How is this challenge of mine
going? I’m tackling a movie a day, to clear those bookshelves of movies that
just shouldn’t be there. Books should be there. Fear not, for they are. I don’t
seem to be clearing the movie stacks as fast as I’d like. The endless pile of
submarine flicks sank below the depths, true…
John Carpenter’s proving to be a problem.
It’s Escape from New York. Damned
thing has three commentaries on there. This means I’m watching a movie four
times. Throw in a few other features, and add up the running-time. Four days of
this. It’s quicker to escape from New York for real, and I’ve done that on several
occasions.
Escape
from New York counts as many films instead of one, and takes days to wade
through – for I have other things to be getting on with. Eating. Sleeping.
Trivial matters, I know. There is no game of knocking back shots for John
Carpenter movies. The game would kill you and anyone sitting next to you.
Take a shot every time Carpenter makes a
film that is really a western.
Add a drink if he works on the score.
Knock one back if there’s no budget to speak
of.
Slug one down for a bleak ending.
Raise a glass if Kurt Russell is in the movie.
And raise another if Keith David is in the film.
Charles Cyphers appears in the movie? Down a
swig in his honour.
This one will likely kill you twice over.
Knock one back if a character’s name references someone else. Sam Loomis in Hallowe’en comes from Psycho,
though coincidentally acts as a reference to the actress Nancy Loomis – who
also appears in Hallowe’en.
In The
Fog, Charles Cyphers plays Dan
O’Bannon – Carpenter’s collaborator on Dark
Star. Joanna Cassidy is A. Whitlock
in Ghosts of Mars – a sideways
reference to Albert Whitlock, “credited with art duties” on The Thing.
Some of those are a bit of a stretch. Maybe
avoid delving too deeply into character references from other films…
But do swig one down if John Carpenter appears in the movie. The usual giveaway will be helicopter stuff. Look for Rip Haight. Carpenter has a helicopter-based cameo in this film, and also appears as a musician in Ernest
Borgnine’s opening scene.
Drink a shot if the movie features space or
an entity from space.
Is George Buck Flower in the movie? Now there’s
a man with a hell of a filmography. A drunken filmography, at that. He was your
go-to guy if you wanted a drunk, a bum, or a drunken bum in your scenes.
Okay, okay. A shot for Donald Pleasence, and
a shot for Jamie Lee Curtis.
It might be easier to knock back a drink if
Dean Cundey ISN’T the cinematographer on a John Carpenter movie. But…damn
it…drink one for Dean Cundey if he worked on the production.
Where would that put Escape from New York, so far?
Cinematography? Dean Cundey. It’s a
western. All John Carpenter movies are westerns. Carpenter did the score, there’s
his delivery guy helicopter cameo,
and he played in the band. I hear he also directed. Snake Plissken takes his name from a real guy. There are references
to other directors: Cronenberg, Romero,
to name but two. Donald Pleasence is in there as President John Harker…
This may be a reference to Jonathan Harker in Dracula.
Too much of a leap? Carpenter eventually did his own western take on a vampire
movie. JOHN CARPENTER’S VAMPIRES
features a psychic link from vampire to victim, much like the telepathy between
Dracula and Mina Harker in Stoker’s novel. This stuff swirled around in
Carpenter’s brain for years.
Speaking
of things on his cinematic mind, Carpenter shows The Thing from Another World and Forbidden Planet on television in Hallowe’en. He’d return to those sc-fi inspirations with his own
version of The Thing. Vague elements
of Forbidden Planet linger over Ghosts of Mars.
Back to our escape. Jamie Lee Curtis
narrates Escape from New York. Kurt
Russell? Yes. Buck Flower has a small yet important drunken role. Charles
Cyphers? Check. Is there a budget to speak of? They couldn’t afford to film the
whole movie in New York, so they sneaked the Statue of Liberty in there…
Movie budgets are cheap bullshit adverts when
released into the wild by movie companies for reasons of publicity. So add a
mine full of salt to any talk of budgets. Going by cinematic releases in 1981,
we see the big budgetary hitters are Indiana
Jones, Superman, and James Bond.
If we believe the studio-backed accountants, that year’s Jim Henson flick, The Great Muppet Caper, had over twice
the budget of Escape from New York.
We’ll say Carpenter’s budget was low for its
scope and ambition, at $5-7 million. For the sequence involving that dash to
the wall, they bought a disused bridge for $1, filmed their scenes, and then
sold it back when production closed. Cheap and cheerful.
I’ve not listed all the in-joke name
references, people on the movie production side can be a bit obscure, so you
are on your own when it comes to downing shots. Isaac Hayes plays a character
named for John Wayne – The Duke. Mind
how you go with that alcohol. You may think the ending is bleak, and that’s
worth a shot.
Yes,
I’d skip this boozy game if I were you.
Carpenter is at his best when he has no
money to spend. He’s forced to be far more creative, to compose his own music
for reasons of cheapness, to use vehicles owned by his production crew, and to
fly helicopters himself when required.
Oh, some of his films were made with money. Memoirs of an Invisible Man had the cash
for early computer effects. What did Carpenter bring to that movie? His love of
Hitchcock thrillers. He saw an opporchancity to do North by Northwest, but our hero on the run can’t even be seen.
Except by the audience, when required.
If I could recommend one John Carpenter
movie to you, I’d recommend at least three. Is there a film that sums up his
style? Sadly, yes. He made one film that now serves as a greatest hits compilation…
Ghosts
of Mars counts as many films.
I like this one much more than I should, and
I want to like it even more…yet I can’t.
Movie opens with a vehicle moving
relentlessly in the direction of the audience. And we also have a character introducing
the story in flashback at some sort of legal meeting.
Why, that’s Big Trouble in Little China with the serial numbers filed off.
Our tale is set
in a town way out in the dusty desert, and is approachable by train. Hell,
that’s a western. With a jail-break. All John Carpenter movies are westerns. A
hint of John Ford, a touch of Howard Hawks, and you are ready to ride.
All
are westerns? Even The Thing, right?
Yes. Kurt Russell is having a drink in the saloon, playing a game with a lady.
He throws booze in her face and calls her a cheatin’
bitch. Then a stranger comes to town and stirs up trouble, setting the
cowboys at each other’s throats. The stranger’s trying to stake a claim.
Mars. There’s a theme of possession. We get
that in The Thing and again in Prince of Darkness. Slashers and
stabbers, in masks? Okay, that’s Hallowe’en.
Not that Carpenter ever cared for the term slasher
as a descriptor of, er, slasher
movies. What else? An eerie mist that rolls in, bringing terror.
Yes,
we’ve seen The Fog.
Roaming bands of crazies. You get those
a-plenty in Escape from New York. A
base under siege…there are a few Martian corridor-fixated camera shots
reminiscent of The Thing. Here, the
exterior of the outpost is Martian Red instead of Antarctica White…
And that redness is sprayed on, to make
everything look Martian.
Anyway, you get the idea of a town with one
main street. Western. Carpenter is playful. Outpost
31 is Precinct 13 with the
numbers reversed…two places under siege…one from within and the other from
without.
In Ghosts
of Mars he gives us an assault on a police facility, all over again. He
throws in the alien possession idea mixed with the crazies from New York.
There’s an attempt to replicate the banter between men and women from the
movies of Howard Hawks.
I say attempt,
as, damn it, nothing quite works to full capacity in this film. It’s a greatest hits compilation. And you’d be
better off watching the other stories unfold in earlier movies. See his other
films first.
Carpenter flat-out tells us Howard Hawks
directed The Thing from Another World.
It’s still debated whether that’s strictly true or not. What do we have going
on in this movie, set on Mars? That’s not
Hawks. It’s imitation. We got to watch the movie before it had time to finish.
Finish what?
Finish
imitating Howard Hawks.
Carpenter was too busy imitating Carpenter.
The ghosts in this movie attacked elsewhere and moved on to attack the main
area – we know that from a “survivor” who came from the first place. That’s
straight-up imitation of the basic structure of The Thing. A survivor from the Norwegian camp reaches the American
camp and tells everyone what’s going on. If
only you spoke Norwegian Hovitos.
And so it goes.
The
banter isn’t quite up to the usual standard. We’ve seen and heard it all before
in previous Carpenter films. Ghosts of
Mars is linked rather dubiously to Escape
from New York. If you want to see a movie called Escape from Mars, featuring Snake Plissken, well, just watch this
movie featuring Desolation Williams.
We see what you did there. Once we put on
those special sunglasses. We were promised one thing and given a cheaper
version of it. Consume films. Be happy.
Carpenter walked away from making movies for
around a decade after that ghostly Martian excursion, and returned for one
final film as I type…The Ward, which
I have not seen.
I stopped to watch the trailer for The Ward. Now I feel I’ve seen the whole
movie. The art of the movie trailer is truly dead. Stopped again to watch the
trailer for Ghosts of Mars. I rest my
case.
Anyway, gulp a slug of booze if the movie
title is JOHN CARPENTER’S…
That gives a new meaning to JOHN CARPENTER’S THE THING if the title
describes what he is and not the film that belongs to him.
Leaving directing behind, his most recent
credits have, unsurprisingly, been for movie scores. Ghosts of Mars falls down on the score, too. It feels as though the
movie is leaning a bit more heavily on the music for assistance than it should
be doing.
We
brought Anthrax in. Suddenly, that’s a selling-point. The score is right
for another movie. Just, for this one, it feels like the music was asked to do a
lot more than its fair share of the work in selling visuals.
The
main villain, super-mutant, chief zombie guy, who spends the movie screaming blah-de-blah-de-blah in Martian, is very
transparently meant to be Alice Cooper – who wasn’t available. Cooper’s
involvement would’ve shifted the musical tone, I’m sure. No Anthrax. Carpenter had
to go cheaper with Cooper aboard. He’d have written his own score in full.
Alice, I guess, might have penned a Martian track for an album.
Cooper released Brutal Planet just before Ghosts
of Mars went into production. As the brutal planet is never quite named in
the song, it pretty much works as the opening track for this movie. Missed
opporchancity? Yes.
Back to the formula of JOHN CARPENTER’S GREATEST HITS…
Hell, Prince
of Darkness does the building under
siege idea mixed with possessed bodies a hell of a lot better than Ghosts of Mars does, and Prince of Darkness features just as many
John Carpenter movies thrown into a blender…
It helps if you’ve seen some Quatermass films for Prince of Darkness. Yes, it is written
by “Martin Quatermass” and that’s worth a shot. There’s a character named Wyndham, and Carpenter would go on to
direct John Wyndam’s work…so there’s another shot.
Kneale
University could only be a reference to the creator of Quatermass, grumpy Nigel Kneale. Down a slug of booze to get over
that sly bit of movie commentary. On the topic of grumpy Nigel Kneale, you
don’t delve terribly deeply into Kneale’s work before finding out how much of a
grumpy bastard he was. Really grumpy. Not yelling at clouds, but yelling at the
sky behind the clouds. That grumpy.
The chief complaint of Nigel Kneale is that
everything isn’t written by Nigel Kneale – and that everything NOT written by
Nigel Kneale is a waste of time. Oh, except for the third Hallowe’en movie, but he had his name removed from that production.
Ghosts
of Mars might’ve worked on the effects side of things if they’d cut the
effects to the bone. Keep it minimalist. The town’s main street was okay.
Building interiors did the job. Things fell apart if you were looking at a city
in the distance or encampments below.
Train fakery is acceptable. If Carpenter’d
directed a straightforward action movie on our world, aboard a train, there’d
be a load of train fakery anyway. We give that one a modest pass.
There’s an Evil Dead feel to the alien possession which worked for reasons of
cheapness. By fuck, my annual coffee budget is larger than the amount of cash
they threw at The Evil Dead. Threw
at, and missed. Say that in the voice of Sam Raimi, laughing.
Where does the ghostly Carpenter movie fall
apart? Our heroes are waiting for the train. Not quite the 3:10 to Yuma. Let’s say 3:10
to Yu-Mars and be done with it. There are other ways to handle this. But Carpenter
goes with a Martian stand-off.
You know the red mist possesses humans and
turns them into self-destructive cultists. And you know if you kill a possessed
human that the alien flees that corpse and seeks a new living host. The
survivor tells us so. In her own way.
The last fucking thing you are going to do
is…kill any possessed people.
No. You just can’t kill them. Instead, movie-makers,
you write scenes about finding ways to block the possession. Annoyingly, there
is a way to reverse the possession and expel the alien right there in this film.
That part of the story should’ve been the main focus. Get everyone high as fuck
and stroll out to the train.
But no. There is a slow-mo trip to safety.
This goes nowhere. The 3:10 is late. Snake Plissken…Desolation Clones…comes back into the fray, both guns blazing,
along with everyone else, and they start killing aliens. I mean…they start
releasing monsters who can fly right into your head.
Your small valiant party attacks the zombies.
And you kill more of them than they kill of you. Enough of them are now free to
possess…ALL OF YOU. It is beyond tedious. The movie should end right on that
fight. For reasons of padding out the plot, the film is obliged to continue.
Flashbacks abound. The whole story is a
flashback. But we stop off for a flashback inside that flashback. And we might
even delve deeper into Inception
levels of stories within stories, but frankly I haven’t the time. I stopped
counting flashbacks within flashbacks. With a movie execution like this, it is
hard to care.
Yes,
the movie was executed.
Annoyingly, just to pad the story out even
more, there are scenes of splitting the party and duplicating dialogue to show
a flashback to what happened when the groups parted company. Let’s go over to
another character and see what occurred there in his side of the flashback. A
little overlap in the flashbacking and you pad the movie out just a touch more.
You can admire Sam Peckinpah’s work. But any
western attempt at slowing the motion
of characters here…is not tribute. No. It’s just a way of padding the movie out
a little more more. I could go on.
Truth be told, I’ve gone on too long.
There’s only one thing worse than a bad
movie. And that’s a movie that comes so close to avoiding being bad. You can
drive the Pork Chop Express through the holes in many a John Carpenter film on
a dark and stormy night, and no one cares. We embrace the strange nonsensical
rhythm of it all.
Just not here, on Mars. I like the absurdity
of the balloon sequence. Comes out of nowhere. No real budget for it, alas. The
movie aches on many levels, though. You can set your watch by the second,
showing Pam Grier’s departure from the story after those dollars went her way.
She gets the shortest stick in this flick, as far as the main actors are
concerned.
The dialogue isn’t quite right. And the
effects aren’t all there. The music tries too hard. This is a twice-cooked
meal. The only reason Donald Pleasence isn’t in the film? He’d died over half a
decade before. Inconvenient. (Doesn’t stop his resurfacing in a much later Hallowe’en movie, though.)
I don’t actually have a problem with the
cast. The actors do what they can. Second-shortest end of the stick goes to
Clea DuVall, playing a character who is shocked by it all. We’re all shocked by
it. Is the cast game enough for this? Not quite, but I don’t hold that against
them.
The padding. Inconsistent effects. Massive
plot point over not killing the possessed – you could rack up a load of tension
there as the heroes try their damnedest NOT to kill a maniac. Repeat the fight
from They Live.
We’d judge
you…but only a little.
Strap that possessed maniac to a bed and add
a little more tension as the character tries to escape. Make the movie about
NOT killing the enemy, coming up with other ways to raise the tension. Here’s a
problem. Solve a problem. Obstacles in the way. At least throw a bone to the three-headed
dog of plot holes.
Anyway, it’s a bit shitty to take a
Carpenter interview with The Guardian
and split it across two Blu-ray releases. See. Even the special features let
you down. I’m told you can view the whole thing online. Guess your level of
irritation at half-interviews depends on which Carpenter movies you feel like
buying. VAMPIRES has the first part
of that interview. It’s a gritty western.
Movies you feel like buying? That is, while
the physical medium of the movie-on-disc is still a thing, for those who don’t
want films beamed into the base of the spine by corporate chips. Consume streams. Be happy. Send us your
viewing data.
Yes, Ghosts
of Mars has achieved its cult-like status. Carpenter’s not a fan of the
word cult. Good job he hasn’t made
any cult films. Or slasher movies. His Martian effort? It is watchable.
Bearable. Endurable. To a point. Should have been so much more. How to fix it?
We can’t. Reduce the budget. Cut scenes you
can’t film. Of course, Carpenter already did that anyway. He’s a carpenter by
nature, as well as name, and knows what to cut and when – more so in his
earlier films.
I won’t say much about ESCAPE FROM L.A. It was rumoured to have been a bridge between the
New York escape and some sort of escape from the planet Mars. This sounds nearly true, and almost plays that way
in viewing Ghosts of Mars. But then,
the Martian film is a compilation of other Carpenter outings.
Spoiler alert. Knock back a shot if you
think ESCAPE FROM L.A. has a bleak
ending. All electrical machines are wiped out. So how the hell does anyone
convict Snake Plissken of a crime so harsh that he’s sent to Mars as punishment
for a sequel? How do they fix up a rocket to send him on his way? Wouldn’t they
be better off repairing hospital machinery first?
ANYWAY.
In the
Los Angeles outing, I think the same thing goes – kill the money spent badly. In
the Martian movie and ESCAPE FROM L.A.
it’s an idea to cut the budget and eliminate the plastic computer effects. Work
around scenes you then cannot put on film. Improve the tone of the product.
As for
escaping from Mars…
Did Christian Nyby direct The Thing from Another World or didn’t
he? Is Ghosts of Mars a retooling of
an idea for a third Snake Plissken film or not? Hell, it’s enough of a
retooling of Assault on Precinct 13
as it is.
Certainly wouldn’t work as a vehicle for
Snake Plissken. Does the man do nothing but spend his hours escaping? Ah, I
guess that’s what we do, too, when we spend time watching escapist fare.
Back
to it. These shelves don’t clear themselves of movies. Unless you avoid putting
movies on bookshelves alongside books in the first place. There’s a harsh
lesson to be learned in there, somewhere.
Wednesday, 1 February 2023
ASSAULT ON JOHN CARPENTER’S ESCAPE FROM PRECINCT MARS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.
Thursday, 22 December 2022
YOU CAN’T NEGOTIATE WITH A MESSY ARCHIVE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.
Days grow shorter until they
grow longer. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the “shortest” day of
the year will, invariably, be followed by a day with an extra minute of sunshine
added to it…minus half an hour of daylight from a torrential downpour at 3.30
in what’s laughably referred to as the afternoon. Why mention this? It’s the “shortest” day
today, and that’s no good to me. Looks like the blog ate my homework. It’s been
a busy month, and I’m only just getting around to blogging. In a little over a
week, I must blog again.
Yes, I’d have preferred to blog on the 1st
of the month. But, in the wink of a blink, it is now the shortest day. There’s glorious
artificiality in creating a yearly archive. Soon I’ll have to copy those dusty template
files over into next year’s farm-fresh folders. Always feels false. Like doing
taxes.
Never falsify your taxes when you can fake
someone else’s.
Plastic cheese levels of artificiality
abound, when it comes to archives. But for the sake of convenience, we divide
sizeable chunks of time into years. Winter weather eerily tells me it is
winter. In Scotland, that sensation can occur in June. December tells me, with
long frosts and short days, that I must carve a new statue from a block of
marble…and call that statue the next year’s archive.
What of the main archive, though? The
collection of files, year to year? How messy is that? There’s an area of the data
factory that is the messiest. It is the part of the whole collection that is
the hardest to deal with…though it contains the fewest files.
And that part is on the dreaded desktop.
I leave files there for convenience in handy
folders with temporary names. TEMPORARY,
TEMP, TEMP 1, TEMP 2, BODY DUMP LOCATIONS, RESERVE COFFEE VAULT GRID REFERENCE,
etc. It’s my duty in life to ensure that they are all temporary files. And
that they don’t contain much.
But…by fuck…getting rid of them is hard.
They are joined by more files. At one end, the folders are deleted or join the
main archive stream. At the other end, random stuff wanders in and clogs up the
system. These items penguin-walk across the screen.
Let us be clear. The “system” is a clean
desktop. Free of file folders. I allow links to pesky services: shortcuts to the
recycle bin, media playing apps, this bit of software, that control panel, and
so on. Links are useful.
Folders, while handy, aren’t a permanent part
of the system. They are tiny fish who come in and make themselves useful to the
shark by cleaning things up. But then I have to clean up the stuff that was
cleaned up.
If I create a folder in the archive itself, away
from the desktop, for this purpose of housing temporary things, then I create a
folder that is in a drawer. Unseen. Easy to forget. Letting files slip onto the
desktop is my way of having an alarm system in my face.
Information builds up. I don’t quite know
where to archive it just yet. Or I must work on it for a bit, and then archive.
Time-specific items sit on the desktop for a day or until a particular date.
Come the appointed hour, I sweep the area as clean as I can.
Well, the big hour approaches. I must always
have an empty desktop in December. At some point in the last two weeks of
December, preferably. Definitely in the last week. Always. This is a
lie…sometimes the quick level of change required from December into January
isn’t as quick as I’d like.
Hell, I’m still eating Christmas treats in
January and cooking tinned food from December in March at the latest. Files
don’t need to be updated by the stroke of midnight as the 31st of
December steps out into the night.
I foolishly decided to research the
shelf-life of tinned goods. There’ll be
supermarket data, I said to myself. Not reams of articles in preparing your
bunker for the forthcoming Zombie Apocalypse™.
It’s fine to eat cans left over from
December in the far-off realm of March.
What’s the state of play right now? There
are 67 items on the desktop. Files or folders. I’m not counting shortcuts. One
of these is the file I am typing into and another is the file marked backup that auto-generated when I saved
my work.
We’ll drop that to 65. Let me just take a
load of images away and file them where they need to go. Or delete, as applicable…
A good (indifferent) 90 minutes, and here I
am. There’s one item left – this file. And there’ll be a copy of it as soon as
I save. There. That leaves 26 links. I zapped a few of those shortcuts, as
well.
Oh. And one curious folder that has no properties
but isn’t quite a shortcut. Things are tricky in the world of archiving. You
can’t negotiate with a messy archive. I suspect you can’t really negotiate with
a tidy one, either. There’s less room for manoeuvre, there.
Can I now copy the archive for safety
reasons? I should be able to. Copying never copies the stuff on the desktop.
And so. That’s why I clear the decks. Stow loose cannons. Shiver some timbers.
Scunge the lungeons. Make ready for sail, abaft the Braithwaites…
*
Somewhere along the way, the
sun set on the shortest day of the year. Not as early as it did earlier in the
month during ALL THE RAIN IN FIVE MINUTES, but rain has that effect on the
light sensors.
I also found time to make a brief trip into
the woods, and, importantly, managed to come back again. Things stand in the
way of blogging. Another day may pass before I publish this blog. So how did I
do, in sweeping the digital dust off my electronic desktop?
A few things had to be swept under the
carpet. I moved them to next year’s archive using a spot of time travel, a flux
capacitor, and a cup of coffee. Yes, I like the annual archive to be tidied
promptly. Sometimes I really jump the gun in setting the next year’s archive
up, though. I may be late with blogging, but I am now a bit early for next
year.
*
Up before the dawn, I
resolved to publish this blog today. How fares the desktop? I’d added three
more files there overnight. Easy to move to the “right” locations. So we’re
more or less in the clear again, right?
The image in this blog is from the Tomb of Dracula. (Pencils by Gene Colan,
and inks by Tom Palmer. Colan did a few comics direct from the pencils. No one
inked Colan the way Tom Palmer did. And that...is a Comic Book Fact™. Palmer died back in August. He was 81.)
A copy
of it sat on the desktop, but I’ve moved it to a file inside the archive. And a
copy of the illustration has the starring role of BEING the desktop itself.
That’s the background. You’ll never see the desktop that clean.
This morning, the desktop is almost empty.
On the blank space to the left, I keep all the shortcuts. The blank space to
the right is reserved for temporary file and folder placement. As it is harder
to see things on the central image itself, I try to keep the desktop as clear
as possible.
That’s my traffic management system. As the
files penguin-walk their way across the wasteland, they bunch up against the
image…and then I have to do a spot of cleaning. I recommend this visual
approach to people with cluttered desktops.
Put an image on the screen centrally. Keep
shortcuts on one side and the random stuff on the other. Never the twain shall
meet, and good luck to you with that.
Right now, the desktop contains this file.
It’s here as a reminder that it is here. I work on it. Return to it. I am
alarmed that it is on the desktop. There’s the copy, saved on the desktop. And,
while I am in here, there are several phantom copies as literal temporary files
– with the extension .tmp. Those
vanish when I save and close the file.
What’s left? Finish writing. Save the work.
Transfer it to the blog. Publish. Archive the entry. Stare at a clean desktop.
Start saving everything, all over again. Some of it to the cloud. And all of it
to a portable hard drive. There are two of those hard drives. Copies of copies.
I can snatch one from the shelf if I must evacuate…
But if there isn’t time, and there isn’t,
I’ll rely on the essential material that’s saved to the cloud, to rebuild after
a fire. I have no personal copy of myself in the event of a fire, so, as usual,
I have sixty seconds to be outside once the alarm goes. If I have a hard drive
with me, fair enough. And if I haven’t, there’s the cloud. Also, if I must, I
will reconstruct things from memory. Let’s hope, if it comes to it, that I
improve on whatever I rebuild.
And now, with one mighty sweep of a digital
hand…mouse…the desktop is free…
Sunday, 2 January 2022
BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA…AGAIN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.
Come to this blog freely, go
safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring.
Regularly, I place tree-based data-storage
devices on tree-based data-storage devices. Paper books on wooden shelves.
Books come in and must be stored somewhere.
I know,
yes, I know. Books come in and books don’t go out, and there’s always a
Bookpocalypse looming. New books must be read. Yet…
Old books can be read again.
And
so…I turned, once more, to Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula. What is a classic? Stoker’s tale is certainly that, but
what’s the definition? We might as well go with Alan Bennett’s remark: a book everyone is assumed to have read and
often thinks they have.
Have I read this classic work or…did I only
watch the move/TV adaptation? In watching an adaptation, would I be shocked and
surprised, on reading the book, to discover that diabolical liberties had been taken?
Classics I’ve read. Time for a very brief list
in no particular order. Strong Poison.
Tom Sawyer. Jane Eyre. Treasure Island.
Wuthering Heights. Dracula. Frankenstein.
Adaptations, flattened to fit a two-hour
movie-slot, are always going to be patchy. Better to go for lengthier TV
adaptations, in which fewer diabolical liberties are taken. If you have a
dedicated reading-space, and coffee, then stick with the originals if you can’t
bear to see a much-loved classic knifed from all directions.
Curl up with a good book, and pretend the awful
motion-picture does not exist. (Round up the usual suspects. You know the
drill.)
Dracula
opens with a lawyer, Jonathan Harker, travelling to Count Dracula’s quaint home
to assist in legal matters when it comes to moving house. Spoiler. Oh, and the
Count is a vampire.
When we leave the castle behind, things
don’t look too good for the abandoned lawyer. London is Dracula’s target, and
Stoker fills the text with characters. Fictional London, aye, and Fictional
Whitby, are both fair teeming with characters.
Dracula’s thirst for blood is matched by the
workman’s thirst for alcohol, judging by the many friendly bribes that aid the
vampire hunters in their investigations.
In the opening of this tale, at the castle,
in the severe vampiric wilderness, there are precious few characters. Indeed,
it is Harker’s realisation that the Count’s home is empty of servants that
raises more and more suspicion in his fevered mind.
Harker is left to the lack of mercy of
Dracula’s three undead minions. Few other characters visit the castle. Over in
the pub-filled stamping-ground of humanity, Stoker throws characters our way
thick and fast.
Here lies the problem of dealing with
adaptations of the tale. Many characters are many characters too many. In the book,
there’s space for these choir-like assemblies of voices and their different
methods of conveying story. Hardly anything truly happens directly in Dracula…
We are given a collection of notes. Letters.
Diaries. Newspaper articles. Stoker warns us of the existence of many receipts
and bills of lading and railway timetables, but he doesn’t bog us down in
those.
The novel is written, pencilled in, penned,
typed up, noted in shorthand, and gathered at the edges by means of newspaper
stories. Characters frantically chronicle that morning’s events while on the
afternoon train to the next vampire hunter meeting, which, itself, will be
noted in print much later.
Only with Doctor Seward and his phonograph
in action do we occasionally stumble upon an event that is happening while his
recording device is in motion.
That brings me to his patient: R.M. Renfield.
Our lost lawyer friend, Mr Harker, arranged Dracula’s purchase of a property
right next to Doctor Seward’s very Victorian asylum. Dracula’s new temporary
abode isn’t spooky enough by itself. His new lair needs Edward Gorey levels of lunacy on neighbouring soil.
It isn’t long before Dracula is at the asylum
window, having late-night chats with Mr Renfield. They share an interest in
blood. There’s a much-used method running through adaptations, to save screen-time,
of condensing characters into one role…
For some reason, it is fated to Renfield,
across adaptations, to merge with the character of Jonathan Harker. Renfield/Harker
is often the first condensed casualty in a Dracula
adaptation. It seems that writers are hell-bent on turning the patient into the
lawyer.
The lawyer is mobile. Renfield, however, is
an inmate who engages in brief bursts of movement when he escapes the confines
of his cell. It’s a shame that he’s the first of many elements to go, as…
He’s vital to the plot.
In
movies, Renfield can come across as a minor character. In the book, though,
he’s significant. For a novel named Dracula,
we find Dracula himself conspicuous by his absence. Stoker wisely has Dracula
conspiring offstage for much of the action.
Various unrelated newspaper accounts track
Dracula’s bursts of activity across the map of London. When he appears in
person, he takes the centre of the stage.
Bram Stoker, should you look him up, would
be remembered chiefly as a figure of the theatre had he not written Dracula. He kept one eye on adapting his
story to the stage, after all. (And his theatrical version predated the book’s
publication by the barest whisper of a vampiric sigh.)
So don’t be surprised by the Victorian
theatricality of a Victorian novel penned by a theatrical fellow. Stoker was
not just any theatre-lover, but assistant to noted actor Sir Henry Irving. Much
has been made of Dracula’s habits and their alignment with the temperament and
physicality of Sir Henry.
Adaptations sent me to the source, and I
found I much-preferred the source. Dracula
wasn’t the first vampire story, and it certainly wasn’t ever going to be the
last. Stoker threw an undead quote into the book by mentioning the poem Lenore, so we see vampiric roots from an
earlier time appearing in the novel itself.
And it is to poetry that we’d look, in
search of early vampire tales that were written down. Before that, as usual, to
stave off the mystery of the night, you’d be huddled around a campfire trying
to keep people entertained.
If that campsite happened to be the Villa
Deodati at Lake Geneva, and you knew Byron or Shelley, then the stories told
would chill the very marrow of your bones. From that rain-lashed place, two
classic works emerged.
We’ll call one Frankenstein. And, just like the later Dracula, this tale faces knives from all directions when being
adapted. For reasons of cheapness, a trip into the icy wastes at the novel’s
end is a trip too far for most movie budgets. That chill journey is often
replaced by a lab explosion.
The other spooky story from out of Lake
Geneva, scribbled by John Polidori, is titled The Vampyre. Today we’d call it highly literary revenge-porn
against Lord Byron. The Villa Deodati was the prototype of an internet forum
where a teenager could publish her grave-robbing fan-fic without fear of
cancellation.
A
forum like that always has an edgy character in there, floating on the periphery
while aiming barbed taunts at the centre, and that’s pretty much Polidori’s
role in the literary space.
Polidori gave us the aristocratic vampire
preying on young women. Lord Ruthven, the vampire, or vampyre, is based on a man who had little time for the undead – Byron,
though there’s a cottage industry out there trying to convince us of his own
vampirism. But this blog post is about Count Dracula and not Lord Byron, and I
fear we must move on before sunrise surprises us.
In short, it’s a good while after The Vampyre before we reach Dracula, by way of Varney the Vampire and other literary routes most quaint and
curious. For completeness, we should add alternative titles to the well-known
tales…
Frankenstein
is all about The Modern Prometheus. Varney’s
vampiric saga also travels under the guise of The Feast of Blood, and a last-minute change to Dracula deprives us of the story named The Un-Dead.
If we are to believe the notion that Lord
Byron was (and remains to this day) a real-life vampire, then we must go along
with the awkward literary notion that Byron wrote everything. He penned The
Vampyre, scribbled Frankenstein, created
Sherlock, and wrote up his exploits as Varney…
And
then “in retirement” Byron went on to write Dracula,
The Railway Children, 1984, The Phantom Menace, several episodes of
the TV soap EastEnders, and, in a
failed attempt at dispelling the mythology, this very blog post.
My point, in detouring through this
graveyard and that cobbled street, is to consider Dracula against the backdrop of a blood-red sky as we approach the
setting of the sun. There’s before Stoker’s novel and after…
Before, you certainly had the aristocratic
vampire in fiction. After, you had a legion of aristocratic vampires. You can
hardly move through fiction without encountering Count Orlok (Dracula, hiding
from copyright law), Countess Dracula, Count Yorga, or every edgy aristocratic
vampire character from the roleplaying game Vampire:
The Masquerade.
As to that last, I fervently avoided the
aristocratic cliché when playing the game. When you think of roleplaying games
and aristocratic vampires, you are led in the direction of Dungeons & Dragons and D&D’s
very own Dracula photocopy, Count Strahd von Zarovich, ruler of Barovia. (Curiously, Dungeons & Dragons emerged from the American Lake Geneva. Coincidence? Byron wrote the Monster Manual, obviously.)
Your mileage in subverting vampiric cliché
in your own fiction will vary – for the dead ride quickly – but, damn it, over
in the fantasy world of D&D, the Hammer Horror treatment comes across as
a bite refreshing…
Moving swiftly on…
I revisited Dracula. It is a dramatic telling of Johnny Foreigner invading
London. You can see the tabloid headlines today…
EASTERN EUROPEAN
CRIME LORD AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT CORRUPTS ENGLISH ROSE…AND MILKS OUR BENEFIT
SYSTEM. HE’S EXPLOITING THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE AND HAVING A LAUGH WHILE
ABOUT IT.
Of note, I once stepped onto Ellis Island
and straight into the viewing of a play on illegal immigrant Bela Lugosi’s
acceptance into America. On his side, he wasn’t an actual vampire. And, today,
if a vampire like Lord Byron came out of “retirement” and promised to use his
vast and secret fortune to fund his own happy meals from out of a blood bank,
would we use vampire as a term of
abuse?
We’re human. Of course we would. (I have to
say we’re human. This camouflages the fact that the blog post was written by
Lord Byron, and is fresh to print from his holiday hideaway retirement cottage in Transylvania. Cottage. Castle. The terms are
interchangeable.)
There’s so much lore around the creation of Dracula, and of Frankenstein before it, that the best thing to do is ignore all the
psychobabble and delve straight into the words. Visit these books. Revisit
these books. Judge for yourselves.
I like Dracula
for the framing of the story. Readers are invited to piece together the narrative
as the clues come in. It’s a Victorian detective piece, and you are forgiven if
you end up wondering where Sherlock Holmes is in all this.
Stoker’s novel is out of copyright, and the Dracula/Holmes crossover is not the
original idea it once was. There’s a well-worn path from Baker Street to Castle
Dracula, now. I have at least one comic book adaptation on the shelves, around
here, somewhere.
From time to time, I revisit works. Some
books are worth reading again, even though unread books glare at me as I pass
them by to remove the stake from Stoker’s novel one more time. In literary
terms, Dracula is bound to outlive
all of us. The book is still in print to this day, and has taken on an Un-Life
all of its own. It’s better for a classic to be an Un-Dead book than an unread one.
Tuesday, 24 July 2018
BOARDGAMES AND OTHER PLANS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.
And now you know that I had other plans.
Trying to track the Whitechapel murderer to his lair...
Assisting Sherlock Holmes in curious investigations...
In writing stories, I read my work aloud in the different accents of the characters passing through semi-imaginary worlds.
We'll explore the idea of running games with someone who faces more than a few difficulties in getting through play. This includes Tourette tics, Coprolalia, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
As with everything else, these plans take a million years and a million more. But I am under the gun, and must away to unbox a game in front of several cameras.
Pictured above: Pandemic Legacy, with 12 mm dice replacing stickers. Fury of Dracula, 3rd edition, receiving an undead helping hand. Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective: Whitechapel/West End adventures.
Deep Sea Adventure with a playmat replacing the submarine token. Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu. A cluster of ships spilling across the board of Black Fleet.
Melissa C. Water appears by kind permission.