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
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?
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