Ryan’s Massive Buffy Blog: Season 1

Most of us are aware on some level that we walk in two worlds. There is the pragmatic world—school, work, putting food on the table and keeping a roof over our heads. Then there is the spiritual world. It doesn’t matter if you think of that literally or metaphorically. There are unconscious forces coursing through all of us that have nothing to do with how well we function in modern society. We are wired to survive in jungles, escape predators, and overcome fears that have nothing to do with sitting in a cubicle listening to Drake on Spotify.

From the broadest possible perspective, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a TV show about this disconnect. The very title evokes the kind of kitsch our emotional needs can sometimes feel like. How many of us blush when we retrace a heated train of thought in the light of day? We want to be stable, constructive, serious people, and yet every night we encounter something that makes almost no sense in that context. This is the leap the original producers of Joss Whedon’s Buffy screenplay failed to capture. “How,” they asked, “could the story of a teenage girl named Buffy who kills vampires possibly be taken seriously.”

It’s not hard to see the TV show as his decisive, hundred hour reply.

We get jealous because our best friend is happy. We catch ourselves in the middle of an hour-long rant to our imaginary boss. We daydream about being rich and famous even when we can’t get up the gumption to take out the garbage. We get nostalgic for toys we lost when we were five years old. Our demons are (in most cases, I assume) metaphorical, but that doesn’t make them any less real. Running and hiding do us no good. Repressing often makes it worse. The only option is to confront our emotions and use them to our advantage. It takes an exceptional person to navigate that terrain while keeping their life from falling apart. It takes a slayer.

It’s also possible to view this pop culture behemoth in purely allegorical terms. When we first meet Buffy, she is a sophomore in high school dealing with raw, confusing emotions that seem very much like a horror film. Bullies become hyena people. Online boyfriends turn into internet demons. As Buffy grows older, the story becomes more complex. Her senior year is filled with rituals and fairy tales. Her first year of college is dominated by tales of metamorphosis and transformation. By the time she’s an adult, the demons have come to represent the forces of apathy and ennui. The result remains the same: the slayer faces a demon. The slayer slays it. The slayer remains a slayer.

This is one of the reasons (though definitely not the only one) why Buffy feels like such a personal journey to many of its fans. Take away the demons, the good guys and bad guys, the desperate plots to save the world, and you have the skeleton of a story that’s not unlike one we all go through. Buffy discovers intense emotions as a teenager. She figures out where she fits in this new world of feeling. She falls in love. She loses love. She learns to trust and relate to other people again. She develops opinions on social, political, and religious subjects. Her focus shifts to other people like her mother and her little sister.

And whether it’s a large penis-shaped snake demon or a punk rock vampire, she’s ready to face down her dark foils at every turn. We get to watch as someone navigates the world we remember all too well and behaves like a courageous, decent human being. The writers were not oblivious to how empowering this sort of thing can be.

Another reason why Buffy feels so ahead of its time is its pioneering use of the internet. The show doesn’t feel like a mere linear story. It feels like a dialog with the viewer. Other shows like Community feel the same way, and you’ll find they utilize many of the same techniques. Buffy writers frequented the boards of Whedonesque and other fan sites, gathering opinions and expectations offered up by the people who cared most. They didn’t always cater to the fans’ desires. Often it feels like characters in his series die just when we are beginning to fall in love with them. That’s not accidental, and it’s not always something you can plan either.

In the same way, the dark fringes of the show’s fandom often work their way onto the screen. The Trio, the misogynist geek villains from season 6, have a lot in common with the twenty-something fanboys who made up Buffy’s core demographic. Here is a show with the same audience breakdown as Star Trek, celebrating the efforts of a harried single mother as she battles three Star Wars-revering manchildren. They’re calling out the worst in their own fans.

But that’s what’s so magic about Buffy. It’s not always saying what I want to hear, but I always feel like it’s speaking directly to me. So for the next few months I am going to be exploring the show season by season, examining its ideas and offering some insight wherever I can. I admit up front this will not be objective. Buffy is my favorite TV show, and it’s a distant race for second. My goal isn’t to convert the curious or preach to the choir. It’s merely to celebrate a novel use of the television medium, and to remind everyone (myself included) that there are demons out there that need slaying and it’s time to get to work.

Season 1

First seasons tend to be the worst of the series. Watch any show from Breaking Bad to the Simpsons, and you’ll find the first episodes plagued by sluggish pacing, dueling priorities, and inconsistent characters. For the millions of dollars being invested, you would expect a major network TV show to be meticulously plotted. That’s not always for the best though. Consider how dry the first season of The Office is, before the writers allowed their characters to breathe outside the confines of what they thought the show needed to be. The looser, less structured product actually turned out to be much better. Or think about how great the first season of True Detective was, and compare it to the disaster of a second season. When you are telling something like a hundred hours of story, the beginning doesn’t matter nearly as much as you think.

All of this is to say that the first season of Buffy can occasionally be rough, and on a technical level it’s easily the worst of the series. The dialog is too nineties. The stories often come from clichés about high school rather than lived-in observations. The sexy older teacher turns out to be a praying mantis. When everyone’s nightmares come to life, Giles dreams about Buffy dying, Willow dreams about public speaking, and Xander dreams about being chased by a clown. At its best, it’s clever. At its worst, it’s derivative.

But for the already-converted, the first season of Buffy is a fascinating look at what might have been. Those abortive first attempts include the scariest episode the series ever produced (“The Pack”), one of the strangest episodes of television I have ever seen (“Puppet Show”), and a handful of truly great standalone Monster of the Week episodes that do the show’s predecessors (like The Twilight Zone and Star Trek) proud.

Whedon-penned “Angel” is the first episode that truly feels like the final Buffy product, beginning to end. It’s followed by the conceptual energy of “Nightmares,” a great look at loneliness with “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” and “Prophecy Girl,” the damn-near-perfect finale that leaves no doubt this show is headed for great things.

It’s worth noting that season 1 is the sole Buffy season without any market testing. Faced with a much lower budget and faster deadlines, the Buffy team wrote, shot, and edited the entire first season before fans had even seen the premiere. The final product amounts to their best first guess. With that and the alternative blank screen in mind, it could be a lot worse.

Episodes 1 and 2 — Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest

It’s your first day at a new school. Things didn’t go so well in the last town, so you’re focused on making a new start. You keep your head down in class. The popular girls want to hang out with you. A new start; a normal life; you just might be able to pull it off.

But soon enough some British librarian is asking you to continue your battle against the forces of evil, and the fate of the world is in the balance. And your allies in this battle aren’t so much the A-list as a girl so shy she can’t sustain a conversation and a dorky pop culture aficionado who has a major crush on you.

Giles isn’t alone in his premiere-closing observation, “The Earth is doomed.” At the risk of getting all big-picturey, the teens of generation X weren’t exactly considered a cultural point of pride. Raised on Saturday morning cartoons, video games, boy bands, and far more accessible porn than any generation in history, these youths, and the idea they were destined to inherit the world, unsettled many people who were a lot less uptight than Giles.

Again, I won’t argue that the first two episodes of this series are great. Clearly the whole crew was still getting their act together. The fight scenes in particular border on being unwatchable. But emotionally, this is the right foot to start on. One need only peruse a few back issues of The New York Times to see apocalyptic prophecies about Gen X that make the current Millennial backlash seem quaint. The first episode of Buffy took every teenage girl discovering the world can be a hostile place for young women, every boy who passed over his textbooks to read Spider-Man comics, every shy outcast lost in the burgeoning horizon of the worldwide web, and gave them a chance to fight and kill the ancient laws that declared they didn’t stand a chance.

And we can roll our eyes at how much The Master looks like a Power Rangers villain or how dated the pop culture references are, but still the most important quality of the entire series is apparent to those who look: we are rooting with Buffy, Willow, and Xander, because they are us. They are the attention-deficient, desensitized, undereducated problem children of a broken world, but they can still save that world the way people have done for generations.

Episode 3 — Witch

The one-word title of Buffy’s first true-blue monster of the week episode is a loaded one. Think of the first thing that comes to mind when a person says “witch.” Now think about how many of those kneejerk reactions are gross female stereotypes exaggerated into a monstrous, zeitgeist-baiting form. Buffy the slayer might have to fight a witch, but Buffy the show is clearly fighting the idea of what it means to be a witch.  

Feminism (or a nineties, male showrunner version thereof) is part of the series’ DNA, but in keeping with the premiere, the allegorical demon is actually age discrimination. Someone is using black magic to sabotage cheerleading tryouts. Buffy and the gang narrow the suspects down to goth outsider, Amy. Even Buffy, despite her own struggles with identity, is quick to blame the teenage girl. The narrative paints an easy enough picture. Amy isn’t all that talented, and she doesn’t have the work ethic of the best cheerleaders. She uses dark magic to get ahead, hurting whoever she must to achieve validation she never earned.

Only that’s not quite right. Amy is only trying out for cheerleader because her mother has possessed her body and is living her own dreams through her daughter, less vicariously than literally. Amy is merely a victim of others’ expectations. It’s not the pinnacle of sophisticated storytelling, but Witch is a smart, focused look at the kinds of judgments being hurled at young people (especially teenage girls) and why those judgments are lies.

Episode 4 — Teacher’s Pet

There’s a running joke throughout the whole series about how Xander is attracted to demons. I expect an existentialist like Joss Whedon would make some comment on how men tend to be more likely to look for some kind of imagined idealization in their potential partner, while women focus more on the actual person.

And that kind of commentary does work its way into the episode. Xander admits that he watches a lot of porn, and later he blushes at the revelation that he is still a virgin. These moments feel like lived-in confessions about the confused chaos of young male sexuality. However by the standard of later Buffy metaphors, Praying Mantis Teacher is pretty uninspiring.

While Witch actually required the characters to overcome their prejudice, Xander is never actually confronted by the empty female avatars he sees in the pages of Hustler. He pursues an empty projection of his lust. He is attacked by a giant insect. It might work for Pavlov’s dog, but it really doesn’t get to the heart of the issue.

Episode 5 — Never Kill a Boy on the First Date

This episode feels like something a rookie writer would shout during the first pitch meeting. “So Buffy is on a date with a boy, but she also has to slay vampires and she has to hide her secret identity the whole time!”

Owen is the most confused of all the boys Buffy ever dated. He’s shy. He’s a little doofy to be the hunk everyone claims he is. He reads Emily Dickinson, and we all know everyone who did that in high school was super cool.

I mean I get it. Buffy has some complexity, so her dream guy probably would too. But Owen feels too much like some writer’s ideal boyfriend, as opposed to Buffy’s dream guy. As a result the whole thing turns to farce really fast, and not, as Xander might hope, the “fun, bawdy French kind.”

Episode 6 — The Pack

The Pack is the most frightened I have ever been that a network TV show was going to murder a baby on-screen. That’s the kind of darkness you earn. This episode isn’t exactly nuanced, but good lord is it effective. The bullies get their kicks from saying the meanest, most hurtful things they can to whoever will listen. And we must watch them eat the adorable pig mascot, cannibalize the even more adorable Principal Flutie, and terrorize the entire campus.

Two things are undoubtedly communicated here: first, there’s an inherent appeal to doing the worst possible thing. We can tell because we enjoy watching, even if we want to look away. Xander says the most hurtful thing he possibly could to a vulnerable, lovestruck Willow. And we also get to feel just how intimidating the gaze of someone who wants to hurt us can be. For a show that had 144 episodes with a monster in all of them, the scariest villain they ever concocted was a teenage boy leering down at his female victim. 

Episode 7 — Angel

So let’s get into the genius of Angel for a second. The character doesn’t always work, I realize, but in the world of Buffy he is a revelation. Buffy represents the heart of a hero in the body of someone society tends to underestimate. Angel represents the opposite. On the surface Angel is the perfect person. He’s beautiful, brooding, and always around to help when evil strikes. That’s why Buffy is so surprised when he turns out to be a demon at the core.

Eventually Angel would become Buffy’s series-mate, and the larger ideas of her series would be highlighted by his contrast. Buffy is the story of a young woman learning to trust her instincts when the rest of the world is telling her who she can or cannot be. Angel is about a man who realizes he’s been allowed too much freedom–that a moment of pure happiness isn’t worth causing pain for others. While Buffy needs to reject society’s projections of her, Angel needs to learn to care more about how he affects his neighbors.

One could extrapolate too much on this. I don’t think the show is saying all men are evil and all women are inherently good. I think the looking at patterns. Men, especially straight white men, are often given free reign in society. Yet the stories told about them still tell them to pursue their own freedom at all costs. Meanwhile so many doors are closed to women, yet our narrative art remains maddeningly apathetic about their need for heroic avatars. The journey faced by women today is far more fitting for stories about heroes who learn to trust their instincts. It’s not about absolutes.

Episode 8 — I, Robot… You, Jane

It’s easy to dismiss something that just doesn’t work and not to pay attention to what the writers were trying to do. I honestly think they tried with this episode. The role of technology in society was still very much a hot button issue in 1997, not in the exact same ways it is now, but the two are comparable. Unlike sexism or bullying, it wasn’t something with a clear right and wrong. Technology was eating away at the natural enjoyment of life. We are living in a kind of dystopian realization of that fact now. 

This is a Willow episode–she, after all, is Jane to the Demon Robot–but it’s also a Giles episode. From the first episode Giles served a distinct function in Buffy’s world. He is an old British man because they are the most likely people to read heroic epics. He is the archetype of all that judges the modern day by an ancient standard. Of all the characters on the show, he is the one who would not actually watch a show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer because he considers pop culture to be inherently disposable garbage that doesn’t challenge in the way fine literature does.

And while he might be underestimating the value of X-Men comics, Giles isn’t exactly wrong about computers. They did make us a less connected society. Many people operate the web in a healthy way. Many have also lost themselves. The show tries to address both sides, but they’re just not ready to tackle such a weighty topic yet. When Giles goes on his rant about how books have texture and smell, the writers (most of whom grew up in a pre-internet world) have no adequate response to give to Willow or techno-pagan Jenny Calendar. So what later seasons could maybe have pulled off as a nuanced discussion of technology in the modern world, turns into a one-dimensional “very special episode” about how online dating can kill you.

Episode 9 — The Puppet Show

I’m about to defend The Puppet Show, while admitting I’m very glad there is not another Buffy episode like it. Yes, the show succeeded with this kind of absurd genre-bender later without needing to jump off the conceptual deep end. Yes, it’s an episode in which Buffy helps a ventriloquist dummy who is really a horny demon hunter from the forties, defeat a strange alien creature disguised as a teenager who is looking to kill the puppet’s supposed owner, another teenager who has cancer. Also apparently Giles is judging the talent show and Buffy, Xander, and Willow have to perform a scene from Oedipus.

But if a person dreamed a Buffy episode, it would probably look a lot like this. The elements that make the show coherent are amplified here more than in the focused, more intelligent episodes. You’ve got the burgeoning camraderie of Buffy, Xander, and Willow, the playful relationship Giles has with his teenage counterparts, the absurd Scooby action amplified for maximum campiness. There’s a point I will raise later in season 3, about how every great show eventually becomes a parody of itself because the most powerful joke is an inside joke. This is the first time Buffy the series views itself as an inside joke. It’s not consistent, but also there’s Willow running off stage to throw up in the middle of an Oedipus monologue.

So you lose some, you win some.

Episode 10 — Nightmares

I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’m going to draw another comparison to Community. Nightmares has a lot in common with that show’s signature episode, Modern Warfare. It’s not revered by fans in the same way, nor is it nearly as good an episode of television. However this does have one very important thing in common with that paintball action movie pastiche: both episodes represent the moment their shows destroyed all their boundaries.

Dan Harmon likes to talk about how Modern Warfare was the first moment he saw Community as a show he loved as well as worked on. By making their show a parody of the tropes of other media, Community established that they could go anywhere and do anything that captured their imagination. “Nightmares” does something similar. It’s the first instance of Buffy’s writers embracing their “emotions as magic” motif and letting it wreak havoc on the world they constructed.

The magic here is nightmares. Everyone has them. And by episode 10, fans had a chance to identify with the characters and see how they constructed their world. The nightmares aren’t all that unique (as I mentioned earlier) but still there’s a thrill to seeing Buffy, Giles, et al face the same problem. And when the writers got the chance to keep what worked in season 2, they kept returning to the outline of this episode. Just like “Modern Warfare” bore classics like “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons” and “Critical Film Studies” in its DNA, “Nightmares” foreshadows Buffy classics like “Hush,” “Once More with Feeling,” and even “The Body.” We take an emotion or type of magic. We filter the lives of all the characters through that prism and see how they respond. How would all the characters behave if their darkest secrets came out in Broadway-style musical numbers? How would they act if none of them could speak? How would they react to a real-world death?

It’s the moment a show goes from telling the audience something to asking, “What if?” alongside everyone else. That’s the moment a story becomes capable of anything.

Episode 11 — Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Along with The Pack, this is one of the episodes that defines Buffy’s first season as its own valuable entity. Both stories are very rough in places, but they also show the careless cruelty and psychological confusion of high school life in ways later seasons shied away from. Here a girl named Marcy is ignored so much she turns invisible. She uses her newfound curse/power to haunt Cordelia, the most popular girl in the school.

The turning point comes when Marcy finally gets Cordelia tied up in a chair. A lot of high school shows, especially in the nineties, glorified the loners and ragged on the oppressive bourgeois class. Buffy took it one step farther. Marcy gets the chance to pursue her bitterness. She gets her supposed enemy tied up. But then what? By taking jealousy to its natural conclusion, the show begs the question: what’s the point of going down that path in the first place? What are we glorifying when we mindlessly attack those we perceive as more loved or valued than we are? Are we really willing to follow that to its natural conclusion?

That’s something you can say out loud. Or you can watch the knife rub back and forth across Cordelia’s face as Marcy prepares to push her pain on another person.

Sidenote: this is also the first episode where Cordelia makes sense as a character.

Episode 12 — Prophecy Girl

What does it mean to die metaphorically? Writers, especially screenwriters, love to cite big story charts with Joseph Campbell’s name plastered all over, in which a hero journeys into the unknown, faces death, and emerges with newfound strength and wisdom. Every story, they will tell you, is really about death.

That’s all nice and poetic, but what does it really mean? To end its first season, Buffy explores the meaning of heroism and does its best to elaborate on why all this pseudo-intellectual, metaphysical psycho-babble actually matters. The episode begins with Buffy being told she is going to die. Unlike other prophecies and negative preconceptions, this one is absolutely, for sure going to come true.

Later Buffy finales would deal more specifically with the real challenges of being a teenager. She would fight against the dark side of love, the abuse of authority, threats against her family and her way of life. But to end its first season, Buffy has to bring everything full circle. Buffy has earned the respect of her British Harold Bloom avatar. She has forged her own path in the social Darwinism of high school. She defeated her foes and looked good doing it. But now she must prove that she can face the oldest, most powerful force in human life. Like Odysseus, Aeneas, Beowulf, and Neo before her (or, I guess in Neo’s case, two years after her), she must pass through the threshold of certain death.

Understandably she has reservations. It’s not fair. It shouldn’t be necessary for a happy, healthy life. And looking at her face, even Giles can’t help but agree. But this is where the genius of Buffy comes in. Anyone with a $30 Barnes and Noble gift card can learn all about how to write stories about life and death. But it takes real talent to identify where we face similar thresholds in our everyday lives. Xander knows Buffy will reject him, but he asks her out anyway. Willow loves Xander and feels pressure to assent to everything he says, but she chooses not to be his backup because she knows it will make her miserable.

And ultimately a similar ordinary life story inspires Buffy to face down the dark lord of the vampires and save the world. Joyce gets her best moment of the series in which she’s not a dead body, recounting a night she went stag to a dance and wound up meeting Buffy’s father. In the midst of certain failure, she found her victory. So Buffy puts on her best dress, grabs her crossbow, and walks through death to save the world.

And the definitive touch is just how absurd it all seems. The Master kills Buffy. Xander revives her. She wakes up with a newfound confidence and kicks ass. There’s no real reason to this change. Honestly, it’s impossible to explain logically. Why does it work that way? Why must we pass through our greatest fears, our most certain failures, in order to find happiness? Aliens in the audience might find it the ultimate kind of farce. You only know it’s true if you’ve experienced it before, which every human being has the potential to do.

Film Journal Week 1 – 1/1-1/7/2020

In 2019 I kept a log of all the media I engaged with over the course of the year. Anything longer than 20 minutes (so no songs or short youtube videos) was recorded in a 30+ page calendar along with information on their length and writers and directors. 

I’ve decided to take that project one step further in 2020, writing about the films that I see on a weekly basis. These won’t exactly be reviews–I’m not sure there’s any reason to review Fanny and Alexander in 2019–but more a journal of how the films made me feel, with any unique insights I may have had. I’m avoiding setting a length for these pieces, and expect they will range anywhere from a blurb all the way up to the dreaded essay. 

For many years writing about films was a huge part of my identity. I stopped at least somewhat because I wasn’t sure if there was any value, at least with me as the author, in adding to the glut of online content.

But during a film marathon last year that I documented on Twitter, I rediscovered a love for picking out underseen films and at least trying to talk a little bit about them. So here’s my effort to expand upon that premise into the new year. Like most New Years resolutions, we’ll see how it goes. 

1/1

Uncut Gems (Josh and Bennie Safdie, 2019)

I remain undecided whether dust storm of anxiety produced by this loud and sleazy thriller counts as tension. That’s a commentary more on my personal preference than the film’s quality. Tension is a feeling I love to experience in a theater. Anxiety, the depersonalization caused by threats or overstimulation, just makes me shut down. Sometimes it’s hard to comment on a film’s actual merit, because the filmmakers clearly intended to make something you find deeply unpleasant. There’s merit in unpleasant things! And the anxiety here is certainly sincere and honest to the subject matter. Adam Sandler’s Howard and the world he inhabits are loud and grating and built to sustain the kind of reflection-free, overstuffed life he tries to lead. His search for pleasure and the bottomless pit of addiction it breeds lives on the screen in all its ugly, uncompromised glory. It’s just not an experience I hope to repeat any time soon. 

The Rise of Skywalker (J.J. Abrams, 2019)

Sigh. I had no plans to pay money to see Rise of Skywalker again, but when my little brother said he hadn’t had a chance to see the film yet, I embraced the opportunity to give it another shot. I hated Spider-Man 3 on my first viewing too! Maybe with fresh eyes J.J.’s meandering odyssey would transform, like that film, into a camp odyssey that asks only that you submit to its overstuffed story before heaping rewards on you. Now I knew what it wasn’t. Maybe I could learn to accept what it was.

But I didn’t. I am someone who tries desperately to find something to enjoy in every movie (see Cats below). If I’m sitting in a dark room for two hours, I will myself to stay engaged. But I was restless and frustrated and deeply bored every second of Rise of Skywalker. Its cowardice and, worse, laziness prevented me from even savoring the visual spectacle and melodrama. I really liked The Force Awakens. I loved The Last Jedi. I enjoyed Rogue One. I even found Solo watchable. But I remain baffled by The Rise of Skywalker. Its every pleasure eludes me, and I doubt I’ll go back a third time. 

1/4

The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)

Harvey Keitel’s disturbingly jacked naked body is the perfect visual summation of The Piano, a movie that is both deeply troubling and incredibly sexy. Holly Hunter (in one of the best performances I have ever seen) doesn’t get to deliver a single line in the film. That’s a very unsubtle metaphor for the role her Ada plays in society. She is hemmed in by her ungainly garments which snag in the thick jungle. Her heels sink deep into the untamed mud. The film opens with her literally tossed about on the seas on the shoulders of unfriendly men. The love triangle pits her between Alisdair, an oblivious and somewhat cruel man who sees her as little more than his property, and George, a hermit who appears to care for her, but also steals her piano and only agrees to return it to her for sexual favors. But her real choice is between living in this cruel world and dying. It’s hard to watch, and yet you can’t look away.

1/5

Heart of a Dog (Laurie Anderson, 2015)

This 70-minute tone poem doesn’t aspire to much. At times it mentions Anderson’s dog. It also talks about 9/11. It feels like a personal essay but without enough detail to really anchor it in its place and time. There’s something to be said for just taking a moment and letting thoughtful dialogue rush over you while watching highly treated footage of a dog running on a beach. If that’s your thing, have at. 

Magnet of Doom (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1963)

I was obsessed with Jean-Pierre Melville in college and tried to watch all of his films. This was one title that wasn’t available in America in any format, at least until the Criterion Channel added it to their “Complete Melville” set. It’s a perfect example of why I love this filmmaker though. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays a washed up boxer looking for a new start, who lies his way into a job with a disgraced banker leaving for America to escape conviction for his crimes. Just when it felt like I had a good handle on the story, it would twist and transform into something else. What first felt like a light exercise in Melville’s love for American noir turned into a more nuanced commentary on masculinity, power, and wealth. I might be obsessed all over again. 

1/6

You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay, 2018)

Lynne Ramsay makes deeply uncomfortable films about broken people, the types of people and films Joaquin Phoenix has turned into a legendary career. They’re both doing great work in this fairly traditional thriller about a suicidal veteran who makes his living looking for abducted girls and killing their abductors. The story is almost indistinguishable from your average Liam Neeson film. It’s the execution, both Phoenix’s deeply wounded soul and Ramsay’s focus on the less obvious details in each moment, that give the movie its spiritual energy. 

Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019)

I didn’t hate Cats! Sure, the CGI is bad, Hooper’s direction is amateurish, and the musical itself is a faux-surrealist nightmare that pretends sentimentality sans-context is some kind of high artsy dream logic, but as I said in my Rise of Skywalker review, I want to enjoy every movie I see and there was plenty to enjoy here. Even if that enjoyment came from gasping in horror at the mice with children’s faces, or smothering laughter as Judie Dench delivered a one take three minute solo staring directly at the camera, or scanning each frame for the effects that were clearly still not completed, I remained engaged the whole time. And honestly, I don’t mind the aesthetic of cats in attics having weird cat mythologies with, apparently, cat action movie cliches at the end. It ain’t art, but it’s very watchable. 

1/7

Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)

I love love love this movie. The story is easily the most simple on this list, and I might have known exactly how it was going to end after 20 minutes, but still I can’t bring myself to spoil a moment of it. Each act of humanity or cruelty in this aggressively naturalist tale about a poor wanderer and her dog hits with the force of its authenticity. Kelly Reichardt, who has been on my radar since Meek’s Cutoff in 2011, is a master with sound. The film doesn’t have a score, but you would never tell. A well-placed train in the background or melancholy wind can make a moment come alive.  Michelle Williams also does what she’s best known for doing. I was transported. It broke my heart.

Horrorthon 3: Grandson of Horrorthon

Four years ago I was preparing to shoot a horror film. Looking for unsung great horror that might fly under the radar of your typical website’s top 20 list, I stumbled upon a discontinued AV Club column that was either a terrible idea or one of the best ideas I’d ever heard of: a theoretical 24 hour horror marathon. Some famous director or actor would curate a theoretical 24 hours program of their favorite horror films.

I love to talk about movies, but feel like so much of that conversation gets tied up in top 10 lists or arguing about which film is “better.” This particular organizing strategy focused more on the actual experience of watching the films, and that really appeals to me. So a year later I asked my friend and fellow horror lover, Andy Johnston, to do a similar marathon with me. A couple years later we did another one.

In celebration of Halloween, we’re doing it again. Our usual disclaimer is that we are not actually watching all of these films in 24 hours, nor should any sane person. But sometimes a framing device sticks, and as a writer you learn not to question inspiration. Please peruse these options at your leisure. If any interest you, I hope you will check them out. And if you disagree with our takes or have suggestions for other films, please drop a comment. As you may have noticed from all these entries, we really, really love talking about horror films.

6:00 PM – Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999)

This is our third horror marathon, and while we’ve never planned this, the opening film has always set the tone for the rest of the night. The first year Andy started with Frankenstein, after which we delved into the classics. Last year I chose House of the Devil, kicking off a trip into many unsung contemporary horror secrets.

My choice for our opening this year lands somewhere in the middle. One of the first films ever mislabled “torture porn,” it’s such a classic that it could easily serve as a signpost for the beginning of modern horror. Granted, by the post-Saw standard (and, frankly, by the standard of most of Takashi Miike’s other films) it’s pretty tame, but the brutality on display hits with a force that much gorier films since have struggled to match.

Part of the reason for that is the rage on display, timelier now than ever. The story is about a rich widower whose film producer friend holds a fake film audition to find him a new wife. After parading women around under false pretenses, asking them questions, making them dance, he eventually settles on a beautiful woman nearly half his age. She seems perfect, and things go exactly as planned, at least until he discovers her penchant for dismembering and torturing her partners.  

This film is one of the first I am aware of to really dig into the ugliness inherent in so many romantic films that portray men hunting for unsuspecting women. It ultimately twists that standard on its head, then saws away at it with razor wire one foot at a time.

7:55 PM – Island of the Lost Souls (Erie C. Kenton, 1932)

True to form, I’m letting Ryan take the lead on the brave new future of horror, while I continue to muck about in the not-so-tried-and-true classics of the genre.  As such, permit me to transport us to the moody trappings of 1932’s Island of the Lost Souls.

Lost Souls is the definitive take of the age old Doctor Moreau story, a story that has no shortage of interpretations.  However, what sets this Doc apart from the many before and after is Charles Laughton’s galaxy level gravitational pull, which feels right at home in aq story about a mad scientist who creates a subservient race of animal-human hybrids.  An honorable mention goes to the sneaky performance of Bela Lugosi, himself just a single year removed from having played Dracula.

The race anxieties of the film are worn on its sleeve, as Moreau himself is a man in pursuit of a superman, a sentiment that is uncomfortably close to the realities beginning to bud overseas in the 30s.  While Lost Souls fails to make a lasting statement on the matter (really, what film in the 30s could be expected to grasp that? Actually, don’t answer that), it makes up for it with brilliant set design, rousing energy, and an affecting, human story that espouses dignity above the horrific reaches genetic science.  Island isn’t a scary film, per say, but unsettling in that the beliefs and theories that inspired Moreau would not be out of place in the various political circles of 2018.

9:05 PM – Mother (Bong Joon-ho, 2009)

Some might argue that Mother is not a horror film at all, but rather just one of the most uncomfortable detective films ever made. Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Snowpiercer) has always enjoyed blurring the lines of genre. But from the devastating torture sequence to the film’s recurring obsession with needles and the upper thigh to the overall implications of the narrative, it’s possible there’s more dread in these two hours than any other horror film we’re covering.

The opening sequence immediately lets you know you’re onto something special. I can’t do it justice, so i’m just going to post the video link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqokbMIzd7w

That’s actress Hye-ja Kim, whose imbues her character (credited only as Mother) with a fierce resilience that becomes both inspiring and terrifying. When her son is accused of brutally murdering a young girl, she sets out to prove his innocence by finding the real killer. Her strange, unsettling, illegal, and often immoral methods ultimately lead her to the truth, whether she is ready for it or not. Her performance, along with Joon-ho’s obsession with grotesque storytelling, leave an impression that’s hard to shake long after the final credits roll.  

11:15 PM –  Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi, 1964)

As Ryan will no doubt point out, it’s not fair to call Kwaidan a single entry- in reality, it is an anthology of separate stories, not unlike an entry you’ll find further down the list.  Yes, it is 3 hours. Yes, that is LONG for a horror film. However, you would be remiss to simply pass this up for its length.  Kwaidan is a kaleidoscopic vision of horror done by slow drip.

At any given moment during Masaki Kobayashi’s visual symphony, you could pick and choose stills to base entire stories off of. Incidentally, I’m not unconvinced that Kobayashi didn’t do just that, as the stories themselves tend to vary in memorable details, with a high point in Hoichi the Earless, a story of a blind monk who is roped into giving a musical performance to a demonic host, while chapters such as Woman in the Snow tend to veer off into outright fantasy, rather than horror.  To watch Kwaidan is almost as if glimpsing the fevered premonitions of a Del Toro of distant past.

As to what’s on Kwaidan’s mind, that’s more difficult to pinpoint.  Kobayashi was a cheerful cynic, meaning he tended to be more invested in the struggle than the result, and each of these stories tends to reflect exactly that- relatively decent people with a singular fault that prevents them from persevering to the story’s happiest conclusion.  Regardless, Kobayashi’s work as a whole, and specifically, Kwaidan, stands as a reminder that Japan in the 60s was a complicated and traumatized region that produced some of our best longstanding film- yes, including horror- and comparing it to what emerged at the same time from America is an utterly fascinating experiment.

2:20 AM – Train to Busan (Sang-ho Yeon, 2016)

Well, Kwaidan being the longest horror movie of all time means that we blew past the traditional midnight slot. Never fear. I’ve been to many a midnight screening that was delayed well into the morning thanks to technical difficulties. You can only sit on your phone for so long. After an hour or so you’re forced to talk to the people sitting next to you just to kill time, and they’re the sort of folks who also attend midnight screenings of Seven Samurai, so they’re usually pretty okay. You chat for a while, discover others that care about the same art and social issues that you do, your faith in humanity is restored, and then when the projector does roll you feel like you’re really part of a community appreciating human expression together. It’s a beautiful experience if you don’t have to wake up the next day.

ANYWAY, I’m not implying that watching Kwaidan is like sitting in a quiet auditorium for 3 hours, BUT also I feel like the our 2:20 screening probably needs to bring the heat. And that’s why I chose Train to Busan, straight up one of the most intense, entertaining, crowd-pleasing zombie movies I’ve ever seen.

The setup is not entirely original. A bad father tries to redeem himself by taking his daughter to see her mother in Busan. As they travel a zombie outbreak begins, infecting both those on and outside their train. You can probably guess some of the ensuing plot. A hodgepodge group of survivors (including a pregnant couple, a baseball team, two elderly friends, etc) must travel through infected cars and keep the train running as they make their way to the reportedly safe city. Some passengers become distrustful and try to kill other passengers, etc etc. The movie mostly follows the rules of the genre, but here’s the thing. It all works. Other movies break the rules because they’re too chickenshit to follow them this successfully. I can’t remember the last film that made me laugh, cry, and straight up cheer with this kind of regularity. It’s the kind of movie midnight screenings were made for, even if they start at 2 in the morning.

4:20 AM – Nightmares (Joseph Sargent, 1983)

I am so, SO pleased that Nightmares made the 4:20 slot.  Why? Just watch a youtube trailer. I’ll wait.

HELL YEAH BUDDY HELL YEAH WE’RE GONNA WATCH THIS KICK ASS MOVIE THAT’S ACTUALLY FOUR SEPARATE MOVIES AND ONE OF THEM STARS EMILIO ESTEVEZ AS A VIDEO GAME PUNK WHO HAS TO FIGHT AN ACTUAL ALIEN HELL YEAH HELL YEAH.

Okay. Got my inner college alcoholic rant out of the way.  So what’s the actual deal here? Well, this IS an anthology, and recently I’ve gotten REALLY into the idea of film anthologies, specifically horror anthologies.  There’s just this really holistic, summerstock theatre quality to them that I dig. I wish more people did them. I wish multiple directors would get together and do them.  ‘Cuz that would be boss as hell. The original idea was that a new installment would hit theaters every year and this would become A Thing. Of course, it wasn’t A Thing, ‘cuz streaming didn’t exist yet and theater audiences have goldfish memories, but it was rather forward thinking of them!

Anyway, Nightmares is four stories, ranging from your typical home invasion story to a Spielberg-esque desert truck chase to a ridiculously compelling story about a home with a giant rat problem.  Really, it is rather fascinating to see what kind of Totally 80s anxieties these movies betray. You have serial killers (did you know that, according the FBI, there were THREE TIMES AS MANY ACTIVE SERIAL KILLERS in the 80s?! What a terrible time to be alive), Evil Video Games, Road Rage Stalkers, and…uh…Rats, though that story, I’d argue, is more about domestic violence and underlying family splits, but whatever.

And yeah, as much as I love Emilio (and seriously, I freakin’ love classic Emilio),  none of these films could stand on their own, but together, you get an entertaining blend of hopeful, campy classic 80s horror that slides nicely into that 4:20 time slot. It’s…uh…well, it’s NOT Kwaidan, but it is storytelling at an economy rate, so there’s that.  Look, just shut up, open another beer, and enjoy The Bishop of Battle.  You’ll understand so many more gamer culture jokes after you do.

6:00 AM – A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)

We’ve been watching horror movies for 12 hours. You may be feeling some understandable fatigue. I mean, I think this has been a pretty diverse group of films thus far, but 12 hours of anything can get to be a stretch. So as the sun rises and you suffer through that specific all-nighter stomach churning from caffeine overdose and exhaustion, let me try my best curveball—a gothic western vampire romance performed entirely in Farsi.

Some accused writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut feature of being all style and no substance. It would be interesting to see those same critics revisit the film now that perhaps it’s more understandable why a woman vampire might travel through a dark, seedy town (literally called Bad City) taking revenge on bad men. This avenging demon (known in the film only as “The Girl”) finds men who take advantage of women and violently dispatches them, sometimes for the benefit of younger male onlookers who live to absorb the lesson.

But this isn’t just a revenge film. It’s also about the way The Girl negotiates her own loneliness and staves off cynicism in such a bleak world. To that end, we meet Arash, a well-meaning, hard-working young man who eventually wins The Girl’s heart. Their relationship begins in one of my favorite scenes in any movie in the last 20 years. Sure, the mood and style are both breathtaking, but it only works because the emotions of both characters and the stakes of their unlikely romance have been so clearly established (as opposed to 95% of other vampire romances that lean on mythology or melodrama). There have been a lot of shock scares, beheadings, dismemberments, and twists of fate in these films, but the only moment that truly drove me to shout, “Holy shit!” over and over at the screen involved a man in a vampire costume pressing his face into a real vampire’s hair while a disco ball spins in the background.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuN4wcDGlIc

7:45 AM – Masque of the Red Death (Roger Corman, 1964)

It would be a crime- A CRIME I SAY- to do a marathon without at least devoting an hour or two to the Vincent Price.  Combine this with the opportunity to steal a glance at the vast, sweeping catalogue of Roger Corman, and I’d argue you’re getting a hell of a deal.

Here’s the thing.  This is Vincent Freaking Price.  The stories themselves are fine, if not a bit tired, but you’re here to watch a master go about the work of acting. And I’m not talking about acting in the goofy ass Jared Leto tricking himself into believing he’s the Joker offset kind of acting. I’m talking about acting as an honest to god, 9-5 profession who’s optics were secondary to the actual craft.

Price himself is as unlikely a genius as, say, Boris Karloff. He is not an impressive looking man, be it in looks or stature, and yet, not unlike the previously mentioned Charles Laughton, his presence demands the attention of a room. He frames himself in a shot without regard for the DP, he overpowers those around him with his charisma and charming lull.  He simply IS the gothic cinema world that has become synonymous with his own name. Never once during each of the shorts do you look at this guy and say “nah, sorry, I don’t buy that”. You just accept it. That’s Price.

Of course, what Price and others of his kin in the horror of the 30s and 40s had in common was a true passion for the stage, which is something arguably missing from modern film today.  While modern actors might offer a more intimate or emotionally daring performance in the modern horror of today, no one does it with as much poise, style- or, dare I say, fun, as Vincent Price.

And for all of the praise I have to throw at the leading man, it would be a shame to gloss over Roger Corman, who Ryan tells me has yet to be properly included in our Horror-thon. I have to admit I was a little surprised, at first, ‘cuz I genuinely love Roger Corman, even if he is a cheap bastard who would happily reuse scores and set assets from film to film to avoid having to pay someone for an honest day’s work.   

Corman actually did two additional Poe films, Pit and the Pendulum and House of Usher, both of which are definitive retellings of Poe in their own right, but Masque is easily his most flamboyant, if not ambitious.  If nothing else, it namedropped Satan enough times to chase even the most easy going Christians out of the theater.

So there you have it.  Two greats of horror in the primes of their respective careers.  And to think, I almost passed this over to write about Price’s Nathaniel Hawthorne adaptations *shudders*.

9:10 AM – Goodnight Mommy (Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala, 2015)

I just happened to catch a screening Goodnight Mommy a row behind the designer of the haunted house I was working on that fall. This man oversaw some of the most graphic, disgusting live theater I’ve ever endured, but after this film ended, he could only say, “Well, I wasn’t expecting that.”

This is not a comfortable film.

Moreover, much of that discomfort comes from the familiarity of the setting: two twin brothers, living in an isolated farmhouse with their mother, playing in the backyard, hiding under the bed when they’re scared. But they’re mother returns from plastic surgery not quite herself, and suddenly a bit of that domestic safety is threatened. As her behavior becomes increasingly erratic, the boys begin to seriously question whether the woman behind the mask is truly their mother, and if not, what is she really?

I can’t say more than that without spoiling important developments, though you might wish I had before it’s over. This film brings torture horror into the suburban living room in ways that Wes Craven and David Cronenberg never dreamed of. And it’s all the more effective because directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz insist on shooting its most brutal twists with the matter-of-fact, bright objectivity of a prestige drama. There’s no looking away. There’s no hiding behind genre.

This all builds to a pretty harsh criticism of the west’s deification of boyhood and childishness in general, which, you might have noticed, is even more timely four years later. I know I sound like a broken record repeating that insight over and over again, but I would argue it’s also just the nature of horror to understand a society’s darkest impulses, its most foreboding prophecies, before that society full understands itself.

10:50 AM – First Man Into Space (Robert Day, 1959)

I love this film for many reasons, starting with the campy poster that I have hanging in my den to the borderline flat earther science that is betrayed by the plot.  Worry not, telling you what this is about will spoil nothing, so hang on tight.

An army test pilot goes up into the atmosphere in a rocket. He wants to break the atmosphere and enter space. The level heads at mission control tell him not to.  He does it anyway. When he returns to earth, he mysteriously disappears. Days later, a meteorite monster begins attacking livestock and innocent civilians. You’ll never guess what the connection is.

Look, if it sounds hokey, that’s ‘cuz it is.  But films like these are valuable time capsules, because of what we can learn from their self-imposed hysteria.  Back in good ol’ 1959, this film was actually marketed as science based. Seriously. It seems laughable now, but remember that this was the same period that critics raved that Robinson Crusoe of Mars was pointing the way toward the future, and that movie ended in a Martian invasion.  In fact, this movie was so serious about its supposition that they got Chuck Yeager, he of the sound barrier breaking flight, to stand in as the pilot for a few shots.

But the “science” of the film is only half the equation.  The other half is the absolute confidence the film’s writers have in the United States government.  Cynicism is not a thing here. If anything, the film is all too happy to remind us that our pals at the good ol’ US Government are here for our own good, ensuring that Glory Boys are held in check from taking ridiculous scientific risks that would transform them into meteor monsters- and wouldn’t you know it, when the film does come to its end, it’s an ending that any four star general could be proud of.

That makes the whole experience rather surreal to watch in 2018, an environment where we all roll our eyes at Michael Bay’s devotion to The Troops.  If you’re a lefty in favor of demilitarization like me, horror like First Man Into Space and others of its ilk is a valuable look into the conservative American film audience, who, it turns out, didn’t always used to be so averse to big government after all…

12:10 PM – The Leopard Man (Jaques Tourneur, 1943)

You may have detected something of a pattern thus far. As I mentioned in my first entry, Andy and I never plan our film choices in advance, but structures do tend to assert themselves. This year’s pattern seems especially obvious–Andy goes back to the classics, I deal with modern horror.

Unfortunately for consistency, there’s Jaques Tourneur. Until I’ve exhausted the man’s filmography, I can’t let one of these marathons go without one of his films making an appearance. Tourneur operated at one of the worst periods ever for horror. Between the Universal renaissance of the 30’s and the B movie surge of the 50’s, you have world war II and a generation with other things on its mind.

I’ll leave you to run a Wikipedia search on Val Lewton and the RKO horror films, but suffice it to say that during this period Jaques Tourneur and his RKO comrades directed some of the greatest horror movies in history. The Leopard Man is part of that fine tradition, and while it doesn’t have the psychological or thematic weight of his masterpieces, Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, it does have some of the most terrifying sequences in the first half-century of cinema.

Particularly brutal is the scene in which a teenage girl is pursued by the murderous feline on her way home. She knows her pursuer is after her, but her angry mother, believing her to be overreacting, won’t open the door. Scenes like this get picked apart in 2018 because they’ve existed for so long and become a crutch for lazy filmmakers, but imagine something like this playing in 1942. It’s almost unbearable to me today, and I’ve seen Goodnight Mommy. Imagine people who could still remember screaming at Frankenstein taking this in. Tourneur was decades ahead of his time.

1:20 PM –  Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, 1960)

This is one of like…3 films about face removal that I had to choose between, because that is apparently a sub-genre of horror now.  This was actually the first French film I ever saw. No joke! I watched it ‘cuz I heard a girl I was dating at the time namedrop it, and I wanted to seem really cool and cultured, so I gave it a go and got to enjoy the privilege of being moderately horrified for my trouble.

In all seriousness, Eyes Without a Face is a tour de force.  There are no winners in this story, no heroes.   One part Rappaccini’s Daughter, and one part modern torture porn, it’s the story of a brilliant doctor who commits murderous surgeries to complete a face transplant for his daughter.  In many ways, it comes full circle with the previously cited Island of the Lost Souls, itself a mad genius doctor tale, only Eyes is far more willing to follow its supposition to its bloody end.

This is a haunting film.  Years later, it still gives me goosebumps, and even just a single still of Edith Scob’s formless face is enough to make me want to seek the comfort of a warm, safe blanket.  I know some folks would say my penchant for old ass movies can make for a low frills slog, but trust me- Eyes Without a Face is fucking terrifying even by today’s standards.  You’ve been warned.

2:50 PM – Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi, 2009)

How far we’ve come. Nearly 21 hours after we started this theoretical adventure, and I’m not sure there’s any more way to shock or surprise you. If you made it this far, the only option left is to finish strong. And so I leave you, not with the most intense or most violent or even the scariest horror film (hell, it’s rated PG-13), but with a movie that claims one of the three most enjoyable film screenings of my entire life.

Look, if you know me, you know I love Sam Raimi. I chose to end the first incarnation of this list with The Evil Dead 2, my favorite horror film of all time. And so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I would choose his most recent genre creation, but I’d like to make a case for Drag Me to Hell as a standalone horror film, outside Raimi’s considerable influence.

Imagine some nobody made this film. It’s 2009. I’m getting passed over by Navy Seals with PhD’s who have fallen so far they’re applying for the same 10 dollar an hour jobs at Kohls. The world seems an especially brutal, unforgiving place, and into that world pops a film about bad people going to hell. Except hell imagery, evil gypsies and curses and blood,only provide half the film’s menace. The other half belongs to banks that pressure you to rip off the poor to protect yourself, and shamen who demand your credit card before offering assistance, and rich, protected people who reassure themselves that they are “truly good” while the rest of the world burns. That kind of righteous anger is missing in the rest of Raimi’s work, and it elevates this film in ways even the Evil Dead series can’t touch.

But it’s not all serious. Like Evil Dead, there are loads of very scary, very silly moments that endlessly delight a genre nerd like myself. If you’re giddy at the thought of an evil old woman trying to gum someone to death after her dentures fall out, or embalming fluid falling from a dead body into someone’s mouth, this film should keep a smile on your face for its entire 100 minute runtime.

4:30 PM – Predator (John McTiernan, 1987)

So we know that 2018 is hell and that film is now rotten with franchises and IPs that depreciate faster than your average college degree, but the greatest tragedy of this is that many great franchises that began in the 80s are now falling to a generation of young horror film fans who have no idea what it was like to associate these household names with singular, quality films. There is perhaps no franchise starter that better personifies this than Predator.

Predator is the first and only good film in a long ass line of reboots and crossovers, and there is no way to bend reality to say otherwise.  It is a film that excels despite itself, with glowering lines such as “If it bleeds, we can kill it”, and revelling in its front man, Arnold Schwarzenegger, himself a joy that younger generations are sadly becoming further removed from, there are legitimate moments of fear and dread that only increase as the genre crosses from hardcore action film to slasher.

The genius is in Predator’s premise- a group of badass military commandos, the kinda guys you imagined your childhood GI Joe’s as being in real life, go into a jungle to capture some political prisoners, only to find that there is a hunter even more deadly than themselves.  The film quietly chips away at the bravado and machismo of its characters, stripping them down until we’re left only with a half naked Arnold, smeared in mud, screaming animalistic howls into the night. No film crosses genres or tones so deftly, and no film accomplishes the hunter vs hunter trope as capably (no, not even Freddy vs Jason lol).  

Predator would go on to become a darling of the video game world, in some ways equaling and even surpassing its spiritual brother, Aliens.  To watch Predator is to experience a strange cocktail of elation and terror, to exist within a strange no man’s land between action heroes and animals.  It is a classic that deserves better than the heaps of decaying sequels that followed it.

Ryan and Andy Present: The Halloween Overachiever’s 24 Hour Horror Marathon: Year 2!

Two years ago my friend and fellow horror connoisseur Andy Johnston and I teamed up to plot out a miserably ambitious, purely theoretical 24 hour movie marathon. We never actually watched all those movies in a row, because we are not crazy people, but the act of planning was still a lot of fun.

After conferring on Facebook, we decided to do it again. The rules are straightforward. Andy and I alternate choosing films that we think would fit well in this program. We can choose these for any number of reasons: the time of day at which they screen, thematic connections to other films, how much fun or how ambitious they are, or just because we want to.

It goes without saying that you don’t actually have to watch these movies in order at one time. If there are any movies on this list that interest you, then we’ve achieved our objective. Or you could watch all of them as part of some insane marathon. If so please tell us. I don’t think either of us can afford to give you a prize, or even have 24 hours to kill to join you, but you will have our undying respect.

Well let’s get to it.

6:00 PM
The House of the Devil (Ti West, 2009)

Ryan: When we did the previous list two years ago, we began with some very essential but also fairly dated monoliths of the horror canon. Indeed, it took us almost five hours to get to a movie made in the last forty years! As much as I love the classics, I want to try a different tack this time around. After all, horror is first and foremost the genre of attention-deficient teenagers. Let’s get right in and scare the bejeezus out of people.

And the film I choose for this task is The House of the Devil. Devil is a modern horror classic, blending those two most perfect of traits for a horror film: a surplus of intelligence and a total lack of shame. Ti West has no qualms about manipulating the audience. When a moment is meant to scare you, he ratchets the score up so you can’t help but jump. He’s not above any trick as long as its effective.

In fact, it took me a second viewing to realize what some viewers on IMDB were complaining about: the movie is 80% winding dialogue sequences. But these are structured with such devastating foreshadowing for the horror to come, I don’t know how an active viewer could not spend that time cringing with anticipation. And when the climax does arrive, it delivers. Both viewings have ended with my heart pounding, hairs standing on end, butt perched so close to the end of my seat I might as well be squatting. It sounds cliché, but horror thrills this pure are pretty rare.

7:35 PM
Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder 2004)

Andy: Okay. First off. If you haven’t seen Romero’s original opus, stop reading and fix that. It is perhaps the single most important zombie film (aside from the one that started it all), and you’d do yourself a disservice by watching the leaner, faster and angrier remake first.

Alright. Now, for those of you still with me, please put down your bricks and socks full of quarters. I know. It’s Zack. Snyder. I get it! I really do! He’s teeeerrrrible. BUT. His take on George Romero’s mall-based thriller is hands down his best work (look, I know, it’s a low bar, just stick with me here).

This film is different from its predecessor in every way possible. Gone are the shuffling, creaky zombies of old- we now have fast, lean and inescapably strong zombies. The mall is still there, but instead of just a couple of characters milling about and pontificating about their predicament, we’re treated to a diverse crowd that is surprisingly human, if not rather likable. The film explores many of the what if’s we’ve often fantasized about when considering a zombie outbreak- “what if a pregnant woman gets bitten?”, “what if I was stranded in a gun store?”, “what job would help me be best suited for a zombie outbreak?” (hint- it’s not security guard), and of course, “would driving a bus with chainsaws stuck to the sides through a crowd of zombies work?”, “if I had access to my own private island would I be safe from the zombies?” (I’ll let you guess that for yourself).

Anyway, back to Snyder. What we know now about the filmmaker is almost enough to ruin this film. Almost. But the scares, action and affectation of atmosphere are just too well done for this film to fail. His musical montages are amongst the best of his career, his shifting amongst a large cast is deft and his ability to capture the sheer scope of a worldwide outbreak has only been matched by Romero himself.

If you want to understand just how the zombie genre got…er…reanimated…you’d do worse than to start here with this modern-ish take on the Romero classic.

9:20 PM
Martin (George Romero, 1978)

Ryan: I agree with Andy on the Dawn ’04. It was a smart and really engaging update. You don’t risk much by saying it’s Snyder’s best film, but I’ll go one step further: I like it more than 28 Days Later, the critical darling sprinter zombie film from the same era. Hopefully you already wasted all your projectiles on Andy.

Anyway, let’s stick with the Romero vein. You’ve seen the best remake of horror’s greatest (yeah, I said it) auteur. Now enjoy what I consider to be the man’s unsung masterpiece. Also we just gave you two straight up crowd-pleasers, so it’s about damn time you sat through an art film.

With Martin, Romero tries to modernize the vampire mythos in the same way he made zombies about nuclear anxiety instead of voodoo. The titular character believes himself to be a vampire, thanks to years of conditioning by his family. He sedates victims (mostly women) then removes their blood via syringe.

The metaphor is not subtle, but the film is a bonafide seventies counterculture masterpiece about how religion and social repression helped foster a world of monsters. Martin ultimately comes into contact with several women, including one of his former victims, and realizes the damage he’s done to them, even if they don’t remember. It’s surprisingly forward-thinking in its views on sexism and male entitlement, but it’s also a stark condemnation of the idea that superstition and ignorance can protect us.

If that sounds like a bummer (which, okay, it kind of is) try to remember that both Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead are also thick with social allusions. Romero knows how to make old school horror thrills and riveting character drama support his larger ideas. That’s why he’s the best.

10:55 PM
Event Horizon (Paul W.S. Anderson, 1997)

Andy: Speaking of forward thinking, what do you get when Paul W.S. Anderson (he of the…um…famed(?) Resident Evil franchise) decides he’s going to ape Solaris?

You get the film that laid the groundwork for every horror video game to follow. From Doom 3 to Dead Space to Prey, Event Horizon’s aesthetic is ever present. Particularly argumentative people might say Alien or its many sequels were more responsible for this, but it bears mentioning that the folks who are programming games today were in the prime of their adolescence when Event Horizon was in theaters. When talking about the way some films influence a generation, sometimes timing is more important than quality.

That’s not to say Event Horizon is a poor film. Not unlike Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, Anderson’s Event Horizon is easily the high watermark of his career (again…this guy is responsible for the Mortal Kombat movie, so, you know, perspective is key here). You have to willfully ignore a good deal of dialogue, but visually, the film is arresting. It’s a marvelous late 90s concoction of practical effects and imaginative environments turned on their heads to horrify the audience.

Its most iconic quote, “Where we’re going, we don’t need eyes to see” plays better in the moment than it ever could in the imagination and takes a rightful place in horror’s hall of fame for chilling quotes. Despite the quote, you’ll want to keep your eyes wide open for one of science fiction’s most off beat (and chilling) films of the late 90s.

12:45 AM
Attack the Block (Joe Cornish, 2011)

Ryan: The Midnight Movie holds a sacred place in horror. It is traditionally where you show subversive trash (but in a good way) and cult classics, two staples of the genre. Midnight screenings have helped increase the popularity of films as diverse as The Evil Dead, Troll 2, and Eraserhead.

I mulled over this choice for a long time. On our last list, Andy rose to the occasion with The Blob, one of the most fun, ridiculous, pulpy films ever made. It’s an unimpeachable classic of late night horror, while not being as obvious as Rocky Horror Picture Show. I’m not sure I can top it by that logic.

So instead, I’m going to project what I think could very well be a Midnight Classic of the future. Attack the Block is one of the most fun films ever made. A gang of teenagers teams up to protect their apartment complex from an alien invasion that seems to be limited exclusively to their block. Director Cornish is best buds with Edgar Wright, and he shows nearly all of Wright’s skill for melding diverse influences into something unique and great on its own merits. Spielberg and Carpenter, as well as Wright himself, all get due credit as the charismatic young cast (including The Force Awakens’ John Boyega and new Doctor Who Jodie Whittaker) flee danger on bikes, stage battles in apartment hallways, and evade pursuing gangs and “gorilla wolf motherfuckers.”

As its stars’ profiles rise, I could easily see this become a late addition to the classic horror pantheon. Until then it will have to remain one of both horror and science fiction’s most awesome secrets.

2:15 AM
Pitch Black (David Twohy, 2000)

Andy: Ryan’s doing an awesome job of highlighting some bonafide classics, which makes my next choice feel downright antagonistic–but we’re obviously in a sci-fi horror groove here, and no such conversation would be complete without mentioning David Twohy’s love-it-or-leave-it opener to the Riddick franchise.

Forget about the overwrought Chronicles of Riddick and the workman-like sequel. Instead, stick to the remarkably focused Pitch Black, a well scripted horror that takes its time and lets us fall in with the surprisingly well rounded characters-to name a few, there’s a pilot with a nasty secret, a self-serving bounty hunter, a faithful Imam, an eccentric archaeologist and, of course, the enigmatic super-criminal Richard B. Riddick.

While it is no exaggeration to say this is the role Vin Diesel was born to play, the film would hold up on its own even without its glowering point man. Filled with character-driven crisis and exasperated by an imaginative (if not a tad scientifically impossible) world of darkness and monsters, Pitch Black demands your attention with a boldness that you’d expect from a more prolific filmmaker, and you can’t help but respect it for that. This is both the strength of Twohy’s man vs. monster film and the crux that he struggles to recapture in his subsequent films.

4:05 AM
The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005)

Ryan: I have to admit that I’ve never actually seen Pitch Black. I’m willing to give it a try though. Based solely on word of mouth and a handful of movie stills, I believe it has a lot in common with my next choice.

In the Descent, a team of badass spelunkers find themselves trapped in a massive (and, um, pitch black) cavern. Soon they discover, as people in horror films are wont to do, that they are not alone.

And that’s it. That’s the movie. It doesn’t get much simpler or more primal. But that’s exactly where The Descent draws its power. Because with so little plot, the movie has time to really seep the audience in unbearable levels of claustrophobia, darkness, and sheer animal terror.

I mean my god. It’s almost too much really. It’s like the feeling of being five years old and running up the stairs from a dark basement, amplified and sustained for ninety minutes. Those eyeless human hybrids… shudders

I hesitated to include it, because it’s become deservedly popular in recent years and I don’t want to repeat all obvious classics; but it’s 4:05 AM, arguably the most exhausting hour of night, and also the last bit of darkness we’re going to get before the sun comes up. The audience probably needs a good gut punch right about now, and this is the movie to do it.

5:45 AM
Videodrome (David Cronenberg 1983)

Andy: Well, the sun is starting to peak through the blinds and you just finished The Descent. As you come up on the 12 hour mark, you’re no doubt feeling akin to Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Rather than trying to remedy this, I’m going to suggest we embrace this feeling with a good ol’ fashioned morning viewing of Videodrome.

Videodrome is best taken with little sleep (and possibly some drugs), as we follow James Woods through a television screen and into a world so steeped in visual innuendo and mystery that the viewer can’t help but feel as hypnotized as Woods’ dangerously curious protagonist.

Cronenberg’s penchant for practical effects have always defied reality, but never are they more stark than in Videodrome- from the famous enveloping television to the sickening bodily transformation of the film’s many damned characters, Videodrome doesn’t so much lead its audience as it forced it to submit to its bloody wiles. You leave the experience feeling dazed, and months later you’ll find unintentional homages to Cronenberg’s masterpiece in everything…including your own work.

That Videodrome manages to be memorable much in the same way of a bad pop song or a commercial jingle is a remarkable point in its favor, given Cronenberg’s subject choice. It’s the rare film that requires a single viewing to unsettle you for years to come.

7:15 AM
Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1931)

Ryan: I like this idea of traveling down the rabbit’s hole, and thusly I’m going to derail this trip through modern horror—fun though it has been—to see if I can even upstage Videodrome for sheer batshit lunacy. To do that, I’ll have to take us back to a more experimental time in movie history, when people still actively theorized about the link between cinema and dreams as more than feel-good jargon.

With Vampyr, Carl Dreyer set out to transpose a straight up nightmare, with all its detours and absurdities, into film form. He succeeded in creating one of the strangest, most hallucinatory visual experiences of all time. Practically a silent, excusing the occasional sound effects, Vampyr drops the audience into a strangely-defined world alongside cipher Allan Grey. After a strange old man is found inside Gray’s apartment, Dreyer drags the audience from one Jungian set piece to another. A shifty-eyed doctor is poisoning a loved one. Untethered shadows of skeletons waltz along the walls. One moment we are sitting on a sun-drenched prairie, the next we are being buried alive inside a glass coffin.

Dreyer was a devout Christian, so I hesitate to suggest he intended this film to be viewed on drugs. It’s not necessary either, though this is definitely one of those films. I would guess that staying up all night watching horror movies could have a similar effect. In either case, it makes for some seriously unnerving viewing.

8:35 AM
Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter (Joseph Zito, 1984)

Andy: So I know this is like, a totally different direction from the whole ART thing, but I figure at this point you’re well into the morning, you’re probably having some breakfast or…whatever it is you do to keep up your energy during this nightmare, and you need something light to keep things moving. How about a recommendation for the ONE Friday the 13th movie that is worth seeing? No? Are you sure? Okay, that second “no” was pretty emphatic, but we’re gonna go with this regardless.

You know about Friday the 13th. Jason. The hockey mask. The lake. The camp. What you didn’t know is that one of these movies doesn’t suck as much as the others, and it’s not the one you’d think. While the first film gets credit for trying to be a real movie and the tenth film is a remarkably self-aware space romp that borders on being a Muppets movie, 4 is the one that actually succeeds at being interesting by neither avoiding its machete wielding protagonist nor mocking it. Simply put, it is a better slasher flick than it has any right to be.

Perhaps more remarkably, the film even succeeds in building not only a sense of lore surrounding the unkillable Jason but in establishing a Van Helsing-esque foe for him in the 12 year old Tommy Jarvis. This is the first (only?) film in the series where you get the sense that these characters not only serve a greater purpose than their red shirt castmates, but that they actually have a chance to overcome their immortal antagonist.

The title gives you the sense that the writers (I know, I was shocked to learn these films had them too) had a very specific purpose- to kill Jason for good- and they pursue that objective with naked zeal throughout the runtime of this slasher. I’m not sure why they thought this was a realistic goal- after all, Friday the 13th would go on to have 8 more films after this one, but their optimism regarding the limits of capitalistic greed make this an admirable endeavor in an otherwise uninspired series.

10:10 AM
Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957)

Ryan: I’m actually glad you chose that one Andy, because it means all bets are off. Which means it’s time for me to shoehorn in a Jacques Tourneur movie! For those unfamiliar with Tourneur’s work, he’s one of the unsung masters of horror cinema. His work with Val Lewton in the forties included groundbreaking classics like Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie (which I included in our last marathon).

By the time he shot Night of the Demon, Tourneur’s career had take a bit of a downward turn. Demon is occasionally tainted by the compromises he had to make once he was no longer under the creative protection of RKO’s horror unit, including a really cheesy demon puppet that he never would have agreed to if he had any say.

But for the most part this is still an obvious work of genius, well ahead of its time. Tourneur gleefully mines paranoia about satanic cults and curses (the movie was heavily censored for its American release), as well as the more natural fear we all have of our impending death. The story is cheesy in a typical 50’s B-horror fashion. A hunkish professor named John Holden is handed a sheet of parchment by a Satanist named Karswell which says that he will die in three days. At first John is a skeptical, as are all professors in 50’s movies, but strange occurrences, including a glowing light that follows victims through the forest, soon win him over.

The movie gets a lot of suspense out of characters literally fleeing their death, but it also is a great bit of mood work. In one scene Holden confronts Karswell, who dressed as a clown and hosting a children’s birthday party. Soon the party is interrupted by a tornado, and Karswell and John duck inside. But the children disappear. It leaves you to wonder whether the children have the worst parents on earth, or whether they were really children at all. The more John digs, the less the familiar trappings of reality make him feel safe, and the more real and isolating his curse of death seems.

11:50 AM
Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey 1962)

Andy: Glad you went back Tourneur, ‘cuz if you didn’t, I would have. It’s no exaggeration when I say I own at least six of his films and any one of them could be argued for as a classic.

So lets fast forward about five years to 1962’s Carnival of Souls. A strange, foreboding film, its story on Mary Henry, the lone survivor of drag race gone wrong. , as she relocates from her small town to a, um, different small town (in Utah, no less). The story gets weird when she starts receiving visits from the undead.

Produced on shoestring and a hope, Carnival’s quality comes not from its effects but from its remarkable atmosphere, as the story dwells on Mary’s inability to fit in with her conservative small town surroundings. As one might expect of someone who has survived a deadly car crash, Mary battles depression, a crisis of faith and a disturbing sexual siege from just about every man in town before finally holding court with the dead at their nauseatingly shot nightly carnival.

I know that it’s easy to fall into superlatives when trying to sell folks on old school horror, but this film truly is as unsettling an experience as it sounds.

1:10 PM
It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2015)

Ryan: I already reviewed It Follows when it was released two years ago. My take at the time was that it was the best horror movie so far this decade. That opinion has yet to change. The opening scene alone, for my money, stands right beside the spinning dance shot in Carrie and… okay, I’ll lay back on the hyperbole. The point is I like this movie a lot.

What’s it about? Okay, so there’s a demon that follows around teenagers, and once they have sex with someone, then it starts following that person instead. If it kills that person, it starts following the original person again. We pick up this chain as a young woman named Jay decides to sleep with her boyfriend, thus inducting her into the path destruction. Her friends try to help her, even though they can’t see the demon (which only appears to its intended victims). Her life becomes a desperate plea for people to believe in her suffering.

While I love this movie, I’m placing it here because we seem to have an interesting discussion going between modern and classic horror. Like Carnival, It Follows is also a super low budget, masterful exercise in mood that examines a specific kind of midwestern repression. That opening scene I was talking about earlier features a teenage girl running terrified through her suburban neighborhood at dusk. The neighbors look on and ask if something is wrong, but (like the audience at this point) they don’t really know what’s bothering her and can’t do much to help.

Because I’m lazy, but also because I don’t have a ton to add, I’m going to quote my thoughts on the opening scene from my original review:

“This scene doesn’t exist in any screenwriting guide. It’s not plucked from genre conventions that I’m aware of. It’s scary, but it’s also focused on the strange, human experience of being a teenager in the American suburbs. The point is clear enough — how real is any of the pragmatic world when your inner world is in trouble? Being young can feel like a horror film. There are numerous dangers and traps you don’t have the experience to predict, while your hormones act like a vindictive screenwriter drawing you to walk through every door and look over every ledge without knowing why.

Adulthood is a lot like watching that horror film, and there’s a temptation to shout at the screen in frustration with all the clarity that’s easy when you’re sitting in an air conditioned auditorium. Of course there’s a reason we go see horror films in the first place. Audiences long to commune with a younger vision of the world, where a forest is a dark, mysterious kingdom and not just a bunch of trees. As Jay and her friends run around their community escaping the spirit, they revisit old beach houses and pools that made up the mythology of their childhood. There’s a sense that they’re growing both forward and backward. They’re learning to be more mature, but they’re also remembering those fragile bonds that tied them to the world in the first place.”

2:55 PM
I Married a Monster from Outer Space (Gene Fowler Jr 1958)

Andy: Horror is such a rich genre for sexual anxiety, which makes it all the more fascinating to find traces of those themes as far back as 1958. You wouldn’t have a film like It Follows without first having I Married a Monster From Outerspace, a sci-fi horror that was produced for a mere third of the cost of Carnival of Souls…which, given the title, isn’t all that hard to believe.

Moving on- the story gets straight to the point. Marge wants to get married to the man of her dreams, so she does, only to find him an utterly changed man when they finally move in together. Her man, Bill, turns from a warm, loving person to a cold, distant and at times violent housemate. Tensions build- Marge can’t get pregnant, their dog gets mysteriously strangled and Bill starts spending more time at the bar with his newly married buddies than he does at home.

So, wouldn’t you know it that one night when she follows Bill on one of his nightly excursions that she discovers her husband’s worst impulses come from a perfectly logical source- namely his being from outer space.

If you can believe this (and I’ll forgive you if you can’t), the film only improves from there, as the writers treat their proposed invasion with utter seriousness. They don’t talk down to the subject at hand, instead allowing for scenes to play out at an organic pace, treating Bill not as an invader but a tortured foreigner, while Marge is given both opportunity to overcome her situation as well as understand it.

As the film wraps, we’re left with one of the more sensitive commentaries on the anxieties garnered from a conservative approach to marriage. While that message might be lost on a decidedly more liberal audience today, for those who still have a foot in that culture, I Married a Monster From Outer Space still hits home with devastating accuracy.

4:15 PM

Ryan: I guess that leaves me with the closer then. I’m going to try to pull us in at 6:00 with a movie that has an exact run time of 1 hour and 45 minutes that also could fittingly close out such an impressive list. Should be easy enough…

15 minutes later…

The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo Del Toro, 2001)

“What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and time again? And instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber.”

With these words, Guillermo Del Toro remade the horror movie in his image. Taking the folklore of his childhood, his love of Spanish horror films like Spirit of the Beehive, and the fraught political history of his Latin American heritage, Del Toro crafted one of the most humane and moving ghost stories ever told in any medium. Pan’s Labyrinth gets more attention (it definitely deserves some of it) but in this writer’s opinion, Backbone was the real breakthrough.

The story revolves around a ten-year-old boy named Carlos who is moved to an orphanage after his father was killed in the Spanish civil war. Soon Carlos is haunted by the ghost of a young man killed by a missile, who keeps telling him that many in the orphanage are going to die. The story develops from there, with the real world struggled against the fascists slowly infringing on this mythical orphanage in a style evocative of the best Magical Realist authors.

Del Toro’s greatest gift is his humanity. Beginning way back with Cronos, he was always looking for the place where the supernatural and the naturalist intersect. He’s interested in ghosts and human emotions equally, because he understands implicitly that they are the same thing. I cannot think of a better place to end a look at both old and new classics than with the filmmaker who, perhaps more than any other, has channeled the old into something truly new.

This is not intended as a plug for The Shape of Water, but I’m definitely going to be there opening day.

I Shot a Movie Yesterday

It seems like a small thing. Actually, it is a small thing. With everything going on in the world right now, I almost didn’t write about this because, frankly, who cares.

But through the microscope of my personal experience, it was huge. Last September, just before I started suffering insane side effects from my use of Adderall, I began shooting a short film. It was nothing world-changing. It barely qualified as art. But it was something I had written at a vulnerable moment, and it meant something to me. At almost that exact same time I finally melted. I became more depressed and anxious than any other time in my life. I started having panic attacks on a daily basis. Some nights I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t able to relax around other people. Simple tasks like showering or doing laundry became unbearable. I almost had to move back in with my parents because I just could not function on a day to day basis. I blogged about a lot of this last year, but that was before things got really bad. When things got really bad I didn’t have the words to express how bad they were.

This weekend, nine months later, I finished shooting that short film. Recovery has been slow and isn’t anywhere close to 100% complete. It’s still hard for me to focus for more than a few hours at a time. I still get bad headaches, and I’m very emotionally distant most of the time. It’s still harder for me to engage the world consistently than at any other time in my life, and I’ve suffered from severe depression since I was a teenager. Still, this was a symbolic reminder that I didn’t give up. While I don’t always feel like my efforts are actually working, this was real-world evidence that after changing nearly everything about my life, I could do something that I once feared I had lost the ability to do for good. I was able to pick up a task that I had to drop for nearly a year, and I was able to finally complete it.

And it felt amazing. It was the best I’ve felt since last summer.

A special thanks to Dawson Ehlke and Brickson Schwenn who both donated a not-insignificant amount of their lives to helping me finish. It meant a lot.

That’s all I have to say. Happy Pride weekend everyone.

Not So Impossible: A Story of Depression

Part 1 — Bootstraps

At a distance thing looked better than ever. I knew they did. I had worked hard to make them look that way.

I had just been promoted to supervisor at work and received a two dollar an hour pay raise. I was writing for a local website. It didn’t pay, but I was getting exciting networking opportunities. A few of my articles had earned me a decent following. I had been living for almost a year in my own apartment. I was planning an ambitious production of a little-known William Shakespeare play, with a cast and crew locked down and a good venue booked.

It had been years since I was first aware of my severe depression and anxiety; since I first started going three or four days without sleep, sometimes sleeping 20 or 22 hours instead; since I fell apart the last year of college and departed one class short of graduation;  since I laid on the floors of friends apartments staring at ceilings and walls because my emotions were racing so quickly I could do nothing else; since I failed to hold a job and moved into my parents’ basement; since I made a manic return to school which I self-sabotaged in an absurd manic episode; since I drove away dozens of friends, not understanding my own behavior, some calling me a toxic personality; even since I stumbled alone through Minneapolis living in a house for recently released prison inmates, regularly getting into car accidents, making myself throw up with anxiety, hoping nobody discovered my apartment and car were covered in trash, barely holding it all together.

But now things looked okay. At family gatherings I could tell people what I was doing with my life. I could be proud.

I had worked more than 52 hours a week, sometimes up to 70 or 85 hours, for over a year to get to this place. I had made a few new friends. I started dating again. I lost weight. I directed a play for the Fringe Festival in August. The show hadn’t gone especially well, but it was a far cry from the Fitzgeraldian tragedy I had been living up to that point.

Part 2 — It’s an Awful Sound When You Hit the Ground

The lie I had preserved for over a year, thankfully, came crashing down on my head one cold day in February.

It started with a physical illness; the kind it’s easier to admit you have out loud. I hadn’t taken a day off work for my health since I moved back to Minnesota, but with the heat in my apartment at ninety degrees, wrapped in two comforters, and shivering like a dead man, I found it necessary to take a week off work.

Lying there in bed, surrounded by the same trash and unwashed sheets and (I could faintly detect) the smell of mold, I wondered melodramatically if I died, how long would it take for anyone to notice? This was as much a practical question as a maudlin one. A distance had formed between myself and everyone who knew me. I blamed all of them for its creation, despite my being the common denominator. I avoided all phone calls, especially from my family. I had driven all my friends away. I hadn’t seen any of them in over a month.

At the end of the week, just as I was starting to feel better, I treated myself to a movie at the dollar theater in Hopkins. During the trailers I reached into my pocket and discovered my phone was gone. I looked all over the theater, traced my steps back to my car, then tore the car apart looking. The phone was nowhere. I knew I wasn’t going to find it. This used to happen to me all the time, when I was a kid stretching into my earliest years in college. It hadn’t happened for a while though.

I went back inside to finish the movie and then spent three hours trying to get my old Kindle charged and connected to internet to cancel my phone and make arrangements.

Both of these first two problems should have been tolerable, but there was a greater fear that made them disastrous. I didn’t want anyone to look too closely at my life. Viewed through a magnifying glass, my steady improvement could be seen more clearly as rapid deterioration. For every step forward, I became less human. I was living an adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, hiding in the back corner of a dark room, thoughtless and blank, long past the point of remembering why I was there or how I intended to escape. I felt a deep, animalistic panic about the idea of anyone stumbling upon my hidden squalor.

The final blow to my facade was struck the very next day. I hadn’t checked the oil in my car in months, and driving down highway 169 I heard a weird sound in my engine. Within a mile my car was violently lurching. A hundred yards after that it was dead on a busy highway with no shoulder. Also, I had no phone.

In the cold February wind I stepped out and began flagging people down. All I was thinking was how angry I was, and how afraid I was that someone might look inside my car, see the food lying in the passenger seat, smell the cigarette smoke I had been hiding for years, notice how low my bank account had fallen despite all my work, realize it was all my fault.

It took two hours for a snow plow to pull over and offer to call the police. For two hours, in the cold, still sniffling, I stood in front of my car, waving my arms wildly, getting the attention of distracted drivers who came a little too close for comfort. They towed me to an auto body shop. The mechanic tried not to stare at the disaster of torn books and fast food bags and dirty clothes, passing a look midway between pity and embarrassment. The engine was dead, he said, and it would cost more than the total cost of the vehicle to repair it. I left the car, never to see it again.

The bus didn’t leave early enough for me to make my new job, and I had promised my parents I had plenty of money, so I took a rental car to work for the next two weeks. By the end of that period my account was overdrafted by nearly 500 dollars. I avoided the emails from the venue for my play, as well as my editor who wondered why I was skipping out on assignments. If anyone asked, everything was fine. Small problems don’t cripple big people. I was going to overcome all of this.

After work every day I crawled into bed and slept around 14 hours. I hated myself for my weakness, my laziness, my sloppiness. Phone calls kept ringing. I kept ignoring them. My voicemail filled up and I deleted each new entry without listening. I tried watching movies, but that was too stressful. For three days I rewatched the same five episodes Buffy the Vampire Slayer over and over. If you had asked me immediately following an episode what I had watched, I probably couldn’t have told you. In fact, whole weeks would go by during which I couldn’t recall a single detail. The very idea of forming words in my mind became exhausting.

Just for fun one night I decided to try writing a Buffy episode in my head to bone up on story structure. I fell asleep before I was able to muster even one sentence. 

I was just fine, thank you for asking.

Part 3 — Epiphany

Depression is a kind of insanity, and therefore it’s hard to explain in sane terms. Part of me was desperate and scared. Part of me also believed I was fine and I just needed to get over myself. With benefit of hindsight, I hadn’t been fine in a very long time–I started exhibiting many of these symptoms in early childhood–so I didn’t have much for comparison.

Often when severely depressed I’ve found thoughts and feelings escaping their anxious cages with seemingly no ties at all to anything I’m doing or feeling on the surface. Sometimes I would burst out crying for no apparent reason. Other times I would write about trees for an hour, then realize I had actually written about a friend who hadn’t called me back, or a task I was afraid of, or suicide. I was trying to send myself signals that I was incapable of receiving.

When my doctor asked me if my Prozac was working, I said possibly. We agreed it might be a good idea to double up my dosage. I told him nothing about my life up to that point. I didn’t want to complain. It seemed pointless.

The Prozac only helped me get to work each day. It made my head swim and my problems seem far away, but still my brain was unable to form words. This was a far cry from the Ryan who had once won contests with his writing, who took and passed genius tests as a child. 

This was the other Ryan–the one who, at the exact same time as a child, was also placed in the special needs program because he lost all his assignments, accidentally wrote on his forehead, wandered the house late at night worrying until he made himself throw up, and seemed lost in invisible, fanciful dramas nobody else was privy to.

I started drinking heavily, looking for whatever relief I could find to recharge for the next day. There is no paid sick leave for mental health. If I committed myself or sought a drastic solution, I could wind up broke and living with my parents again, possibly for good. I held on, just barely, for the next month. I drank more, finding the loss of inhibitions exhilarating. I started realizing that, while inebriated, I could make plans and speak honestly with myself in ways I couldn’t crippled by anxiety. I started recording these thoughts so I could listen to them the next day.

One night I went too far, which just happened to be far enough. It began with tears. I was crying uncontrollably. My hands were shaking. My room was dark. I was too anxious to even watch TV. I couldn’t bear the thought of living another day. The alcohol gave me just enough perspective to see I hadn’t been well for years, and to see all my actions as a slow, helpless decline that could only have ended up here. Even now, with the benefit of perspective, I know that was true.

I decided to try a game. In my head I was going to mentally chart a path to happiness, one that began with me, drunk, sitting on the couch. I would create a strong mental image of what I wanted and how I planned to obtain it, and use it as my light at the end of a tunnel. I thought about filmmaking, my original childhood dream. I tried a version of the story where I fell in love. In every situation, I couldn’t get beyond the first couple steps. I began realizing that my irrational anxiety, calibrated incorrectly by my broken brain, had attached itself to even my happiest memories. My stomach lurched even at the thought of love and fulfillment. At times my whole body would shut down and despite the fact that I had slept plenty and it was the middle of the day, I would pass out while trying to think about these things.

 

I’ve never been a drug abuser. I don’t judge those who do it safely. It’s just never been my thing. But I was scared of myself, and the idea of ending it all was becoming just too tempting. I had realized how easy, how natural it was to slip off to sleep; thought how a bottle of sleeping pills might just make it permanent. 

I wasn’t quite ready for that yet. I thought, what else can I try that I haven’t thought of yet? I recalled one night, years earlier, when I took some adderall with alcohol. I had felt invincible. I needed to feel invincible to conquer this. So that night I downed a whole bottle of whiskey and a couple pills. Do not regularly do this. It’s a very bad idea. It is, however, a better idea than a whole bottle of sleeping pills. 

I blacked out, but not before I turned on my tape recorder. When I woke up, head tilted up toward the ceiling, my tape recorder had been running for almost six hours.

I turned it on and listened.

For the first few minutes I fumbled carelessly with words. I could vaguely recall what I had said during this part. But then began the parts I couldn’t remember. The effect was, in the most literal sense of the word, life-changing.

Just to be clear, again, I’m not advocating for drug abuse as a solution to depression. There is a good chance it can cause serious damage. My circumstances were singular and unique, and I know they’re probably not repeatable. However they are my honest circumstances, and I cannot change them.

I heard my voice change from desperate and lethargic to calm and hopeful. It began, “Ryan, you’re going to know deep down this is true. Right now I’m wasted, but even in this state I’m more sane than you are.”

From there I took the problems I had been facing; questions I had been asking myself for years; paradoxes I had tried to solve in short stories and plays; and one by one I calmly and rationally explained them to myself. “You’re trying so hard to be normal. Doesn’t that seem weird to you? How much do you read? How often do you work? How many of your problems do you face head on and still you can’t get by? Don’t you think maybe there’s a problem and maybe you don’t deserve it?”

I recalled a relationship from a year earlier (or the closest I had gotten to a relationship in a long time). We had gone on a few dates. At times there was a real connection. On the night of the fourth date, she came over to my place and we watched a movie. We started kissing after the movie was over, but then, suddenly, without warning, she stood up and said she had to go. I never heard from her again.

I explained the situation to myself in a way that didn’t end with, “You’re cursed and nobody will ever love you.” The way I was telling it now, I had been unable to feel any of the things she was feeling. My every decision, every movement was wrong, because I was not drawing from the source of hope and passion and, yes, lust, that she was. Most people, somewhere inside, take this connection for granted. I didn’t have it.

I remembered a movie I had written years earlier. I told myself it was really about me; whereas, when I made it, I told everyone including myself that it was some pointless grand philosophical treatise on some meaningless subject or other. It was really about me, alone in my apartment, learning that life scared and alone isn’t worth living, building up the courage to venture out and engage the world on its own terms. Some part of my brain so feared this idea that I was unable to look at it directly, yet still every scene followed that through-line and some part of me knew what I was doing.

I described in beautiful detail the love I felt for the people in my life. I remembered times I had noticed they were sad, but didn’t know what to do. I remembered things they said–how clearly they wanted me to give them some part of myself–how I had been totally unable to do that.

Nothing I was saying sounded ridiculous. All of it rang true. Somewhere inside me was this smart, loving, hopeful person. He was drowning, but he wasn’t dead yet. And it wasn’t all his fault.

I continued like this for six hours, eventually reaching this conclusion: “Deep down you know something is wrong, but you won’t trust your intuition. You fight so hard to convince people you’re okay, but have you ever once really believed you wanted to succeed? It’s okay to want to get better. It’s okay to take care of yourself for a while until you do.”

My studio apartment felt more silent than it had since I moved in. I was held in rapt attention, hanging on every world like I hadn’t in half a decade. Instead of the massive hangover I had expected, I felt an inner peace like one I hadn’t known since childhood. I felt like I had just awakened from a bad dream.

Part 4 — Getting Better

I swear this next part is true. It’s the truest thing I have ever experienced. If I hadn’t lived it, I wouldn’t believe it was possible. I wouldn’t have believed anyone else if they said they had experienced it.

Something was different. It was very, very different. I knew this alone in my apartment. I knew it when I walked outside. I knew it talking to a coworker in the parking lot. A weight had been lifted. Listening to a song before bed, I felt my emotions rise and fall with the music. It was so beautiful I cried (stark sober this time). I hadn’t really heard music in years. My attention was now able to engage what I looked at without attaching the echoes of myriad embarrassments and failures long forgotten, without being weighed down by a sluggish spirit that just couldn’t be bothered.

Over the next few weeks I felt an explosion of motivation without any anxiety. I cleaned my car and apartment. I returned library books that were years overdue. I got back in touch with friends and family. I started filling out applications for grad school. I had an out of body experience reading Walt Whitman aloud. My mind naturally and effortlessly attached itself to ideas and plans and the entire universe had never before seemed so fascinating, so full of promise.

When speaking to people, I found myself listening and wondering what they needed, rather than desperately wondering what they wanted from me. I started writing again, for the first time in ages, and it was easily the best work I had ever done. I had been manic before, but this was different. Mania is selfish. You are powered by irrational desires that develop internally. This was a heightened awareness, an engagement with the world based on feeling. I was connected to everyone and everything in ways I had never been aware of before. Something happened, and then I felt it. Now I could mourn with those who mourned, rejoice with those who rejoiced. It felt like the most incredible thing in the world.

All the things I learned in school, all the reading I had done, all the observations I had made around other people as an adult were suddenly accessible. I felt a deep intuition that guided me to a stronger connection with those who, just a week earlier, I thought I might never see again. As many friends and family members commented, I was like a new person.

From  a distance, I could also see the wreckage of my past life. How foreign and alien my languishing thoughts seemed in the cold light of day. I wondered how I could ever have fallen into that trap and promised myself there was no going back.

With my newfound awareness, I also began scheduling appointments with a therapist. I wasn’t so delusional to think I would never need help again. I applied for new jobs, realizing I had no intention of spending my whole life as a security guard. Filling out job applications (much like doing the dishes and the laundry, going to the bank, talking on the phone) suddenly seemed easy. Everything that had defined my life for almost a decade felt like a cruel joke.

For the first few days all I felt was an intense sense of relief. Then I began remembering events from the past few years–relationships, achievements, even books and poems I had read. I was flooded with a warm sense of connection to the world. So much good and beauty was filling up the spaces fear and hopelessness had once occupied.

Most importantly, I no longer hated myself. I could see I was always working to become this person, that this person wanted to help people, wanted to carry his own weight in the world, and expended an abnormal amount of effort to get there.

After a couple meetings with my therapist, she said she believed about 80% of people with my severity of depression who go untreated are homeless. I started crying.

Part 5 — Glory Fades

The next month was the happiest of my life. Nothing exceptional happened. I felt wind and sun, read poetry (I realized that I hadn’t really understood poetry until that very moment). I came up with a dozen great ideas for new writing projects. I thought of half a dozen subjects I wanted to study. The fascination I once felt, had feigned in absence, had returned; and, because I never once abandoned it, even in the absence of all feeling, I was able to pick up right where I left off. I started a book club with my brother and sister, and made plans to just meet up and talk with my estranged friends.

Selectively, when the moment was right, I told people my story. In many cases they looked relieved, as though they had been worried about me and I was saying something they had wanted to hear for a long time. I felt loved and cared for in ways I had never before been capable of feeling.

The anxiety was the first thing to return.

I was having a conversation with my family after my brother’s graduation. There was nothing particularly notable about the conversation. We weren’t fighting. But that irrational fear that had clouded my every conversation since I was a child flickered for a moment.

I knew it distinctly. And because I had hoped it would be gone forever, I panicked. I asked to leave, walked outside to get some fresh air, and repeated a few of the strategies my therapist had taught me. I tried square breathing, creating a personal history, meditation, then ultimately locked myself in my brother’s room and read a book.

The episode passed.

A few days later it returned again. When I was at my worst in years past, I would fear calling someone I had known for eight years by their name, wondering if I was on a first name basis with them or whether I might get the name wrong, even if they were my best friend. Almost anything anyone could worry about in any circumstance, I worried about in every circumstance. And since my epiphany, I knew that those people had tried to care about me, but every time they looked into my eyes they saw I was still treating them like a stranger. I was neurologically incapable of familiarity–a black hole that desperately sucked the warmth from others, giving none back, not even keeping any for itself.

I promised myself I couldn’t return to this. I felt that, whatever control I had, I would fight with all my strength never to go back to where I was. I called my therapist’s office phone and left a voicemail. “I need to see you as soon as possible. When can I schedule another appointment?”

I wasn’t going back. I couldn’t.

Slowly I went back.

The book club I had started with my brother and sister, for which I had planned a dozen activities, began to feel like an exhausting and impossible task. I would spend all day reading, but the ideas that had flocked to my brain so easily were all gone. Every word now had some weight attached. Without even realizing, I would forget about it for two weeks at a time.

Things went on like this for a while. I kept doing all the things I had done while I felt well, but they were growing harder, less natural, and I felt like I was getting nowhere.

Then one Sunday evening I was driving, and suddenly, without any forethought, I shouted, “FUCK!” and started punching myself in a violent fit of anger. I pulled off to the side of the road, hands shaking, face beet red and sweating.

This new depression wasn’t like the last one. I didn’t feel lifeless. I felt angry and troubled.  My helplessness was now twinged with fierce desperation and a knowledge of all I had to lose. While feeling anything seemed like an improvement, it made it harder to cope with the life I had managed to sustain during my last bout. I called off work one night because my head was racing so fast I couldn’t sleep, and I was making myself throw up. At work I would experience violent fits of anger–alternately, sometimes I had to take a break to go hide in the parking garage one building over and cry for fifteen minutes.

After nearly two months in paradise, I felt like I was on the return trip to hell. This fear and frustration gripped me and I started lashing out with any emotion I could hold onto. One day I would feel an almost uncontrollable rage, the next I could feel nothing at all. My therapist made an appointment for me to meet with a psychiatrist to get me on new prescriptions that could help with my symptoms, but the nearest available appointment was a month away and I could feel my hold on reality slipping.

By the time the appointment came, no remnant of that old inner peace remained. I had taken up reading, meditation, exercise, and better nutrition as coping mechanisms, but even these felt completely powerless to deal with the weight that was, daily, piling onto my every thought. I had learned to trust my intuition before. Now my intuition was screaming “Abandon ship!”

Part 6 — Triumphant

“i simply stopped
writing of truth
when my truths
no longer sounded
trimphant”
– Saul Williams

I am sitting in front of a computer screen. The words just barely hold my attention. Not every sentence is a winner, nor is it attached to an emotion, that way the best writers are able to accomplish. My sentence structures are much simpler and less revealing than my writing was a few years ago–than it was two months ago. In some ways the very act of writing makes me feel like a cripple, because I wind up comparing myself to the relative wellness of the past.

Still, I want to speak and words form in my head. I cannot remember the sheer hopelessness that crippled me not three months ago. I have not fallen that far.

I take my daily regimen of pills and feel some small improvement. My apartment is still clean, within reason. My car is also clean, within reason. I hung out with people last night and had a decent time, even if for long stretches of the night I felt nothing.

The other day I auditioned for a play. My leg shook so uncontrollably that twice I almost fell over. However, I held a conversation with the director that I couldn’t have managed last year. They were considering me for a small role in the ensemble. That had never happened before. Ultimately they went another direction, but they think my odds are good if I try again next time.

Yesterday the pills didn’t work. I paced anxiously, trying breathing and meditation. After six hours of effort I still hadn’t calmed down.

I went for a drive. I tried to focus on the warn sun against my skin, the cool breeze through the window gliding across my cheek. Still everything was racing and empty.

I grabbed a seat at a coffee shop, outside on the patio. While sipping a drink, I read some poetry. I heard a few lines in my head. They felt honest. I wrote them down, and continued. The overall poem was terrible, but the two lines were very good. When finished, I felt calmer, if not perfect. I was able to sleep that night.

Today I am not better, but I know what better looks like. I know it’s something I’m capable of. I know if I keep fighting I will get there someday. I know I really like the person waiting for me when I get there. I know people need him–there are things he can do in this world to help others and be necessary.

At my last session my therapist said, “Your goals are reasonable, but sometimes your timetable isn’t.”

She also looked me in the eyes and said, “I promise you will get better.”

If only one thing changed since February, it was still a big one: now I believe her.

Review: Finding Dory

In his short story collection, “Twice-Told Tales,” Nathaniel Hawthorne brilliantly revisited the ancient myth of Theseus and the labyrinth. For those unfamiliar with this tale (which should apply to at least half the audience of a Pixar film in 2016) Theseus was a Greek hero imprisoned by Minos, the King of Crete, in an impossibly complex maze from which nobody had ever escaped. Fortunately, Theseus had won the love of Minos’ daughter Ariadne. The young princess gave her lover the keys to navigate the gordian passages and emerge on the other side unscathed.

Like many writers of his time, Hawthorne was obsessed with finding modern significance in older stories. His take on history’s first great prison break updated the material for an audience that was beginning to struggle with concepts of individuality and mental health that were foreign to the ancient world. In the reheated version, the labyrinth is not merely physically complex. It has a magical effect on its captives, blinding them to reality and imprinting untold anxieties and invisible rules on their brains until eventually they went insane. This will be familiar to anyone who has ever walked downtown in a large city during rush hour.

In this version of the story, Ariadne didn’t simply hand Theseus a map. She also gave him a long thread, holding the other end herself. Every few minutes she would tug on this thread, and Theseus–whose mind was constantly wandering and threatening to give up–would remember his lover and his mission and continue soldiering on. It’s an elegant metaphor for the way love serves as a compass in a modern world where a person’s greatest enemies are often the voices inside their own head.

Pixar, America’s last bastion of innocence, has also been revisiting their twice-told tales recently. When they were trailblazing outsiders, John Lasseter’s brain trust dismissed the idea of (non-Toy Story) sequels as pointless cash grabs and exploitation of audiences’ desire for familiarity. Now in their third decade and decidedly “the establishment,” the world’s most popular animation studio has eased up on that rule. The results have been uneven, ranging from classic (Toy Story 3) to acceptable (Monsters University) to “sign of the apocalypse”-level terrible (Cars 2) with Incredibles 2 and Toy Story 4 rumored to be on the way.

Finding Dory fits easily in the Classic camp. It might even be the best sequel Pixar has ever produced (which you will know, if you’ve seen Toy Story 2, is a very, very tall order). This time the protagonist is Dory, the memory-deficient blue tang who played sidekick to clownfish Marlin in Finding Nemo. I’ll admit that the idea of structuring a whole film around a one-joke comic relief character sounds like a bad idea. Fortunately, director Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E) remembers the inherent sadness in the character that audiences from 13 years ago may have forgotten.

Marlin’s cross-ocean odyssey (more Greek stuff, one might observe) was lined with brutality and sadness just subtle enough to sneak past younger viewers. Dory was one of billions of fish alone with a disease and no way to help herself, like a dolphin with a plastic can holder wrapped around its nose. Her mental illness was great for getting the kids to laugh, but the character voiced by Ellen DeGeneres always had a whole lot more going on. If you revisit the movie before seeing its sequel, you may remember how heartbreaking it is when Dory begs Marlin not to leave her in his despair because she doesn’t want to forget anymore.

So now, thanks to Pixar’s absolute refusal to coddle their youngest viewers, we get to see a wide-eyed (like, excessively wide-eyed, even for an animated baby fish in a children’s film), optimistic child version of Dory torn away from her family and lost in a vast, unsympathetic ocean. Hey kids, here’s what growing up actually feels like. Good luck.

Thankfully (because I don’t think I could have handled much more of that lost child thing without completely losing it) Dory has found a slightly happier place when the story actually kicks in. She now lives next door to Marlin and Nemo and is accepted (though begrudgingly) as part of their community. Her memory problems are still an issue. She wakes up her neighbors over and over in the middle of the night and distracts the children of Nemo’s school. Likewise, her call to adventure isn’t quite as desperate as Marlin’s attempts to save his one surviving child. Instead, she remembers her original mission of trying to find her parents, along with some idea of where they might be.

The target audience of Finding Nemo was adults (particularly young parents) in 2003. Marlin was a widower trying to protect his only child in a world becoming scarier and less predictable every day. He needed to learn to trust and explore again and do away with old prejudices about outsiders. Dory has more in common with the young adults of 2016. She is single, unmarried (we’re still left guessing about what her relationship with Marlin actually entails) and plagued by problems of a vaguer, more psychological bent. The world is telling her to simply fit in and make peace with the way things are. “The only reason to travel across the ocean is so you never have to do it again,” Marlin insists.

But Dory is better at trusting her instincts because they’re all she has to rely on; and those instincts tell her there are answers somewhere out there if she only looks hard enough. At the end of this journey is not some great extroverted trek across the world but a manic heist inside an Oceanographic Institute that essentially amounts to fish therapy. Yes, fellow Millennials, Pixar is still making movies exclusively for us. Aren’t we special?

Along the way, Dory learns to trust her instincts and embrace her positive qualities. Children will see this as yet another story about “believing in yourself,” but to an older, more jaded audience, there’s some pretty loaded subtext. All of a sudden I’m wondering if Dory’s plight has always been a metaphor for the way the internet has stunted the memory of children of the nineties and made self-discipline far more difficult, while also preserving their sense of whimsy, intuition, and optimism far longer than their parents.

This is also where the labyrinth comes back into play. In her quest for home, Dory keeps recalling stray memories from her past and messages her parents imparted before she lost them. Her approach seems insane compared to Marlin’s pragmatism, but in the end it’s the only way to navigate a problem far more complicated than (if nowhere near as dramatic as) finding one child.

Dory also quickly realizes that many other animals have their own quirky, impossible problems. There is a seven-legged octopus (or septopus, as Dory calls him) so afraid of being released into the ocean that he’s trying to hitch a ride to a Cleveland aquarium instead. There are sea lions who obsess over their status napping on a single rock. There is a blank-eyed bird that can only hear someone if they look it in the eyes and mimick its call several times. Two of Dory’s childhood friends include a nearsighted whale shark and a beluga whale whose sonar is blocked.

The voice of Sigourney Weaver frequently reminds visitors that the goal of the Institute is rehabilitation, then release. However the reality of their treatment and display for callous audiences is far more Darwinian. Some animals deemed beyond help eventually become fodder for aquariums and petting pools. These creatures seem lost in their own personal labyrinths, and many of them need the kind of openness and optimism that comes very naturally to Dory. Just like Dory’s friends serve as her connecting thread when she’s facing her darkest fears (that would be following simple directions like “take two lefts”), a self-reliant Dory is equipped to serve as their anchor as well.

One of the reasons Pixar remains a force in the movie world, not just financially but also artistically, is their insistence on viewing their movies as a conversation with a specific audience. The young children who first watched Toy Story are the same ones who were teenagers when Finding Nemo came out, college students when Toy Story 3 came out, and now adults in 2016. Their movies continue to address this original audience and reassure them that those timeless lessons about love and, yes, believing in yourself, still apply even when you’re approaching 30.

Their message to the Marlins of the world: learn to see these internal struggles as a fight for the same sense of home and connectedness you feel for your children. Their lesson to the Dories of the world: keep trusting your instincts and fighting the battles you need to fight, no matter how many op-eds call you selfish and entitled. The lessons your parents imparted to make you self-reliant still apply, even if the context has gotten muddy. The world needs you, not someone else’s idea of you, whether they care to admit it or not.

In other words, just keep swimming.

Rating: 9.5/10

Poems

EVIDENCE

Someone always throws the first punch
But not always the one standing at the end
I search for your hair on my pillow
Like I’m excavating a crime scene
I make a chalk outline where you left an impression
And cone off half the bed
I put your toothbrush and a stray hairband in plastic bags
Marked evidence
I tell myself tomorrow I will identify the guilty party
Then I tape off the whole bedroom
And sleep on the couch

CREATION

In the beginning, God Created the Heavens and the Earth.
Well, not really the beginning.
First He thought about it for a good long while
Eternity, in fact
But being God, He had that kind of Time
So eventually He decided to go for it
And God said let there be Light
And He saw that the Light was good
But was it, really?
Blinding and everywhere
It certainly sold the majesty and glory
But it was also a bit hyperbolic
So God cooled it down with Darkness
Which wasn’t so bad
It certainly balanced out the Light
But the Darkness was just so maudlin
Now every Light sat by itself, silhouetted against a black abyss
God decided to sleep on it
So there was evening and morning, the first day
On the second day
1:45 PM, to be exact
God stopped hitting snooze on His alarm
And looked back at the universe
It needs more contrast, He observed
So God thought about what other contrasts He could work in
He needed something that wasn’t too much like Light and Darkness
Around 5:00 PM He had worked Himself into a frenzy
He was pacing
Muttering to Himself
What was He so worried about?
He was the only One watching
Why bother hesitating?
He could just start over if it sucked.
I’m God, He told Himself
Yeah, I Am!
I’ve got infinite power
In fact, nothing that’s made would be made
If I didn’t make it
Whatever I make should be grateful I made it
Bitch
And He clenched his stomach and shouted out
Sky and Water
And He felt better once he’d done it
He opened his eyes
And He really liked Sky
Water had its good points too
They certainly weren’t like Light and Darkness
He decided He would keep them
Now He was getting somewhere
He rewarded Himself by taking the rest of the night off
But now God couldn’t take His mind off the whole project
So He lay awake all night
And eventually decided that Sky and Water weren’t exactly opposites
Not the way Light and Darkness were
He considered something else–Matter and Antimatter?
[He wrote both words in a notebook]
No, He thought, He had committed to Sky and Water
He had to make them work
So He decided to try a third contrast
And before the third day was out, He came up with Land
[He also snuck in Antimatter, but thought it would be better as subtext and didn’t tell anyone about it]
He decided it was perfect
He was excited to enjoy it
He sat on the Land
He stuck His feet in the Water
He looked at the Sky
In Light and in Darkness
He told Himself it was good
And He went to bed
But honestly, it was boring
That was obvious in the cold Light of the fourth day
There was no risk here
It totally lacked in drama
It was nap music
He thought that was good?
He couldn’t trust His instincts
Maybe He should start over?
No, He thought, I need to get better at finishing things
Eternity behind Me and I’ve made exactly one thing
He got the idea for Plants and vegetation in a dream during a depression nap
He was so excited
He spent the whole afternoon painting on every little blade of grass
And He went right through midnight
And as morning came on day five, He was burnt out
I spent all afternoon drawing little green lines in the ground
And what did it really do?
Who did it really benefit?
I need something more intimate
So God got Himself some Fish
And He prepped their habitats
And made special Plants for them to feed on
And occasionally He would make bubbles float around them to see them swim away
He spent a whole day procrastinating like this
He told Himself it was good for His soul
But day six came around and He felt guilty
He needed to see it through
To take this to its logical conclusion
Until You risk going too far, You never know how far You can go
So God decided to test the whole Fish situation on Land
As a thought exercise
He called them Animals
He decided He liked them best of everything He had done so far
Just thinking about the Platypus made him chuckle til he did the snort thing
He did the same thing with the Sky right away
Throwing out birds and bats and pterodactyls and shit like it was nothing
I need to remember this, God told Himself
This is what happens when I discipline My instincts
I have to learn to enjoy hard work
For an Almighty Being, I have been floating around in nothingness far too long
Creation is friction
It’s the course I set myself on
I can never go back
And so God decided that He would brainstorm one last best idea before He went to bed that night
And He thought and thought and thought
He wouldn’t let Himself sleep until He had it
He was setting His foot down
And eventually it came to Him
I could make something in My own image!
Enough random creation!
This matter is just an obfuscation!
I’ve been avoiding Self-expression!
And so God explored His own nature
His own habits
His own hopes and desires
And decided He would Plant them all
Into the most honest, powerful work He had ever released
He imagined the rave reviews now
And decided to create panels of Cherubim and Seraphim
Just to praise the release
He checked on all His favorite Water/Sky/Land areas
Like Yosemite
And New Zealand
Making sure the Light was just right
And then it hit Him
Fuck
He was going to have to show this to an audience
He was sure they would like it
Probably
He thought about what they would see
On the one hand, there was sex and music
On the other hand, there was cancer and artificial peach flavoring
He decided He would take the seventh day off
Just to be sure.

Two Noble Kinsmen announcements

Hey people,

Sorry for the lack of activity the last couple weeks. I know I kind of dumped a new Facebook group on your mat, rang the doorbell, and ran off. I promise I was sufficiently miserable to justify this. I won’t go into details, but I’m going to need all your phone numbers again, and you probably won’t recognize my car when I see you next.

Anyway, at long last here’s an event to tide you over.

Another Play Reading!

Saturday, February 27 at 6:00 PM.

Once again I’m inviting you all to come in and read The Two Noble Kinsmen. For those who attended the last reading, this one is going to be a little different. For one, there will be plates. The paper towels will not be poisoned.  Also booze.

More substantially, we’re going to talk about the play with a little more focus. I’m going to have a list of questions for you all to consider before the reading begins. I’m also asking that everyone have some idea about their character beforehand as well. I don’t need you to read the play, but if you’re attending, you should at least talk to me so you have some idea what you’re going to be doing. I may also stop the reading to give a note here and there or to ask someone to try something.

For anyone interested in actually being involved in the play, that’s something we can discuss at this event as well. I’ll be hanging around for an hour before the reading and afterwards as long as it takes to work everything out.

Everyone is invited. Even if you don’t want to read, your input and experience are still greatly appreciated.*

*However the booze is only for readers.

About The Two Noble Kinsmen:

William Shakespeare wrote The Two Noble Kinsmen with John Fletcher in the year 1612. It was likely the last play he ever worked on. Because Fletcher had become even more popular than Shakespeare in later years, many editors stopped placing Shakespeare’s name in the byline. When Fletcher fell out of style during the Restoration, the play went with him. For over 200 years it went without a single performance until evidence and modern scholarship reasserted Shakespeare’s large contribution. For this reason it’s arguably the most Shakespearean play not to be featured in most “Complete Works” collections and has gone without performance in many areas, including Minnesota.

The play is based on Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, which itself was based on a story by Boccaccio which was based on a story by Statius who was inspired by one of the oldest of all myths. It tells the story of two young knights, Palamon and Arcite, who are captured by King Theseus during his war with Theban king Creon.

In prison the two cousins and lifelong best friends both fall in love with Theseus’ sister-in-law Emilia, who they see in the garden through their prison window. They go from planning a “noble” life in prison to attacking each other over the love of a woman who does not know either of them exists. When both leave prison and are free to continue their lives, they decide instead to risk death to remain in Athens and continue fighting for her love.

Shakespeare’s audience would have known this story pretty well, as Chaucer’s Tale had come to represent the way rediscovery of the Greeks led to chivalry in the Middle Ages. It began as a very reverent story about the inheritance of Western culture, but became a full-on parody by the time Shakespeare and Fletcher told it. Both had recently read Don Quixote and adapted it into a lost play called Cardenio. They seem eager to parody all the ideals of their culture in the same way.

It’s also one of the craziest plays Shakespeare ever wrote, full of songs, battles, references to past plays, and a sprawling cast of eccentrics (including a mad doctor, a man in a baboon costume, and one of Shakespeare’s best characters, the Jailer’s Daughter). Act 2 functions as an abbreviated version of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Act 3 is a reimagining of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (with many of the same characters, it could even be considered a sequel of sorts). It’s irreverent, complex, preposterous, perfectly structured, and insanely fun.

Two Noble Kinsmen: Update

Hey all. Just checking in. Pretty much the last three weeks have been dominated by working on the play. So here’s a bit of a progress report.

As of this moment I’ve solidified my concept for the show. I’ve roughly designed a set that I think accommodates that concept.

I held a reading with nine other lovely people, and we discussed the play. I’ve cut the script down to around 2400 lines. I’ve signed and mailed the contract for the venue and the dates of June 23-26. I’ve settled on a company name: Stranger Case Theatre. The tentative logo is featured below.

I’ve also now read half a dozen different critical commentaries on the play and I’m more or less bursting with thoughts about it. With a couple more months until production really gets underway I’m just going to drop them here. Peruse them at your leisure.

What is Two Noble Kinsmen?
Two Noble Kinsmen is a play co-written by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher around 1612 or 1613. It is very possibly the last play Shakespeare ever worked on, and some evidence suggests he wrote much of it from his home in Stratford. The story is an adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales, which is itself an adaptation of a story from Boccaccio’s Decameron, which was an adaptation of a story from Roman author Statius, who based his story on an ancient Greek myth.

There are a number of fascinating things about the story, in particular the change in tone that developed over the years of its evolution. The protagonists, Palamon and Arcite, are two young prisoners taken by Theseus king of Athens when he invades the city of Thebes. Both young men fall in love with Theseus’ daughter, Emilia, and go from being best friends to sworn enemies in competition for her love.

The original myth was meant to depict the ideal soldier, resolute in love and duty even if it meant the killing of a friend. Statius adapted it with similar intent. The story was recovered by Boccaccio during the Middle Ages as the concept of chivalry developed. It became the single defining story about how medieval Europeans were transforming their culture through returning to ancient Greek ideals.

Of course as the Renaissance hit, chivalry was already on its way out. Chaucer’s adaptation is much more of a parody than Boccaccio’s. Shakespeare and Fletcher take an even more comedic look at the material, which some critics believe even borders on cruelty. However there is a sense that Chaucer at least looked back on those simpler, more idealistic times with a sense of nostalgia. The nostalgia is there for Shakespeare and Fletcher, but one of the challenges in adapting the show is figuring out just how sympathetic the authors were to that ancient code of knighthood. It’s worth noting both authors had likely read Don Quixote that same year for the first time, and were also working on an adaptation of that novel called Cardenio (Fletcher would adapt the book fifteen more times in his career, so it’s safe to assume he was a fan).

So if Shakespeare wrote it, why have I never seen it performed?
While this isn’t exactly true, the defining factoid about Two Noble Kinsmen is that it’s the least performed play by Shakespeare. It’s still probably in the bottom five, but it’s grown in popularity over the last fifty years, in large part due to its novelty.

The play did go over 200 years without a single performance. There were a number of reasons for this.

First, being the last play Shakespeare ever wrote and credited to a co-author who was alive when the first Folio was compiled, the play was not included in the first folio. Since that is the de facto qualifier for inclusion into the canon, the show was shrugged off by many critics for years. Initial playbills for the show (dating around the 1630’s) billed it to Fletcher and Shakespeare. However, Fletcher remained as popular as Shakespeare up until all the theatres in England were closed (and briefly after the Restoration), so most editors figured it was more valuable to credit the play to Fletcher and his cowriter Beaumont than to cram Shakespeare in the mix.

Of course today there are no Fletcher Festivals anywhere in the world. Shakespeare’s ascendance to the title of world’s most popular playwright occurred shortly after the Restoration. Fletcher, along with Two Noble Kinsmen, fell off the map.

It took a good 200 years for the critical establishment to accept the play as bonafide Shakespeare. Today it’s easier to find someone who doubts Fletcher’s involvement than someone who doubt’s Shakespeare’s. However once the play achieved acceptance, it was discovered that it was actually pretty difficult to stage. As different as Shakespeare and Fletcher’s attitudes toward chivalry were from Chaucer’s, our ideas have changed a thousand times more since the days of Fletcher and Shakespeare. So even if both authors (as I believe) were writing a vicious satire of noble culture in the vein of Don Quixote, the expectations and biases of their audience are nothing like the expectations of audiences today.

Also the dual authorship is noticeable, at least in the reading. Fletcher was a young, up and coming star whose quick, joke-heavy style was a reaction against the longwinded seriousness for which Shakespeare had become the posterboy. Fletcher even wrote a number of parodies of Shakespeare’s plays, much as Shakespeare had done earlier in his career to playwrights like Marlowe. The differences are obvious throughout the text.

For instance, Shakespeare tends to spell all his character names as he found them in Plutarch (his favorite source for material), while Fletcher tends to go with the spelling as found in Chaucer. Because I am a profoundly nerdy person, I’m amused by the idea of Fletcher arguing, “We’re not adapting Plutarch! We’re adapting Chaucer!” and Shakespeare responding, “Yeah, but… Plutarch!” Ultimately they just agreed to spell names differently in their scenes.

And unlike Hamlet or Macbeth or As You Like It, there is no dense performance history of directors and actors contributing to our understanding of the play. A director is essentially flying alone when they approach this material. That’s been both the biggest impediment and the biggest attraction for directors who wanted to tackle the show up until now.

Okay, so why do Two Noble Kinsmen?
I covered this a little bit in my last blog, but here I’d like to go a little bit more in depth regarding what I believe the potential for this play is and how I hope to achieve it.

The play is very much about the way legends affect how we live today. In Act 3 several actors perform a “Morris Dance,” which was a ritualistic, medieval dance full of symbols and allegorical characters. The dance predicts how the events of the story will play out. Often the character refer to past myths or the concept of “the gods” to explain actions they themselves caused. Palamon and Arcite are young and very idealistic. Old Greek heroes like Theseus and Pirithous look at them with a sense of nostalgia for youth, the way Renaissance audiences looked at chivalry, nostalgic for simpler ideas of nobility.

So I think this is the perfect play to adapt as my first ever foray into Shakespeare: I am adapting a 400 year old play which is about the way 400 year old plays affect the way we live (for better and worse). I think the play’s “problems”—the ending is a tough sell for audiences, and the story of knights just doesn’t appeal to modern audiences the way it did back then—give the director and actors opportunities to do precisely what the play is asking of the audience: to look at old stories and ask ourselves what the stories we tell today have in common.

The Royal Shakespeare Company staged the play in 1986 as a Kabuki drama, in the wake of Akira Kurosawa’s King Lear adaptation Ran, when audiences really liked samurai stories and easily related the strict code of the Samurai with the code of chivalry. Other stagings have made Palamon and Arcite soldiers, cowboys, and definitive alpha males with an emphasis on their sexuality.

Also it’s one of the few plays in Shakespeare that offers almost an equal number of major roles for women. To some extent this is ancillary. It was probably the result of the Globe burning down and Shakespeare’s company being forced to move to a young boy’s theatre called Blackfriars where they had access to more young actors for female roles than ever before. However in practice it means that some of the best female roles Shakespeare ever wrote, particularly the Jailer’s Daughter, have never been seen by audiences.

There is also that outsider appeal which I mentioned last time. This is a play most audiences have never seen. They don’t know how it ends. And so we get the chance to surprise people with Shakespeare.

The play is also very funny, very beautiful, and almost perfectly structured despite the dual authorship. It has a lot in common with late Shakespeare Romances like Cymbeline, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. There’s a lot of conjecture about why Shakespeare ended his career with the Romances. The genre had been considered outdated his entire career, and in fact he was the first playwright of his generation to revive it. Romance was a play about ideas, one that had elements of both comedy and drama, and which sacrificed the dense characterizations of Macbeth and Hamlet for larger ideas about the world. While the outdated Romances were mostly religious in nature, Shakespeare’s last act as dramatist was to modernize the form into what now seems like an almost postmodern kind of philosophical drama. His “gods” acting on the world weren’t merely figures for reverence—they were the larger forces at work in the lives of human beings just outside their awareness.

I tend to think Shakespeare turned to the Romances in his old age, just as he became the top dramatist in England, as a way of returning to the plays he grew up with. As a boy he loved Plutarch and ancient history. Almost all his Romances take place similarly in the past, with gods and oracles and spirits controlling the lives of his characters. In his Romances, an older generation looks nostalgically on a younger generation and views their youth as a kind of lost Eden. A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest have a lot in common but are also fundamentally different. In Midsummer Shakespeare took the vantage point of the horny teenagers surrounded by spirits. In The Tempest he was the old man, bored with the same magic.

Of course working in an elaborate children’s theatre with space for puppets and complex staging, as well as large paintings of myths on the wall, didn’t hurt at all. Whatever the reason, the Romances mark a distinct and fascinating final stage for Shakespeare’s career that shines light on the rest. He wrote mostly comedies and histories in the first third, the great tragedies in the second, and ended by blending all those genres into something distinctly his own. Two Noble Kinsmen, regardless Fletcher’s contribution, falls into this camp.