugaboo tribe is an invention of Poe's, added, perhaps, because the word sounds humorous and because “bugaboo” means “object of fear”; Smith obviously fears having the number and severity of his debilitating wounds exposed to the public, and, in fact, when his wounds were discovered, “Johnson was lampooned when he appeared in public on crutches and tied up in wound dressings on various parts of his body.”

Brutus

Much of the description of Smith confirms Poe's intention that he should represent a grotesque, a figure whose physical or emotional abnormalities symbolize his or her spiritual condition. His hair is like that of Brutus, which was worn short in a “natural” style and “brushed forward onto the forehead.” However, as the reader soon learns, “there is nothing at all natural about Smith's hair,” and this bit of description, like others of Smith, heighten the horror of the revelation of Smith's true appearance and condition at the end of the story.

Likewise, the “stiffness and rectangular precision in Smith's movement,” accounted for by the story's narrator as deriving from Smith's soldierly bearing, in fact, may be explained “by other reasons,” such as those suggested by the story's resolution.

At the end of the story, Smith is revealed, as he dons the prosthetic appliances that make him appear to be a normal, even robust man—the hero he is regarded to be by the general public who admire him greatly—to be little more than the “a large and exceedingly odd looking bundle of something” the narrator mistakes him for being.

To appear heroic, Smith needs a cork leg, a prosthetic arm, artificial shoulders and a synthetic “bosom,” a wig, dentures, and a artificial eye. As these items are fitted into place, Smith mentions how he came to lose some of his original body parts: the “fight with the Bugaboos and Kickapoos,” he confides, was “a bloody action” in which a participant suppose he will escape “with a mere scratch.” He lost his hair when he was scalped. He “swallowed” his natural teeth “when the big Bugaboo rammed” him “down with the butt end of his rifle.” The Kickapoos, he recalls, gouged out his eye.

After Smith applies these many prostheses, his whole appearance changes; he is transformed, his improved appearance astonishing the narrator:

I now began very clearly to perceive that the object before me was nothing more nor less than my new acquaintance, Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith. The manipulations of Pompey [Smith's servant] had made, I must confess, a very striking difference in the appearance of the personal man.

There is but one detail remaining: Smith's voice, a funny “little” voice “between a squeak and a whistle.” Everyone to whom the narrator spoke as he sought to information about Smith, the man behind the myth, agreed that the general's voice was deep, rich, and commanding. The voice the narrator has heard, however, is absurdly high-pitched and weak.

Once Smith's palate is installed, however, another miracle of technology occurs, as his voice changes, resuming “all that rich melody and strength” the narrator “had noticed” when he'd first met the general. Smith offers another explanation: the palate compensates for the Indians' knocking “in the roof of” his mouth and cutting “off at least seven-eighths of” his tongue.

As Smith adds these accessories to his person, he identifies the men whose mechanical magic and technological wizardry have made his transformation possible: Thomas provided the cork leg; Pettit, the shoulders; Ducrow, the bosom; De L'Orme's, the wig; Parmly's, the teeth; Dr. Williams, the eye; and Bonfanti's. The eye.

Smith's naming of names occasions jabs at various actual “tradesmen . . . working in Philadelphia during the years Poe lived there” and suggests that their appliances are not likely to be as effective as the story suggests. For example, the oculist, Dr. John Williams, was generally regarded as a quack who got rich offering “dubious cures” to the desperate. In fact, Poe seems to summarize the oculist's character when he refers to a joke about the doctor: “Why is Dr. Williams' cash . . . like a divorced wife's pension” Because it's all eye-money.—alimony.”

Likewise, the artificial eye was supplied by “a New York retailer” known for selling “knick knacks and gew-gaws.”

As usual, there is much more to a Poe tale than first meets the eye.

According to one take on the story, in “The Man Who Was Used Up,” “Poe is saying that Johnson has been 'used up' in the war and is ineffective as Vice President” (300). this interpretation dovetails with the epigram with which Poe opens the story: “Pleurez, pleurez, mes yeux, et fondez vous en eau!/ La moitie de ma vie a mis l'autre au tombeau,” which Poe himself translates as “Cry, cry, my eyes, and melt in water!/ Half of my life has put the other in the tomb.” The first half of Johnson's life, which he devoted to military affairs, left him wounded and ridiculed, despite his heroism in action, thereby destroying the second half of his life, his political career. (“Used up,” in military slang, meant dead, as Poe implies by rendering the second part of dramatist Pierre Corneille's quotation “Half of my life has put the other in the tomb” (bold added).

The story has other messages, too. Although Johnson lost much in the service of his country (however much we might, today, decry his actions—and those of the United States, which ordered them), and should have been regarded as a hero, rather than as a target of ridicule and satire, Poe's own, included, he was lampooned for his sacrifices.

His public image was intended to disguise and conceal the effects of his service and suffering and, perhaps, the historical causes of them. The public did not love, or even know, the true man; it honored and revered only his heroic persona, the man he appeared to be. Later, the same public ridiculed and disrespected Johnson himself. As David Haven Blake has observed, “What we find in 'The Man Who Was Used Up' is that the publicity surrounding the hero's experience is ultimately more significant than a narration of his suffering.”