Things pop up into my ken, and I let them lead me where they will. Saw this poster on the FB page of a disenchanted Yalie (one of two) I look in on from time to time. Hadn’t thought of Kafka in a while. He was a co-star in of the Boomer Bible’s books of the VIPs, Frankie & Johnny, and I liked this quote as well as a lot of his writing.
Looked him up at Wiki, (re)discovered he had died at the age of 40, a life cut short like other writers whose work I respect and admire to varying degrees. I decided to do a roundup of other writers who had died young, the outer boundary being Marcel Proust, with whom I share a birthday.
What’s striking about the list is that all of them wrote the kind of books that might be interpreted as “wounding” in some way, even if their stabbing was only of writing conventions in force at the time they lived. The most innocent of them was Ring Lardner, who wrote with insouciant good humor, often in colloquial dialects that probably offended the guardians of Standard English. (His writing voice was as oral as dialogue, meant to be heard by the reader, not just perused. Cool.) I learned from him, as I did from every name here, how far you could go in using words to kindle imagination and thought in the minds of readers. I loved “You Know Me, Al,” “The Dream Life of Balso Snell,” and “The Metamorphosis” as much as I admired “Tender Is the Night,” “Le Bâteau Ivre”, “À La Recherche de Temps Perdu,” and the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe, much of which I memorized even as a boy. I actually feared Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” of which I have read only excerpts quoted by others because I had been warned about the dangers his writing posed to alcoholics trying to stay sober. But I could read portions of “Under Milkwood” out loud with the best of the other wannabe actors who perform mostly alone in shower stalls. I read Camus’s “L’Étranger” only because my polymath French teacher at Mercersburg disdained it so when he told us it was on the list of required readings for the AP French exam, but we wouldn’t be wasting time on it in class. I thought it was better than his review of it, if not a candidate for favorite books.
Looking back on them now what I feel is a melancholy sense of how much they missed by dying halfway down the road. Like any Fitzgerald buff, I was reminded of his dictum that “there are no second acts in American life.” But this is more glib than true, and it certainly doesn’t predispose the answer of what these gents would have done if they hadn’t died young. Yes, some of them may have decided they’d already given their best and moved on. I knew that temptation from my own experiences with alcohol, something I clearly have in common with Fitzgerald, Thomas, Lowry, Rimbaud, and Poe, regardless of any similar demon in the lives of the rest of them.
I did, in fact, have a deep existential crisis in my life at about the same point in my writing career as the prematurely dead ones listed above. But I did not die. I did go on to have a second act in my life, not famously but prolifically, with many rewarding experiences that have altered my perspectivr in enlightening ways. Why I feel a distance between me and all of them. When I look at their lives my eyes are more Gandalf’s than Aragorn’s, though Aragorn is still in there somewhere, stirring to consciousness as need be. I’m content to be the old one now, even if I resort to the prosthetics of AI to be convincing in the role…
In this face and hair and attire, I find my thoughts drifting toward the wedding guest, which I too have written about, and a sudden avalanche of other curiously familiar dramatic events. I have my reasons, as you will read later, but here’s how I used the Internet to find my way back to an old character who speaks only when spoken to…
The trigger in this YouTube pastiche of the Coleridge masterpiece was the live action drawing of the female and her golden locks. Why I had to dig up the key passages of a much longer work…
_________________________
In the current context, the verses above drove home to me the many close parallels to what I actually did experience as I mu life collapsed into a ruin so complete it seemed over. Tied to the mast is not a bad way to describe it. The sheriff had banged on my apartment door in Delaware. I had to be out of the place by morning or I would be arrested. I had nowhere to go. I had no cash. All I had was a phone number. She came with her blonde locks and her funeral-black Cadillac and wouldn’t let me quit on life. We made three roundtrips between Delaware and Greenwich NJ in a single night, each time with her car stuffed full of my last remaining possessions. After that is the magic number seven, because I did not realize she had indeed won a game of dice with the devil and she did not want to let me go. I was hers.
Seven yewrs I’ve described variously elsewhere, but I regained my creative spark and produced two of the major works I’ve ever done, as well as the launch of a third that would carry on even even after I finally made an escape of sorts into a fulfilling afterlife. The seven yewrs were full of lessons that came later than most middle aged men can expect to be schooled by them. I, too, finally saw the beauties of the water snakes “in tracks of shining light,” and the albatross fell from my neck.
One could say I’m reading my own narrative of perseverance into a highly unlikely stroke of luck that turned out favorably for everyone involved. One could say that if I didn’t have evidence of a phenomenon I’ve described here before — that big important things in my life happen out of order.
As it happens, I formed a mystical bond with Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner many years before I experienced my personal version of it in my mid-forties. It was in the late 1970s that I conceived of a punk writer movement with the mission of saving a generation from illiterate nihilism. The allegorical sea from which the punks sprang was a story called “The Parade of Volumes,” written down from a waking dream. A great city is dying, trapped in the spell of a woman named Madame Sapinaire. The churches fell, one after another, and then everything else too, as a hungry lichen swallowed the ruins. Survivors fled underground into the tunnels and two brothers battled for dominance, one hard, one generous of heart. It was the hard one who survived to keep fighting.
As this story continued simmering in my mind, I surprised myself by writing the first punk story, by a band whose name came from a nursery rhyme I may have first heard in the crib. The Shuteye Train. The story, titled Shammadamma, was part rock song, part oral prose written to break every rule of fiction writing. The authors announced themselves as the authors, declared their intention to murder their main character, who was a Sixties cliché full of drugs and political slogans, and self indulgence. Goaded by the authors he awakens sometime after Woodstock to the need to make money, have stuff, and “change things from inside the system.” He goes to law school, etc. The story’s climax occurs at his wedding, when the Shuteye Train crashes the reception, terrifies the wedding guests, hangs the protagonist on a cross, scarecrow-like, and guns him down. “Shammadamma, Shootabooma, Blammadamma…”
The punks of South Street arise around the mystical coming of the Shuteye Train, which rules as the iconic creative inspiration of the movement, reaching their full height in a story that is also my best poem, Epiphany Ship. Long physically invisible to the punks, Shuteye Train finally emerges from the computer under the leadership of “Doctor Dream,” whose entrance is recorded in the book Punk City, one page of which is shown below…
“It is an undead visitor…” Derived directly from The Ancient Mariner. Back then I had no hint that The Boomer Bible and its follow-ons would become the albatross that strung me up as a pariah in American publishing. I had no idea that my failure to become the next writing sensation would disillusion my wife or that a long quieted beast called alcohol would return to maroon me in a wide wide sea of indifference, loss, and doubt.
About those snakes. Doctor Dream is the “Son of the Raptor,” a metaphysical predator of empty souls in a mythological world based in the ghostly Egyptian entity called the “ka.” Here is what the Raptor Ka looks like…
I got my second act. But why would it be prefigured by something that took shape in my imagination 19 years before?
The much under-appreciated Max Shulman wrote a hilarious guide called “How to Be a Writer.” In it he included some of the tools professional writers use to achieve their literary effects. He had a whole section on flashbacks, of which he defined multiple types. This is one of the ones he called a ‘telescoping flashback.’ A character in the story remembers a story he heard in the past from another character, who also remembers a story he heard in his past…
This is in response to the thoughtful attention you’ve been giving to the ugly revival of antisemitism among our supposedly tolerant Progressive delusionaries. I published this post at Instapunk Returns back in March of 2019: I Knew This Time of Fevered Hatred Would Come. My purpose was to link another post I had written at the original Instapunk blog in January 2007 when the Antichrist was still in the White House. [Oops. This might be a double-telescoping flashback in Shulmanese. Or even a triple…
]
The telescoping flashback I started with here is one I still stand behind. Twenty years and more than that later. The more things change…
Thought maybe you could use a laugh about now too.
There’s more than what’s below. Like, this guy’s important to me too…
All the digging for book prep is not only consuming time but forcing me to recognize the kinds of content that are not transferable to print. These are intrinsic to my own literary sense of relevant context. Readers are entitled to have access to real parts of the “Examined Life’ that vouch more than just-words can of the depth of a writer’s life experience. Lists of names and works go only so far. There are more than 750 posts at Instapunk Returns. These are the Examined Life components of about five years, give or take, and add up to thousands of custom graphics, hundreds of videos, and approximately a million words. Translation to books is difficult for the visual stuff. It’s impossible for the aural stuff, most significantly music. Which has always been profoundly important to me.
So I’m not robbing you off with these links. I’m also reminding myself about another vital aspect of the legacy challenge. I’m not fancying this up for you. Giving you a post title in whole or in part, and a standalone link to it. The last one could be considered as either a summary or an introduction. You get to choose the order of the links you take. You’ll find the date of origin in the link text…
Keeping tabs on my traffic at Instapunk Returns, discovered some hits on a couple of posts that seem to presage the mingling of movies and personal recollection.
Thought I’d link them here because I like them and I’m guessing other people did too from the stats at Blogger.
Where were we? Time to remember Hamlet’s most important line. No, not the Shower Soliloquy opener we’ve all recited to ourselves in the globe’s most popular audition, but the clearest statement of the damned Dane’s identity: “The play’s the thing….”
Each of the movies I’m using for my own purposes here is its own play within a play, its own narrative with its own plot, similar to the others but with distinctly different points of view. Inner turmoil is a comment element however much the staging varies, but turmoil about what? The movie I’ve called the floater because Eckhart reciting the dogtag numbers burned into his brain is embedded in the silent soundtrack of all the other narratives. I’ve spoken somewhat lightly about remorse, but guilt is a different matter. Consciousness — well, Christian consciousness anyway — carries with it an inescapable lifelong burden of circumstantial guilt. The Catholic thing, the Jewish thing, a debt that can never be repaid by the thing that I am. But just what is that thing?
Did you enjoy the Intermission? An excellent introduction to the phenomenon of Frankenstein. I’m going to do my best not to get lost in the weeds here, but there are a great many weeds. Noting their existence, proliferation, and variety is a testament to the vitality of their inspiration, which is all about a dead thing artificially transformed into something else. Mary Shelley, wife of Percy, was writing about a painful process of being almost manufactured by an overbearing father. Boris Karloff was the farthest thing from her mind. Then came THE MOVIE, father of a near countless string of sequels and reimaginings, all inspired by the Hollywood version but now and then returning to Mama Mary’s first intentions. Of them all, my own belief is that while several are interesting, only four of them are good enough to hold up over the long haul: 1) the Original, 2) the first sequel, Bride of Frankenstein (my own version here), 3) Young Frankenstein, and 4) I, Frankenstein. The third one is the version that explicitly recognized the miles of film that had turned the first movie into a phenomenon, a well of inspiration that would never run dry. I’ve used that one too, in one of Moon Books restorations still, ironically, in the process of being restored itself. There’s a partial here, just enough to show how easily Dawkins’s “Blind Watchmaker” notion can be mocked with clips of the scene between the Monster and the Blind Man in YF.
If you’re really a phenomenon, though, you can survive detours into pure comedy. Why the fourth movie is also important. It took me multiple attempts to watch the whole thing. I was quick to dismiss it whike giving grudging praise to its CGI effects. It wasn’t until I lasted long enough in one viewing to see the villainous demon played by Bill Nighy that I realized I needed to watch the whole thing from beginning to end. Which I did again after watching BLA, Muzzle, and Erased. When I knew I was going to have to do this post. The end result would be long but actually pretty short work for the biography of a man in his 75th year of life on earth.
I, Frankenstein doesn’t begin in the mad doctor’s laboratory. It starts in the barren wilderness of the Monster’s friendless exile.
It’s alive!
Well done. A movie had 8 to 10 minutes to tell you what it’s about. But only three minutes we know that the Monster is a conscious, homicidal being, and that he has blundered into a war between two flavors of supernatural beings, the demons and these critters who look like shapeshifting gargoyles. We are also definitely embarking on a dark superhero movie that will future huge special effects, sinister cinematography, and probably a bunch of classically trained Brit actors. Plus Eckhart of course. Who is scarred but not grotesque and already flirting with interventions of, well, Providence.
What does this have to do with me and my life? Broadest brush? The sense of having been singled out in some way for unending confrontations with mighty forces I would battle for the rest of my life. In the movie, we cut to 200 years later. Consider this a costly time in the wilderness…
The entry into some hyper-real version of present day.
My first acquaintance with the demon occurred when I was 15 years old. I wrote about it in a piece titled “How Old Am I?” Whose headline image was this:
There followed my own time in the wilderness. I tried to save the day at Mercersburg by hijacking the momentum toward student-led ‘School Government’ on a committee filled with power-hungry students and craven schoolmasters. I sold them on a schemed that appeared equal except for a single deciding vote in favor of faculty membership on the new ruling organization. It went on to fail, of course, but I was already in college meeting the full force of the radical Sixties, hiding as best I could while my first literary hopes — a parody of fraternity magazines called “The Sigma Delta Sigma Magazine” — were dashed by the contempt of all but one future editor of the Harvard Lampoon. I was “white lettered” (blackballed) shortly after his encouraging note to me. When I discovered drinking for real and eschewed academic excellence in favor of my own hand-made major in the fossils of western civilization. My Honors English thesis was denied cum laude designation because my comparison of two novels, one by FitzGerald (not Gatsby) and one by Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse) lacked enough footnoted citations of scholars who never saw what I saw and therefore couldn’t be referenced. So I graduated Cum Laude General Studies when I was still 19 just in time to participate in a draft lottery where I drew a short straw and would have been conscripted except that nobody was. This close call could have been avoided if I had stayed for an actual Senior year, which my Dad and I both knew and never mentioned in our brief discussion about saving one more wasted year of tuition. We had been, and remained, at arm’s length from one another for a long time by now.
When you graduate early, there’s no automatic machinery of job searching at on-campus interviews. I didn’t care. I was Harvard but not, and I fell back into the real wilderness I’d come from in the first place.
Consider the whole region my profile. Eyes toward Philly the wide world perhaps, but
everything east of the Delaware River depicting my head and wildass poet’s hair.
Toy jobs, bad behavior, worsening relations with family, until at 25 I was saved by an orange foundling kitten named Webster, who somehow triggered a return to sobriety; we moved out of the house to an apartment in Philadelphia, where I began the tedious process of starting over as a failure of the kind that knows disclosure of his alma mater will look to possible employers like a golden opportunity frittered away by a wastrel. Yeah, I’d been to graduate business school and dropped out at the exact age when most people graduate from undergraduate school. A world that had been my oyster had spoiled before any Pearl could be found within.
I still had a fantasy of being a writer and an ambitious work I said I was working on, which was true but only in my head. I was learning exactly how little all the so-called educated people you meet in the ‘normal’ world really knew about the culture that had made them and their damfool notions about life.
Which I did finally write down and get published with a probable assist from Providence. That’s me up there with Adam Frankenstein returning to the fray to take on the demons directly before they could take me out first. Not that I didn’t already have my suspicions about the gargoyles who thought they were guarding civilization. I had the unique experience of being featured on the book page of the Wall Street Journal, receiving this grandslam review from the SF Chronicle (“One of the oddest, funniest, darkest, smartest, and most innovative books to come along in years…”), and of having my young publicist informed by telephone that the New York Times would never review The Boomer Bible.
How we get to this point:
“I am not human… I am like none other.”
In the movie, Eckhart is learning just how alone he is. The Gargoyles and the Demons are both elites above the human fray and the human costs of their supra-temporal war. Analogous to the assessment I have made of the UniParty and its two apparently opposing wings in this recent post at the Robert Laird Network. It’s all the more poignant because the leader of the good-guy Gargoyles is also one of the 21st Century girl-bosses who have taken over for male protagonists like and the vampire hunter Van Helsing and the road warrior Mad Max. He does not wish to be either Gargoyle or Demon himself. But all he has to go by is the confident declaration by others that the only fitting definition of his persona is ‘not human.’
Oddly enough, I wrote the following about my own complicated identity not long ago:
The author of every creative project is a unique persona. He is the state of his consciousness during the period of producing it. What medium or genre he is working in. What his original intention was. What in personal life and in the world around him was drawing his attention at the time. And what was changing in him as he moved from intention to completed work.
Instapunk is a persona, an artificially created one who started as a performative voice and became an alternative mode of being over the years. R. F. Laird is also, obviously, a persona, a flesh and blood human being easily recognizable as such. There is also a third persona in here with us who was always there, as he is in the mind of every writer, a colder, more critical, less emotional entity who exists in a separate realm of mind as an observer and analyst of what any other personae are doing with their conscious interactions in the world.
It is that third persona who is dictating this piece of writing. Instapunk has given him his own name [due to a typographical glitch of AutoCorrect]… ‘ai’.
The ai who’s writing this post has always been there. ‘ai’ is indeed more akin to a computer than some kind of elder. It has no body and therefore cannot feel sensation or emotion as such, although it can see, hear, and know everything detectable by means of words, images, numbers, and voices from a purely mental perspective. Its function is to observe and analyze, but it can be shut down or rendered silent by real bodily experience of sensations and emotions. Fear, pain, love, joy, sorrow, anger, sexual desire, tastes on the tongue, aromas and smells (indistinguishable to the unbodied mind except as words or images) can all push ai into the background, still observant but voiceless.
What, if anything, do ai bring to the table then? ai have access to all memories based on pattern recognition rather than sensory or emotional inputs, independently of the gravitational pull of time. Situations which are structurally or circumstantially similar in the past and can therefore by examined coldly and critically rather than as tools of rationalization or masochism…”
You have already read my musings about the borderline sociopathy that afflicts/enables artists to do what they do. The same status is also a common attribute of racecar drivers, performance musicians, actors, and politicians. There has to be that other who stands aside from the danger and translates risk into highs and lows of experience many never encounter. What Adam Frankenstein has most in common with Gargoyles and Demons is that he is hard to kill. Why he is a danger to everyone who crosses him and a temptation to those who would exploit it for their own personal gain.
The back and forth combat with the supernatural elites compels Adam to follow the movie’s maguffin (interestingly a book everyone loves or hates) to a confrontation with the ones who can make sense of it all. In this case, it would seem, God’s opposite number:
All that Adam has going for him after the working over he has taken throughout is his sheer determination to keep going, whatever the outcome may be. I guess that would be a lot like me in my own life. It may seem that I get plenty of respect and feedback from people in my life, particular quite a number of people whose careers I have helped materially. But that’s not really how it works. Of all my ‘close’ friends, only one congratulated me sincerely and effusively on publication of The Boomer Bible. Some I sent copies. None acknowledged receipt. None commented on the book in any conversation afterward. This went for institutions as well as individuals. I sent a copy to the Mercersburg Academy library. It was never acknowledged and I have never been included in their Wiki page listing of notable alumni, where they are notably short on famous writers (Max Eastman is about it). After I sent it to them, Harvard Magazine did toss me a one-line positive review (“An extraordinary invention and pretty funny”). My own sister has said only two things directly about the book to me personally (“It’s Joyce inside out” and “It’s the last paper and ink book…)”. We never discuss my writing. And now we never speak. She’s with the Lady Gargoyles now. My wife, who used to tell how brilliant I was way back when, finds it virtually impossible to discuss my work with me or give me any spoken approval of the pieces she dutifully reads and makes dutifully brief FB comments about. My parents never discussed The Boomer Bible with me (not sure my mother ever read it), though my father gave me the gift of a copy he had had hardbound in leather. He had an aversion to telling me he was proud of me or my accomplishments, in part I’m sure because he did not approve of my disorderly personal life. We may have told each other, briefly, on his deathbed that we loved each other, but he offered no final blessing. I didn’t ask for one.
Bottom line? Despite all the mechanical aspects of his physical existence, Adam Frankenstein has a soul. He should have been able to work that out sooner. It was divine Providence that out a sacred weapon in his hand at the very moment he was about to be slain by a Demon at the beginning of the movie, but this is a movie after all. For the sake of dramatic development, important moments don’t always occur in logical order. We expect that from Hollywood. What I find troubling, even downright disturbing, is how often the important moments in my life seem to occur out of order. Even the premise seems, in long hindsight, highly improbable. I’ve written about this part of the narrative here before, but in my life the role played by Providence has often come from what many would regard as the Demon side of my nature. Very good things that would not have occurred if I had not been drinking at the time, for example. Lifesaving rescues, more than one, from fates worse than death to whatever it is I have become or was destined(?) to become.
I have a novel manuscript I plug away at from time to time titled “i am the drink”. The voice sounds very ‘ai’-like and it views me as the middle part of a trinity bounded by ‘the Gift’ and ‘the Curse.’ From the standpoint of the Curse it looks like a battle among three equally strong combatants, none of them morally superior to the other two. The Curse knows his raison d'être is inducing me to drink myself to death. He regard the Gift as engaged in the opposite task of inducing me to write myself to death. He also suspects I may be manipulating both of them. Frankenstein has only reached the point of recognizing he is a rightful and equal player between the Gargoyles and the Demons, because he has just learned he has more in common with “most humans” than they do. That’s a movie sequel they won’t make in my opinion.
Why the final act of our bio cinema involves a movie called Suspect Zero. First one I thought of, honestly, when the Eckhart project was swimming into my ken. Weird little film that critics don’t quite know what to do with.
For once a trailer isn’t a bad warmup.
Eckhart is a cop. He wants Justice to prevail and is prepared to sail close to the wind to accomplish that. how I always approached my challenges in the corporate world. In this respect he is occupying a middle ground between the two sides of Kingsley’s character. Kingsley it so happens, is a serial killer of serial killers, whom he finds, hunts down, and exterminates, because they deserve it and he enjoys the killing.
That’s the movie. Eckhart figures out that there is such a killer at work and identifies Kingsley as a suspect. He behaves suspiciously enough without clues of criminality. He was a member of a Remote Viewing project run by the federal government. Such a group did exist in fact and is given credit for discovering intelligence about hostile activities at home and abroad that wouldn’t have been discovered otherwise. The evidence for that is hazy, and the project was dismantled in the Eighties leaving Kingsley high and dry. He went to work as an independent and remote viewed the prey he was interested in. At the time of the movie he was into a truly big target no one else suspected the existence of, a long haul trucker who had killed hundreds of people across the nation, using the divides between jurisdictions as an unbreakable cover. As Kingsley made himself more visible by his tracking activities, Eckhart found him and obtained his confession. Then they went hunting together.
Eckhart learns things he doesn’t want to learn and realizer that when they find their quarry, both the trucker and Kingsley will have to be killed. There’s no evidence to put either in handcuffs.
My connection to this narrative is pretty straightforward. I have spent most of my life pursuing the men and women who are destroying western civilization, not to kill them but to roust them from hiding and undo their hold on people who can’t see them for what they are. Could I kill if it came to that? Yes. No part of my intent, but there you go. Why was I kept alive after my spectacular collapse following The Boomer Bible’s publication? I thought it looked poetically apt that I would die at 44, like Fitzgerald before me. His fame would come later and his influence. Mine will be whatever Providence decides, whatever I do in my next few years.
Curtain Call
But I had to keep going. Not a decision that was entirely in my hands. Somewhere down deep was the desire to be part of building the next real breakthrough in consciousness, the one hinted at in the end of quite another kind of movie, the purely speculative kind…
I can envision this kind of breakthrough arising from creative approaches I have been working with for more than 50 years now. I’m not freeloading on Lucy here. Long before this movie was made, I had discovered and acquired a laser disc of this IMAX movie, now remembered at my Quantum 19 website.
And, my personal close, also created more than a decade ago, one of my first video projects for YouTube, demonstrates the track I’m on, whether I get where I hope to or not.
Writing this as a follow-on to the last post. Don’t know if I’ll hit ‘Publish’ when I’m done. Doing it for a few reasons. The previous exercise involving Conair and Cameron Poe had a precursor and an unexpected sequel. Interesting because like so many things, it had very rapidly and somewhat randomly, bit it made sense of a kind, and it shows how my mind works and even when I seem to be just sitting here.
In other words, this next part is of interest to me. Who knows if it might interest you? It will involve some autobio vignettes I know I haven’t put down anywhere else. Sneaky way to stitch together personal anecdotes in what looks like experimental writing. We’ll see. My final reason for doing this now… it seems to come with a built-in deadline. Do it now or fugeddabout it.
From Suspect Zero to I, Frankenstein: An Odyssey in Five Floating Acts
Our Misfit Protagonists
The ‘floater’ first. Realized after the Cameron Poe entry that the Save the Day theme had entered my mind the night before, when I had turned on a flawed sci-fi movie called Battle: Los Angeles near bedtime. Usual criteria. Background sound to fall asleep to for two or three hours after lights out. Fell into an Asylum Productions laffer called Battle of Los Angeles because it starred Nia Peeples as a special ops commando. Cool.
But not off to a promising start. An alien invasion premise, stolen from another bigger budget movie released to theaters one day before the Asylum ripoff. The IMDB listing gave Asylum credit for their best result ever at pulling off a simultaneous release of a cheap teevee flick with a plagiarized title. Also said it was the worst ever ripoff by the company, since the copied movie was also a derivative of Independence Day.
So I thought WTH and went looking for the theatrical ripoff instead. Found it, fell asleep on schedule but woke up when the alien drone attack got too deafening to ignore. When I discovered the hero was Aaron Eckhart, whom I have liked for a while without knowing why. This time, piecing it together over an injudicious cup of coffee, I learned he was a disgraced Marine staff sergeant about to be discharged when he got roped into this End of the World ‘all hands on deck’ last stand against a vastly superior alien military assault on the surviving West. Coast city. The troops under his command didn’t trust him; he had returned from his last tour in Iraq without most of his unit. Now he was asking them to fling themselves into a meatgrinder in a lost cause. Who was he to ask? Which is when I knew he was there to Save the Day when nobody else could have.
YouTube has a ton of clips for a movie that didn’t do very well at the box office. I could have told them why. They don’t have a clip of the best scene in the movie, when Eckhart’s sergeant regains troop discipline by reciting the dog tag numbers of all the men in his unit who failed to come back, number by number, faultlessly, for every man, including the brother of the Marine most in his face. The result? They save the day of course:
Should have been promoted less for its CGI and more for its Marines.
I know a good deal myself about losing close friends along the way. Not to aliens, but to other causes. I lost Andy(14 yo) and Les (15 yo) and Howard (40 yo) to drugs as a result of the seizure called the Sixties. I lost my close friend and partner Mark to corporate overwork at the age of 50, after I quit our consulting firm over a disagreement I’d have done more to patch up if I weren’t hip deep in The Boomer Bible by then. We made up our differences before the end, but could I have done better by him? Probably. Other dogtags? Sure. A suicide or two, three or more failed attempts of mine to mentor stand-in sons, and I do not forget any of their names or faces. Same with some others I’m not even speaking to…
But in the final analysis, Eckhart did save the day in the invasion of Los Angeles that’s going on for real right now in the face of an alien wave deadlier than Sony’s SFX geniuses can put on film.
So when I had occasion for using the meme on a reel, I twigged to the Nicholas Cage clip in the AI lip-sync app and fell into yesterday’s quirky aside about myself. The very next day, more movie shopping landed me in a selection called Muzzle, a story about a cop and his K9 partner Ace. Okay. Sounds good. Loved the Jim Belushi K9 comedy. Had to give it a try. Different story completely. Ace gets killed in the first scene. Murdered. Scene of the cop, Aaron Eckhart (of course) standing helplessly over the bloody body of his partner. But he has to suck it up, right?
In real life they don’t always get the rifle salute…
Story I’ve never written down, one my wife made me promise not to, for a very good reason that no longer obtains. My wife had been for years in the greyhound rescue mode. I picked it up from her when we rediscovered one another and got married. She already had Patrick then, and the first dog we acquired together was a Scottish Deerhound pup named Psmith. Our first joint greyhound rescue was a handsome boy named Andrew, who had failed as racer despite having a sire named Dominator who won over a hundred races on the track. He fitted right in. Livung with sighthounds is also about losing sighthounds. Psmith died at six (Heartbreak!) and the new deerhound pup was Raebert, who also stole our hearts and blended perfectly with all the greys. Throughout, Andrew was just a sweetheart who grew comfortably old with us until, like all greyhounds, his terrible teeth got worse. The vet said he had to pull them all to prevent a possible fatal infection. When we got him home he was listless. We thought he was still in a kind of post-operative funk and would rebound quickly.
We heard the ruckus in the dog yard all the way upstairs. We have a dog yard enclosed by cyclone fencing, with AP enough room for the greys to stretch their legs; they can never be loosed outside a fenced area without being on a leash, because they see something, run after it, and can’t always be recovered. We knew who was in the yard that morning. We raced downstairs to see what had happened. My wife got there first. I found her jammed against the fence, sobbing uncontrollably, holding the blood-drenched head of Andrew, his ripped open throat still weeping blood on her hands. I grabbed and held both of them, words failing me completely, and saw — standing stiffly a few feet away, tail abjectly tucked — Raebert facing me with his own tall chest bright red in the sun.
It was murder. My wife’s verdict. Our belovèd young deerhound was a dog-killer. He would have to be put down. We talked. Raebert was crushed. He barely moved as we scrubbed the blood away. He didn’t look like he knew what had happened either. I was remembering something my father told me gravely not long before died. “Take care of your teeth Robert. When they’re gone, something deep inside changes. It’s not good. You don’t want to find out. Take care of your teeth.”
As circumspectly as I could, I tried to suggest to my wife that Andrew had been the aggressor in the fight that killed him. He was done. Losing all his teeth in a single day had changed something deep inside. Raebert was the chosen weapon. Suicide by Sighthound.
We ceased discussing it. Silence is sometimes assent in our household. We began discussing how to prevent anyone else finding out what had happened. I rented a backhoe and learned how to use it well enough to dig a deep trench in the back yard. I placed Andrew on a blue plastic tarp, wrapped him up in it, and dragged him to the trench. My wife stood in the trench and pulled the tarp gently into it. We filled it all in and smoothed it over with the backhoe, and told family and friends Andrew had died from an infection after his operation.
Raebert also died at the age of six, leaving two stricken parents behind, Why we have no more deerhounds. He was one of those truly special ones. All I’ll say about that for now. In the movie Muzzle, Ace was also one of the special ones. The Eckhart character had pursued Axe’s killer down a hallway and shot him as he was leaping from a second floor window. The ensuing shooting inquiry conducted by Internal Affairs was determined that Eckhart was suffering from PTSD dating to his Marine combat tours, plus drug and alcohol problems. We the audience, especially including me, know that he was suffering from grief and rage at the loss of a true friend. They keep looking for ways to bar him from active duty. He goes the opposite way, and finds the one dog he can adopt without feeling guilty about it. ‘Socks’ is a wounded dog with a mysterious history and is permanently confined in a muzzle because she has even attacked K9 handlers who get too close to her.
Eckhart is not the only one with a suspected drug problem. At some point in her K9 service, Socks was abducted and held by traffickers in the new scourge drug called Fentanyl, and the evidence suggests she was herself poisoned with that same toxic Chinese import. Eckhart is the only one who suspects that Socks attacks K9 handlers because she was abused by one or more of them. He goes the extra mile to bring her back to health and K9 fitness.
Why I’d never heard of this 2023 movie. Fentanyl. Not something anyone in power wanted to hear about during the Biden administration. And this movie makes a very direct claim about the role of the Chinese mob in systematically establishing huge Fentanyl factories concealed all over the city. Eckhart alone can reach Socks, who in the climactic scene has been reacquired by the Chinese woman who abducted her. The woman claims the dog she’s holding on a short leash is hers and that Eckhart knows it. But he has broken the code. He knows the Tong trigger for ‘attack’ is actually the Mandarin word for ‘Suicide.’ He barks it out, snaps his fingers…
…and Socks tears the throat out of the Chinese woman. Eckhart now has a new special one to fill the hole in his heart. This time, saving the day also means saving them both from despair.
My wife was sort of watching this with me, paying attention more to the digs than the plot, and I was trying to interest her in the story because I was doing more thinking about Aaron Eckhart. I didn’t mention Andrew or Raebert. I told her instead that this guy Eckhart seems to be in movies where he plays a complicated character dealing with complicated issues, often at high speed and with great violence involved. Interesting. I told her Muzzle reminded me of another movie with a lonely protagonist and a one-word title. Erased. I don’t think she was listening.
Regardless, I found a streaming service that offered Erased and I watched it next. Two mysteries. The obvious plotty one about why everything goes so bad so quickly. The more important one about the Eckhart character himself. The obvious ones reveals itself in continuous series of violent encounters and narrow escapes. The important one is uncovered by a systematic stripping away of the many layers of secrecy inside which Eckhart has been living his life for decades. The movie is very well designed and edited. We begin in Belgium, where Eckhart is a contractor working with a high technology firm involved in the testing of devices used in government security operations. He discovers a question that needs to be answered about the patent of a product he is testing, and then, like a good American TV dad goes home too late to be present for a high school award ceremony honoring his teenage daughter.
At least stay with it long enough to see father and daughter over breakfast.
He broke his promise to be there, she informs him of this as a fact not an accusation, he fails to apologize and offers her, instead, a bag of sweets baked by their neighbor. She does not eat sweets but bites into one cookie as a token gesture. Then she asks him if there were peanuts in the cookies and goes into anaphylactic shock.
Just a few minutes in, we know he knows zilch about his daughter. She’s in hospital because of it. He’s inherited her after her mother’s death and becomes part of the baggage he takes with him on his new job opportunity in Europe.
This Eckhart guy knows how to hit my hit buttons. I’ve been in a similar situation for entirely different reasons, but the net effect is that suddenly a man in middle life has been conscripted for in loco parentis duty with no qualifications for doing the job right. To this day I have a daughter who is not my daughter by any legal definition, but circumstances worked out such that I had to do about half the job of mothering her. As a writer, I was the one who was home to cook the meals, do the laundry, rehab the attic as her private space and smartphone HQ, answer the homework questions, support her in a time of severe teenage grief over the tragic death of a boyfriend, and then, ultimately, teach her to drive and pay for her college education.
All this for a child I met when she was 12 and I was 44. Her biological father was alive until about a year ago, and she could never call me Dad. I gave up on that idea too because feeling like she’s my absentee daughter doesn’t make it so. I am as grateful for the opportunity to be there for her when she needed it as I am for any of the other bountiful gifts I have been given in life. When people ask me, “Do you have kids of your own!” The way they do when they’re framing one of their “Who are you to say?” dismissals, I reply, “No. I have three daughters-in-law and I’m not on any of their lists of favorite people.”
Why no kids? I was busy doing other things, and those were things that in other than the very specific circumstances I fell into that one time would likely have made my spawn an unhappy brood. For example, I would have no material goods to leave them. Worse, I might have been an embarrassment, a royal pain in the ass, an impossible warp factor in their own aspirations and material ambitions.
It’s a parallel deal with the Eckhart character in Erased. He’s been very very busy with other things than child rearing. What exactly? In his case, we learn the answer by degrees, layer by layer. The mechanical plot explodes in the first place because he asks a fatal question about a patent. Fatal because it causes the place he’s been working in to disappear overnight, and everyone with whom he has been working to be killed. Overnight. He is the target, the real reason for all the subsequent violence in the film. Why?
The movie is far less bald than that in its revelations, however. We observe the unveiling of Eckhart’s closetful of secrets through the eyes of his lonely daughter. Even he is slow to realize the extent to which a complicated past has caught up with him and endangering both himself and, much more importantly, his only child…
He learns in the course of one day that 14 years of life has been erased from existence. I can relate. I’m not a movie, so it took more than one day, but I also experienced the odd sensation of being officially removed from the life I’d been leading for many years. In order, I lost my marriage, my consulting income, my literary career (The Naked Woman heresy made me a nonperson in American book publishing), my family home (foreclosed with a great chain barring the entrance through the driveway’s granite head posts), my relationship with parents I had out myself at severe financial risk to move into a more manageable house (turned my astonished accountant down flat when he asked for a bridge loan), my belovèd Bengal cat (catastrophic liver failure as a yearling), my bailout apartment in Delaware (evicted by Sheriff’s bang on the door), my driver’s license (DUI), and my legal identity (forced under the radar by an IRS that under Clinton had just eliminated income averaging after my most lucrative consulting year ever). That spectacular fall from grace required about two years all told, and that’s how I came to be a fill-in Dad to a teenager whose mother thought recovery of my driver’s license was her worst enemy (for the record it wasn’t, but my enforced isolation led directly to the creation of Shuteye Town,Shuteye Nation, and my first blog, the prototype for Instapunk. I also had some save the day moments during my sojourn in Greenwich, but I mention that only because I gave as much as I got in those years, and my regrets are few. Apart from barely existing in the outside world that is.
Eckhart’s daughter had a somewhat stormier separation from her Dad than my (sort of) daughter had from me. I was simply gone one day, returned to look after my mother’s sad final days in Salem. Emotional, yes, but hardly as shocking as this…
Worse, in the ensuing getaway she, and we, learn the darkest secret of all. During his time with the CIA, Eckhart’s last long assignment was as a member of a hit squad. She overhears a hushed conversation with his boss in which he says, “my job was killing people,”
I have received death threats, still do from time to time, but I have never killed anyone. I have never even driven a minor child or a sober adult anywhere when I was anything other than stone cold sober. Why perhaps my time of erasure did not end this way…
I can hear you from there. Is he done yet? No. Eckhart isn’t. Why should I be? I committed to five acts. And the next one’s a doozy.
But I do think you deserve an INTERMISSION. I’ll be back tomorrow for the final acts. Made my deadline for today anyway. Which was today.
Have some refreshments in the Lobby. I’ll be back before you know it…
