Danse Macabre Page 9
I can't imagine anyone with a severe nutritional deficiency caring much about I'm OK--You're OK, or anyone trying to scratch out a subsistence-level existence for himself, his wife, and his eight kids giving much of a toot about Werner Erhard's est course or Rolfing. Such things are for rich folks. Recently Joan Didion wrote a book about her own odyssey through the sixties, The White Album. For rich folks, I suppose it's a pretty interesting book: the story of a wealthy white woman who could afford to have her nervous breakdown in Hawaii--the seventies equivalent of worrying over pimples.
When the horizons of human experience shrink to HO scale, perspective changes. For the war babies, secure (except for The Bomb) in a world of six-month checkups, penicillin, and eternal orthodontics, the pimple became the primary physical deformity with which you were seen on the street or in the halls of your school; most of the other deformities had been taken care of. And say, having mentioned orthodontics, I'll add that many kids who had to wear braces during those years of heavy, almost suffocating peer pressure saw them as a kind of deformity--every now and then you would hear the cry of "Hey, metal-mouth!" in the halls. But most people saw them only as a form of treatment, no more remarkable than a girl with her arm in a sling or a football player wearing an Ace bandage on his knee.
But for the pimple there was no cure.
And here comes I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. In this film, Whit Bissell assembles the creature, played by Gary Conway, from the bodies of dead hot-rodders. The leftover pieces are fed to the alligators under the house--of course we have an idea early on that Bissell himself will end up being munched by the gators, and we are not disappointed. Bissell is a total fiend in this movie, reaching existential heights of villainy: "He's crying, even the tear ducts work! . . . You've got a civil tongue in your head. I know you have. Because I sewed it back myself."8 But it is the unfortunate Conway who catches the eye and mainsprings the film. Like the villainy of Bissell, the physical deformity of Conway is so awful it becomes almost absurd . . . and he looks like nothing so much as a high school kid whose acne has run totally wild. His face is a lumpy basrelief map of mountainous terrain from which one shattered eye bugs madly.
And yet . . . and yet . . . somehow this shambling creature still manages to dig rock and roll, so he can't be all bad, can he? We have met the monster, and, as Peter Straub points out in Ghost Story, he is us.
We'll have more to say about monstrosity as we go along, and hopefully something of a more profound nature than is contained in the ore we can mine from I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, but I think it's important first to establish the fact that, even on their simplest level, these Tales of the Hook do a number of things without even trying to. Allegory and catharsis are both provided, but only because the creator of horror fiction is above all else an agent of the norm. This is true of horror's more physical side, and we'll find it's also true of works which are more consciously artistic, although when we turn our discussion to the mythic qualities of horror and terror, we may find some rather more disturbing and puzzling associations. But to reach that point, we need to turn our discussion away from film, at least for awhile, and to three novels which form most of the base on which the modern horror genre stands.
CHAPTER III
Tales of the Tarot
One of the most common themes in fantastic literature is that of immortality. "The thing that would not die" has been a staple of the field from Beowulf to Poe's tales of M. Valdemar and of the telltale heart, to the works of Lovecraft (such as "Cool Air"), Blatty, and even, God save us, John Saul.
The three novels I want to discuss in this chapter seem to have actually achieved that immortality, and I believe it's impossible to discuss horror in the years 1950-1980 with any real fullness of understanding unless we begin with these three books. All three live a kind of half-life outside the bright circle of English literature's acknowledged "classics," and perhaps with good reason. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written at white heat by Robert Louis Stevenson in three days. It so horrified his wife that Stevenson burned the manuscript in his fireplace . . . and then wrote it again from scratch in another three days. Dracula is a frankly palpitating melodrama couched in the frame of the epistolary novel--a convention that had been breathing its last gasps twenty years before when Wilkie Collins was writing the last of his great mystery/suspense novels. Frankenstein, the most notorious of the three, was penned by a nineteen-year-old girl, and although it is the best written of the three, it is the least read, and its author would never again write so quickly, so well, so successfully . . . or so audaciously.
In the most unkind of critical lights, all three can be seen as no more than popular novels of their day, with little to distinguish them from novels roughly similar--The Monk, by M. G. Lewis, for instance, or Collins's Armadale--books largely forgotten except by teachers of Gothic fiction who occasionally pass them on to students, who approach them warily . . . and then gulp them down.
But these three are something special. They stand at the foundation of a huge skyscraper of books and films--those twentieth-century gothics which have become known as "the modern horror story." More than that, at the center of each stands (or slouches) a monster that has come to join and enlarge what Burt Hatlen calls "the myth-pool"--that body of fictive literature in which all of us, even the nonreaders and those who do not go to the films, have communally bathed. Like an almost perfect Tarot hand representing our lusher concepts of evil, they can be neatly laid out: the Vampire, the Werewolf, and the Thing Without a Name.
One great novel of supernatural terror, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, has been excluded from this Tarot hand, although it would complete the grouping by supplying the best-known mythic figure of the supernatural, that of the Ghost. I have excluded it for two reasons: first, because The Turn of the Screw, with its elegant drawing-room prose and its tightly woven psychological logic, has had very little influence on the mainstream of the American mass cult. We would do better discussing Casper the Friendly Ghost in terms of the archetype. Secondly, the Ghost is an archetype (unlike those represented by Frankenstein's monster, Count Dracula, or Edward Hyde) which spreads across too broad an area to be limited to a single novel, no matter how great. The archetype of the Ghost is, after all, the Mississippi of supernatural fiction, and although we will discuss it when the time comes, we'll not limit its summing-up to a single book.
All of these books (including The Turn of the Screw) have certain things in common, and all of them deal with the very basis of the horror story: secrets best left untold and things best left unsaid. And yet Stevenson, Shelley, and Stoker (James, too) all promise to tell us the secret. They do so with varying degrees of effect and success . . . and none of them can be said to have really failed. Maybe that's what's kept the novels alive and vital. At any rate, there they stand, and it seems to me impossible to write a book of this sort without doing something with them. It's a matter of roots. It may not do you any good to know that your grandfather liked to sit on the stoop of his building with his sleeves rolled up and smoke a pipe after supper, but it may help to know that he emigrated from Poland in 1888, that he came to New York and helped to build the subway system. If it does nothing else, it may give you a new perspective on your own morning subway ride. In the same way, it is hard to fully understand Christopher Lee as Dracula without talking about that red-headed Irishman Abraham Stoker.
So . . . a few roots.
2
Frankenstein has probably been the subject of more films than any other literary work in history, including the Bible. The pictures include Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf-Man, The Revenge of Frankenstein, Blackenstein, and Frankenstein 1970, to name just a handful. In light of this, summary would seem almost unnecessary, but as previously pointed out, Frankenstein is not much read. Millions of Americans know the name (not as many as know the name of Ronald McDonald, granted; now there is a real culture hero), but most of them d
on't realize that Frankenstein is the name of the monster's creator, not the monster itself, a fact which enhances the idea that the book has become a part of Hatlen's American myth-pool rather than detracting from it. It's like pointing out that Billy the Kid was in reality a tenderfoot from New York who wore a derby hat, had syphilis, and probably back-shot most of his victims. People are interested in such facts, but understand intuitively that they aren't what's really important now . . . if indeed they ever were. One of the things that makes art a force to be reckoned with even by those who don't care for it is the regularity with which myth swallows truth . . . and without so much as a burp of indigestion.
Mary Shelley's novel is a rather slow and talky melodrama, its theme drawn in large, careful, and rather crude strokes. It is developed the way a bright but naive debate student might develop his line of argument. Unlike the films based upon it, there are few scenes of violence, and unlike the inarticulate monster of the Universal days ("the Karloff-films," as Forry Ackerman so charmingly calls them), Shelley's creature speaks with the orotund, balanced phrases of peer in the House of Lords or William F. Buckley disputing politely with Dick Cavett on a TV talk show. He is a cerebral creature, the direct opposite of Karloff's physically overbearing monster with the shovel forehead and the sunken, stupidly crafty eyes; and in all the book's pages there is nothing as chilling as Karloff's line in The Bride of Frankenstein, spoken in that dull, dead, and dragging tenor: "Yes . . . dead . . . I love . . . dead."
Ms. Shelley's novel is subtitled "The Modern Prometheus," and the Prometheus in question is Victor Frankenstein. He leaves hearth and home to go to university in Ingolstadt (and already we can hear the whirr of the author's grindstone as she prepares to sharpen one of the horror genre's most famous axes: There Are Some Things Mankind Was Not Meant To Know), where he gets a lot of crazy--and dangerous--ideas put into his head about galvanism and alchemy. The inevitable result, of course, is the creation of a monster with more parts than a J. C. Whitney automotive catalogue. Frankenstein accomplishes this creation in one long, delirious burst of activity--and it is in these scenes that Shelley offers us her most vivid prose.
On the grave robbery necessary to the task at hand: Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance. . . . I collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. . . . I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment.
On the dream which follows the completion of the experiment: I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the graveworms crawling in the folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretch--the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks.
Victor responds to this vision as any sane man would; he runs shrieking into the night. The remainder of Shelley's story is a Shakespearean tragedy, its classical unity broken only by Ms. Shelley's uncertainty as to where the fatal flaw lies--is it in Victor's hubris (usurping a power that belongs only to God) or in his failure to take responsibility for his creation after endowing it with the life-spark?
The monster begins its revenge against its creator by killing Frankenstein's little brother, William. We are not terribly sorry to see William go, by the way; when the monster tries to befriend the boy, William replies: "Hideous monster! Let me go. My papa is a syndic--he is M. Frankenstein--he will punish you. You dare not keep me." This piece of rich-kid snottiness is Willy's last; when the monster hears the name of its creator on the boy's lips, he wrings the kid's bratty little neck.
A blameless servant in the Frankenstein household, Justine Moritz, is accused of the crime and is promptly hanged for it--thus doubling the unfortunate Frankenstein's load of guilt. The monster approaches his creator soon after and tells him the story.1 The upshot of the matter is that he wants a mate. He tells Frankenstein that if his wish is granted, he will take his lady and the two of them will live out their span in some desolate wasteland (South America is suggested, as New Jersey had not yet been invented), removed from the eye and mind of man forever. The alternative, the monster threatens, is a reign of terror. He voices his existential credo--better to do evil than do nothing at all--by saying, "I will revenge my injuries; if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear, and chiefly towards you, my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. Have a care; I will work at your destruction. . . . I will desolate your heart, so that you shall curse the hour of your birth."
At length, Victor agrees, and actually does make the woman. He accomplishes this second act of creation on a desolate island in the Orkney chain, and in these pages Mary Shelley creates an intensity of mood and atmosphere that nearly rivals the creation of the original. Doubts assail Frankenstein moments before he is to imbue the creature with life. He imagines the world desolated by the pair of them. Even worse, he imagines them as a hideous Adam and Eve of an entire race of monsters. A child of her times, Shelley apparently never considered the idea that for a man capable of creating life from moldering spare parts, it would be child's play to create a woman without the capacity for conceiving a child.
The monster turns up immediately after Frankenstein has destroyed its mate, of course; he has several words for Victor Frankenstein and none of them are "happy birthday." The reign of terror he has promised takes place like a chain of exploding firecrackers (although in Ms. Shelley's sedate prose they are more like a roll of caps). Frankenstein's boyhood friend, Henry Clerval, is strangled by the monster for openers. Shortly thereafter the monster utters the book's most horrible innuendo; he promises Frankenstein, "I will be with you on your wedding night." The implications of this threat, for readers of Mary Shelley's time as well as our own, go beyond murder.
Frankenstein responds to this threat by almost immediately marrying his childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth--not one of the book's more believable moments, although hardly in a class with the abandoned trunk in the ditch or the runaway Arabian noblewoman. On their wedding night, Victor goes out to confront the creature, having naively assumed that the monster's threat is against himself. Meanwhile, the monster has broken into the small hut Victor and Elizabeth have taken for the night. Exit Elizabeth. Frankenstein's father goes next, a victim of shock and heartbreak.
Frankenstein pursues his demon creation relentlessly north, into the Arctic wastes, where he dies aboard the Polebound ship of Robert Walton, another scientist determined to crack open the mysteries of God and Nature . . . and the circle neatly closes.
3
So the question arises: How did it happen that this modest gothic tale, which was only about a hundred pages long in its first draft (Ms. Shelley's husband, Percy, encouraged her to flesh it out), became caught in a kind of cultural echo chamber, amplifying through the years until, a hundred and sixty-four years later, we have a cereal called Frankenberry (closely related to those two other favorites of the breakfast table, Count Chocula and Booberry); an old TV series called The Munsters, which has apparently gone into terminal syndication; Aurora Frankenstein model kits, which, when completed, delight the happy young modelmaker with a glow-in-the-dark creature lurching through a glow-in-the-dark graveyard; and a saying such as "He looked like Frankenstein" as a kin
d of apotheosis of ugly?
The most obvious answer to this question is, the movies. The movies did it. And this is a true answer, as far as it goes. As has been pointed out in film books ad infinitum (and possibly ad nauseam), the movies have been very good at providing that cultural echo chamber . . . perhaps because, in terms of ideas as well as acoustics, the best place to create an echo is in a large empty space. In place of the ideas that books and novels give us, the movies often substitute large helpings of gut emotion. To this American movies have added a fierce sense of image, and the two together create a dazzling show. Take Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel's Dirty Harry, for instance. In terms of ideas, the film is an idiotic mishmash. In terms of image and emotion--the young kidnap victim being pulled from the cistern at dawn, the bad guy terrorizing the busload of children, the granite face of Dirty Harry Callahan himself--the film is brilliant. Even the best of liberals walk out of a film like Dirty Harry or Peckinpah's Straw Dogs looking as if they have been clopped over the head . . . or run over by a train.