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.
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