Nice Jacket: Endgame

*The Grove Press Twenty-Seventh Printing of Samuel Beckett’s 1958 play Endgame

The cover image is terrifying and conjures, for us now, less the post-modern existential horror of the play and more the squalor of our political realities.  More Abu Ghraib than a bad dream, the power of the grainy reproduced photograph of the cover comes not from the fear we have of the figure, but the moral fear produced by the figure’s implications.  The man is bound to a chair.  His face is draped with a towel.  Spots of blood form a ghostly mouth and eyes over his face.  His hands hang limply over the arms of the chair, and his human form is hidden beneath a heavy sack or straight jacket.  The typewriter font of the play’s title lends the image the quality of a piece of classified information from a government file.

We’ve all seen the now iconic images of prisoners being tortured and humiliated in Iraq.  I’m sure some have been desensitized to their power, but I still feel they symbolize the U.S.’s foreign policy of the past ten years in a way nothing else can.  There’s a delicate balance between immersing oneself in the nonstop media onslaught of the 21^st century and being a complete Luddite.  I lean toward the latter, but accept the power of images to affect policy and the moral opinion of a nation.  Sometimes a snapshot can do this more effectively than a brilliant movie or play or book.

But none of this is what Beckett’s play is about.  Endgame belongs to the Theater of the Absurd, a school of mid-century European theater firmly set on the premise that in a godless universe all human endeavors, especially communication, are meaningless.  This begs the question – why write a play in the first place?  Why, for pedantic reasons of course, to show the rest of the human race the meaningless of their lives and their relationships.  In Endgame, Hamm, a paralyzed man, is served by Clov, a clownish servant.  They rely on each other more for petty arguments than for survival.  But in this way each is indispensible to the other.  Beckett is not much of a humanist when you get down to it, though I suppose he does, in his better plays, capture the real taste of 20^th century human suffering better than most writers.

More than anything, Beckett’s plays strike me as visually important and innovative.  Happy Days, the play Beckett wrote after Endgame, centers on a woman who is literally buried up to her chin in the rubble of Western Civilization.  Her situation is much like Hamm’s in Endgame.  They are both paralyzed but still willful and struggling against the cruel world.  Joyful stuff!

These Faber editions of Beckett's plays are more typographically interesting, but much less visually powerful.

 Here's the first part of a filmed version of Endgame.

 Related Links:

1. An Appreciation of Beckett from The Guardian
2. Review of Faber's Reprints from The Telegraph
3. New York Times Review of a Recent Production of Endgame

Horror Film Star Feature #1 - Danielle Harris

Danielle Harris began her film career as Michael Myers' niece, in the 1988 slasher Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. Running from Myers for most of the film, she proved a perfect foil for the demonic killer, even donning a Halloween costume nearly identical to the clown outfit Myers wore when he murdered his sister as a child, the event that kicked off the Halloween story in 1978. Fans of the successful Halloween 4 were left, at the time, to wonder if the precocious Jaime Lloyd would be donning a mask for good in the next film, continuing her uncle's murderous legacy. (Fortunately) that wasn't the case, and the following year, Harris returned as Jaime for Halloween 5. The fifth film in the series was a bit of a bore, and couldn't stand up to 4 (or, obviously, the original classic), but Harris pulled off a great role, continuing the Jaime Lloyd character, this time as a mute child with a tenuous psychic link to her again-resurrected uncle.

In the nineties, Harris had some few notable film roles (Marked For Death, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, The Last Boyscout, City Slickers, Free Willy), but made her name mostly in television series such as The Wild Thornberries and That's Life.

The storyline begun in Halloween 4 and 5 was continued in Halloween 6, though Harris' Jaime Lloyd character was only briefly seen onscreen and was played by J. C. Brandy, after Harris balked at the character's treatment in the script and at the low salary offered for the role. This was probably the right decision; the producers of Halloween 6 really did take kind of a shit on the character in the first ten minutes of the film.

Harris surprised Halloween fans by returning to the franchise years later, in the "second series" of films directed by shock master Rob Zombie. When she came back to the franchise, it was due to her own pursuing of the part of Annie Brackett (originally played by Nancy Loomis in the original 1978 film), as Zombie originally had no interest in bringing back any of the cast of the original series.

Both the new Halloween (2007) and its followup, Halloween II (2009), have some pretty serious flaws, but then, that's the case with every film in the original series as well, with the exception of John Carpenter's first. But there's a lot to like about the new ones. I'm one of the few out there who actually enjoyed Zombie's second outing in Michael Myers territory more than his first. One of the issues I took with his first Halloween is the film's bizarre structure, which leaves the traditional Laurie Strode story with a mere forty-five minutes to play out, after following Myers through his troubled childhood and subsequent breakout from the mental asylum. The audience is never allowed to get to know Laurie Strode and her friends.

Harris gives a solid performance as Annie Brackett, but she isn't given enough time. In this respect, Halloween II gets the job done much better. Harris's Annie from the second film is a much tougher character, cocky and rough, but still a sweet kid; that side of her just remains a bit further below the surface. The dynamic between Annie and her father, Sheriff Brackett (played by the always excellent Brad Dourif) is particularly enjoyable to watch; she teases him and gives him shit nearly constantly, but it isn't hard to see the love evident between the two.

As a side note, there's really no point in comparing Harris's take on the character to Nancy Loomis's from the 1978 film. They're both energetic, confident, and somewhat rude, but the two acting styles are fairly opposite, making for two similar but very different portrayals of the Annie Brackett character.

In addition to preferring Zombie's second Halloween to his first, I'm probably also in the minority when I say that I think the theatrical cut of this film plays a little better than the fifteen-minute-longer director's cut. It's faster-paced, and you don't get so many close-ups of a shaggy-ass, bearded Michael Myers without the mask on (Myers works better as a character when you see less, not more, of him, and when he has less screen time). One thing the director's cut does better, however, is to include more between Annie and Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton). Their relationship is significantly more complex in the director's cut, with the two of them antagonizing each other much more, evidencing the fact that a lot has changed between the two best friends since the events of the last film. It isn't like the verbal sparring between Annie and her father; in this case, you begin to wonder if the girls are even friends anymore, and if their mutual attack by Myers one year before screwed them both up to the point that they'll never be able to connect like they once did.

[Spoiler warning] Also, the director's cut features a fairly heartbreaking death scene for Annie. In the theatrical cut, Sheriff Brackett finds her body, falls down, shocked, jaw dropped, and is carried away by his deputies. The longer version extends this moment, giving the Sheriff an extended flashback to moments from Annie's past, from her childhood. On its own, it's a wonderful scene, but, like much of the rest of Zombie's Halloween films, it doesn't quite fit with the other scenes, and is a great example of why these movies are good candidates for the "sum of their parts" designation.

Harris appeared in last year's darkly humorous gorefest, Hatchet II, further cementing her reputation as a modern scream queen. And unlike some actresses who've shown up in horror films only to later scorn the genre in the press (Jennifer Connelly, Jodie Foster, etc.), she clearly has a sincere love for the genre. Her appearances at horror conventions always draw a crowd, and she seems to have a good report with her fans. She joins Jaime Lee Curtis and Paul Rudd in the small group of actors who got their start in the Halloween franchise and went on to have successful careers.

Frozen - dir. by Adam Green (2010)

Adam Green is a talented guy. Most known for his 2006 send-up of 80's horror films, Hatchet, over the past few years, he's demonstrated talents for very different types of scary movies. His 2010 thriller, Frozen, is as different from Hatchet as a film can be, and features no monsters, slashers, or pyscho-killers. The villain is this one is Mother Nature herself, and it's one of the better man vs. nature films out there.

Whereas Hatchet and its sequel, released last fall, combine dark humor with over-the-top gore, following the basic A-to-B of the slasher genre, Frozen packs its punches with intense, real-life situations, and is, in some places, rather difficult to watch.

On a Sunday night, three college kids convince a ski lift operator to let them go for one more trip down the hill, before the resort shuts down for the week, not to re-open until the following Friday. The lift operator gives in to their request, then leaves his post to use the bathroom, asking a co-worker to cover for him. The co-worker thinks everyone's off the lift, and shuts the operation down. Leaving the three students stuck in their chair, at least fifty feet above the ground, with no one in sight, the resort lights turned off, and a hail storm on the way.

Some criticism has been thrown at the film, some folks bothered by the actions of the kids on the ski lift, questioning the rationality of their decisions; decisions which, in some cases, inch them unnecessarily closer to death. But no one claimed at the beginning of this film that any of these kids are particularly smart, and, without giving away the action of the film, I would suggest that plenty of people I know--possibly even myself, in a situation that awful and nerve-wracking--who would likely attempt some of the same idiotic maneuvers these guys attempt to pull off.

Emma Bell (recently seen in AMC TV's The Walking Dead) nails the role of the girly-girl relying on her boyfriend (Kevin Zegers, who you may have seen in the remake of Dawn of the Dead, Wrong Turn, or TV's Gossip Girl) to protect her, even when it should be perfectly obvious there's nothing he can do for either her or himself. The most rational character, as played by Shawn Ashmore (The Ruins, X-Men: Last Stand), even goes to some lengths to save this girl and protect her from the reality that it's very unlikely any of them will make it out of the ski chair alive.

There are some nature elements aside from the cold and the hail storm that these kids face, but I'm not going to go into detail here, so as to avoid ruining some of the film's surprises. It's a grim story, well-directed, and very intense, and another win for Adam Green, in addition to the two Hatchet movies and the equally different psychological thriller, Spiral (2007). All of these are worth checking out, with Frozen being the best of them.

Nice Jacket: Blow-Up and Other Stories

*The Collier Books 1971 Third Printing of Julio Cortázar's Blow-Up and Other Stories.

Writers and lawmakers had contemplated the moral and social implications of photography for decades before Cortázar published Blow-Up in the mid-60s. The peeping tom strikes us as the creepiest kind of voyeur. Give him a camera and his offense becomes a civil issue. He's now not only breaking the law, he's also infringing on our rights. With the recent prevalence of social networking, which integrates photography into our daily discourse to a degree unimaginable only a decade ago, an individual's control of their privacy and personal image is even more tenuous.

In the 60s Cortázar, and filmmakers like Michelangelo Antonioni, who adapted Cortázar's story, and Michael Powell, whose Peeping Tom stands up even better as a psychologically terrifying and socially relevant document, sexed up the idea of the camera's power, both over the photographer and the subject. It's an issue we should reexamine, now that a million drunk college girls are indiscriminately sharing pictures of themselves draped over each other at the bar.

Collier's cover of the Cortázar collection shows a grainy close-up of a photographer, his piercing eye contrasted with the glare of the camera's lens. Underneath, the same image is shown at a greater remove, suggesting motion and distance. The photographer's stare becomes horrifying because of its vapidity. Its mere presence is cause for alarm, like the stranger standing on the tower in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.

These movie posters are sinister in two different ways. The poster for Blow-Up uses negative space and the human form to show the photographer's wicked power. The poster for Peeping Tom shows a more paranoid image, the light from a keyhole imposed over a bloodshot eye. Great typography all around.


Check out this intense trailer for Antonioni's film.



Look out! for this trailer for Powell's film which reminds me of a module of Look Around You a hilarious British parody of educational films.



Related Links

1. Cortázar Interviewed for The Art of Fiction

2. The Times Review of Antonioni's Blow-Up

3. The Times Review of Peeping Tom

Miscellany: Suvanto Scenery

The most interesting aspect of Maile Chapman's otherwise overly-formulaic and derivative Scandinavian novel Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto is the setting. While the story and characters strike me as Chapman's attempt to channel Russell Banks channeling Woody Allen's Interiors channeling anything by Ingmar Bergman channeling Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain she manages to evoke the Finnish landscape enough to make me wonder what this place really looks like.

The Karelian Isthmus, where the novel takes place, turns out to look a lot like the northern states of the American Midwest - Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota. But among these untamed lakeside forests, a much richer architectural past is hidden.

Enjoy the scenery. A lot of this land is now part of Russia.



Lake Vuoksa - Courtesy of Dmitri A. Mottl, 2009.



Perovka River - Courtesy of Евгений Адаев, 2008.



Viipuri Wyborg Round Tower - Courtesy of Merja, 2010.



Loincloth in Lappeenranta - Courtesy of Finbar_Mad, 2004.



Olavinlinna - Courtesy of Jussi Hellsten, 2010.



Boat Houses - Courtesy of Miguel Virkkunen Carvalho

Katherine Noel, reviewing the book for the New York Times, on the other hand thinks Chapman's premise is quite original.

Friday the 13th YA Series, by Eric Morse

About five years ago, a company called Black Flame put out a series of Friday the 13^th-inspired novels, featuring Jason Voorhees in all his post-Jason X, but pre-remake, glory. Being a massive Friday the 13^th fan, I was curious to check these books out—but after reading their basic plot summaries, I lost interest. The stories sounded ridiculous and barely resembled the Friday the 13^th I’d grown up with, that was such an important part of my childhood (if you think it's ridiculous that Friday the 13th would be an important part of anyone's childhood, then welcome to the low-brow portion of our website). These stories seemed to have more in common with the later films in the series, the ones that strayed from the basic slasher formula in hopes of creating something different.

For the record, normally trying to do something different is admirable, preferable to just spitting out the same thing over and over. But not with slashers and not with Friday the 13^th. Innovation isn’t necessary with this franchise; and not only isn’t it necessary, it’s traditionally looked down upon by the most hardcore fans of the series.

So I didn’t order the Black Flame books. Maybe if they were 200 pages, I would have, but at 400-plus . . . I mean, it’s Friday the 13^th, OK, what the hell were they gonna do for 400 goddamn pages? A few months ago, I decided that I might like to check out the novels after all. I read a lot, and I’ll happily admit my tastes include classics, serious literature, and also some pretty silly stuff. Unfortunately, by the time I’d decided I’d be willing to part with a few bucks for these Black Flame novels, they’d gone out of print and were no longer available for a few bucks.

Looking for the Black Flame books inspired me to re-read the Young Adult horror series written by Eric Morse in 1994. After New Line acquired the rights to the Friday films and put out Jason Goes To Hell, they commissioned a line of books to cash in on the series' name and on the popular YA horror market. This was the time of R. L. Stine and Christopher Pike, before the arguably more talented J. K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer. Now, I mention those two names while fully aware that neither of those authors write horror. There doesn't seem to currently be as much interest in straight up scary stories in today's YA market; it's more fantasy, dark as that fantasy might be. But in the early 90's, the money makers were horror titles.

Eric Morse (real name William Pattison) wrote four books, all under 200 pages, in the "Camp Crystal Lake Series." He had plans for more, but the series was canceled after the fourth, Road Trip, was released (and very recently, on his website, the author posted the final chapter, going a chapter at a time, for a period of months, of his "fifth Crystal Lake book"). It's hard to imagine why Berkley and New Line would come up with the idea of a book series cash-in on a popular film franchise, only to short that series on advertising, to the point that even today, many fans who've seen every Friday the 13th film aren't aware of the Camp Crystal Lake books.

It seems New Line's only stipulation on granting the rights for print was that the novels couldn't actually feature the Jason Voorhees character. Bummer, right? I mean, it didn't work in Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning [1985]. But recall, that movie was a piece of shit in general, and the reason for its failure wasn't simply the guy-disguised-as-Jason "surprise". The concept Morse came up with, having a different character stumble across the famous Jason Voorhees hockey mask in each story, becoming possessed by his spirit, and carrying out murderous acts on local townsfolk and traveling teenagers, works surprisingly better than you might think.

I got a kick out of these books when they came out. I was in junior high, and a fan of all kinds of horror fiction, including the YA stuff, and nearly jumped out of my pants when I came across these books. I read them with great joy, realizing they were what they were, not exactly Shirley Jackson or Stephen King, but exactly what I wanted--the printed equivalent of the gory, crazy, and often silly horror franchise that I loved so much.

Morse got the tone of the films down with his novels. Despite the YA target audience, the novels are full of ridiculous amounts of violence, high body counts, and inventive death scenes. And they respect the source material. Nothing in the books contradicts anything in the films (which contradicted each other constantly). Morse even takes the time to look a little deeper into the town of Crystal Lake, something else that was rarely done in the films.

In the first book, Mother's Day, a backwoods hunter puts on the hockey mask and terrorizes some kids staying at the long closed campgrounds. The second book, Jason's Curse, involves the sister of one of the kids killed in Mother's Day, as she and her friends set out for the cursed campgrounds, seeking revenge. There's a nice continuity with this series; each book is its own story but makes references to the previous entries.

The third, The Carnival, has a traveling carnival dumb enough to set up shop on, yes that's right, the old campgrounds. I don't know if these guys never watch the news or what, but no one seems to be aware of the camp's legendary murder sprees. It's the same non-logic the movies follow, and I love it (though, thankfully, it never gets quite as silly as some of the goings-on in New Line's Jason Goes To Hell, which was released a year before these books). The fourth book, Road Trip, has a skinny dork putting on the mask and taking revenge on the van-ful of jocks he's been stranded with in the woods outside the camp.

When I read over these books recently, they took me on kind of a nostalgic trip back to my junior high days. Sometimes you pick up something you loved as a kid, to check it out again, and you're disappointed. But with the Camp Crystal Lake books, I found myself pleasantly surprised. If you're a Friday the 13th fan and are unaware of these novels, they're worth checking out, if you can get hold of some used copies. Clearly written by a fan of the series.

Eric Morse / Friday the 13th YA websites:

http://f13bloodbath.homestead.com/preview.html

http://www.outpostvevetta.com/

http://www.myspace.com/f13_bloodbath

Miscellany: The Other Orwell

The Fall 2009 issue of Lapham's Quarterly (that's right, I'm over a year behind reading my subscription) excerpts a George Orwell essay from the 1940s, entitled “How the Poor Die” which references a time in Orwell’s life more fully explored contemporaneously in Down and Out in Paris and London. While Orwell is famous for his novels Animal Farm and 1984, I’d always heard talk of his days fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He seemed to be a Hemingway figure who was less concerned with being a prolific modernist and more with the integrity of both his life and his work.

Most of his non-fiction books have been rather obscured by the fame and ubiquity of his two popular novels, which nearly every American kid read in school, at least back when I was in school. Even New York’s great bookstore, The Strand, which boasts 18 miles of books couldn’t keep a copy of anything else by Orwell on the shelf for more than a few days, according to my friend who has worked there for years. More recently, his Essays, Homage to Catalonia, and Down and Out in London and Paris have been reissued by various publishers.

For “How the Poor Die” Orwell became a pauper, developed an illness, as the poor do, and went to a public hospital in Paris for treatment. Not only the treatment he receives, but also the treatment he sees others receive reveal a healthcare system stuck in a rut of cold, clinical (and often primitive) practice. Orwell seeks treatment for what he believes is pneumonia. When he is admitted to the hospital, he is promptly given a cold bath, a flimsy robe and the order to walk across the open air courtyard in the frigid February air.

All the patients in the pauper’s ward are given numbers. Orwell sees number 57, an old man, dying of natural causes. “As I gazed at the tiny, screwed-up face it struck me that this disgusting piece of refuse, waiting to be carted away and dumped on a slab in the dissecting room, was an example of ‘natural’ death, one of the things you pray for in the Litany. There you are, then, I thought, that’s what is waiting for you, twenty, thirty, forty years hence: that is how the lucky ones die, the ones who live to be old. One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think now, as I thought then, that it’s better to die violently and not too old.” This honesty allowed Orwell to fight in wars he felt were just and to live a full life, in fear of living vacantly, not of dying meaningfully

.

Seriesofhopes posted an interesting piece called Visualizing George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris" providing pictures of some of the conditions and locales in Orwell's book.