Michael Grasso / February 21, 2024

Near the end of Richard Nixon’s first term, the forces of conservatism and reaction were in the ascendancy in America. This public resurgence of “traditional values” was itself a counter-revolution against the turmoil unleashed by the young in their opposition to the Vietnam War and their support for the civil rights struggle, which had swept through America’s streets over the previous decade. America’s traditional power structures did not ignore this radical wave of change; under both Lyndon Johnson and Nixon, the government unleashed all the instruments of the state to try to quash these movements. And many parties on the side of the Establishment within this new generational “culture war” found themselves looking for ways to co-opt and capitalize upon the more superficial aspects of the youth revolution.

Nowhere was this more evident than in mainstream American Christianity. Upon seeing the counterculture’s exploration of new spiritual and numinous experience in defiance of their technocratic Cold War suburban childhoods, Evangelical Christian sects saw that in order to compete in America’s vaunted “marketplace of ideas,” they would need to divert idealistic youth, many of them exploring psychedelics and Eastern religions in search of deeper meaning, back to the bosom of church and pastor. A fusion of hip, Aquarian awareness with the radical promise of early Christianity had already begun to take root within pop culture on stage and screen, as well as within the various churches, communes, and outreach programs that comprised the nascent Jesus Movement. But the big Evangelical preachers and churches who had spent the years since World War II expanding their enterprises by way of mass media were largely outsiders to the Jesus Movement, which had grown from within the nominal grassroots of Evangelical thought, especially on the West Coast. Apocalyptic preachers were reaching out to the young by meeting them where they were: using music, comic books, and other elements of popular culture.

The Campus Crusade for Christ, which was founded by Evangelical candy magnate Bill Bright and his wife Vonette in 1951 at UCLA, had allied with postwar megapastor and confidante of presidents and celebrities Billy Graham (after the Brights’ falling out with ultraconservative Evangelical preacher Bob Jones Sr.). In the first two decades of its existence, the CCC had performed “conversion events” at campuses such as Berkeley that had long been hotbeds of left-wing activism. But by the late 1960s and early ’70s, the Campus Crusade for Christ was toiling in the same vineyards as the Jesus Movement—and reaping many fewer conversions. The old-school Evangelical power brokers were never going to have the broader, hipper, more ecumenical appeal that the Jesus Movement inherently possessed. What the more traditional Evangelicals did have going for them was their access to the traditional levers of media and to temporal and monetary power.

From Bright and his allies came the idea for Explo ’72, a mass meeting meant to bridge the gap between the new Jesus People and their older Evangelical forebears. Explo’s name was “meant to suggest a spiritual explosion,” but also evoked the recent worldwide success of Expo ’67 in Montreal and Expo ’70 in Osaka. Explo ’72 organizer Paul Eshleman, 30 years old at the time of the event, had been a crucial part of CCC’s activities during the late ’60s at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a campus that was one of the most fervent homes of protest against the military-industrial complex (in the person of Dow Chemical‘s recruiting of students). Eshleman was given the monumental task of organizing a week-long event that Bright envisioned would encompass tens of thousands of college-age evangelists, musical acts, pastoral instruction and networking, and a public relations program that would entice young people across America not only to come to Christ but “To evangelize the world in our generation.”

In The Explo Story: A Plan to Change the World, published soon after the June 1972 event held in the Dallas, Texas metroplex, Eshleman and co-author Norman Rohrer present highlights from the many activities and events at Explo. Bill Bright’s bombastic foreword dispenses with the occasional light-hearted humility of Eshleman and Rohrer’s text, celebrating the worldwide impact of the event. Bright eerily predicts that “Explo ’72 was part of a plan, part of a world-wide strategy dedicated to the fulfillment of the Great Commission by the target date of 1980.” While the entire world did not come to Christ in the next eight years, Evangelicals would elect a President in 1980 who would bring their millenarian dreams of Christian conversion and conquest to the fore of American society. 

To be fair to both Bright and Eshleman, the organizers of Explo ’72 did have a lot to celebrate; the event was a truly massive effort. (The final chapter, wittily titled “How God Did It,” is actually about how many individual members of CCC contributed to the event’s success.) While the text does kick off its first chapter by having a good-natured laugh at all of the logistical difficulties that the young participants experienced in accommodations and transportation, the remainder of the book takes up the mantle of Bright’s braggadocious joy. The photos included in the book run the gamut: crowd shots at the nightly revival meetings held at the Cotton Bowl, views of the Explo “campsite” set up for overflow after Dallas-area hotels had been filled (the chapter titled “Mud, Mosquitoes and Miracles” offers clear parallels to the much larger crowd at Woodstock three years previous), and intimate shots of young people singing and shouting praise together.

This foregrounding of the younger generation in the book is a constant. The Reverend Graham, in a press conference with Bright, makes the ironic statement that “Many of the great movements of world history have begun with students.” (Considering the youth revolts in the streets of the West and the Cultural Revolution sputtering to a close in the People’s Republic of China, one wonders if Graham’s evocation of left-wing youth insurgency on campus was wholly intentional.) Explo did succeed in co-opting one aspect of the Jesus Movement—its forays into Christian music. Giants of the Jesus Movement (and what would one day become known as Christian Contemporary music) such as Larry Norman shared the stage with giants of the mainstream: Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, and June Carter. All of them literally went on the record in support of Explo with the 1972 LP Jesus Sound Explosion. The threads of country, gospel, contemporary Christian rock, and old-time religion mingled freely on stages that evoked the new ’70s trend towards massive arena rock tours. Additionally, professional athletes and coaches made appearances to spread “the Message in Muscle.” Dozens of NFL players, current and retired, showed up, including Paul Eshleman’s father “Doc” Eshleman, then-chaplain of the NFL.

But whatever moments of joy and cultural relevance emanated from the Explo gathering, deep down the organizers knew what the event was all about: bringing the “lost sheep” of the Baby Boom back into the fold of conservative Christianity. All throughout The Explo Story, the anxieties of a world that had changed in the blink of an eye over the previous five years are laid bare. Eshleman and Rohrer are assiduous in making sure that the reader knows this gathering was designed to be multiracial and multicultural: “Explo drew the largest number of blacks and other minority groups of any Christian gathering of its kind in history.” Later in the text it is discovered that this “largest” percentage of Black Christians was “[a]pproximately three per cent—about 3,000 delegates—of the Explo crowd.” A frankly patronizing conversion story appears in chapter 4, “A City of ‘One Way!’ Streets,” where a young white woman overflowing with the “spiritual rekindling of Explo” met a Black man on the street who “held up both hands. ‘These are the hands of a criminal,’ he hissed. ‘Can your whitey God forgive me?'” Of course, the young woman evangelist prays with the Black man for twenty minutes, inducing him to release his worries of “selling out my people to believe in a white God,” and another soul is won for Christ.

Even more stark is the anxiety around the Vietnam War. The first half of 1972 saw the North Vietnamese Eastern offensive in response to the ongoing attempt of the Nixon administration to cut a retreat from Southeast Asia while declaring “peace with honor,” all while killing tens of thousands of civilians in the bombing of neighboring Cambodia and Laos. Around the edges of Explo, a real, if minority, Christian peace movement was present: placards reading “300 Gls killed this week in Vietnam won’t be reached in this generation” are mentioned by Eshleman and Rohrer dismissively. Routinely, Eshleman and Rohrer dismiss the “dissenters” at Explo, who “backed off when confronted with love and reason by our staff.” Throughout Explo ’72, rah-rah patriotism edges into Christian nationalism. The book cheerfully states, “Men soon to face enemy fire deserve priority in hearing the gospel and in receiving training to lead buddies to Christ.” During Explo’s “Military Seminar” and Flag Day celebrations, Pentagon higher-ups such as Army Chief of Chaplains Major General Gerhart Hyatt and Navy Chief of Chaplains Francis Garrett were featured speakers. Even the tiny minority of young people who sought recognition for their anti-war stance against the “shushing” of the crowd were performatively brought back into the Explo fold: “Chaplain Garrett was greeted by the protesters who asked, ‘Admiral, can you say you love us now?” Throwing his arms around several of them he replied, ‘Yes, I love you.’ This reply brought tears to many of the demonstrators’ eyes.” The Evangelical reliance on public profession and witnessing to bring new souls to Christ is a common thread in these anecdotal tales.

Ultimately, the real world of the 1970s couldn’t be kept from the cultural cloister of Explo’s star-studded seminar rooms, stages, and stadiums. The sinister Children of God cult was lurking at the conference (they were deemed “extremist” by the authors in the same breath as the anti-war protesters). In a startling piece of historical irony, the final night of Explo ’72 happened to coincide with the Watergate break-in. Billy Graham had been a Nixon confidante, his first-term Inaugural pastor, and his co-conspirator in professing virulent anti-Semitism. And on the final night of Explo ’72, he made the compact mentioned at the beginning of the book into a holy covenant with his young Evangelicals to remake America: “I am asking you to light a candle… and we will start a spiritual fire here tonight that could sweep the world… It could help evangelize the world before 1980. Let’s leave here tonight dedicated, committed and determined to change the world in the next eight years.” A lot can be said about the ridiculous, garish, and pandering elements of the vibe around Explo ’72, but no one can deny that, by 1980, America would end up changed by this movement and this generation of young Christian activists, and changed for good, well into the next century.

Michael Grasso is a Senior Editor at We Are the Mutants. He is a writer, museum professional, and a lifelong Bostonian. You can follow him on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/mutantsmichael.bsky.social.

 

Reviews / November 27, 2023

From the Garage to the Station: Stories from the Gateshead Music Collective 1980-1988 By Sned Amorphous Press, 2020

One of the strangest things about having been involved in something, however peripherally, is watching its story get rewritten and mangled as it becomes formalized and turned into grist for the academic culture mill. As the center of psychic gravity inevitably tends to shift towards the HQs of the various industries that engage with this kind of thing, provincial scenes often end up getting overshadowed by events in the big cities, meaning that narratives about England—and the UK in general—tend to get monopolized by the southern metropolis where the money lives. It’s a shame for many reasons, one of which is the way it obscures the fact that, despite the obstacles they face, necessity often means that the provinces are actually just as creative and inventive in their existential solutions as the bountiful big cities, if not more so.

I briefly touched on the North East of England in my piece on artist James Cawthorn—it’s a lovely, imaginative, and unfairly disregarded area of Britain that bore a lot of the brunt of Margaret Thatcher’s battle to free the UK of the pesky mines, heavy industry, shipyards, unions, and jobs that were holding the country back from achieving its destiny as a services industry-based hub of global excellence in the money laundering trade. As I said in that article, the North East is completely its own place with its own strange magic, political history, and deep links both to the ancient past and to the future. Gateshead is a large town that sits across the River Tyne (immortalized by historically underrated local band Lindisfarne in my least favorite of their songs, “Fog on the Tyne“) from the better-known and larger city of Newcastle, and the self-published From the Garage to the Station is an oral history of the Gateshead Music Collective (or GMC) in the words of the (then) young people who started it, ran it, and frequented it in the 1980s, from their first small club, the Garage—an actual garage, natch—to the larger Station, lent to them by the relatively enlightened local council and so named because of its past life as a cop shop.

Both venues provided places for young people to practice with their bands and on weekends organized gigs that saw the cream of UK punk come to town. The story is told by a colorful and engaging cast of dozens of characters, from feminist collective Them Wifies to people with prototypical punker names like Keeks, Sprog, Scruff, Crazy, and Shev, and the whole thing is illustrated with exactly the kind of blurry photos that put you right in the middle of the fug of fag smoke, stale beer, and deafening punk racket. Part of the pleasure of From the Garage to the Station is that it’s a direct, non-profit product of the scene itself and is intended for the kind of people who were actually involved in it, as opposed to being another extrusion of the academia/media complex mentioned above.

The book was put together by Sned, who’s a bit of a historical figure on the UK anarcho/punk/DIY scene himself: as well as being involved in the GMC first hand, he was the drummer in seminal UK hardcore bands Generic and Pleasant Valley Children and ran the Flat Earth distro and record label for many years (full disclosure: he was also unfortunate enough to have to put up with playing and living with me for a bit). To sum up, From the Garage to the Station is a genuinely inspirational journey through the memories of the people who took part. Anyone who has been even tangentially involved in the extremely heterogeneous cultural phenomenon that falls under the umbrella category of “punk,” or probably any other kind of DIY organizing, will get chills of recognition reading it, but even those who haven’t been will come away from it feeling energized.

Copies of the book are available from Sned’s web distro Amorphous Pieces, (or from PM Press if you’re in the US), where you can also pick up an omnibus collection of every issue of beloved British punk fanzine Raising Hell published by UK anarcho overlord and punk rock Samuel Pepys Ben Sik’o’war between 1982 and 1990 that will give you a complete immersion in the mood, humor and attitude—and stench—of the UK punk scene of the time. And for anyone in the UK, running through November/December 2023 there’s also an exhibition and event organized by a collective of which Amorphous was part to celebrate the legacy of The Station and other youth-led music collectives in the North East of England.

Richard McKenna grew up in the visionary utopia of 1970s South Yorkshire and now ekes out a living among the crumbling ruins of Rome, from whence he dreams of being rescued by the Terran Trade Authority.

Reviews / October 31, 2023

The Norliss Tapes
Directed by Dan Curtis
NBC (1973)

On a pre-pandemic Halloween four years ago, my co-editors decided to bestow upon me the honor of reviewing famed made-for-TV movie The Night Stalker (1972). Even though I’d heard its praises sung far and wide, it was my first time watching Darren McGavin’s harried newspaper photog Carl Kolchak chasing a vampire through early-’70s Vegas. It was a triumph, and one I was a bit miffed that I’d long overlooked. This Halloween, I decided to give another of Kolchak producer Dan Curtis’s horror TV movies a try. The Norliss Tapes, which aired on NBC in February of 1973, features another favorite of genre sci-fi and horror TV, Roy Thinnes, in the lead role. Like McGavin, Thinnes would two decades later pop up as a guest star on The X-Files thanks to series creator Chris Carter’s love of his lead performance as David Vincent, lone crusader against a secret alien invasion in short-lived cult series The Invaders (1967-1968).

At the outset of The Norliss Tapes, we see Thinnes as David Norliss, in desperate emotional straits very reminiscent of David Vincent, in his richly-appointed study surrounded by the titular audio cassettes. On a phone call to his publisher Sanford T. Evans (Don Porter), Norliss sounds like a broken man, face contorted in exhaustion and terror, telling Evans his book on “debunking the supernatural” is late and the reasons why are on a series of tapes. “When you hear them,” Norliss croaks ominously to Evans, “you’ll understand.”

I made mention of the Nixon tapes in my review of The Night Stalker, seeing in Kolchak’s recounting of the details of his case into a tape recorder a prefiguring of the audio tapes that would roil the nation in a year’s time, and it’s interesting to see Curtis revisit this trope here just a few months before the Nixon White House taping system was revealed by Alexander Butterfield in front of the Watergate Committee in July 1973. Audio cassette technology was relatively new in ’73, developed for commercial use only a decade prior, but already it had begun to supplant the much more cumbersome reel-to-reel recorders. This increased availability made home recording possible for the everyday consumer, and gives The Norliss Tapes a sheen of high-tech to juxtapose with the ancient occult mysteries we’re about to see unfold.

Evans gets stood up by Norliss for a lunch date to discuss his book, and decides to visit Norliss’s home, where he sees an incomplete book introduction in the typewriter, along with a pile of audio tapes that contain the true tale of what has Norliss so shaken. For Kolchak, the tape recording is a mere dramatic coda, a testament made after we’ve accompanied him on his heroic journey through the nightside of Vegas. But in The Norliss Tapes, the recording itself becomes the medium by which we the audience are able to witness the drama in flashback. The telefeature was intended as a pilot for an episodic series much like the eventual 1974-75 Kolchak: The Night Stalker; and in that series, each new tape would present a new episode in Norliss’s sanity-draining wilderness year investigating the occult.

In his examination of surveillance in 1970s politics and media, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance, poet and media scholar Stephen Paul Miller explores the decade by examining the seemingly omnipresent (self-)surveillance through recording devices in both the era’s fiction and in reality. Speaking in relation to 1971’s Klute and 1974’s The Conversation, both of which feature ominous audiotape recordings whose contents stalk the protagonists throughout the film, Miller states: “Terror lies in auditory feedback. In the early seventies, the feedback of auditory surveillance is ominously put into place.” In terms of self-surveillance and the role it played in the downfall of Nixon, the result of the presence of a documentary audio record is clear: “Perhaps it was unfortunate, perhaps it was not inevitable,” Miller opines, “but Nixon was our secret self. In an uncanny fashion, he came to represent America. He undid himself through self-surveillance. One might say he found himself to lose himself. In the same way and at the same time, the great American middle class gradually lost its New Deal tradition of social and economic progress in favor of stronger identifications with narrow self-definitions and interests.” This evocation of the narcissism, the hall of mirrors self-obsession of self-recording and its implications on identity and class, strikes an interesting light on the first case Norliss is asked to “debunk.”

That first case file throws him into the world of the wealthy and their forays into both creative art and dark ritual magic. Norliss receives a call from a widow, Ellen Cort (played gamely by future Police Woman Angie Dickinson), who says she’s had to deal with a prowler on her property who killed her loyal guard dog Raleigh. Ellen says she shot the trespasser point blank with a shotgun, but he still managed to get away. The further twist? Ellen is absolutely certain the intruder is apparently her own late husband, artist James Cort (reliable 1970s and ’80s action movie heavy Nick Dimitri). Norliss, a skeptic, investigates the world of artists, bohemians, and occultists swirling around the Corts, including mysterious antique dealer Madame Jeckiel (Blaxploitation star Vonetta McGee).

The McGuffin powering James Cort’s return from the grave is a mysterious ancient Egyptian ring dedicated to the god of death Osiris, which was sold to Cort by Jeckiel. In a bargain with the demon “Sargoth,” Cort seeks immortality by using his artistic skill to create a golem of clay for the god to inhabit. The clay sculpture appears out of nowhere in Cort’s old studio, while at the same time, in the wealthy Bay Area community surrounding the Corts’ property, exsanguinated corpses are turning up everywhere, causing local sheriff Tom Hartley (Night Stalker veteran and perennial ’70s TV lawman Claude Akins) to try to cover up the occult crimes to avoid a panic. Of course, the lurid murders are being committed by the undead Cort, as it’s discovered by Norliss at the opening of the third act that “the [statue’s] clay is 40 percent human blood.” Norliss and Ellen succeed in burning down the studio, destroying not only Cort’s unholy artistic creation but the undead artist himself.

The narrative thrust of The Norliss Tapes—an investigator seeking to debunk the paranormal—would be familiar to a broad cross-section of middle American TV audiences, and not just because it’s a bit of a retread of ratings success The Night Stalker. 1973 was also the year of famed psychic Uri Geller’s appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where fellow stage magician Carson (with the help of professional debunker James Randi), was able to scuttle Geller’s purported psychic ability to bend spoons and repair watches. Of course, in the world of The Norliss Tapes, debunking doesn’t come so easy. Over the course of the TV movie’s two hours, Norliss turns from a skeptic who seeks to put a stop to “the fake mediums, phony astrologers, the self-proclaimed seers and trick mystics… bilking millions of dollars each year out of their gullible victims,” to someone who takes the eerie advice and occult expertise of Madame Jeckiel seriously. His combination of dogged investigative work and willingness to believe Ellen Cort—that her assailant survived a point-blank shotgun blast—puts him on a collision course with dark powers.

Ultimately, all of these dark powers are put in service of the wealthy. Madame Jeckiel’s shop purveys artifacts for the delectation of the ruling class, just as James Cort’s art does. Cort’s art dealer, Charles Langdon (Hurd Hatfield), tries to do a little graverobbing to grab the valuable ring of Osiris from Cort’s interred body, and of course winds up as one of the zombie’s victims. Dan Curtis’s direction and cinematography does an amazing job at capturing both the lush interiors and stunning landscapes of the Bay Area; Norliss’s agent and publisher dine in a high-rise San Francisco restaurant with amazing window views. Curtis also treats the everyday schlubs out there in 1973 Television Land to high-angle location shots of Norliss driving his admittedly super-cool rust-orange convertible Corvette Stingray along the Pacific coast. Thinnes’s hardboiled voiceover on the audiotapes informs us, in case we weren’t aware, that “there’s no doubt this rugged peninsula country could give the French Riviera tough competition.” The catacombs under Cort’s palatial estate, built “in the 1920s… during Prohibition [to store] guns and liquor,” allow the zombie Cort to move around on the estate from his studio to the world beyond, preying on his victims to collect blood for his demonic ritual. Like Peter Falk’s contemporary series Columbo, the wealthy in The Norliss Tapes are venal and greedy: greedy for more trinkets, more luxury, more fame, and ultimately more life. In a way, Norliss has managed to do what he set out to do, but instead of stopping con men from bilking the innocent, he’s uncovered a world in which the rich can defy any authority—even death—with the help of their supernatural patrons.

In the implicit distance created by the narrative frame of (presumably quite wealthy) Sanford Evans listening to the titular Norliss Tapes, we again delve into the questions of economic class, memory, distance, and haunting. The Norliss Tapes may never have been picked up for a series—a failed pilot itself seems to me a fairly hauntological what-if—but as Evans is about to pop a second audiocassette into the cassette player, as the case of James Cort fades into the magnetic ether, I couldn’t help but think about Mark Fisher’s observation from his essay “The Slow Cancellation of the Future” from Ghosts of My Life:

[Hauntological artists] were preoccupied with the way in which technology materialised memory—hence a fascination with television, vinyl records, audiotape, and with the sounds of these technologies breaking down. This fixation on materialised memory led to what is perhaps the principal sonic signature of hauntology: the use of crackle, the surface noise made by vinyl. Crackle makes us aware that we are listening to a time that is out of joint; it won’t allow us to fall into the illusion of presence (emphasis mine).

Cort’s crimes against the innocent—and by extension the panoply of sanity-shattering cases presumably on Norliss’s remaining tapes—will never be heard, their greedy perpetrators never brought to earthly or cosmic justice. Just another mediocre TV series consigned to the dustbin of history? Perhaps. But I like to think of those audiocassettes as something more, as a kind of unrealized “18½-minute gap” in the early ’70s self-surveillance panopticon, a lost testament of crimes disallowed from entry into the permanent historical record. Haunted by occult secrets, we the viewers and listeners come to realize that some tapes will truly never be heard.

—Michael Grasso

Features / October 30, 2023

Photo: Teesside Gazette

Ever tried carving a turnip? Attempting to prise out chunks of the cold, iron-hard flesh is about as gratifying as it sounds, and yet, pumpkins still being an outré foreign exoticism in the crepuscular 1970s, turnips were what they gave us kids of the UK, when they gave us anything at all. The best you could hope for in terms of results was the kind of thing seen above in the hands of the kids posing in 1976 with Willie Maddren, football deity of the English North-East, and resembling prehistoric fetishes: frightening, certainly, but more in a literal than a playful way, which was more or less true of Halloween itself. The drab austerity of our Halloweens past is so axiomatic that it’s now cliché to hear boomers and Gen Xers incongruously united in bemoaning the fact that the nation’s youth no longer appreciate the joys of a day where nothing at all happened except whatever self-inflicted fear you could muster up to torment yourself with. The adulthood-defying Bacchanalia of the North American Halloween industry being denied us, we had to get our eerie thrills where we could, and that was as true of music as it was of non-root vegetable Jack-o’-lanterns and sexy nurse costumes. So read on to discover the ten songs that, despite having no actual connection to the 31st of October, yet produce a frisson of seasonal alarm in the paranormally persecuted inhabitants of Mutant Mansions.

“Dear Diary”
By The Moody Blues
Deram, 1969

I think we all know who’s actually responsible for the children of Olde Englande historically not getting to enjoy the full throttle commercially-propelled joys of the 31st of October: the dickhead known as Charles Dickens, that’s who. By setting the Western world’s second favorite supernatural story at Christmas, he basically ensured that, until the twin forces of untrammeled kid-targeting capitalism and untrammeled middle-aged narcissism prevailed, the nation’s ghost industry was doomed to gravitate around the 25th of December, with sundry worthy M.R. James adaptations the order of the day. Until around the time Tony Blair managed to liberate the City of London of its pesky banking regulations, Halloween in England (other parts of the UK have their own traditions) was left to be just a vaguely worrying oddity where, though you could make a witch out of a plastic lemon if you liked, you were also guaranteed a depressing dearth of seasonal plastic tat and traumatizing TV programming.

But fear not, Britain’s Most Haunted Band (catchier than “band where all the songwriters seem deeply depressed”) The Moody Blues were on hand to provide eerie prog-rock-folk dirges year round that lent themselves to unnerving interpretation. “Dear Diary” is one of those dirges. It might have been all the Herbert van Thal anthologies I’d been mainlining since infancy, but somehow, perhaps due to an idiosyncratic interpretation of the line “For goodness sake, what’s happening to me?” or what I perceived as Lovecraftian undertones, I mistook the song’s existential critique of straight society for an eerie and beguiling ode to monstrous difference, an error that cast its lackadaisical groove, Ray Thomas’s melancholy flute, and the gurgling, vaguely amphibian effect on Justin Hayward’s vocals in a more sinister light. That

If they weren’t so blind, then surely they’d see
There’s a much better way for them to be

sounded less like a call to arms for the Brummie hippie lifestyle and more like an invitation to radical and frightening mutation. Listened to in autumn twilight, it still sounds like the final jottings of someone journaling their drift away from the human race.

—Richard McKenna

“The Tale of the Giant Stone Eater”
By The Sensational Alex Harvey Band
Vertigo, 1975

A song doesn’t have to be about vampires, pumpkins or ghosts to inspire a spot of seasonal terror (nothing rhymes with vampires or pumpkins anyway, and “roasts” seldom inspires terror, unless you burn the Yorkshires). The swift and total devastation of the pristine and ancient in favor of the cheap thrills of modern convenience is a terrifying concept, but when I first heard “The Tale of the Giant Stone Eater“ by The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, I was five years old and the message went over my head. Nevertheless, the song terrified me profoundly.

It wasn’t the only sinister musical narrative with a cultish theme of death that I obsessed over as a child, but it was certainly the most chilling. I didn’t even like to look at the album cover (conceived as a parody of prog album artwork of the time), with its spiky earth movers and snarling but doomed dinosaurs. The lurid colors had the menace of classic horror comics, and rifling through my dad’s record collection to have another look at the starship on ELO’s Out Of The Blue meant risking touching the cursed album by mistake. I didn’t want the song to be aware of me, or perhaps to fly on to the record player by malign magic, and start playing itself. We were forbidden to touch the record player, and thus I would have been helpless to listen, and I was very determined to do that as little as possible.

If my dad put the album on (Tomorrow Belongs To Me), my brother and I would flee the room, often in tears. The song is written in the style of a fairytale, and so it felt somehow personal, as though the narrator was addressing me directly.

Gather round boys and girls and listen,
To the tale of the giant stone eater.

The opening piano notes were sly and insinuating. You could tell something terrible was about to go down, and sure enough the piano swiftly gave way to the inexorable pounding of heavy guitar chords, and the alliterative aggression of the lyrics:

Sudden savage shining soiled solid sanded
Steel shuddering shattering shoveling until the
Sabre toothed rooter roots the earth

It was heavy stuff. Definitely not in the league of the Beatrix Potter cassette we’d recorded rude words over. 

Our dad is a terrifying geologist from Arbroath, so we ought to have been hardened to the psychic effect of Scotsmen ranting about rock stratas, but in hindsight perhaps that was part of the terror. For us, the song was a cross between an incomprehensible ghost story and getting bollocked by dad for failing to show sufficient interest in igneous rock on a family holiday. Sometimes you just wanted an ice cream and a go on the arcade machines, and in the context of the song, that made me Part Of The Problem. 

The eater eats his fill and is not satisfied and
Roars and revs his mathematical rage
On the footprints of Vikings.

My brother and I definitely belonged to the camp of “Plastic space agents, selling candy floss contracts.” Perhaps Alex Harvey believed, like my dad, that candy floss would make a mess of the car. On the other hand, Harvey was inspired to write the song after seeing a bulldozer clearing ancient Scottish countryside to build a new motorway, so maybe he’d have appreciated the despoilment of our Ford station wagon via tiny sticky handprints, a constellation of careening concurrent calorific cavepainter complaint.

As a young fan of musical theater, I was drawn in by the storybook narrative and complex lyrics, as well as by the way the music constantly switched between lyrical, harsh, faux jaunty, and bombastic, the lulls and the peaks feeling like a tease and a threat. I usually tapped out about the time Alex Harvey repeats “TEN MILLION YEARS OLD!” in an increasingly unhinged bellow, but occasionally I’d be able to force myself to listen to the whole song. My fascination with it made it scarier to me, which I think is the case with all good horror. It stuck in my mind, and I’d find myself pondering the lyrics, which I took very literally. I concluded that as I was not made of stone, the stone eater would not want to eat me (even during the great stone shortage!), but it was possible it could chew up the land our house was on, reducing me and my family—and more importantly the dog and my My Little Ponies—to a pulp of shattered soil and human viscera.

On the whole, I preferred the mellow space swoop of ELO.

Of course, given today’s increasingly bleak environmental outlook and the rise of AI devastating the human component of various industries and arts, the lyrics are unsettling in a different way.

The eater eats again retches roars and vomits
His computerized future is bright with security
Headshrinkers analyze the unknown
Meanwhile another tree dies of shame

—J.E. Anckorn

“Enigma”
By Amanda Lear
Ariola/Polydor, 1978

Italian kids of the late 1970s didn’t have Halloween. They only had a vague idea that it existed in America because of the “Grande cocomero” (the “big watermelon,” a.k.a. the Great Pumpkin) in Charles M. Schultz’s Peanuts strips, which had been translated into Italian since the ’60s by semiotician, writer, and cultural critic Umberto Eco. Eco was also responsible for the creation of the term “toffoletta” to describe a marshmallow to Italian readers who obviously had no idea what it could possibly be. When I saw Snoopy and friends roasting them on the campfire, I presumed “toffolette” must be delicious cubes of cheese.

So, no Halloween in the ’70s—but we did have (limited) access to a lot of spooky stuff all year round. We had those lurid giallo movie posters that plastered the walls of every Italian city, we had Dario Argento, we had Mario Bava’s horror films and Ruggero Deodato’s cannibal epics. Granted, most of us kids could only dream of actually watching them, but we were free to fantasize endlessly about their goriness. (I was 15 when I finally saw 1975’s Profondo Rosso, and it didn’t live up to my wild fantasies. I only learned to appreciate it much later.)

The most precious spooky thing we had was something American kids our age could only dream of: a sorcery-themed late night variety show called “Stryx” aired by the second channel of the Italian state TV from October 15 to November 19, 1978. Stryx was a sexy, all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza that in its brief life hosted witchcraft-inspired performances from international disco queen Grace Jones, Indian actress and singer-songwriter Asha Puthli, and Brazilian superstar Gal Costa. Eight-year-old me was allowed to stay up late to watch it even though the performers were half naked and the provocative dance numbers were not exactly kid-friendly. But Stryx was fun for the whole family and perfect Halloween viewing, even though there was no such thing as Halloween.

Actress, model, Dalí’s muse, Roxy Music cover girl, and international maid of mischief Amanda Lear was of course a family favorite and Stryx’s brightest star. She spoke fluent Italian and because of her deep, throaty voice, many Italians (encouraged by the “stampa rosa” gossip tabloids) were titillated by the idea she might be a trans woman. Lear was popular enough that in 1980 she appeared in a TV commercial for an Italian sparkling wine sold in individual aperitif bottles so small that the product was sold as “Nano ghiacciato,” which roughly translates as “dwarf on the rocks,” political correctness not being a priority in the Italian advertisement ecosystem at the time.

My favorite Amanda moment in Stryx was her performance of the song “Enigma.” Lear was led to the stage by a leash held by the ringmaster—actor, singer, and former ‘60s heartthrob Tony Renis. Her body shrouded in a black cloak, she looked like a witch being dragged to the gallows—yet enjoying every second of it. She soon disrobed, though, revealing a red sequined catsuit that was surely on Madonna’s mind when she was preparing her costumes for her Confessions on a Dance Floor Tour.

The song was naughty fun even if you didn’t speak English: “Give a bit of mmh to me and I’ll give a bit of mmh to you” she purred, while stroking three (terrified) black kittens on an inflatable plastic mattress intended to look futuristic and Barbarella-like, surrounded by half naked space odalisques and alien creatures unleashed from the Mos Eisley Cantina.

“Enigma” was a top ten hit in Italy and, more surprisingly, in Belgium.

—Daniele Cassandro

“We’re Gonna Change the World”
By Matt Monro
Capitol Records, 1970

It’s the stuff that catches you off guard in what you thought was a safe and secure environment that’s always the creepiest. Playing at home when I was young, my mum would invariably have the cheery, anodyne burble of BBC Radio 2 soundtracking her housework. Yet to my infant ears, there was often something a bit “off” about the songs it played, from themes of abandonment (i.e. John Denver’s “Leaving On A Jet Plane” and Middle Of The Road’s “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” with its “Woke up this morning and my mama was gone”), to old men apparently preying on younger women (i.e. Ringo Starr’s “You’re Sixteen” and Charlie Rich’s “The Most Beautiful Girl”).

But the song that disturbed me the most was Matt Monro’s “We’re Gonna Change The World.” Listening now, it’s a brilliantly sung and arranged piece of “adult pop,” with an intriguing and multi-layered lyric about women’s lib. But at the time, all I heard was its eerily jaunty call for revolution: “Come with us, run with us! / We’re gonna change the world / You’ll be amazed, so full of praise / When we’ve rearranged your world / We’re gonna change your world!” With its groovy threats to overthrow the everyday, it felt more than a little terrifying—at the age of 6, I really didn’t want my world to be rearranged. It conjured visions in my head of hordes of protestors charging down the street with a gleam of madness in their eyes.

Kids are often portrayed as little anarchists in waiting, reveling in chaos and disorder. But this kid for one was pretty disturbed by the thought of everything suddenly changing overnight, the velvety tones of Monro’s voice and the tune’s upbeat penny whistle melody somehow only adding to the sense of dread it imprinted on my conservative soul.

—Joe Banks

“Heartache Avenue”
By The Maisonettes
Ready Steady Go, 1982

You might think that by age 11 a child would be mature enough to not be actually frightened by something as innocuous as the jaunty blue-eyed-soul of The Maisonettes “Heartache Avenue,” but that’s a stereotype I wish to smash. I claim my right to make myself constantly anxious with anything that comes to hand.

Never one for coping well with ambiguity or mixed messages, young me immediately took fright when the band first appeared on Top of the Pops. Perhaps it was the jacket and polo-neck combos, half enigmatic Mastermind miscreant, half provincial perv. Perhaps the strangely mechanical way lead singer and songwriter Lol Mason moved, as though obeying some obscure rite. Perhaps that his stylings vaguely evoked both the Yorkshire Ripper and Mr. Mann, the foot fetishist chiropodist doing cheap cash-in-hand home visits out of hours who for months had spent Tuesday evenings in our front room caressing my poor mum’s tormented feet (and, over a couple of weeks, slowly and agonizingly slicing a verruca out of one of mine) before departing under a cloud after his qualifications or intentions were called into question. Perhaps it was the ominous, oddly processed voices of the backing singers, or the downward synth slide that evoked a nauseating feeling of time slowing down. Perhaps the doomy cover photo on the single, half Last Year at Marienbad, half moment-before-nuclear-impact. I wasn’t even mad about avenues full stop, to be honest, the only one near my house being home to the caravan site where I’d been attacked by a scary Alsatian called Terry.

So as much as I liked the song, I couldn’t help feeling that it was in some way freighted with horror, Heartache Avenue no simple metaphor for lost love but an actual suburban nightmare zone where one might be trapped, like Doctor Who in Castrovalva. Given the appalled reaction my NHS glasses, Adric haircut, and fucked up teeth (it can’t have been my deeply irritating personality) provoked in any girl I spoke to, was I also doomed to inhabit this cursed liminal space? An awful feeling of dread that it might actually be my destiny flooded my brain every time I heard the brass section kick in at the start of the song.

I never saw The Maisonettes when they appeared on French TV, which feels like a stroke of luck, as the “Lions Club grandee trapped inside a video game set in a mountaintop cult sacrifice complex” would only have added yet another layer to the vague unease that “Heartache Avenue” triggers in me even now.

—Richard McKenna

“Eve of Destruction”
By Barry McGuire
Dunhill/RCA Victor, 1965

In 1983 and 1984, I feel as though every night I went to bed singularly petrified of nuclear war. This, of course, was the era of The Day After, Testament, Red Dawn, WarGames, Ronald Reagan callously and dangerously joking around about starting the bombing in a matter of minutes, appearing before Evangelicals and calling the Soviet Union the Evil Empire. I wondered nearly every night if I’d wake up the next morning or simply be vaporized in my sleep—or, worse yet, maybe I would survive a nuclear exchange and be forced to watch as my family slowly perished from radiation poisoning. (Yeah, Testament really did do a fucking number on me.)

It was also right around this time that I really started becoming conscious of pop music, my own musical tastes, and my young self as an attentive, active, and appreciative listener of music. Sure, before I turned 8 there had been music on in the background, on pop and oldies radio in the family station wagon, but it was the coming of cable TV and MTV to our house that really kickstarted my awareness of the past 25 or so years of rock and roll and what was considered cool by millions of American teens a little older than me. My dad took me to local New England record stores like Strawberries and bought me 45s of Toto, Michael Jackson, Thomas Dolby. The family hi-fi was all mine; my folks, much to the dismay of my future-self-as-music-nut, were never really into putting together a record collection.

It’s this combination of new music and oldies radio that led me to two strikingly different anthems that tapped into my childhood nuclear war neuroses (the next one I’ll get to a little later in this feature). Barry McGuire’s 1965 Billboard number one hit (!)—despite numerous radio bans for its “subversive” lyrical content (!!)—protest anthem “Eve of Destruction” had to have been something I heard on oldies radio as a kid. I remember being transfixed by the song’s vaguely threatening aura, a mix of thoroughly pessimistic meditations on the Cold War, Vietnam, and domestic racial unrest. It was the second verse that put the chill down my spine: “If the button is pushed, there’s no runnin’ away / There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave / Take a look around you, boy, it’s bound to scare you, boy.” And on some very conscious level at the time, I was aware this was an old song! One that was a hit when my parents were only a little older than I was! How long had this fear about instantaneous global nuclear war been going on, I asked myself! This was the kind of historical perspective that truly impactful music hits all of us with occasionally: an intergenerational connection that conveys the collective weight of history. I remember calling into the selfsame oldies station to request that they play the song. What the DJ in 1983 thought of an 8-year-old kid calling in with his mom’s help to hear a hoary ’60s protest song, I will likely never know. But man, am I curious.

—Michael Grasso 

“Angie Baby”
By Helen Reddy
Capitol Records, 1974

By the time the ’80s rolled around, Britain had grudgingly accepted certain aspects of Halloween. We would sometimes sing spooky songs in school assembly, or color in a skeleton, but this wasn’t really any more attention than was paid to something like Harvest Festival (and I suspect horror fans would be more interested in the time we were taught how to make a corn dolly than anything we did for the 31st of October). 

Pushback from the church led to rival “All-Saints” events where kids were encouraged to dress as saints instead, and which inevitably saw lines of girls dressed as St Trinians filing into church halls across the land in mini skirts and ripped fishnets. Parents in general weren’t especially worried about Satan, but there was still the lingering concern that sending your kids to demand sweeties with menaces from the neighbors might be considered bad manners.

All of this meant that I didn’t really have a Halloween tradition of child-friendly spooks to engage with, and I developed a range of slightly odd fears in their place, like the test card flying out of the TV into my face, or the red lines painted at the bottom of our local pool, which I thought were a grate with a shark behind it. That said, my spooky song was more connected to my creeping dread of approaching adulthood than those more visceral childhood terrors. 

I first heard “Angie Baby” in the early ’90s on a compilation of ’70s number 1s my parents brought from a petrol station. The story is essentially about a weird kid negotiating her relationship with the opposite sex, and as an 11-year-old already dealing with the imposition of puberty, I kind of related. Trapping the souls of men inside your radio and letting them out occasionally to dance around your bedroom was less familiar to me, but you have to take representation where you can find it. 

Back then, the involvement of the radio seemed like an intriguingly modern take on a ghost story (I had decided that Angie’s suitors must have become ghosts in order to fit inside), while their sorry plight and Angie’s isolation, confined to her room for some vague mental disorder variously described as being “insane” and “touched,” added all the poignancy of a good Victorian haunting. I misheard the line “All alone once more, Angie baby,” when her father knocks on the door, dispelling the spirits, as “Oh-oh once more, Angie baby,” the plaintive cry of a ghostly dance partner begging for one more turn around the room before being banished back to his portable prison. In my mind, the boys were like the mournful spirits of drowned sailors, and Angie was a more sex-positive Miss Havisham.

Angie gets the opportunity to put her magical radio into effect when a neighbor boy “with evil on his mind” sneaks into her room and offers to dance with her. I didn’t really understand at the time what sort of evil he was considering, and thought that probably he was going to bully her for dancing by herself, or perhaps he would pretend to take her seriously and then do a really silly dance and ruin it all. Part of me quite liked the idea of trapping boys inside a radio. Anything to do with growing up, in fact—bras, periods—they could all go in. And then I would simply slip the radio inside a storm drain and skip off into the sunset.

On the other hand, maybe Angie had also noticed that boys tended to be nicer if you talked to them one on one. Maybe she was just using her radio to get them away from their friends for a minute so she could find out what kind of person they were without them shouting or kicking footballs in her face. I could kind of see that. It had perhaps also occurred to me that having a sad ghost boyfriend would be pretty sweet.

Ultimately, though, I didn’t really approve of Angie’s methods, even if the neighbor boy was planning to ruin her romantic evening by doing a silly dance. Honoring Habeas Corpus is surely the bedrock of any relationship, and do you really deserve your sad ghost boyfriend if it was you that made him sad? I certainly had some thoughts about Angie Baby, but the secrets of interacting with boys remained as opaque and as terrifying as ever.

—Amy Mugglestone

“Walking in Your Footsteps”
By The Police
A&M Records, 1983

As I mentioned above, my parents didn’t have a huge record collection, but my grandmother was a completely different story. She was always ahead of her time, thinking differently, whether by her reading of purveyors of popular occultism and spiritualism such as Edgar Cayce in the bland American ’50s, her committed anti-war protesting as a middle-aged housewife during Vietnam, or her musical tastes, which eschewed the fusty big band and “beautiful music” sounds of her own Greatest Generation and found her grooving instead to Boomer rock and New Wave artists like Billy Joel, Elton John, and the Police.

My grandmother is the one who first put a copy of the Police’s 1983 international blockbuster hit LP Synchronicity into my hands. I remember listening to the whole album on her hi-fi in our family’s in-law apartment and being spooked by the tales of suburban middle-class dread (and lake cryptids!) in “Synchronicity II,” identifying far too much for an 8-year-old kid with the narrator of “King of Pain,” and having absolutely no clue about Sting’s pseud-y literary references to Carl Jung and Paul Bowles in “Synchronicity I” and “Tea in the Sahara,” respectively. (These days, in my dotage, forty years distant from the affectations of Gordon Sumner’s lyrics, I do admit I wonder how much of the album cover art’s veiled references to Jungian theory, surrealism, and psychic research laid the groundwork for later grown-up obsessions with same.)

It was track A2, “Walking In Your Footsteps,” that really got the hooks in me. Anchored by a “tribal” rhythm and melody, the synths and sequencer evoking pan pipes and hollow log percussion, Sting sings a paean to the vanished “brontosaurus,” wondering if his blind march to extinction has a lesson for us. I mean, come on: I was a kid of the ’80s, I loved dinosaurs and, if you mentioned them, I was definitely paying attention. But the twist came in the final verse, where I learned that we humans could easily follow in the friendly yet dimwitted dinos’ giant footsteps: “If we explode the atom bomb / Would they say that we were dumb?” I understood the irony and humor here in comparing us clever apes to the pea-brained dinosaurs, but did I fully understand how our intelligence could equally consign us to a Darwinian ash-heap? Again, thanks to previous exposure to media like Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, it was made clear to me “over and over and over again” (to reprise Barry McGuire’s haunting chorus) that technological intelligence was no guarantee of the survival of our species, and that in fact, it might be a detriment. “Walking In Your Footsteps” was the self-aware, wry, ironic dialectical counterpart to Barry McGuire’s defeated dirge of resignation, and I think on some level both of those songs contributed to my psychological attraction/repulsion complex with the idea of nuclear annihilation.

—Michael Grasso 

“Excerpt from ‘A Teenage Opera’”
By Keith West
Parlophone, 1967

Halloween in the North-East of England in the late ’70s was a less garishly sexy festival than the one we’ve now grown accustomed to, and probably best characterized by the lingering odor of burnt turnip in drizzle. In truth, many of us were biding our time for November the Fifth, with its glamorous fireworks and massive municipal bonfires. Festive fact: it was actually illegal not to celebrate Bonfire Night in the UK for over 250 years, though how the men from the ministry enforced this remains mysterious. Anyway, whether cheerfully acknowledging the spirit world while dressed in a bin-bag, or gazing wistfully as the effigy of a Catholic conspirator was therapeutically consumed by the cleansing fires of The State, Samhain week contained two fun-sized opportunities for youngsters to contemplate Death. This locus of jocular creepiness is also inhabited by “Excerpt from ‘A Teenage Opera’,” which, it bears saying before we even get started, could easily be the most annoyingly punctuated song title of all time.

Originally released in 1967, I first heard it played in heavy rotation on ’70s radio request shows like Junior Choice, hosted by the avuncular Ed “Stewpot” Stewart, and one hosted by the considerably less wholesome Jimmy Savile. Written and performed by producer Mark Wirtz and fronted by Keith West (of psychedelic practitioners, Tomorrow), the single was conceived as being part of a larger body of work, the ‘Teenage Opera’ of the title. Apparently to be set in a turn-of-the-century village, each song was to tell the story of one of its inhabitants. Despite harboring the giddy potential of song titles like “Cellophane Mary-Jane” and “The Paranoiac Woodcutter,” the project was not initially completed.

Only the first single was a hit, and such was its ubiquity that it became more simply known as “Grocer Jack.” Though failing to make the US Hot 100, it was massive in the UK and Europe, especially in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. And as masterful as the composition no doubt is (getting the thumbs-up from the likes of Paul McCartney and Pete Townsend), the real hook is the undeniably cute and catchy children’s chorus, as performed by some West London school-of-performing-arts-type kids.

The song begins with Mr. West describing how Grocer Jack, though 82 and suffering some kind of heart failure, is tortured by his sense of duty to deliver food to the village. The chorus, first time around, seems to be from Jack’s perspective as he’s dying on the floor: “Grocer Jack, get off your back / Go into town, don’t let them down.” As Jack correctly suspects, his value to the townsfolk is entirely contingent on his function as a retailer, and they are annoyed at his non-appearance: “Mothers send their children out / To Jack’s house to scream and shout.” This time the children sing the grocer-torturing chorus, exhorting the dying man to “get off his back.” Slacker.

After a pastoral interlude, it appears that Jack has definitively croaked. The townsfolk feel some pangs of conscience, and the children are baffled as to where their beloved grocer has now gone: “Grocer Jack, Grocer Jack / Is it true what mummy says / You won’t come back, oh no no,” and we’re left with the children of the town attempting to process the realities of death.

And so to my cozy late-’70s living room, where as the radio played I found myself also starting to wrestle with notions of mortality, and getting my first real tastes of The Fear, the surface cuteness of the chorus having served as a means to smuggle in much darker materials. Listening to this song was like turning over a stone to find something hideous underneath, but its morbidly sentimental aspects, creepy enough in their own way, were not the only reason I found it so terrifying. There was another, absurd as it now seems, which nevertheless scared the bejaysus out of eight-year-old me. Having recently been allowed to stay up late at my Nan’s, I’d watched the horror anthology film Tales from the Crypt (1972). One of the stories, “Poetic Justice,” starred Peter Cushing as Arthur Grimsdyke, an elderly dustman persecuted and eventually driven to suicide by his heartless neighbors. In a scene watched between terrified fingers, Grimsdyke returns from the grave exactly one year later to exact his revenge.

With the poor treatment of an elderly man who only meant well, some connection was made between Grimsdyke and Grocer Jack, as I wondered:

What if it isn’t true what mummy says?

Oh no no.

—Christopher Ashton

“Revolution 9”
By The Beatles
Apple, 1968

The only “song” that ever scared me was “Revolution 9” from the Beatles’ White Album. A few of us were over at a friend’s house in the very early ‘80s and, this being the very early ‘80s, his parents were nowhere to be found. Naturally, we ransacked the place, ate an entire box of Ding Dongs, and eventually descended upon the record collection. Boy of the house Tom (not his real name) pulled out all of the Beatles records and regaled us with a short but succinctly gruesome version of the “Paul is Dead” urban legend: here was Paul, he said, pointing to the cover of 1969’s Abbey Road. He’s the guy with the cigarette. Notice Paul’s feet? Well, he has no shoes, and John, the guy in all white, he’s leading them all to Paul’s grave. “The other Beatles killed Paul, man.” 

Now, I knew next to nothing about the Beatles at the time. I would have recognized a few songs from the radio, but, unlike Tom’s parents, mine were not ex-hippies—the closest thing we had to a Beatles record in my house was Chuck Mangione or Neil Diamond. To me, all of the Fab Four looked like fucking Charles Manson, and I knew they were British—a people whose accent and mannerisms I had early on pegged as supernaturally evil (possibly because of Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin). So when Tom showed us the White Album and told us about this “weird song” that proved Paul was murdered, I was not only fully ensconced in the rabbit hole—I was sure that I, like Mr. McCartney, would remain buried there forever.   

“You have to make the song go backwards,” Tom said. “Bullshit,” we said. “I’m serious,” Tom said. For all the kids out there, you have to understand that making a record play backwards was a manual process: you had to physically turn the record counterclockwise with your fingers, and you had to do it evenly and at a speed that came close to the 33 and 1/3 revolutions per minute a record spun when the machine was playing the right way. And we knew backwards was the wrong way, partly because of the increasingly disgruntled Evangelical Christian movement: these fine folks described rock ‘n’ roll as “a force accommodating demonic possession,” and claimed that subliminal “satanic messages” were deliberately being put in songs to control and pervert the minds of young people. Also, let’s not forget the still-lingering terrors of The Exorcist, where Linda Blair’s head spins around like a fucking record, and Father Karras figures out a demon is possessing poor Regan by recording her and playing the tape backwards. (I talk about the Beatles, Manson, The Exorcist, and how the Christian Right invented “satanic backmasking” here.) Basically, we were damned before the music even started. 

“Revolution 9” is an avant-garde concoction of sound effects, dialogue snippets, and tape loops that Lennon described as “painting in sound a picture of revolution.” What do you think it sounds like in reverse? Yes, drugged-out bloody murder. When the words “revolution nine” are played backwards, you’re supposed to hear the secret message: “Turn me on, dead man. Turn me on, dead man. Turn me on, dead man.” What we heard was something a little different, a little more sinister: “Let me on, dead man. Let me on, dead man. Let me on, dead man.” Death was a train, we deduced, and the garbled screeches and haunted marching band and manic laughter were soundtracking a descent into hell. Or better yet, the train was chugging upwards, forwards, back to the light. But who was talking? Paul? The other Beatles? Or was it us, from the future, a warning from beyond the grave?  

After that, Tom showed us the inner sleeve of the Eagles’ Hotel California, where, he said, you can see the devil himself peeking through a second story window. Fucking Tom, man. Miss him, miss him, miss him. 

—K.E. Roberts

Andy Prisbylla / June 16, 2023

Other Cinema Peace Sign Flyer. Source: SF Cinematheque Digital Archives

In our current technocratic society, it’s incredibly rare to meet someone who is genuinely free. The erosion of the Consent Decrees of 1948—which allowed media conglomerates to own and control movie theaters—drastically altered the landscape of film and video production, further destabilizing an already unlevel playing field between corporate interests, content creators, and consumers. The trickle-down economics Reagan touted in his 1981 tax act proved only to favor the affluent, further alienating independent creators who were frozen out of a livelihood through economic blacklisting, a perpetual attack that continues to this day. Bill Clinton’s elimination of the fin-syn rules that required television networks to source 35% of their content from independent producers only helped to continue this trend into the new millennium, and soon the mainstream movie and TV-consuming public was offered a slate of hegemonic programming supplied by a monopoly rule. 

With traditional avenues of information exchange becoming more restricted, pockets of transgressive media resistance—inspired by the countercultural film and video collectives of the ‘60s and ‘70s—gained 501(c)(3) non-profit status in 1980s America. These artist-run community organizations championed alternative educational perspectives on media literacy and performance, such as Artists’ Television Access in the Mission District of San Francisco, California. Operating under the umbrella of this community space exists a cinematic collective with a subversive trajectory: a film screening series and analog archive curated from the margins of mainstream media and acceptable art practice. Under the stewardship of underground filmmaker and curator Craig Baldwin, Other Cinema stands as the vanguard of Baldwin’s personal artistic conviction—what he calls “cinema povera,” an anti-capitalist filmmaking creed where artists only use the materials at their disposal to create art. Combine this practice with an ethos of media archeology and mixed-media collage that predates our current remix culture activities and what’s generated is an exhibition calendar of the modern avant-garde—a thirty-six week screening schedule projecting experimental film and video to the masses. Every Saturday night, cartoons, B movies, and commercials hold equal ground with industrial, educational, documentary, personal essay, and public domain/orphan films, bringing together numerous artists and filmmakers from around the world under one cinematic ceiling for close to 40 years.

Craig Baldwin video interview for Guerilla News Network’s Channel Zero, 1995. Source: Internet Archive

Specific details surrounding the origins of Other Cinema are hard to quantify, partially due to the vastly prolific yet oddly cryptic career of founder Craig Baldwin. Born into a self-admitted 1950s middle-class existence in the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael, California, Baldwin spent his teenage years nurturing a ravenous curiosity for subversive cultures and media. During high school, he was often at the local Towne Theater enjoying the latest midnight show of underground programming, absorbing the cinematic combustion of the ‘60s experimental scene led by filmmakers like George Kuchar and Bruce Conner, who as a teacher would later kick Baldwin out of his film class while attending San Francisco State University. In college Baldwin also indulged in subterranean films such as Peter Watkins’s 1966 pseudo-doc The War Game and exploitation flicks like Paul Bartel’s 1975 sci-fi dystopian romp Death Race 2000. Forming a fascination with film exhibition, Baldwin worked as a projectionist at several movie houses throughout the city, navigating the film worlds through an eclecticism of arthouse, exploitation, pornography, and political activism—including contributing programming and film services to El Salvador Film and Video Projects for the Salvadoran solidarity movement of northern California. His early activism with the artistic political action collective the Urban Rats saw him and his cohorts reclaim San Francisco’s urban landscape through adverse possession or “squatter’s rights,” which allowed Baldwin to experiment with expanded cinema performance, such as projecting film in abandoned buildings and other derelict dwellings. 

This direct approach towards genre and social action speaks to Baldwin’s personal opposition towards the status quo, an attitude that not only informs Other Cinema’s motion picture programming but also Baldwin’s own filmmaking forays. His early experiments with Super 8 film—such as the prototypical culture jam/situationist prank Stolen Movie—bled into his 16mm attacks on advertising, consumerism, and colonialism in Wild Gunman and RocketKitKongoKit before gaining maximum velocity with his Dexedrine-driven, countermyth conspiracy report Tribulation 99. Making up the pure found footage/collage aesthetic of his filmography until introducing live-action performance into the mix with his films !O No Coronado!, Spectres of the Spectrum, and Mock Up on Mu, these early works draw heavily from Baldwin’s now massive archive of analog film. Housed beneath the Artists’ Television Access property, this subterranean scroll of marginalized media is continuously rescued from the bowels of civilization’s ever evolving technological burden and given new purpose. The shift from film in the 1970s to magnetic tape in the 1980s saw major institutions overhaul their audio/visual collections in favor of more economical video formats, sending reels of celluloid to the dumpsters and landfills. Much like the Dadaists of the early 20th century avant-garde, whose use of appropriation and photomontage expressed anti-bourgeois protest through their art, Baldwin and company salvaged these bastardized works from material obscurity and celebrated their ephemeral nature through collage and remix. These hybrid works of the late 20th century serve as precursor to many of our current 21st century new media innovations, resulting in the continued radicalization of modern artistic folklore, such as the mashups and supercuts of Everything Is Terrible! and the radical anti-authoritarian statements of the sister collective Soda Jerk. 

Craig Baldwin projecting films in an abandoned structure for a Urban Rats squatters rights protest. Drawing by Mike Mosher, 1984. Source: Artists’ Television Access

Baldwin and Other Cinema’s defense of the diminished and discarded extends not only to the physical media he interacts with but to the audience he exhibits for. Maintaining a dialectical attitude, Baldwin expresses both respect and disrespect towards film genre and classification by spinning one off the other and forming new categories. Each screening is meant to give equal weight to diverse voices and provoke participation amongst attendees—an ethos Baldwin codified with his underground screening series The RAD, The MAD & The BAD while programming film events for Artists’ Television Access during the organization’s formative years. A protean yet practical film genre grouping system sorted through three major categories stripped of pretense and soaked in punk rock colloquialism, each selection was designated its own time slot on Wednesdays and Saturdays with those represented creating a continuity across each section:

The RAD: showcasing political and social action films 

The MAD: mad genius or auteur cinema

The BAD: psychotronic themes of horror/sci-fi/exploitation

Defying the unspoken restraint behind many traditional classification systems that favor a false high-brow aesthetic to an honest low-brow sensibility, The RAD, The MAD & The BAD crossed the cultural demarcation line with an egalitarian stance towards genre representation, allowing for serious discussion about what constitutes a film’s importance and its commodification within society. More importantly, it displayed through example that poor production doesn’t always mean poor quality, and films created on the margins of capital contain a certain cultural influence and accessibility that corporate-backed productions can only hope to afford or inspire.

Detail from a RAD, MAD & BAD programming flier for Anti-Films & Film Offensive, 1987. Source: SF Cinematheque Digital Archives

The authentic response audiences gave towards the weekly film schedule at Artists’ Television Access saw the prestigious San Francisco Cinematheque approach Baldwin to bring his street sensibility to their precocious crowd with Sub-Cinema, a RAD, MAD & BAD-inspired program that ran over the course of 1985. The creation of other pop-up programs like Anti-Films and Eyes of Hell inspired Baldwin to consolidate his film selections under his own programming umbrella, and soon the ethos that fueled The RAD, The MAD & The BAD manifested itself into the physical embodiment of Baldwin’s own psyche and practice with the foundation of Other Cinema. 

If the RAD, MAD & BAD helped bring acceptance to the concept of marginalization in film selection and exhibition during the 1980s, the programming behind Other Cinema built upon this provocation by introducing new alternative voices from the microcinema scene of the 1990s. One of the forefronts of this new cinematic experience, Other Cinema became a home for a subculture of film using and reusing old and new technologies to create future underground works, with filmmakers and exhibitors from across the country like Sam Green, Martha Colburn, Greta Snider, Bill Daniel, Orgone Cinema, 3Ton Cinema, and “others” coalescing to this space like the children of Hamelin to the Pied Piper’s whimsical flute. Many of these groups and individuals appear in Baldwin’s upcoming career monograph Avant to Live!, a 500-page treatise detailing his cinematic trajectory in the media arts.

Baldwin in the archive, circa 2005. Photo by Lauren DeFilippo. Source: Internet Archive

The decline of physical media coupled with our perpetual progression towards a digital state continues to divide us, with some championing the virtual realm and its democratization of new technologies and others questioning its effect on the human experience and how we interact with each other. The popularity of streaming services continues to challenge the economic longevity of physical media, forcing film formats into a wave of obsolescence. Despite this, Craig Baldwin and Other Cinema rise against the tide with an analog assault of expanded cinema every Saturday night. Filmmakers on the fringe and maverick media archeologists with an overwhelming responsibility to film history, yet hamstrung by a lack of resources, congregate at Other Cinema to embrace the struggle in an ever evolving motion picture renaissance. It’s a form of masochism one needs to make it on this side of the art world—the “masochism of the margins,” as Baldwin often says. It takes pain and sacrifice to live here, yet the psychic rewards far outweigh the material loss. 

Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! is a collaborative project between San Francisco Cinematheque and INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media and was released on May 30, 2023.

Andy Prisbylla is an underground filmmaker and exhibitor from the rust belt apocalypse of Steel City, PA. His screening series SUBCINEMA showcases subterranean movies and art through digital programming and live pop-up events. Find out more through Letterboxd and Mastodon. 

Lisa Fernandes / June 15, 2023

All of the characters in Paul Schrader’s Light of Day (1987) are looking for a way out. They’re stuck in menial nine to five jobs, on the line in factories and behind candy-colored checkout stands in supermarkets. Their families are suffocatingly close-knit, with parents watching punitively over rainbow-colored birthday cakes, wondering silently what they did to deserve such ungrateful spawn. Why won’t their children go to church, buy a car, come to Sunday dinner, and settle down? The Rasnick siblings, fronting their small band The Barbusters, wander the crowded barrooms and smoldering arcades of a Cleveland that no longer exists: they’re in a state of freefall, but they’re looking for a state of grace. Salvation ends up being but a breath away.

The fact that Light of Day exists at all is amazing in its own right. It started life as a Bruce Springsteen vehicle called Born in the USA, and though The Boss liked Schrader’s script, he ultimately passed on the project. He did give Schrader a new title, and wrote the title song, on the way out the door. We all know what happened to Born in the USA—the album and the song—after that. But Springsteen wasn’t the only musician connected to the project. Light of Day marks the big screen debut of another popular MTV star and rock icon—Joan Jett, who still performs the film’s title track at live shows. 

Jett is a powerful revelation in the part of Patti Rasnick, who holds down various day jobs (barely) to keep her kid fed while keeping her eyes on the prizes of leather and neon, full arenas and autograph-hungry fans. Playing Patti allows Jett to soar within the bruised and tightly-wound skin of a down-at-heels woman struggling to get up while refusing to compromise her ideals. Patti doesn’t care about her bad reputation either, and Schrader wisely doesn’t force her to. Patti is wise enough to know how good she is, how much more she deserves, and how different her life might be had her luck gone differently. Part of Schrader’s point is that the world is filled with Pattis, and Jett brilliantly plays the difference between what she knows and what Patti knows.

Michael J. Fox splits screen time with Jett as Joe Rasnick, Patti’s more settled brother. While Joe clearly has a love of rock music and an artistic temperament, it’s clear that his dreams are simpler. Patti won’t rest until her pain is consecrated and made worthwhile by a major career breakthrough; all Joe seems to want is a regular gig, a nice girlfriend, and for his family to get along for once. While they’re both talented, the level of commitment they bring to the band is very different. Patti is meant for bigger successes, destined to end up a viral sensation twenty years after the movie’s conclusion. Joe is destined to inherit his parent’s nice suburban house, work a good union job, raise a family, and play in bars on the weekends. He’s a nice guy who’s easily pushed around by the stronger personalities surrounding him. Because Patti is the flashier character, Fox’s performance has been somewhat underrated. But he absolutely aces Joe’s smallness, his inability to make bold moves; only when he acts in defense of his vulnerable nephew and tries to please his mother does he finally break out from under his big sister’s spell. Fox stands out in the film’s smaller dramatic moments, as when Joe is seen alone outside of his dying mother’s hospital room, as hunched and withered as the woman in the bed. He makes Joe likable, sympathetic.  

Joe’s everyman dreams anchor a life with no fixed stars. He dates a nice, upstanding-seeming blonde girl from a richer background, but she fades out of his life when she realizes how messy things are between him and the rest of his family, and how poorly she fits into his working class world. Patti herself has no steady significant other, mainly dedicating her life to music, even at the expense of her young son Benji (Billy L. Sullivan). She commits petty burglary to get the band a new sound board and shoplifts steaks with her son’s unwitting help to reward the band after a brief, anemic wintertime tour leads them nowhere. It’s not Patti but Joe who suffers in both incidents—Patti burglarizes a cousin of a co-worker, who knows exactly who took his tools and demands she pay up, forcing Joe to lean on their angelic mom. And Joe witnesses her shoplift and chews her out over it, leading to an explosive fight and the band’s temporary breakup.

Patti is never clever enough in her schemes to avoid detection, necessitating Joe’s apologies, his bowing and scraping to those who Patti has wronged. This is, we know, how it is between the two. His embarrassed apologies to their parents, who stand back and sigh and tisk at their daughter’s misfortunes, are accepted and received with almost presidential superiority. They all know they can’t really help her. The truth is that Patti sold her soul to rock ‘n’ roll years ago. It’s the only thing that saved her life when the family priest raped and impregnated her as a teenager, a fact she can’t bring herself to confess to her uber-religious mother Jeanette (Gena Rowlands), who still looks to the preacher as a spiritual advisor and looks down on Patti as a fallen Christian.

In turn, Patti has rejected her suburban childhood, the manicured lawns, the safety of the snowbound lanes surrounding their split-level house and the bromides of Jeanette and their cipher-like father, who loves his kids but stays out of Jeanette’s way. Even worse, Patti has rejected God and churchgoing itself. Joe still needs and loves all of these things; he’s never seen to pray, but their parents aren’t worried for his immortal soul. As a duo, Patti and Joe’s united dreams are beginning to untangle. The older Joe gets, the more he begins to yearn for the safety that his parents offer with every home-cooked meal and trip to the mall. The conflict that wears upon them all is a doozy—Joe, Benjamin Senior (Jason Miller), and Jeanette don’t know who Benji’s father is, and Patti simply wants to forget his name and that of the God he claims to serve. 

Interestingly, Patti does not reject or blame her son for what has happened to her. She is shown to be strict but loving, and parents with a sense of humor; she also would rather die than allow Jeanette to raise her child even for a couple of weeks. While Patti tries to prove she’s a good mom by trying to do right by Benji, she also pulls him out of school abruptly in the name of rock ‘n’ roll righteousness. She’s not interested in looking like a good mom to anyone. Ultimately, her choices are another act of defiance against Jeannette.

Joe is a conventionally good uncle, and becomes something of a surrogate father to Benji as Patti joins a different band and spends most of her nights performing. He wants Benji to have an ordinary life instead of whatever haphazard world Patti can offer him. Little Benji, seen strumming a plastic guitar in several scenes, clearly plans on taking after them both—and Joe will do anything to prevent that. He inserts himself nonstop into the boy’s life to offer him a sense of regularity and shouts down Patti for turning Benji into a pawn in her war of attrition with their mother. Joe’s the one who’s stuck making most of the decisions when Jeanette suddenly begins to decline in a way that seems to portend Alzheimer’s Disease but instead presages a quick, devastating cancer death. Only Gena Rowlands’s haunting, gentle performance helps make that part of the story work. Really, Jeanette’s death only exists as an object lesson for Patti (less of one for Joe, whose mourning seems secondary to the situation). 

And die she must, for Jeanette is just one in a long line of suffering, imperfect, Christlike figures who haunt Schrader’s writing. She’s the most human among them, the most easy to relate to, and the easiest to sympathize with. She’s no radical like Travis Bickle, but she causes a storm and a revolution in her own limited way. In Jeanette, forever forgiving, forever faithful, forever motherly—even when she’s trying not to be—Schrader finds maybe the most holy and sacrificing of all the female characters in his entire canon.  

Martyrdom may rule the entire Rasnick household, but it’s Patti who refuses to kneel. It takes Jeanette’s death to change anything, to bring about reconciliation. Patti promises that she’ll do what she must to join Jeanette in heaven, but one cannot picture her in church every Sunday. One can’t imagine her accepting communion, or subjecting Benji to the rituals she has rejected for so long, doled out by the man who abused her. Nor should she. If she spends more time in an arcade than at Sunday services, Jeanette will never know. The important thing is that they come to understand one another before Jeannette dies.

All of the Rasnicks are failed, in one way or another, by the great Gods in their lives. Jeanette‘s prayers draw Patti back to the fold of both home and religion, but don’t provide much succor as she lays dying, much of her recent recall obliterated by the strain of the illness. Joe quits his job to take The Barbusters beyond their regional roots, but returns to pressing out TV trays and taking care of his mother. Benji is let down by his mom’s choices and his family’s infighting. Benjamin Senior, who has spent his adult life worshiping his wife, now has no one in his bed. Patti is betrayed by the gods of rock; she ends up the lead singer of a Vixen-like pop metal band called the Hunzz, precipitating The Barbusters’ breakup and ever-so-slightly selling out to the mainstream in the process. What keeps them all going is their love for one another in the face of their imploding dreams, tied together like lifeboats on a sinking ship. 

The grimy and arid depictions of life in Cleveland in the mid-to-late 1980s shows a town slowly calcifying into a mini desert—the vanishing dream of Reagan’s Morning in America. Schrader’s visual palette snakes between the muted pastels of a shopping mall (stuffed with luxuries the Rasnicks can barely afford) to vermillion neon signs and concrete-colored urban landscapes filled with foreboding looking factories, which look rusted out and precarious, as if they’re about to chug to a stop at any moment. Schrader has derided his work on the film as visually uninteresting, claiming that his landscapes are flat. And yet he plays with the colors of the night and the late-day sunshine in a way that feels natural and unique. The scrubby parks and roadside motels and gloomy supermarkets are compelling precisely because of their glorious ordinariness. And the beautifully framed shots of the band rehearsing together as light streams into an otherwise silent and dark bar are as striking as a Renaissance painting. 

Decades later, the landscape the Rasnick siblings inhabited is long gone. The MarshAlan Industries building where Joe and bandmate Bu (Michael McKean) plied their trade was abandoned in 2000 and razed in 2006; the Euclid Tavern, where The Barbusters play their triumphant film-ending gig, shuttered in the late teens. Light of Day memorializes the Rasnicks’ America, a world frozen forever on a tightrope between what could be and what has died. 

To quote Dennis Potter, the song has ended, but the melody lingers on.

Lisa Fernandes has been writing since she could talk. Her bylines include Newsweek; Women Write About Comics; Smart Bitches, Trashy Books; and All About Romance.

Michael Gonzales / April 12, 2023

Tower Records on 4th Street and Broadway, 1984. Photo by Brandi Merolla

Having grown up in the 1970s, an era when record shops were a fixture in communities and often served as neighborhood social centers, I became obsessed with a small store located on 146th and Broadway. Owned by my father’s friend Mr. Freddy, I visited that record shop weekly to buy 45s to jam on my blue record player. From the Jackson 5 to Gladys Knight & the Pips, he carried all the latest soul records. There were promotional posters taped in the windows and tacked to the exterior walls, and packages of fragrant incense on the counter next to the register. If needed, Mr. Freddy, a sharp-dressed and kindly man, played the disc for me to make sure it was the right one.

As I got older and my musical taste broadened, I began spreading my wings throughout Manhattan, where I discovered other record stores, including Kappy’s in Washington Heights, Bobby’s Happy House in Central Harlem, and Bondy’s, which was across the street from City Hall. Often, I went alone and spent hours flipping through the stacks in search of old soul, new wave, early rap, free jazz, and on-the-money funk. I was a fiend for cut-out bins where I could find discounted records, mostly from artists I’d never heard of—but I liked the covers.

I dug all them shops, but I had no particular favorite until 1983, when Tower Records opened on Fourth and Broadway. Back then the neighborhood was rather bleak. With the exception of New York University and music venue The Bottom Line, there wasn’t much else. Recently, while watching the wonderful Tower Records documentary All Things Must Pass (2015), a senior West Coast employee described the location as “the bowels of the East Village” and claimed he saw a dead dog in the gutter. As the talking heads dropped Tower Records history and lore, I thought about the many hours I spent in that store as both patron and employee. 

With their custom designed window displays that were done by in-house artists, Tower Records was bigger than most New York City record stores. They had large jazz and classical departments, sold cool import and rap singles, and carried an array of music publications, including British papers Melody Maker and New Music Express (NME). Inside the trademarked yellow bags stamped with the red logo, I often carried out lots of goodies. Additionally, Tower stayed open until midnight, which made it the perfect place to drift into after happy hour when some jukebox song was stuck in your head. I can remember my buddy Jerry and I going down there one night when my drunk self believed I needed to buy the soundtrack for Valley of the Dolls just to hear Dionne Warwick singing the theme. 

Though I lived in Harlem and Jerry dwelled in Brooklyn, we often met in front of Tower when we planned on “hangin’ in the village.” We’d flip through racks of records for an hour or so, which was usually followed by smoking a joint in Washington Square Park while watching comedian Charlie Barnett. Back in those days, I had a bad habit of running late and, on one occasion, he befriended a guy begging for change in front of the store. An aspiring playwright, Jerry wrote a one-act about the encounter. Years later, I heard how fallen Grandmaster Flowers, a pioneering DJ from Brooklyn, used to shake his coin cup on that spot and I just knew that’s who Jerry had met. That same year I hung out with Jerry as he waited in line overnight to buy tickets for The Police’s Synchronicity Tour. That year we both worked as messengers in Manhattan, but we were ready to splurge our minimum wages on Sting.

In 1985, two years after Tower’s doors opened, I abruptly quit my gig at midtown coffee shop Miss Brooks after a transgression with a married older woman manager. After leaving, I went to Baltimore for a few weeks. I’d gone to high school there and my mom still called it home. For two weeks I bummed around with old friends and had a fling with a former classmate. When I returned to the Big Apple, I needed to find a new job. As a lover of books and music, my first thought was going to a favorite bookshop, but I was afraid I might get fired for hiding in the aisle reading the latest Harlan Ellison short story collection or a Chester Himes reissue. Instead, I went down to Tower Records the first week in September.

After being directed to the cassette department, I met with the manager, who had me fill out an application. During that era, when most Americans had tape players in their homes and cars, as well as the millions that carried Walkman’s every day, cassettes were a popular format. Tower also sold a variety of blank tapes, cassette player head cleaners, and carrying cases. There were numerous blank tape companies including TDK, Maxell, Fuji, and Memorex.            

With his neo-rockabilly style, the manager was a few years older than me. I don’t recall much about the interview process, but when he asked who my favorite artists were, I went back to my old standards: “James Brown and Led Zeppelin,” I replied. He smiled and hired me. If I had said Lionel Richie and A-Ha I might’ve been kicked to the curb, but instead I was asked to report on Saturday morning at 8:00. As with most retail stores, Saturday was Tower’s busiest day and I was thrown straight into the fire. 

Beastie Boys display window designed by Brandi Merolla, 1986. Photo by Brandi Merolla

That morning I was shown around the cassette department and, for the next few hours, restocked the shelves with co-worker Barry Walters, an NYU student as well as a music critic for The Village Voice. As an aspiring writer and music critic myself, I was both impressed and a little jealous. Barry was a soft-spoken white guy who helped get me through that first day. Later that morning he introduced me to Bryan Ferry’s smooth solo album Boys and Girls and the music of an English band called Prefab Sprout, whose second album Two Wheels Good (aka Steve McQueen) he was reviewing for the Voice. From the first listen I loved the songs (“When Love Break Down,” “Horsin’ Around,” and “Appetite”) written and sung by Prefab’s bitterly charming leader Paddy McAloon, with whom I connected as I pulled overstock from beneath the bins. With each repeated listening, the album only got better, richer, and more tragically poetic.

At noon my manager instructed me to go upstairs and work bag check. That was the area where, for security purposes, customers checked their various sized briefcases, duffle bags, shopping bags, and knapsacks. It was the most rowdy section of the store. Though there was a security guard a few feet away, that didn’t stop people from not making a line, barking orders, flinging their sacks, and basically treating me like a non-person. What made it worse was that I was alone for the first forty-five minutes—and I was a mess. People were throwing bags and yelling as I handed out numbers and placed the belongings in lockers. I felt as though I’d been jumped, punched, and kicked into a gang. Thankfully, one of the guys from the 12-inch singles section on the mezzanine saw that I was struggling and came downstairs to help. At the end of the hour I bolted to the basement and hid in the back. Later, someone told me that if I learned to work the register I could get out of the bag check nightmare.

I enjoyed running the register and was sometimes impressed with the people who popped up in line. Fourth Street and Broadway was still an arty hood that consisted of various galleries, artist lofts, recording studios, and restaurants. Jean-Michel Basquiat lived a few blocks away at 57 Great Jones Street. One afternoon film director Jim Jarmusch came to the counter carrying an assortment of musical genres. I’d seen Stranger than Paradise the previous year, a flick that inspired me to take a few film classes—until I realized it was cheaper to be a writer.

On another day, artist Keith Haring was my customer, and that time I got excited. “I saw you a few months back in the 145th Street subway station doing one of those radiant babies in chalk,” I said. “I love your work.” Keith smiled. “Thank you,” he replied. Before I knew it I blurted, “Can you do a sketch for me?” He looked at me and nodded his head. “Sure, no problem.” I got my notebook from beneath the counter and handed him a black marker. He drew one of his trademark men dancing across the page. Three minutes later he passed the pad back. There was a plain clothes security guard standing next to me. “Can you do one for me too?” he asked. Keith chuckled, but he complied. Later, the security guy regaled me with stories of catching guys shoplifting. “One was that crazy bassist Jaco Pastorius. He came in and tried to steal Weather Report albums that he’d played on. When I caught him he kept screaming, insisting that the records belonged to him.”

A few weeks after I was hired, New York City was supposed to be hit hard by Hurricane Gloria. I was recruited to be part of the Tower team to tape giant X’s across the windows. While goofing around with one of my co-workers, I saw an earth angel descending the stairs. Her name was Pauline and she was a beautiful black woman with long, curly hair and a full figure. Later, I overheard her Brit accent, which made her even more alluring. I went back to taping the windows, but I never released her from my mind. That night the winds were strong and the heavy rain lasted for hours. 

As the King of Crushes, I instantly fell in love with Pauline, though she had no idea that I existed. Unfortunately, every time I ventured upstairs to play the Romeo role, I chickened out. One night I called Jerry and asked if he’d do me a favor. He agreed and the following day met me outside of the store. I’d written Pauline a secret admirer letter with a poem and bought her a dozen roses. In those days, I was always writing poetry, filling notebooks with words of joyful decadence as though I was an uptown Rimbaud. Jerry was assigned to deliver the package for me. Everything went as planned and the following day I introduced myself. Pauline and I stood in the front of the store next to stacks of Pulse magazine, Tower’s own music rag.

“So you’re my secret admirer,” she smiled. “The poem you wrote was very nice.”

“Thank you,” I said, nervous as a school boy. “I was hoping, maybe… can I take you out to dinner?” As Beaver Cleaver would say, I think I sounded creepy, but she was still smiling.

“You’re sweet,” she said, “but I’m dating someone right now.”

I chuckled to keep from weeping. “Of course you are,” I sighed. “It’s cool.” Pauline and I became friendly, and a week later she invited me to a get-together at the Rivington Street apartment she shared with her boyfriend. She scribbled the address on the back of a Pulse that had Stevie Wonder on the cover. The night of the party, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” played at least four times. Outside, a couple of teenagers set fire to Pauline’s boyfriend’s motorcycle. From their fourth floor window, I watched the rising flames.

Preparing for Hurricane Gloria by taping up all the plate glass windows. Photo: Brandi Merolla

Back then “in-stores,” when artists came by for a few hours and signed their latest release, were a major part of the industry. Though I’d never attended any before, I was thrilled when word went around that Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam were coming to the store. The year before, when the group’s debut single “I Wonder If I Take You Home” came out, they’d been a sensation in the city. Radio played Lisa Lisa constantly and at the nightclubs, especially the Roxy and the Funhouse, that track was elevated to an anthem. 

Hours before the band arrived, there were young girls of all races and nationalities dressed like Lisa, with hair swept over to cover their right eye. Thankfully, when the group arrived, they were just as excited as their fans. Lisa’s smile was genuine as she chatted with her fans and signed autographs. I was checking out the scene from the mezzanine with my security guard buddy, who decided to dis Lisa. “She sure has put on weight since the video came out,” he said. Mocking her song, he sang, “I wonder if I take you home if you’ll fit through my door.” I glared at him. “That’s rude,” I snapped. “Why is it always you fat, ugly dudes trying to call somebody unattractive?” Nervously, he chuckled. “Damn Mike, you act like she’s your woman or something.”

Everyone in the cassette department got along, but there was always a little tension when it was time to change the music. One person might want to hear L.L. Cool J or Mantronix while someone else might want to play The Smiths or Eurythmics; my choice was usually Prince or something he wrote, including “The Dance Electric” (André Cymone), “Screams of Passion” (The Family) or “A Love Bizarre” (Shelia E.). After a while it was comical the way people raced to the tape deck to (hopefully) jam their favorite joint.

Upstairs, not far from the employee bathrooms, was where the art team worked. Though not much of a visual artist myself, I’ve always been an aficionado—a fan of comics, commercial illustration, and fine art equally. If I’m not mistaken, it was mostly women working in the art department, and they were overseen by Brandi Merolla. Though I didn’t know her personally, her team’s work was seen throughout the store in the many 3D displays. In 2011, when writer/musician Greg Tate co-founded and edited the lit-mag Coon Bidness with poet Latasha Natasha Diggs, I contributed the short story “Daddy Gone Blues,” about fem-rocker Andrea Holiday, who works in Tower’s art department while trying to be a star. Merolla got to be creative with band posters of Tears for Fears, a-Ha, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, Wham!, Scritti Politti, Prefab Sprout, Aretha Franklin, and everybody else who put out a hit record in 1985.

Although Tower Records was a chain, the owners allowed staff to be as creative as they wanted to be and, personally, I never felt any corporate pressure to act or dress in any certain way. Our managers were cool folks who had our backs. One afternoon I went to lunch with my mother at a nearby Mexican place called Camambra where I drank three very strong frozen margaritas and stumbled back to the store with “cocktail flu.” After standing behind the register for a few minutes, the manager came over and whispered, “I’m not firing you, but you have to go home. I can’t have you drunk behind the register.” The following day I apologized. “Don’t worry about it, man, it happens.” If I was anywhere else, I would’ve been picking up my last check. 

For struggling writers, visual artists, musicians, and future record company executives, Tower was the starting place for many creative souls who needed a job, but didn’t want to work around “regular” people. That 4th and Broadway store had many oddballs who went on to greatness, including bassist Melvin Gibbs, jazz producer Brian Michel Bacchus, A&R man Gary Harris, composer/conductor Butch Morris, and Burnt Sugar keyboardist Bruce Mack.

I was there for a year before I left to work at a homeless shelter the city opened in part of the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital. However, eight years later, when I’d finally become a full-time writer, I was commissioned by Tower Pulse editor Marc Weidenbaum to write the Gang Starr cover story for the May 1994 issue. That relationship lasted for the next two years.

Days before my Tower Records closed down in 2006, I visited the damn near empty store and almost wept. To this day, I’ve never stopped thinking about that music sanctuary for the twenty years it existed at that location. 

Michael A. Gonzales is an essayist/short story writer who has published fiction in The Oxford American, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He contributes pop culture/true crime features to CrimeReads, Soulhead, and Longreads.

Johnny Restall / March 20, 2023

American cinema of the 1970s has long been recognized for its downbeat, character-led crime dramas. From Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971) to Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975) and Ulu Grosbard’s Straight Time (1978), the decade saw a wealth of unusually complex thrillers released by major Hollywood studios. While the critical reception to such films was largely positive, they frequently drew more mixed responses from contemporary audiences, as well as from nervous studio executives. Director Peter Yates’s 1973 The Friends of Eddie Coyle stands as a particularly bleak and restrained example of this cycle, adapted by Paul Monash from George V. Higgins’s 1970 novel of the same name. A deliberately low-key tale of a struggling small-time criminal clinging to the dark underbelly of Boston, it failed to make its money back at the box office, despite generally favorable reviews. Compelling and brilliantly understated, it remains a somewhat unsung gem of the period, ripe for reconsideration as we approach the 50th anniversary of its initial release.

We first see Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum) through the window of a run-down cafeteria. He approaches the glass from outside, slowly emerging from the evening crowds to stare warily into the interior, quietly surveying the scene inside in a way that suggests experience has taught him not to be hasty. His gray clothes match his exhausted, lugubrious features, with his cautious, hooded eyes the only expressive part of his appearance. Already, the film has subtly established Eddie as a shabby, lonely figure, forever on the outside looking in, still seeking his chance but more from habit than any residual self-belief. He is framed above the flowers on the interior windowsill, and their bright bloom contrasts with his drab shape like a funeral bouquet against a gravestone; almost subliminally, the visuals inform the audience that he is essentially a dead man walking.

Eddie is an aging professional criminal, painfully aware that his time and his options are inexorably running out. He is due to be sentenced for his part in a truck hijacking and has little reason to expect clemency, having already served time for previous offenses. He knows better than to inform on the people behind the job, partly from a shop-worn sense of honor and partly from simple self-preservation, having already earned an extra set of knuckles from his associates for a past mistake. He is also trying to make ends meet by supplying handguns to a gang of bank robbers, and his ears prick up when cocky young gunrunner Jackie Brown (Steven Keats) mentions another customer who is buying machine guns. If he passes this information on to the authorities, he might earn a reprieve from the law—he’s too old and tired to face prison again, and has a wife and children to provide for. But can he trust either the cops or the criminals? Eddie’s titular “friends” are closer to jackals nipping at his threadbare carcass, and the scent of his desperation may only bring them in for the kill.

While the plot synopsis may sound formulaic, the approach taken by Yates and Monash repeatedly confounds expectations. Echoing the ground-breaking style of Higgins’s book, the film provides little overt explanation or exposition. The characters, their relationships to one another, and the twists and turns of the labyrinthine plot are conveyed almost entirely through the sharp but sometimes oblique dialogue, forcing the viewer to draw their own conclusions from what is (or indeed isn’t) said. Most of the key scenes consist of innocuous-sounding but heavily freighted conversations between the duplicitous players, and we are never made privy to their inner thoughts or motivations beyond an occasional unguarded word or a vulnerability in their body language. Victor J. Kemper’s unobtrusive cinematography captures the characters under sickly fluorescent lights or lurking uncomfortably in the Autumn sunshine, inviting the audience to study them in their natural habitat as though they were anthropological exhibits. While this admittedly cold approach may alienate casual viewers, it contributes greatly to the film’s sense of realism. It often feels as if we just happen to be in the same dive bars and municipal parks as the cast, eavesdropping on their meetings and quietly connecting the fragments for ourselves—a notion taken further in Francis Ford Coppola’s deliberately disorientating The Conversation, released the following year.

The distinctly unglamorous documentary style of the film also extends to its brief bursts of violence. Yates made his name with the iconic 1968 Steve McQueen thriller Bullitt, as well as his underrated 1967 British feature Robbery, but while all three films share brilliant use of authentic locations, viewers hoping for a repeat of his earlier kinetic car chases will be disappointed here. The closest Eddie Coyle comes to an action scene is Jackie Brown’s abortive attempt to escape the police in the train station car park: barely 20 seconds of wayward driving leading only to an abrupt, clumsy crash. Perversely, Eddie Coyle is a thriller without any traditional thrills. The bank robberies are played with more of an eye for detail than for visceral excitement, as are the arrests. Even the climactic murder of Coyle himself is over almost as soon as it has begun, the victim deep in a drunken slumber and executed unawares while the experienced gunman casually discusses his choice of weapon and disposal plans for the body with the callow driver. The uncharacteristically restrained score by jazz musician Dave Grusin is used only sparingly, and even when it is allowed to breathe and build tension, the pay-off is always swift and matter-of-fact.

In part, this approach reflects the story’s focus on aging gangsters rather than hot-headed young hoodlums. Most of the characters are dull professional men who no longer have the energy or inclination to be incautious in their chosen line of work. Crucially, it also reflects the novel’s preoccupation with presenting crime as simply another form of employment, a thread shared with several other genre films in the age of Watergate. Again and again, The Friends of Eddie Coyle emphasizes the tedious practicalities of the illegal jobs in hand rather than their novelty or danger. The film opens with the robbers tailing an unsuspecting bank manager to his workplace, calmly monitoring his morning routine, casing the branch, and painstakingly setting up their plans, with the resulting heist defined by a similar attention to minutiae. Likewise, we follow the laborious processes of how Eddie buys and delivers his guns, how Brown sources them in the first place, how the criminals communicate with each other below the radar, and eventually how a hit is placed, performed, and dispensed with.

Tellingly, almost every one of these criminal actions is executed in everyday public locations, from a supermarket car park to a bowling alley, as if they were simply a part of ordinary life. We see Eddie at home in the city suburbs, taking out the trash as his children run for the school bus, looking for all the world like any other downtrodden blue collar worker. His wife Sheila (Helena Carroll) appears relatively sanguine about his chosen occupation, with their domestic life presented with a warmth absent from the novel’s more fractious depiction. The film seems to suggest that, while his career may be empty and crushing, it is little more so than several other legal forms of menial employment.

The universe inhabited by the film’s gangsters could barely be further from the epic grandeur of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, released the previous year to great critical and commercial acclaim. Eddie and his “friends” are at the bottom of the pile struggling to make ends meet, far from Coppola’s affluent if troubled Mafia clan. If the Corleones represent moral and political corruption reaching for the apex of US society (particularly in the 1974 sequel), Yates’s film deals with the lowest of the low, who are barely chiseling out a criminal living at the shabbiest, sharpest end of the American Dream. While Vito Corleone dreams of his son Michael becoming a senator, Coyle and his associates show little awareness of nationwide politics, let alone any ambitions in that direction. They are not even on the periphery of the kind of multi-million dollar deals attempted by the New York mobsters of William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971). They gamble everything on a relative pittance, and fail to recognize their losing hand. Scalise (Alex Rocco) and his bank robbers may drive a Mercedes-Benz (presumably stolen), but this only serves to symbolize the way their desire overreaches their actual opportunities and abilities: their greedy decision to pull “one more move” even after a job goes murderously wrong seals their fate.

While the small-time crooks we see in the film scrounge a living from a life of crime, the police live off the criminals. There is a deeply parasitic relationship between the two, embodied by the ruthless agent Foley (Richard Jordan) and the quietly sinister Dillon (Peter Boyle), ostensibly a bartender but actually the man behind the truck hijacking that led to Eddie’s capture, as well as a secret police informer. Foley is ambitious, arrogant, and exploitative, happy to go back on his word or ignore a felony if it suits his purposes. He may share a lack of uniform and longer hair with the upstanding protagonist of Sidney Lumet’s Serpico, released the same year, but Foley’s duplicitous crusade is entirely for the benefit of his own career. He brags about driving fast cars confiscated from criminals, happy to profit from their ill-gotten gains, and thinks nothing of manipulating and exposing the lowly likes of Eddie, contemptuous of the fatal costs for his underworld connections. He regularly meets Dillon, paying him $20 for information and turning a blind eye to the bartender’s suspected illegalities in return, an arrangement tacitly endorsed by his cynical superior Waters (Mitchell Ryan). Foley blithely insists that a beleaguered nobody like Eddie puts his “whole soul” into informing, while effectively giving the more cunning and dangerous Dillon a free pass to run rings around him.

Like almost every other relationship in the film, enforcement of the law is a game rigged against the weakest. American society is depicted as being riddled with division and contempt, with everybody at odds with everyone else and playing entirely for their own advantage. The hippy radicals trying to buy machine guns are despised by professionals like Brown and vice versa, the criminals frequently betray each other, and the mob is rife with casual bigotry against Black activists and the ghetto, with the police working against them all and encouraging their mutual antipathies for fear of the various underclasses one day working together. Even the affluent, apolitical middle-classes are unwillingly dragged into the maelstrom, represented by the bemused bank managers and their terrified families, forced to endure violent reminders of the precariousness of their apparent social safety.

Naturally, such a bleak story requires strong performances if it is to be brought to life without entirely repulsing its audience. Mitchum’s work as Eddie must rank among the finest of his career, playing to his hangdog, world-weary strengths without allowing him to slip into the bored detachment that mars his lesser films. Coyle is no hero, and in many ways he is not even likable: he is bigoted, he arms violent men, and while he is far from stupid he is never quite smart enough, failing even to turn informer successfully. Yet Mitchum imbues the character with a dignity and pathos that ensures his downfall is as pitiful as it is inevitable, a deeply flawed but compellingly human victim of the hard and unforgiving world around him.

Despite the prominence of his name, Mitchum’s character is actually only on screen intermittently, with much of the film carried by the universally superb supporting cast. Jackie Brown is almost a second lead, with Keats playing him with just the right amount of intriguing obnoxiousness. He seems the polar opposite of Coyle: young, loudly dressed, driving a flashy car, and full of tough, cocksure bravado. Yet the two are inextricably linked, sharing the first scene post-credits, and reuniting at several other key moments. It is with Brown that Eddie shares his care-worn wisdom and back story—not that it does either of them any good in the long run. Brown is too arrogant to heed Eddie’s warnings that “You don’t understand like I understand,” and is dismissive of the older man’s complaints, failing to see that Coyle is essentially a mirror reflecting Brown’s own probable future. Eddie, meanwhile, seems to resent the younger man’s opportunities and vigor, seizing his opportunity to sell the gunrunner out with only the mildest sense of distaste. Neither quite has the wit to escape his respective fate, and both are too mistrustful and scheming to consider anything beyond immediate personal profit, inadvertently ensuring that they become easy prey for the venal likes of Foley and Dillon.

The conclusion of Monash’s screenplay departs from Higgins’s book to deliver a last pessimistic twist of the narrative knife. In the novel, Scalise is secretly betrayed by his mistreated girlfriend Wanda, but the mob suspects Eddie of being the informer and orders his murder at Dillon’s hands. (The desperate Eddie does in fact decide to inform on the thieves, only to find he has left his decision too late, with the men already in custody and his information now useless.) In the film, the informer is revealed to be Dillon, who has maneuvered himself into the clear with an utterly sociopathic coldness. He has eliminated Eddie, who could have informed on Dillon’s role in the hijacking that started his troubles, and he has avoided any mob suspicion of being the informer himself by framing and assassinating a (relatively) innocent man for his own treachery, even earning himself $5,000 in the process. Further, he has correctly calculated that the ambitious Foley will be so delighted with the capture of the prolific bank robbers that he will have no interest in the murder of a small-fry like Eddie. The agent simply shrugs off Dillon’s suspected role in the killing in favor of remaining on good terms with his prize informant.

While the book ends with Brown’s lawyer and prosecutor lamenting the repetitive parade of criminals passing through their courtroom, the film closes even more cynically by showing both sides of the law actively perpetuating the cycle. The most ruthless and corrupt cops and criminals play the system for their own ends, walking away with virtual impunity and leaving hapless souls like Eddie and his family crushed in their wake. Hardened robber Scalise gleefully describes crime as “a great life if you don’t weaken”—loaded words that could be applied to the entire dog-eat-dog world depicted within the film—but even he underestimates just how cruelly and duplicitously the game will be played by the eventual victors.

Johnny Restall writes freelance about films, music, and books. He specializes in Cult and Horror. You can find links to his published work here. 

Announcements / January 1, 2023

If you haven’t heard, we wrote a book! And it’s out right now! If you’ve followed us over the last six plus years, you know our MO: we get deep down into the berserk array of popular and outsider media produced during the Cold War and talk about what these various artifacts—lost, forgotten, seemingly disposable—mean in the larger arenas of politics and culture, then and now. We Are the Mutants: The Battle for Hollywood from Rosemary’s Baby to Lethal Weapon takes that approach and applies it to American films released between the arrival of US combat troops in Vietnam and the end of President Ronald Reagan’s second term—probably the most discussed and beloved stretch of movies in Hollywood history. 

Read more about the book at our publisher, Repeater. 

We talk about the book in an interview with Joe Banks at The Quietus.

Check out Andrew Nette’s review at Pulp Curry.

Have a look at Johnny Restall’s review at Diabolique.

You can buy the book pretty much anywhere books are sold, including bookshop.org, Amazon, and Penguin Random House. If you dig it, please rate it and/or review it. We need all the word of mouth we can get. Thank you and keep an eye on the site—we’ll be back soon in some (altered) way, shape or form.

—The Mutants

Lisa Fernandes / November 7, 2022

1984’s This Is Spinal Tap is all about the pining—epic pining, as high and fulsome as the band’s hair and the wailing notes they (try to) hit. Every single member of the band and their entourage is longing after something they want, something they need, but the real world thwarts them with a passionate glee. They’re either too recalcitrant to claim what they need, assuming that if they keep plowing on as they have been, glory will return to them; or, when their heart’s desire finally falls into their lap like a willing groupie, they’re completely unprepared for the responsibility of the task at hand.

Nobody in the band is content with how things are going, except for perhaps bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), whose storyline—which originally contained divorce-based angst—was generally abandoned to the cutting room floor, and Viv Savage (David Kaff), who seems to require nothing more than a good time and a keyboard to be happy. Lead singer David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) longs for the respect the band once earned, and if he can’t be seen as a purveyor of popular music, he at least wants to be enrobed in the sort of dignity that most elder statesmen of rock are afforded. His wife on the astral plane, Jeanine Pettibone (June Chadwick), longs to prove that she has the skill and smarts to manage the band and isn’t just an astrologically-obsessed groupie who happened to get lucky with the lead singer. Manager Ian Faith (Tony Hendra) wants someone, anyone, to respect his authority and listen to what he has to say as chaos unspools around him. And newbie drummer Mick Shrimpton (R.J. Parnell), one in a long line of ill-fated skin-pounders who have lived and died by Spinal Tap’s ethos, just wants to make it through the tour without spontaneously combusting.

At the center of the movie—occasionally apoplectic, mostly filled with a cool and detached sense of calm—stands lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest). His longing is the most ardent of them all: he’s nearly visibly boiling beneath his skin with an obvious and ardent desire for the rest of the world to disappear and leave him alone with David. 

This Is Spinal Tap has undergone multiple queer readings over the years, one of the very first suggested by Roger Ebert himself, who, in his Great Movies review of the film, declares that Nigel “longs for St. Hubbins with big wet spaniel eyes.” The movie’s cast is definitely aware of this interpretation of events. During a live-streamed 2020 reunion to benefit Pennsylvania’s Democratic party, McKean declared that someone once told him that This Is Spinal Tap is “the world’s greatest love story,” a statement McKean seemed to agree with and find flattering.

The film is also a story of watchful envy. It’s hard to ignore the look in Nigel’s eyes as he watches David, who is watching Jeanine, who is watching the stars. When Jeanine shows up in the middle of the tour and David races off to hug her, the camera lingers on Nigel’s downtrodden face as they hold each other. Later in the film, when Nigel enters the room with his Japanese tour trump card, the frame takes in Jeanine’s fury and disappointment. The tables turn in Nigel’s favor, firmly and utterly. The triangle cannot remain neatly balanced: Jeanine may have David’s body, but Nigel has captured his heart.

David’s physical affection for Nigel shows up in various moments in the film—most notably in the way he jollies Nigel into the room so he can hear a local radio station playing their early hit “Cups and Cakes.” There’s more proof in the pudding of the deleted scenes. Nigel teases David about “Nino Bidungo,” a sailor David had an affair with when the two shared an apartment; the two of them play “All the Way Home,” a skiffle-esque tune and their first composition, as a way to apologize to each other for the vicious fight they’ve just had. With David’s fingers dancing along the fretboard and Nigel plucking away at the strings, there’s a sense of harmony and affection, and the look on David’s face says it all. 

Jeanine’s story would be a pitiable one were she not her own worst enemy, so hungry for power that she forces Ian out of his managerial role so that she can run things. It’s possible that she’s looking for control here because she never sees David and—in excised scenes from the film—he is not faithful to her while he’s on the road. If she runs his career and holds his purse strings, then he’ll have to respect her and she’ll be able to keep an eye on him. And in the meantime she can get onstage and bang a tambourine for a few minutes—after all, Linda Eastman got started the same way. But in Jeanine’s case the situation is actually sort of tragic, and just as emotionally provoking as David and Nigel’s unspoken love. The trouble with Jeanine’s attempt at climbing the band’s social ladder is, naturally, that she’s even worse than Ian is at booking the band into suitable venues. Working via astrology and David’s star charts, shoving him out front and letting him indulge his worst tendencies, her machinations are ultimately so clumsy that they result in Spinal Tap playing an amusement park where they’re billed second to a puppet show. What Jeanine longs for—David’s respect—she will never get. She’s left on the sidelines with nothing to be proud of, her influence on the band completely wiped away, longing for somebody to give her attention. But David’s attention remains fixed on Nigel’s face—perhaps forever.

In the very center of this push-pull triangle stands Ian, who just wants the band to get through the tour intact without any further disasters blowing the entire enterprise apart. Once upon a time, one assumes, he sat in some towering office complex, managing the careers of hard-rocking bands that were successful if not famous: a B-grade Led Zeppelin, an off-market Journey. Whatever led him to the door of this down-at-heel rock band, Ian is determined to at least gain some respect from these kids. But the band could care less about respecting him, and he takes his frustration out on inanimate objects. It’s not that the members of Spinal Tap set out to embarrass their fearless managerial forces; it’s that inept staff members, out of pocket creative decisions, and poorly operating stage props embarrass him, staining and straining the tour. 

All of this tension is paid off by an orgasmic on-stage reunion and triumphant Japanese tour, which Jeanine can only watch from the sidelines as Ian smugly keeps an eye on her, tapping his cricket bat against his palm. The film chronicles a long, muddy battle for the band’s soul, and Nigel undeniably wins. Yet it’s not a sexist victory; while rock ‘n’ roll and brotherhood win the day, none of this is due to Ian developing a sudden ability to direct the band successfully. While Jeanine might be a bad manager and a worse girlfriend, the film’s other female characters—Bobbi Fleckman (Fran Drescher) and Polly Deutsch (Anjelica Huston)—are shown to be smart about their individual talents and the music business at large: they exist to point up the fact that Ian’s managerial skills are fairly terrible. What they want is for Ian to act like a sensible person. 

Spinal Tap goes through a long conga line of humiliations before receiving its Japanese rebirth. While most of the movie’s characters get exactly what they need out of the long, strange trip they take to overseas stardom, some are left with their noses pressed against the plate glass window. But as the Rolling Stones famously sang: “You can’t always get what you want/But if you try sometime you’ll find/You get what you need.”

Lisa Fernandes has been writing since she could talk. Her bylines include Newsweek; Women Write About Comics; Smart Bitches, Trashy Books; and All About Romance.

James Higgins / September 26, 2022

 

In the summer of 1970, the launch of the humor magazine National Lampoon was not going well. In his memoir of his time as publisher of the Lampoon, Matty Simmons observed that the first six months of the magazine’s existence were troubled ones: “By the fifth issue, the magazine was floundering. It was funny but haphazard. Circulation, after a first issue [i.e., March 1970] sale of 225,000, was now lingering around the 175,000 mark. Advertising was minimal. But some interesting things were happening.” (To put these numbers in perspective, Esquire‘s monthly circulation rate in summer 1970 was nearly 1.2 million.)

Those interesting things included increasing orders from college bookstores, a signal that the magazine was gaining popularity with young people. Dissatisfied with what he felt was artwork that failed to make the magazine stand out on newsstands, Simmons took charge of the cover for the September 1970 issue, commissioning Sagebrush Studios to create a garish red-and-yellow color scheme that promised (among other things) “Raquel Welch Undressed.” The cover showcased Minnie Mouse in disarray: “Minnie flashed tiny little titties covered somewhat discreetly by flowery pasties.” 

Two days after the September issue went on sale, Walt Disney sued the Lampoon for $8 million (eventually dropping the suit in exchange for a promise by the magazine to never again misappropriate Disney characters). But the September issue was a turning point, as circulation thereafter began to rise. A standout feature was “College Concert Cut-Ups,” a parody of Archie Comics created by Michel Choquette, a Canadian from Montreal who ultimately would spend three years at the magazine and contribute some of its most celebrated comic book parodies.

32-years-old in 1970, Choquette was knowledgeable about the rock ‘n’ roll music scene, including one of the most idiosyncratic bands then performing, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. In 1970, the group released two albums, Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped My Flesh. Both relied on freeform, avant-garde-flavored compositions that were the antithesis of the songs then appearing on the Top 40 singles charts. Along with poking fun at the idea of wholesome, Midwestern college kids being subjected to Zappa’s anything-goes approach to music (and life), “College Concert” found humor in the vagaries of life on the road for a rock band, a theme that Zappa was to cover in-depth in his 1971 movie 200 Motels.

The lead artist for “College Concert” was Joe Orlando, a veteran of the comic book industry who, in 1985, would be made the Vice President of DC Comics. Assisting with the art was Henry Scarpelli, who in fact went on to work for Archie Comic Publications, and Peter Bramley, the Lampoon’s Art Director.

Alas, there is no record of what Zappa thought of “College Concert,” but he must have liked it to some degree, as he contributed to Choquette’s comic book history of the 1960s, the Someday Funnies (which, unfortunately, didn’t see print until 2011).

James Higgins grew up in upstate New York and, like many baby boomers, thrived on a steady diet of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror content in movies, TV, and print media. Now retired, he devotes his days to excavating and examining pop culture artifacts from the Cold War era, both to generate nostalgia among his peers and to ensure that newer generations of young minds are themselves irreparably warped.

Andy Prisbylla / June 22, 2022

Like it or not, we’re all casualties of the cola wars. What began as a pissing contest between beverage barons PepsiCo and the Coca-Cola Company in 1902 eventually became a cultural phenomenon in the mid-1980s. With Coca-Cola’s sugary supremacy challenged in a series of blind taste tests, combined with Pepsi’s subliminal marketing of American patriotism through its red, white, and blue branding, New Coke was introduced in early 1985—a new formula engineered to replace the original company recipe. Within three months, the product was pulled due to overwhelming backlash from the public, the original formula reinstated as Coca-Cola Classic. This led to a boost in sales, with industry insiders speculating that the “great new taste” was nothing more than a marketing scam used to generate renewed product interest. Whatever the motive, the original Coke was here to stay—even if it never really left. Now it was just a matter of selling it back to the young audience who dominated ‘80s consumer culture. While previous promotional campaigns focused on virtuous Americana, marketing mavens now needed something more radical and irreverent. At the time, a certain computer generated media personality created solely to showcase music videos was becoming quite popular. Only this image wasn’t computer generated at all, and it was born from a distinctly anti-corporate sensibility. In 1986, Coca-Cola launched its “Catch the Wave” campaign: the new face of Coke belonged to Max Headroom. 

The subversive paradox created when Max Headroom turned pitchman for corporate cola is just one of many in the career of Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel. While the creative duo had nothing to do with the Coke campaign, their creation was now leaving an imprint on the consumer landscape. As post-punk pioneers with a heavy situationist bent, Morton and Jankel took being on the cutting edge of pop culture seriously. But the method of their engagement with the Spectacle might have turned off Situationism’s founder Guy Debord. While culture jammers like Craig Baldwin and John Law fought the consumer wars from the trenches of the underground, Morton and Jankel were performing hand-to-hand combat with mass media marauders in the corporate arena: a dangerous place to be. The deconstruction that Morton and Jankel utilized in their commercials, music videos, and films was not only satirical but self-reflexive, the kind of artistic-expression-as-critique that can prove problematic within a capitalist society. 

The term “culture jam” was coined by Mark Dery in the post-punk climate of 1984, right where Morton and Jankel made their bones. Hailing from working-class British backgrounds before studying film and animation—Morton worked on the famous marching hammers in the 1982 feature film adaptation of Pink Floyd’s The Wall before being fired—the duo would embrace the eclectic, avant-garde fusion that followed traditional three-chord punk. Jankel’s older brother Chaz—who would go on to score the couple’s 1988 neo-noir deconstruction D.O.A.—played guitar and keyboards in Ian Dury’s band the Blockheads, and served as an entry point for his sister to enter the scene. What Chaz brought musically, Morton and Jankel complemented visually with an assortment of videos and promos created through their innovative production company Cucumber Studios. 

Culture Jam logo created by Tolga Kocak in 1996

Cucumber Studios Animated Logo

Based out of London, the production house soon burned bright in the post-punk/new wave scene as the de-facto stop for commercial record companies looking to merge their tunes with dynamic visuals. While traditional analog animation was utilized—evident in their early promo for the animated adaptation of Marx for Beginners and their music video for the Tom Tom Club’s “Gangster of Love”—the pair also employed experimental computer graphics. In a hybrid mix of analog and digital, their 1979 music video for “Accidents Will Happen” by Elvis Costello & The Attractions combined rotoscoping techniques with early computer generated imagery to create a vector readout of Costello in an early instance of CGI used in a music video. These innovations with the medium eventually led to the duo writing and curating 1984’s Creative Computer Graphics, which chronicled pioneering achievements in CGI while introducing new digital technologies to a wider audience. 

Image excerpt from Creative Computer Graphics by Morton and Jankel, 1984

The success of Cucumber Studios caught the attention of programming purveyor Peter Wagg of Chrysalis Records, who was looking to package a series of music videos within the framework of a television talk show. Wagg turned to advertising creative George Stone, who took this idea and subverted it. Car parks in Britain at the time were outfitted with yellow-and-black-striped safety signs labeled “Max Headroom,” and Stone believed the term would not only make a great title but also allow the program to use the parking signs as a form of subvertising. Morton and Jankel, meeting with Stone, suggested that something more was needed than just generic graphics to introduce each video. The media landscape of 1980s television was saturated with talking heads, and at the same time the MTV VJ was coming into prominence. Bored by the idea of just another flesh and blood huckster, Morton, Jankel, and Stone thought a fully formed computer-generated figurehead would work better. The only issue was that this technology hadn’t been created yet. Predating the bait-and-switch tactics of his future Coca-Cola overlords, the CGI aesthetic of Max Headroom was faked using prosthetics and opticals—inadvertently constructing a situationist prank and fooling the public at large.

Actor Matt Frewer in Max Headroom make-up created by John Humphreys

When Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future premiered in the UK on April 4, 1985, the hour-long cyberpunk telefeature not only served as backstory to Max’s forthcoming Tonight Show-style talk program The Max Headroom Show, but also spawned an ABC Network television series in the US that continued the original film’s story. Morton and Jankel had no involvement with the ABC series and criticized it for its homogeneous approach to the material and lack of credit to the creators. Set in a dystopian future, the original telefilm showcased a world where television programming is the leading commodity and society is controlled by a cabal of networks run by a ruthless media oligarchy. Within this framing, Morton and Jankel simultaneously used the character of Max Headroom to spotlight the mechanisms of corporate greed while allowing said greed to thrive. Max existed between these two worlds and created a paradoxical paradigm. Not only was he a figurehead for the music and soda-pop industries; he was also a symbol of radical intervention—which would later be displayed in the infamous broadcast signal intrusion of WGN-TV’s newscast on November 22, 1987.  

The dichotomy devised during the Max Headroom years would continue to follow Morton and Jankel into their feature film career with 1988’s D.O.A. and 1993’s Super Mario Bros. The concept of remix theory is paramount in understanding these films and how it affected the duo’s time in Hollywood. Remix culture encourages the transformation of derivative works through a mash-up mix of one or more media, and as remix expert Eduardo Navas suggests, there are three types of remix methods to explore. Extended remix is a longer version of an original work, while selective remix consists of adding or subtracting elements from the work to create something new. Reflexive remix allegorizes or transforms the aesthetic and ethos of the original work—challenging the original intent and claiming autonomy. 

B&W turns to color in Morton and Jankel’s 1988 remix of the 1950 film noir classic D.O.A.

Morton and Jankel’s tinseltown rebellion is one of a reflexive remix and deserving of reappraisal—something both D.O.A and Super Mario Bros have received in recent years. The wave of irony that dominated the Hollywood filmmaking aesthetic in the early ‘80s was soon on the wane, and both films were met with derision from audiences and critics alike, with Super Mario Bros receiving the most volatile response. Where D.O.A. won positive reviews by some for its colorful neo-noir deconstruction of Rudolph Mate’s 1950 classic, Morton and Jankel’s dissection of the popular Nintendo video game opened to nearly universal disdain. Regardless of the behind-the-scenes drama and production hell that has been unfairly presented in the press, the cultural zeitgeist shifted from a pop sensibility of kitsch experimentation in the 1980s to a cynical worldview of uniformity and stasis in the 1990s. The duo’s Max-inspired interpretation of the lovable plumbers taking on King Koopa to save Princess Daisy was too esoteric for children to understand or adults to enjoy. Script revisions and loss of creative control at the hands of the studio didn’t help matters much, and Morton and Jankel’s Hollywood career was over before it even really began. They would return to the world of commercial advertising, where their radical tendencies were more (illicitly) successful—such as using subversive sex to sell fast food for Hardees. Soon after, they formed the highly successful commercial production company MJZ, which represents a host of acclaimed filmmakers like Craig Gillespie, Harmony Korine, and Mike Mills. Within time the duo would dissolve their partnership—both creatively and romantically. Jankel would move on to direct more features after a long hiatus—such as 2009’s Skellig: The Owl Man and 2018’s Tell It to the Bees—while Morton continues to produce commercial campaigns for numerous corporate clients. 

As ‘80s eclecticism gave birth to a 21st century postmodern world, where reality is fluid and nothing is free, the careers of Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel seem to suggest that the only response to late capitalism is through disruptive action. When corporate interests seek legitimacy on the backs of creative originals, sometimes the only recourse you have is protest by insurgency. Each project during their partnership, whether intended or not, has acted as a media virus whose effects continue to alter perspectives both old and new. If there’s one lesson to be learned from Morton and Jankel, it’s that infiltration is key.

Andy Prisbylla is the nucleus behind a series of pen names for underground filmmaker and media theorist Psycho Gnostic of Steel City, PA. Connect with them on Twitter.

Stephen Canner / March 8, 2022

From the opening years of the 1950s, various terrestrials came forward claiming to be in contact with the occupants of flying saucers. Their stories were often quite similar. The discs usually came from our own solar system: Venus, Jupiter, or Saturn. Communication was sometimes accomplished via telepathy, sometimes verbally. Perhaps most importantly, the aliens were portrayed as “perfect” specimens of Homo sapiens, although this ideal was almost always a suspiciously Northern European one. Dressed in crisply tailored ski wear, they preached pacifism, universal love, and a cosmic version of the perennial philosophy. A fundamental disagreement over economic theory coupled with the recent discovery of atomic weapons may have driven humanity to the brink of self-destruction, but there was no reason to fear. The “space brothers”—along with a few space sisters—had arrived in their saucers to show us the true path.

Early contactees such as George Van Tassel, Daniel Fry, and George Adamski appeared before microphones, in television studios, and in front of movie cameras, with claims that seemed more like something from the pages of a pulp magazine than from any consensus reality. Even by the standards of the era their tales were simplistic, like the plots of bad B-movies, not believable anecdotes of actual experience. Despite this, credulous souls flocked to these men, eagerly tape recording their public speeches and jotting down the details of their claims. If there was an A-list star among the contactees, it was Adamski. Born in what is now Poland in 1891, Adamski immigrated to the United States with his family when he was about two years old. As a young adult, he became interested in theosophy, an early gateway philosophy to things esoteric. By the early 1930s he had relocated to Laguna Beach, California, where he founded the Royal Order of Tibet. A Los Angeles Times report of the period referred to Adamski as “Professor”—a title he would use for the rest of his life, despite his lack of any academic degrees—and added that his father was Polish, his mother Egyptian, and that he had spent his childhood “in the ancient monasteries in Tibet and learned the laws of the lamas.” He was already, long before he was associated with flying saucers, spinning a fictional web of mystery around himself. In interviews, Adamski went out of his way to make it clear that his organization was not anti-Christian. He told the paper that “The Order of Tibet acknowledges God and Christ. We hold to the basic thought of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, to which are added the ancient law of Tibet.” This is a basic philosophical position that the space brothers of two decades later would certainly recognize.

By the end of World War II, Adamski and his wife were living on the southwestern slopes of Palomar Mountain, northeast of San Diego, where he opened a café. By 1950 he was lecturing on flying saucers, appearing on local television, and showing his soon-to-be-famous photographs. His fame exploded when Flying Saucers Have Landed—a book that bore his name as co-author, although actually mostly written by Anglo-Irish aristocrat Desmond Leslie—was published in 1953. A large part of the volume’s appeal was undoubtedly its inclusion of photographs of flying discs that Adamski had allegedly taken. These images, although proven to be fakes shortly after they were published, provided the original model for what we still think of as the “classic” flying saucer. Two years later, Adamski continued his unlikely tale in a ghostwritten follow-up, Inside the Space Ships (1955). By the late 1950s, Adamski was as close to a superstar as it was possible to be in the tiny world of ufology. He and Leslie had together created the basic template that would inform the dominant UFO narrative for many years to come. Following this model, a number of other contactees emerged making claims very similar to Adamski’s. It was in this environment that Howard Menger first appeared on the scene.

Howard Menger was born in Brooklyn in 1922. When he was eight years old his family relocated to the small town of High Bridge in rural northern New Jersey. These facts are relatively reliable and stable. The rest of Menger’s story, however, is a web of claims and counterclaims that subtly changed in detail from week to week and month to month, even when he himself told it. With that in mind, what follows should not be viewed as the story of Howard Menger, but simply one possibility among many. As recounted in his 1959 book From Outer Space to You, Menger and his younger brother had begun to see unidentified objects in the sky as early as the summer of 1931. After one particularly dramatic close encounter experience in which the brothers witnessed a landed saucer that quickly shot off into the sky, Howard began to wander the woods alone, drawn by an “impulse” to do so. It was on one of these impulsive rambles in 1932, at the age of ten, that he met “the most exquisite woman” he had ever seen sitting on a rock. Wearing what appeared to be a ski outfit, she addressed him by name and told him that her people had been watching him for a very long time. She explained that he had a special purpose on Earth, one that he was still too young to understand, but that in time would become clear. “We are contacting our own,” she told him mysteriously. She began to teach him things that she admitted were still beyond his grasp, then added that over time his mind would play them back “like a phonograph,” with the meaning becoming clearer after each replay. After much talk of “frequency,” “vibration,” “evolvement,” and “universal laws,” she stood to depart. As he began to cry from the emotion of the powerful experience, she comforted him by suggesting that they might meet again, although not until many years in the future.

“Throughout my life the things I had learned in the forest were to lead to conflict with the traditional ideas of the world,” he later wrote. For the rest of his childhood he became something of an outsider, with teachers and classmates finding him odd. After graduating from high school in 1941, he went to work at Picatinny Arsenal in northern New Jersey, where he met a co-worker named Rose Mary Pusinelli. Howard enlisted in the Army in November 1942, and soon afterwards he and Rose were married. While in the Army he saw discs in the sky outside El Paso and encountered more beautiful space people—all of them male—in Mexico, California, Hawaii, and on Okinawa. It was on Okinawa that he again began having “impulses” that drove him to do unwise things, like wander off alone into territory infested with enemy troops who had dug in. After an encounter with three Japanese soldiers who he managed to incapacitate, but not kill, he returned to camp, where he met another space brother. They began to discuss the space people’s pacifist philosophy and the futility of war. Here Menger learned of “universal law,” according to which, in the words of the space brother: “The soul lives on eternally, learning by its mistakes, always progressing. The good that is done is accredited to that soul. The mistakes are forgotten.” He then explained that the aliens effectively controlled advanced technology through the will of the “Infinite Creator;” humans were still too irresponsible to use it for creative, not destructive, purposes. The Venusian also assured him that the war would end soon, with the Japanese “blasted into submission by a power which will shock the world.” Once this prophecy came true, Menger was discharged and returned home fully indoctrinated in the basics of the space brothers’ proto-New Age philosophy.

He settled in the town of Washington, New Jersey, just up the road from his hometown of High Bridge. There he opened a sign painting business, and he and Rose soon had three children. On the surface, their life seemed one of small-town normalcy, but Menger was not destined to lead a normal life. In June 1946 he again met the beautiful alien woman he had first encountered as a child. After a bit of mild flirtation, she told him more about cosmic philosophy and what his mission on Earth was to entail: “You will form groups and teach people,” she said. “Some of these whom you will teach will themselves become teachers and assist you in your mission.” Menger’s own account of the next few years, as told in his book, reads like a very bad and somewhat tedious science fiction espionage novel. Using prearranged meeting sites called Field Locations #1 and #2, he claims that he was telepathically summoned into the woods to meet robust, healthy Venusians filled with interplanetary vim and vigor. It was during this period, after moving his home and business back to High Bridge in 1955, that Menger was allowed to photograph the Venusian spacecraft. The pictures always came out fuzzy, however. At first, he thought this might indicate a problem with the camera. But the aliens told him that the difficulty in photographing the saucers was due to the radiation field around them. Eventually, he began taking photographs using a Polaroid, which produced reasonably clear pictures. As a bonus, there were no inconvenient negatives for doubters of his story to analyze.

In the autumn of 1956, Menger seemed to pop up out of nowhere as a full-blown media personality. Few accounts of his career consider how this occurred, but evidence suggests that the photos he had taken were the key. In late October of that year, contactee George Van Tassel was scheduled to give a talk at a New York hotel. Van Tassel was already famous in UFO circles due to his role as host of the annual Giant Rock Spacecraft Convention held at his private airport in the Southern California desert. He had also published a book in 1952 called I Rode in a Flying Saucer! Menger heard that Van Tassel was going to be in the city—the aliens told him—and traveled there to meet him. Van Tassel was impressed enough with the fantastic story, and especially the photographs, that he invited Howard and Rose to appear on Long John Nebel’s radio show with him on October 30. This was quickly followed by a television appearance on The Steve Allen Show on Thursday, November 1. Long John Nebel, an overnight talk show host on local station WOR, hadn’t been on the air long at this point, but he would soon become a fixture of late-night New York radio. His show would also become a primary big market media outlet for the saucer crowd, with Nebel himself becoming well-known in those circles. The appearance on Steve Allen’s show, a very popular mainstream program, was an even bigger coup. Newspapers jumped on the story and, when United Press picked it up, it went national. Immediately after his return to California, Van Tassel published a long piece on Menger’s photographs in the November 1956 issue of his Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom. In the tiny world of saucer fanatics, at least, Howard Menger had arrived. 

The Mengers were soon bombarded with telephone calls, letters, and visits from both the credulous and the skeptical. Independent witnesses also began to come forward, such as Mrs. Joseph Tharp, who said she was taken into a field by the Mengers where she witnessed three saucers, including one from which a man emerged. Howard and Rose were now a hot local news item, with reporters interviewing waitresses and auto mechanics for their opinions on the couple’s unlikely tale. In general, the tone of these articles was both playful and skeptical. The furor prompted Leonard Randolph of The Pocono Record in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania—only about 35 miles from High Bridge—to begin an in-depth, seven-part series on the subject of UFOs that ran throughout the middle of November. Although the Mengers’ appearance as local celebrities was the catalyst for the series, it also provided a solid overview of the various angles of the phenomenon. The articles approached the subject with a healthy skepticism that still allowed for the possibility that there were things science did not yet understand. Randolph seems to have been very familiar with the subject. In the sixth installment, through a point-by-point comparison, he carefully analyzed the similarities between George Adamski’s claims and Menger’s. He concluded that for all intents and purposes they were identical, right down to the philosophy of the aliens. He went so far as to point out that both sets of aliens were fond of ski trousers and turtleneck sweaters. A media-savvy observer at the time may also have noticed that in both sartorial taste and philosophy these visitors sounded very much like Michael Rennie’s portrayal of the alien Klaatu in the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Curiously, on November 14, on the same page as the first article in Randolph’s series on UFOs, the paper ran a report that in late October four men had sighted an object with a “long cigar-shaped body roughly resembling a Liberator bomber in general shape” over Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania. The object was completely silent and seemed to be moving at about 150 to 200 mph. Instead of wings, it had “two appendages, one on each side, which were not projected away from the body.” A number of other witnesses also claimed to have seen the same thing. The date of the sighting roughly coincides with Menger’s first meeting with Van Tassel. It seems, if nothing else, that a certain synchronicity may have been at work here. 

Throughout the first half of 1957, Menger lectured, appeared on the radio, and was the subject of a reasonable amount of press coverage. In May, he and Rose traveled to California to speak at Van Tassel’s fourth annual Giant Rock Spacecraft Convention in Yucca Valley. Howard now found himself among the heavyweights in the field. Others scheduled to speak during the weekend were Donald Keyhoe, Daniel Fry, Orfeo Angelucci, George Adamski, Desmond Leslie, Edward Ruppelt, Frank Scully, and Truman Bethurum. This list is very close to a complete “Who’s Who” of the biggest names in 1950s saucerdom. The newspaper coverage the convention attracted intensified the spotlight on Menger. In June, The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania, ran a feature article on him. For the first time, the press explored the metaphysical aspects of his story. In the piece, reporter Russ Davis called Menger “a deeply religious man although inclined, he admits, ‘to be independent.’” Echoing George Adamski’s perennialism of the 1930s, Menger explained the aliens’ philosophy: “There is a definite plan to everything and everybody worships the same creator. They are not against any religion that seeks God and the truth. Jesus, Moses, and Buddha are regarded by them as great teachers among hundreds of great teachers whom they acknowledge.”

Menger was soon to have his faith tested. On June 13, his 12-year-old son died of a brain tumor. Less than three months later, his father died. This string of tragedies that began with the loss of his brother in an auto accident two years earlier had to have a huge impact on every aspect of Menger’s life. His ideas, plans, attitudes, and personal relationships would have all emerged from an underlying foundation of grief. To add to his stress, it appears that his father had disinherited him; Howard Senior divided his estate equally between a nephew and a niece. It would be easy to spin a story in which Howard’s father was disappointed in him for publicly espousing such wild claims and bringing unwanted attention to the family. But in light of future events, it’s also tempting to surmise that the disinheritance may have been because his father simply did not approve of how Howard was handling his own domestic affairs. By the end of the year the family farm had been sold, and Menger’s time in High Bridge was about to come to an end.

The first mention of Howard’s new wife in the media comes as something of a shock to anyone reading through the record chronologically. It is a bit like turning on the television in the fall of 1969 to find that Dick Sargent had replaced Dick York as Samantha’s husband on Bewitched, with no explanation whatsoever. The actor had changed; the role was the same. It is not certain exactly when Howard met recently widowed Connie Weber. In his book, Menger claims that he first met her at George Van Tassel’s lecture in New York in October of 1956. Elsewhere, Connie has implied that she was one of the “believers” who enthusiastically showed up at the Menger home in droves after the news of his experiences broke. Either way, Menger quickly decided that they were “a natural couple”—reincarnated Venusians, in fact, who had known each other in a previous life—and this was why they were “irresistibly drawn to each other.” He wrote that, “though both of us tried to fight off the predicted outcome, we were caught up in the overwhelming remembrance of a long ago promise to each other.” An obvious interpretation would be that this is euphemistic language used to indicate that the two had had an affair. Menger spends an entire chapter of his book defending the “naturalness” of their union, couched in the language of the “cosmic philosophy.” He does, however, clearly state that his first marriage had not been altogether happy since his return from the war, and that he and Rose had been at “different states of development.” And of course, even under the best of circumstances, the loss of a child often drives couples apart. According to the records of the Clark County Recorder’s Office in Las Vegas, Connie and Howard were married there on May 26, 1958. 

Like many in the saucer crowd of the era, Menger was quick to use modern audio technology. Just two weeks after his appearance on The Steve Allen Show, he was playing a tape recording of the account of his experiences to visitors at his home, one originally recorded for a radio broadcast. This undoubtedly saved him the tedium of repeating his story to each new group of the steady stream of visitors that appeared daily at his door. He was known to use a tape recorder as part of his presentation in his formal lectures as well. Menger was also the first major name in saucerdom to make use of another current technology: the microgroove record. Sometime during the first half of 1958, he released a phonograph album called Authentic Music from Another Planet. This was an ingenious new way to promote his message, but was also likely an attempt to further monetize his fame, which was taking a large amount of time away from his business but not bringing in a corresponding amount of income. 

In his book, Menger told a curious story about how the record came to be. One day while driving in the countryside, he realized he no longer had control over his car, which seemed to be driving itself. By now he was used to such bizarre occurrences, so he thought little of it. The car took him to a cabin some distance into the woods. As he approached the building, he could hear the strains of the “most inspiring, soul-tingling music” he had ever heard coming from within. Entering, he encountered a man with long brown hair, seated at a strange piano-like instrument. Around him, spread across the floor, were a number of other bizarre musical instruments. Soon two blonde men entered the room and greeted Howard by name. They told him that they were from Venus, and the pianist was from Saturn. When Menger complimented him on his playing, the Saturnian invited him to sit down and play a tune. Howard protested that he had no musical talent. The alien then told him, “From this time on you will be able to play a piano whenever you are moved to do so, and not only this tune, but any melody you wish.” At this point, the analytical reader might well ask how this superpower—for this is what it amounts to—would help Menger in his stated mission to spread cosmic philosophy among the inhabitants of the Earth. The aliens explained to him that anyone who heard this music “would get a feeling, or reach an awareness, which would act as a mental assist to release something from the subconscious. People hearing the theme would react in their conscious state with increased understanding and brotherly love toward one another.” This was quite the superpower, indeed.

Menger soon began to play this new space music on the (terrestrial) piano for friends. He claimed that the “congenial president of Slate Enterprises” in Newark was “so impressed with the music” that he suggested the company release an album. It is more likely that Howard arranged for a custom pressing with the label, but this explanation still leaves room for doubt. In any case, Menger had a copy of the album to play for guests on Sunday, July 13, 1958. The Slate label itself appeared in 1946 and primarily released singles of light rhythm and blues, first on 78 and later on 45. Very little else is known about the company except for what appears on the labels of its handful of releases. The problem with assuming that Authentic Music from Another Planet was a custom release is that Slate is not known to have done any other custom work of this sort. In fact, it is also the only known LP on the label. It is possible that, like many other outfits, Slate released its custom works using other label names. So far, however, no such examples have come to light. There is another purely speculative possibility. Perhaps the “congenial president” of the label was also a saucer fan and made an exception in working with Menger?

The cover of Authentic Music from Another Planet shows one of Menger’s fuzzy black and white Polaroids, tinted blue, with the caption: “Actual photograph of interplanetary spacecraft.” At first it seems nothing more than an abstracted landscape, but looking carefully the viewer can pick out a figure at the bottom of the composition who appears to be looking at an indistinct smear in the sky through binoculars. The image is vague enough that it actually works. Unlike many photos of the era, even today it can instill a twinge of doubt in the viewer—that moment of indecision that tells us we may be in the realm of the impossible. More of his saucer images appear on the back cover, as do photos of Howard and Connie. Although Connie’s real biography is provided—including the intriguing fact that in her youth she had worked as a model for a “famous Cuban sculptor” while living in Mexico City—she is identified as “Marla Baxter.” This was a pseudonym she was already using for her “fantastic” writing and the name Howard used to refer to her in his book.

The album opens with Howard’s narration. Here he gives a condensed version of the unlikely story of how this music came to him. He introduces the first track, “Marla,” as being about “the young lady pictured with me on the album cover.” He then adds that “she is the sister of the beautiful blonde Venusian who spoke to me many years ago.” This track and the next, “Theme from the Song from Saturn,” he says are “interpretations that are taken from the actual music that has come to me from another planet.” He then instructs the listener to “turn the record over and listen to ‘The Song from Saturn,’ as it is played by me while my fingers are guided by this strange force.” In other words, he appears to claim that side two is channeled. This was a strategy that many early contactees adopted, but not one that was common elsewhere in Menger’s narrative.

The truth is that Authentic Music from Another Planet is basically an exploitation album, a record that promises something beyond anything the listener has ever experienced, only to ultimately disappoint. After the consumer has spent his or her money, the album reveals itself to be nothing more than noodly, easy listening piano tracks with a bit of explanatory narration tacked on. Fittingly, this follows a model used by many low budget science fiction films at the time, where more effort was spent on promotion and hype than on the actual product. Had Menger made his compositions sound more avant-garde, especially by creative use of an early electronic instrument such as an ondes Martenot or a theremin, listeners might have believed the music originated “from elsewhere,” and his album would now be a heavily sought-after cult item, commanding hundreds if not thousands of dollars from collectors. In truth, it would have been a more interesting record had he simply banged randomly and atonally on the keyboard for two sides. Unfortunately, the record sounds like what it undoubtedly is, a recording of someone from New Jersey who has had a few piano lessons playing uninspired “light classics.”

Given the paucity of information on the album, it is not known how many copies were pressed. It shows up for sale often enough not to be considered truly rare, but is uncommon enough for a large print run to be unlikely. In 1974, during the middle of a huge revival of interest in UFOs, the album was reissued on the Gold-A label out of Maplewood, New Jersey, its title shortened to Music from Another Planet. It is unclear whether Menger was involved in this reissue or not. Sealed copies of the reissue were still being advertised for sale as late as 1982. 

One of the major events in the career of Howard and Connie Menger was their East Coast Interplanetary Space Convention—held on Connie’s 100-acre farm near Lebanon, New Jersey, where the couple was then living—on September 13 and 14, 1958. This followed an appearance by the couple on Jack Paar’s television program the previous week, and was covered heavily in the local media. Among the convention’s attendees were Long John Nebel, Ellery Lanier of Fantastic Science Fiction magazine, arch-skeptic Jules St. Germain, and Major Wayne Aho. These back-to-back media events were excellent opportunities for Menger to promote the new album. It seems, though, that the response to the disc ranged from lukewarm to actively hostile. One participant in the crowd was quoted as saying, “It sounds like an 8-year-old practicing music for a teacher and not very good at that.” There will always be believers, however. In the September 1959 issue of its newsletter, the Spacecraft Research Association, a UFO club in the Phoenix area, reported that its members had listened to the album at a recent meeting. They were evidently so impressed that at the next meeting they listened to it again, followed by a talk by one David Moore on “the composition of the music and its differences from music of earth.”

Another of the attendees at Howard and Connie’s UFO convention that summer was Saucer News publisher and sometimes-prankster Gray Barker. According to Jim Moseley, it was here that Barker made the deal with Menger to publish an account of his experiences via his Saucerian Books imprint. The deal must have already been in the works, though, as Howard mentions the name of the book on the album, which certainly already existed at this point. Also, on the following Monday, the local paper reported that Menger was taking advance orders for the book. Connie (as Marla Baxter) had released a novel earlier in the year, My Saturnian Lover, which was mentioned on the liner notes of Menger’s LP and during the opening narration. There was no mystery as to who the author was, though, and the local press had fun pointing out that it “might be the story of [the Mengers’] astral love affair—but neither will admit it.” Howard’s book, called From Outer Space to You, was published in 1959. A case could be made that it was actually Connie’s second book, because it is extremely probable that it was largely, if not entirely, ghost written by her. On the back flap of the dust jacket was a large ad for Authentic Music from Another Planet, evidently being distributed by Barker, which also hints at the slight possibility of his involvement in the production of the record.

One aspect that sets Howard Menger’s story apart from other contactees of the era is the constant presence of the feminine. The first alien he encountered was not a virile space soldier, but a beautiful woman. While on the surface the story of a ten-year-old boy meeting a grown woman who teaches him things might seem to hint at maternal symbolism, there is a definite sexual undertone to Menger’s telling of the event. When he meets her again as a grown man, freshly returned from combat and probably in the best physical shape of his life, the sexual attraction is now obviously mutual. And although most of the aliens Menger reported meeting were men, there were a number of women among them, and they seemed to be quite independent. In one scene in his book, a group of space women tell Howard that they do not wear bras on their planet. This subtle, sexually-charged undercurrent could explain some of the appeal that audiences found in these tales.

It is also important to consider the real women in Menger’s life. Despite whatever differences they may have had, his first wife Rose was very supportive of him and his extraordinary claims. Besides helping explain the finer points of his tales to journalists, she even reported to have seen a saucer after getting a “strong impulse” to go outside, the same sort of impulse that drove many of Howard’s actions. Anyone who has ever met their soulmate will probably understand Howard’s idea that there exists such a thing as a “natural couple.” It’s not necessary to believe his complex story of interplanetary reincarnation in order to relate to the deeper truth of the claim. Some individuals just click so perfectly, sharing interests, attitudes, and a fundamental outlook, that it seems they were indeed made for each other. Whatever other chemistry existed between Howard and Connie, it is likely that both were avid readers of esoteric books when they met. Although never specific, references in their writings as well as statements made to the press often revealed knowledge of ideas from both eastern religion and the newly emerging New Age movement. Howard got most of the press, but there is no question that they were a team. In any case, even if they didn’t prove it, they tested the “natural couple” hypothesis pretty thoroughly. Their marriage lasted for 51 years, ending only with Howard’s death. 

Howard and Connie had a son in late April 1959. A week later, Howard was arrested on probation violations for “falling in arrears in support payments to his first wife and their two children, now living in Paterson.” He quickly paid the debt to avoid further incarceration, but was again arrested in mid-August on the same charge. He was taken to the Passaic County jail, but again paid his outstanding debt and was released. By the end of the month, Connie’s farm had been sold for the sum of $43,000. Whether or not the sale was necessitated by Howard’s financial troubles is an open question. Not long after this period of chaos in his personal life, on July 17, 1960, Howard appeared on Long John Nebel’s short-lived television show. Here he explicitly backed away from his original claims, announcing that he may have been “hoaxed or hypnotized” during the events described in his book, and was not at all certain that his experiences had been real. This reportedly did not go over well with Nebel.

Howard and Connie, circa 1950s

In 1963, there were rumors that Howard planned to host another convention similar to the one the Mengers held five years earlier. During this time, he was rumored to be developing a prototype saucer somewhere in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania. Throughout his life Menger tinkered with technology, and this appears to be one of the many projects that never got further than his workshop. Soon afterwards, Connie and Howard relocated to Florida, with a new baby daughter in tow. There, Howard continued his sign painting business, but seemingly could not resist the lure of the spotlight. In August 1965, he convinced the Civic Association of Sebastian, Florida, to hold an Aeronautical and Space Convention with himself serving as chair. The idea was approved, but in mid-September the association learned of Menger’s past. The convention plans were soon canceled. Immediately after this unwelcome publicity, Howard put his name on the ballot to run for Sebastian city council. During the campaign he further backed away from his original claims, telling the press that From Outer Space to You was a “fact/fiction” book. The winners of the election received 182 and 174 votes respectively. Howard came in dead last with an embarrassing 20 votes.

The couple soon relocated a bit farther down the coast to Vero Beach. Howard continued to appear occasionally on radio and television. Connie continued her writing, working as a reporter on general interest topics for a local newspaper. In the spring of 1967, a second edition of Menger’s book was published. That June, he was invited to be a speaker at Jim Moseley’s Congress of Scientific UFOlogists in New York City, held to mark the 20th anniversary of Kenneth Arnold’s first UFO sighting, the event that spawned the saucer craze. Here Howard delivered a rambling speech in which he mentioned his tinkering with saucer technology. In contrast to what he told Long John Nebel in 1960, he defended the original claims made in his book as fact. He then complained at great length and in great detail about the cancellation of his planned 1965 space convention. Other speakers on the roster were Nebel, Ivan T. Sanderson, Gray Barker, Ray Palmer, and contactee-come-lately Frank Stranges. These were big names, but this was to be Howard’s last great moment in the spotlight.

Howard and Connie lived out their remaining years together quietly in Vero Beach. They self-published a few books on esoteric subjects, including a 1991 follow-up to Howard’s first book called The High Bridge Incident, and from time to time would briefly resurface in the media. In 1992, they appeared together in Robert Stone’s documentary Farewell, Good Brothers. In the film, they seem very relaxed and at ease in each other’s company, a “natural couple.” Howard Menger died on February 25, 2009. Connie followed him on January 7, 2017. In a letter to Saucer Smear just after Howard’s death, ufologist Jerome Clark wrote:

Perhaps Adamski and Menger created fantasy worlds for their followers and at some point entered those worlds themselves. Human beings experience that elusive thing called ‘reality’ in sometimes peculiar, hard-to-define ways. Contactees, mediums, and other self-identified communicators between worlds may be able to create imagined alternative realities, which coexist with, possibly even overwhelm, consensus understanding and experience. I suspect that anything you could say, good, bad, or indifferent, about the motives of Adamski or Menger needs to be appended with an asterisk.

The claims made by contactees like George Adamski and Howard Menger seem so very absurd today that we can’t help but wonder about their motives. It is always possible that a story originated with an actual anomalous experience and grew from there. I do have a hypothesis about Howard, though. He seemed to truly believe the things that he said about brotherly love, the soul, and the nature of God. What if it were his goal all along to simply become a teacher of these New Age ideas? To accomplish this requires some form of authority. The traditional path is to attend a university and get an advanced degree in the subject you wish to teach. An alternative path would be to call yourself “Professor” and claim to be the son of an Egyptian mother who grew up in a lamasery in Tibet, as Adamski did in 1934. When this story became a bit rusty, Adamski simply updated it to one in which he was a “chosen” contactee of the occupants of those things in the sky so many people were reportedly seeing in those days. By adopting Adamski’s later model and publicizing it via the mass media, Menger imbued upon himself a certain authority and soon had a number of followers. He became in reality a teacher of the ideas the space people allegedly taught him. It doesn’t matter whether his claims were literally true or not. The ideas existed, and he was teaching them to mankind, just like the guy in his story.

Stephen Canner is an archivist, discographer, musician (The Victor Mourning, Swarme of Beese), and historian of artifacts that emerge from the margins of culture. He blogs at Mediated Signals.

Eve Tushnet / February 28, 2022

“Oh, I saw a flying saucer last night. It told me to give up the electric, plastic way of life.” 

I first heard about the X-Ray Spex from a Riot Grrrl flier handed out at punk concerts in the mid-’90s. Their one album, Germfree Adolescents, was on a list of woman-led punk music, alongside the Raincoats, the Delta 5, Crass, and Jayne County. I loved the band’s name, so I haunted record stores pawing through the XYZ bin until I found the album on cassette during a beach vacation in the summer of ’95. I stuck it in the player and from the moment I heard Poly Styrene’s inimitable voice—at once forthright and teasing, poppy and punishing, skidding from a husky croon to a paint-stripping wail—I was in love.

And that’s the public story of Poly Styrene, née Marianne Elliott: Poly the pioneer, an Afro-British woman fronting a punk band in the overwhelmingly white and male scene of the late 1970s; Poly the artist, the singer/songwriter/designer whose Day-Glo sensibility was the candy coating over lyrics exploring the convergence of consumer culture and personal identity. Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché, the new documentary co-created by Poly’s daughter Celeste Bell and Paul Sng, gives you plenty of Poly the pioneer. Musicians like Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna cite her as an inspiration; Neneh Cherry says, “I actually started singing because of her.” Poly’s artistic influences and choices aren’t explored in as much depth, but maybe all you have to do is play some footage of her howling into the microphone, in a dress that looks like bacon and eggs, to paint the picture. What I Am a Cliche does that no other documentary could do is close the gap between Poly Styrene and Marianne Elliott.

It would be easy to think that Poly Styrene had a band, and then Marianne Elliott had a baby; that Poly Styrene had insights, and Marianne Elliott had a nervous breakdown. But I Am a Cliché doesn’t just show you life after the X-Ray Spex—Elliott’s brief marriage, the birth of her daughter, her mental health crises, her stints in hospitals and with the Hare Krishnas. Bell’s act of insight and mercy is that she allows us to see that Poly Styrene was her mother all along, and vice versa. The documentary is a moving portrait of, among many other things, someone whose struggles with mental health interweave with her incisive cultural critique. You can talk about this interweaving in many ways: maybe Poly expressed her first break with reality in terms of a rejection of “electric, plastic” consumer culture because that’s what she was thinking about anyway. Maybe she rejected the culture of advertisement and consumption, glitz and fame, because it was making her ill. But this film lets its subject salvage wisdom from the wreckage of reason. It’s rare and precious to find a film that doesn’t glamorize mental illness, but also doesn’t let it discredit the sufferer.

There are a lot of inspirational angles to I Am a Cliché, a lot of things it will make you feel okay about, if feeling okay about these things is something you struggle with. It’s okay to be mixed-race in a world that wants to force you to pick sides; it’s okay to be plump in a world that wants to airbrush you for your album cover; it’s okay to have a council-estate accent and the sweetest smile in punk. It’s okay to be a divorced single mother struggling with mental health. It’s okay if you can’t forgive your mother for abandoning you; and if you find that time, against your will, is wearing you down into forgiveness, that’s okay too. But maybe the most unexpected inspirational message of this film is: if you’ve been given something true to say, it’s okay if you say it while taking your clothes off and explaining to your bewildered bandmates that you heard it from a flying saucer. 

***

As art, I Am a Cliché’s most notable feature is Celeste Bell’s slow, deliberate speaking style. Her quiet retrospective is itself a critique of the high-speed punk life—her mother’s career got started in 1976 and crash-landed three years later. This is mostly a straightforward documentary. Bell’s voice, not the images or storytelling techniques (or the bland instrumental music), is what makes space for meditation. The movie opens, “My mother was a punk rock icon. People often ask me if she was a good mum.” It’s not a question anyone could answer briskly. Bell does her mother the honor, and offers viewers the subtle rebuke, of not even asking it too fast. She lets it sink in: what it would mean to be asked that, and to take on the responsibility of answering.

“Marianne Elliott from Brixton” taught her daughter “to love the sea, because water is the beginning and the end of life on earth.” Elliott spent her childhood in public housing, with “a bath in the kitchen with a lid on.” An early poem, “Half Caste,” describes the violence she faced as the child of a Somali father and a white mother, and the violence others projected onto her: “Do you wanna fight…. Will she cut me with a flick knife.” “I remember her coming home with bruises on her legs where boys had kicked her,” Elliott’s sister Hazel recalls. “She was a fighter.” 

A fighter and a seeker, always. Someone always aware of what others saw when they looked at her; who struggled to see herself in the mirror. Poly was “obsessed with fashion,” and her DIY Space Age, Pop Art look defines her punk image almost as much as her lacerating voice—goggles and helmet, bright blocks of clashing color, braids hiding her eyes and braces flashing on her teeth: Mad Max by way of Lisa Frank. People who have long wished they could dress cool like Poly Styrene will be startled and ruefully delighted by Bell’s complaint, “I pretty much hated everything she wore… especially when she forced me into ridiculous outfits too, like the matching mother-and-daughter Laura Ashley phase she got into.” Poly’s style wasn’t a protective coating: watch her still, sad, hopeful eyes and listen to her silence after a TV interviewer cracks, “With those braces on, she’s hardly Linda Ronstadt.” Fame, for Poly Styrene, meant being handled by other people’s eyes.

The documentary presents the X-Ray Spex’s New York debut as a turning point. In New York, Poly discovered that the commercial apocalypse was now. New York was neon, cocaine, the future punching you in the face every time you turned around. Poly felt that New Yorkers really lived the stuff she sang about, and her reaction was horror: “God, if that’s what it’s gonna be like, I don’t want it.” New York refined Poly’s philosophy, as well as her “perverse fondness” for the plastic, throwaway culture she found equal parts seductive and threatening. New York, obsessed with fame, also provided the spark for her bipolar disorder. It was after New York that people close to her began to notice erratic behavior—like that night she saw the flying saucer. Once she started tipping into mental illness, she fell fast: “The first time she saw herself singing on the telly,” Bell recounts, “she was on the psychiatric ward.”

“Lots of episodes” followed. Marianne Elliott was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia—another false identity imposed from the outside. Bell doesn’t sugarcoat it: “I saw my mum being sedated many times… I was scared of her.” Elliot sought solace with the Hare Krishnas, where she received another new name, Maharani Dasi, and reconciled with Lora Logic, the X-Ray Spex’s first saxophonist. The peace Elliot found with the Hare Krishnas was intermittent at best. She still wasn’t able to care for her daughter, and losing Bell, who was primarily raised by Elliott’s own mother, “broke her heart.”

Yet her belief remained firm and sincere. Toward the end of her life, Poly Styrene returned to the stage, doing a comeback concert in which she called Bell onstage to join her in singing one of the X-Ray Spex’s most famous songs, the feminist provocation, “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” It’s an edgy song, but there’s nothing but tenderness in Bell’s voice as she recalls, “It was amazing.” Elliott and Poly flow together here; but Elliott was Maharani Dasi too, and Maharani was Poly, the seeker, the rejecter of modern tech-based life in favor of ascetic community. And so the film ends not with the shared concert, but with a different mother-daughter ritual. Bell honors her mother’s last wish, to have her ashes scattered in the city believers consider the birthplace of the god Krishna.

To my surprise, this movie reminds me of nothing so much as Daniel Kelly’s 2014 Living on Fire: The Life of L. Brent Bozell, Jr. Marianne Elliott was a generation younger than the conservative Catholic firebrand and co-founder of National Review, and differed from him on almost every other demographic marker too. And yet their stories resonate with one another: both founded a vigorous cultural critique on personal alienation from contemporary complacency; both were harrowed by bipolar disorder, which disrupted the family they loved; both sought a deeper truth in religion and found it to be no cure for their suffering, but remained true to their faith anyway, at last experiencing reconciliation and peace. Both found wisdom in experiences that, to unsympathetic normal eyes, might look like nothing but symptoms.

Eve Tushnet is the author of two novels, Amends and Punishment: A Love Story, as well as the nonfiction Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith. She lives in Washington, DC and writes and speaks on topics ranging from medieval covenants of friendship to underrated vampire films. Her hobbies include sin, confession, and ecstasy.

Ty Matejowsky / February 9, 2022

By now, dead shopping malls are as much a part of the popular imagination as they are blighted fixtures of suburban landscapes: sprawling vestiges of a bygone era when droves of consumers flocked to self-contained hubs of retail commerce, embracing late stage capitalism’s aspirational promises, seeking distraction from the inertia of edge-city ennui. Today, abandoned shopping malls haunt spaces of modernity in ways both real and notional, leaving baby boomers and Gen-Xers to confront varying levels of nostalgia and angst as memories of frequenting the enclosed facilities during their halcyon heyday collide with the stark realities of their prolonged and seemingly irreversible decline.

Doubtless, part of the sentimentality surrounding this emergent “mallstalgia” is the conspicuous foregrounding of multi-tier shopping centers in recent popular culture, including Stranger Things Season 3 (2019) and Wonder Woman 1984 (2020). Such depictions—what with their gleaming chrome surfaces, pastel-tinged aesthetics, and requisite new wave needle-drops—exert an outsized influence over how we (mis)remember indoor malls, never mind the commercial primacy and unique subcultures (e.g., mall rats, mall walkers) they once engendered. Amid such vivid renderings, it’s instructive to revisit contemporaneous accounts of mall life published at the height of their 1980s popularity, if for no other reason than to avoid overly romanticizing or essentializing these prevailing generational touchstones.

Notable among these is sociologist Jerry Jacobs’s slender 1984 monograph The Mall: An Attempted Escape from Everyday Life, which makes for some curious if occasionally vexing reading nearly 40 years after its initial publication. Boasting perhaps the least inspiring cover image of all time—a blurry black and white photo of a giant concrete planter sitting amid the half-shadows of a nondescript mall interior—the book came out as part of Waveland Press’s Case Studies, a multivolume academic series familiar to most ‘70s and ‘80s anthropology students.

In The Mall, Jacobs trades the indigenous societies and far-flung research locales of his series peers for the apparently pseudonymous Oldtown Shoptime Mall, an L-shaped, 750,000 square foot retail venue built in 1975, housing some 115 individual stores, and presumably located in upstate New York near his home institution of Syracuse University. Like most other early ‘80s malls, the Oldtown featured a healthy mix of retail and entertainment offerings: video arcades, banks, restaurants, department stores, and specialty shops selling jewelry, music, shoes, men’s/women’s/children’s apparel, sporting goods, books, greeting cards, and gifts. Local teenagers, housewives, and retirees are among those Jacobs identifies as frequent mall-goers, their comings and goings overseen by management staff and minimum wage-earning security guards.

Jacobs’s stated aim is to present “a documentary and ethnographic study of shopping malls in the United States and their profound influence on transforming our urban and suburban landscapes.” He largely achieves this objective when discussing things like tenant composition, mall security measures, and crime statistics (it is employees and not shoplifters who inflict the most “shrinkage,” or store inventory losses). More effective is when he documents the attitudes and behaviors of mall denizens, capturing in sometimes granular detail the ephemera of their casual conversations and social interactions. To wit, Jacobs records some bored high schoolers detailing what they find “weird” in other mall guests (“people who do their hair weird, wear dumb clothes, or wear ‘high waters’”).

Less productive are Jacobs’s attempts to situate his findings within established theoretical concepts. For example, he argues that the social life of shopping malls approaches Durkheim’s “society of saints.” That is, since “nothing unusual is happening” at malls, any untoward teenage or adult behavior, however slight, is unduly magnified and labeled deviant. Unlike the aberrant behavior that he associates with downtown business districts and their various “stigmatized persons” (“vagrants, drunks, prostitutes, street people, ex-mental patients, the retarded, or many blacks and ethnics”), the threshold for appropriate shopping mall behavior is so high, according to Jacobs, that any misstep can invite serious reprimand or sanction.

He further critiques malls by arguing that those frequenting them indulge in what he terms a “shrinking world,” a place where people seek out “a wide range of diversions, e.g., T.V., video games, the ‘walkman’ craze, alcohol, drugs, transcendental meditation, mental illness, art, science or rubic [sic] cubes” to avoid interpersonal interactions and escape the tedium of everyday life. For Jacobs, shopping malls remain places where the tacit promises of social transcendence and personal gratification ultimately go unfulfilled. If these assertions seem a bit tentative or lacking rigor, then readers had best brace themselves for the gratuitous editorializing and anecdotal asides that Jacobs deploys throughout The Mall. The book is chock full of strange digressions that only tangentially relate to its stated research aims.

For instance, when theorizing why shopping malls lack adequate restrooms, Jacobs suggests that they not only serve as potential sites of “crime against persons” but also “other sorts of offences such as ‘tea room trades’ (casual homosexual activities in public restrooms),” adding, inexplicably, that “the author [Jacobs] inadvertently blundered in on a situation of this sort in the restroom of an upper-class department store that anchored one end of a large shopping mall in Northern California.” Similarly, he devotes considerable pages to the perceived socio-psychological effects of coin-operated arcade machines on impressionable ‘80s youth. When addressing the future implications of adolescents spending so much time in mall arcades, Jacobs assumes the moral panic posturing of then U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop, who said in 1982: “Their body language is tremendous and everything is Zap the enemy. There’s nothing constructive in the video games.” As if to further challenge the legitimacy of video games, Jacobs then relates how an Oldtown Shoptime Mall arcade was moved from its original location near a mall entrance to a less accessible area within the shopping center’s basement owing to the actions and threatening presence of “lower class black and white teenagers,” “dope dealers,” and other “undesirables.”

Such finger-wagging gives way to hyperbole and heavy-handedness in the book’s final section. Here, Jacobs drops any pretense at understatement, arguing, for example, that the “promised safety, comfort, and entertainment” of malls are on a “scale [that] has not been seen since the court at Versailles.” No less excessive is the book’s curveball ending. On the last two pages Jacobs warns against seeking escape in things like shopping malls by abruptly recounting the tragic 1983 news story of a 13-year-old California boy who killed himself after his father removed a bedroom television to prevent him from binging soap operas.

So, what to make of this obscure bit of academic ephemera? How should 21st century readers approach what is arguably the first in-depth account of American mall culture compiled by a social scientist, never mind one that inexplicably ends with a teen suicide note. Does this flawed account of a once novel topic of ethnographic inquiry add any new dimension or counterweight to the generalized and deepening nostalgia gaining currency nowadays across popular culture? In considering such questions, it may prove useful to juxtapose this on-the-ground snapshot of early ‘80s mall life with another critique of American modernity, one also suffused with an underlying sense of dread that showcases the ultimate emptiness of Reagan-era consumerism and media information overload. That is to say, The Mall can and maybe should be read as an addendum or companion piece to Don DeLillo’s darkly comic novel White Noise (1985), the story of Hitler Studies professor Jack Gladney and his fourth wife Babette searching for meaning amid a stitched-together family of children from previous marriages, a drug that suppresses the fear of death (Dylar), and an “airborne toxic event” that completely upends their middle-class existence.

A central setting of White Noise—a book itself with no shortage of digressions and seemingly pointless anecdotes—is the ten-story Mid-Village Mall (“a vast shopping center out on the interstate”) where, encouraged by his wife and (step)children, Jack spends an evening roaming fugue-like from store to store buying stuff he doesn’t need, and then driving home in contemplative silence. So immense is the Mid-Village Mall, in fact, that an elderly couple gets lost for two days among its vaulted interior spaces, eventually taking refuge in “an abandoned cookie shack,” before finally being discovered “alive but shaken.” As a sociological primer for the themes DeLillo more trenchantly explores in White Noise, The Mall provides some real-life observations grounded in ethnographic fieldwork. Read together, these nearly 40-year-old books work to demystify some of the idealized trappings retroactively projected onto enclosed shopping centers. More readily, they emphasize inchoate or latent existentialism characterizing mall-going at the height of its ‘80s popularity, as well as the gaping void that persists within so much of our consumerist lifestyle. Jacobs’s The Mall hints at many of the same issues as White Noise, now considered among DeLillo’s most popular and enduring works, albeit with much less eloquence and intentional humor, perhaps leaving some to ponder just how this curious retail ethnography got greenlighted, much less published.

Either way, the malls that Jacobs and DeLillo variously documented in the 1980s no longer wield the same cultural cachet they once did. As resonant reminders of time’s forward lurch and the impermanence of all things once ascendant, the ubiquity of dead shopping malls—analogous to “ghost” or “zombie” malls, which still operate but at much diminished capacity, scattered with mom and pop vape shops and nail salons—elicits visceral pangs of wistfulness even as Amazon buys them up to serve as massive fulfillment centers. 

Ty Matejowsky is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.  He is a Libra who enjoys sunsets and long walks on the beach.

Alex Adams / January 31, 2022

As Godzilla walked away into the sea in the closing shot of Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975), Japanese film studio Toho seemed to kiss their bellicose lizard goodbye forever. After fifteen explosive (and increasingly audacious) films over the course of 21 delirious years, the curtain finally fell and the lights finally came up. But of course, Godzilla is immortal: after nine long years, Toho resurrected the creature for Godzilla 1984, a thirtieth anniversary blank slate follow-up to the 1954 original. Also known as The Return of Godzilla and simply Godzilla, Godzilla 1984 is what we would now call a reboot: part remake, part sequel, a fresh start that retrieved some things from Godzilla’s past while discarding others.

And it discarded a lot. Every character and event—every wacky monster, every alien invasion—featured in every previous sequel, from the often-overlooked quickie follow-up Godzilla Raids Again (1955) to Terror of Mechagodzilla, was unceremoniously chucked in the bin. Retrieved: the aesthetic restraint and doom-laden tone of Ishiro Honda’s 1954 original. Godzilla was back, and it was mean. This new iteration, the last of the Cold War period, is something of an outlier in the Godzilla canon: stylistically distinct from the movies that precede and follow it, with a unique monster design and a feel all of its own. But it is also an interesting oddity among pop culture of the time, because the movie shows the Soviet and American nuclear powers, usually at one another’s throats, cooperating to eliminate an existential threat bigger than either of them. The film also reflects with unusual frankness on Japan’s geopolitical position as a minor power forced to stand up to both the US and the Russians, and, much like other high-profile sci-fi of the age, it is a powerful warning about the perils—and futility—of nuclear confrontation. A Godzilla movie of unusual sobriety, Godzilla 1984 tells us a lot about Cold War Japan, and the film’s Americanization as Godzilla 1985 a year later tells us perhaps even more about the politics of Cold War cultural production in the United States.

Close to the Brink: Godzilla 1984 and Nuclear Confrontation

Godzilla 1984 has a straightforward plot that interweaves two main stories, one focused on the scientific attempts to understand and contain Godzilla, and the other on the political ramifications of the monster’s unexpected rebirth. When Godzilla (played here with characteristic muscularity by Heisei-era suit actor Kenpachiro Satsuma) bursts out of a volcano, the Japanese authorities attempt, at first, to keep its re-emergence a secret, hoping that the creature will lay low and not cause any trouble. However, Godzilla soon forces their hand by destroying a Soviet submarine and almost provoking a catastrophic confrontation between the two nuclear superpowers. The uncovering of this secret quells the international tension, as it proves that no intentional provocation took place. Soon enough, however, Godzilla rampages through Tokyo, devastating the city and causing a Soviet nuclear missile to be remotely launched by accident. The Japanese Self-Defense Forces stop Godzilla with cadmium bombs and the US military launches a counter-missile, detonating the rogue warhead in the atmosphere above Tokyo. But the fallout from the blast reanimates Godzilla once again, and the only way to stop the beast is to lure it into another volcano using the insights gleaned from the scientific research of Professor Hayashida (Yosuke Natsuki). Falling back into the flames and lava of the underworld, Godzilla burns to death.

Godzilla 1984 is, then, the most direct engagement with Cold War themes to be found in the Godzilla series. Where the earlier films of the Shōwa period (1954-1975) addressed geopolitical matters playfully and obliquely through surreal symbolism and space opera allegory, Godzilla 1984 has explicit political themes front and center and throughout. Godzilla’s rebirth is the trigger event so widely dreaded in the 1980s: a sudden, destabilizing, and unpredictable crisis that threatens the delicate geopolitical balance and pushes the world closer to mutually assured destruction.

But though World War 3 may loom menacingly, Godzilla 1984 dispels the threat of nuclear war relatively quickly. The film’s concern is not the fear that an apocalyptic exchange of annihilations will take place between the nuclear powers, because, as mentioned above, the revelation of Godzilla’s responsibility for the destruction of the nuclear submarine quickly calms these fears. The specific and more nuanced fear that the film exploits is that a “slippery slope” effect could result from the use of nuclear weapons in this emergency. Times of crisis are, after all, times of temptation: when things get tough, the option to discard sensitive ethical principles and use brute force to solve problems seems ever more persuasive—as the Japanese were, of course, well aware, having been the victims of American nuclear aggression. Godzilla 1984 is that rare cultural artifact that doesn’t portray crisis as a time when an exception can be made. Instead, the movie foregrounds the struggle to stand by one’s principles when they are most sorely tested.          

This concern is most pronounced in a scene roughly halfway through the film. American and Soviet negotiators attempt to persuade the Japanese Prime Minister Seiki Mitamura (Keiju Kobayashi) to allow the use of nuclear weapons against Godzilla on Japanese territory. Harangued on both sides, the Prime Minister eventually stands firm in his anti-nuclear convictions. Pacifist principles mean nothing, he says, if we abandon them when they become inconvenient. More than anything, then, the film is a reaffirmation of Japan’s anti-militarist credo, enshrined into their post-war constitution in the form of a commitment to never again wage war. Even using nuclear weapons “defensively” is rejected: any deployment at all will legitimize their use and thus set a precedent that will encourage, however indirectly, their use in the future. (Of course, nuclear weapons are used, as a US missile intercepts the rogue Soviet warhead; but this is a tragic eventuality, an outcome that shows that the only justified use of nuclear weapons is itself anti-nuclear.)

This long negotiation scene also articulates a clear and passionate commentary on the Japanese national position during the Cold War. When the Japanese Prime Minister, once he’s finished discussing matters with his cabinet, plainly refuses to allow nuclear weapons to be used against Godzilla, he finishes his remarks by asking by what right the USA or Russia can demand to use these weapons on Japanese soil. “You accuse us of acting out of national pride, and maybe we are guilty of that. But what of your attitude? What right do you have to say that we should follow you? You are being selfish too.” Like the much later Shin Godzilla (2016), which sees Japanese authorities collaborating with American and French forces in their attempts to destroy the monster, Godzilla 1984 shows a Japan that can assert itself as a nation among equals, refusing to be dictated to. There is a certain nationalism here, of course, but also a tentative anti-imperialism. Both the US and Soviet ambassadors are pushy, aggressive, overconfidently combative; the Japanese PM is calm, reserved, above all human, his hands trembling as he holds his cigarette in his office and explains to his ministers how he finally managed to resolve the situation. Unlike the representatives of the nuclear powers, who seem to feel they have finally found the opportunity they crave to push the nuclear button, the Japanese—the only nation to have actually been on the receiving end of a nuclear strike—have a uniquely intimate insight into the human costs of nuclear aggression. This insight demands that they exhibit the vigilance and courage to say no, always, to nuclear weapons.

Rebirth, Resurrection

It’s not only the film’s more open approach to its political commitments that sets Godzilla 1984 apart from previous Godzilla movies. It also has grittier visuals and a more realist narrative approach, blending elements of the horror and political thriller genres into a more stylistically austere version of giant monster science fiction. The tone is darker, tragic, more serious; there are no more victory dances, special moves, speech bubbles, child protagonists, or plucky kaiju sidekicks. In place of these fun, carnivalesque elements that characterize many of Godzilla’s later Shōwa features, Godzilla 1984 prioritizes Godzilla annihilating Tokyo by night while the itchy trigger fingers of global superpowers threaten nuclear winter. The film’s opening has a pulpy horror feel, featuring spooky green lighting, grisly gloop and grue, and corpses sucked dry by a giant facehugger-esque sea-tick. Its closing movement is slow, quiet, elegiac, full of moments of aching stillness as the confused monster is led to its doom. Like only three other Godzilla films (the original, Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla, and Shin Godzilla), Godzilla does not fight another monster, allowing the primal majesty of the monster itself to take center stage.

This majesty feels a little understated, though, as Godzilla’s redesign is only partially successful. There is lots to love, particularly in the creature’s auditory profile. The crashes and booms of its stomping feet are satisfyingly cacophonous, and the roar is more animalistic, guttural, and thunderous—more, in short, like the roar found in the original Godzilla and less like the more jovial skreeonk heard throughout the comparatively light-hearted sequels of the 1960s and ’70s. On the other hand, the suit often looks goofy due to its clunky articulation and static, inexpressive eyes; and compared with Godzilla’s previous destructive antics, the rampage through Tokyo feels lukewarm and low-energy. But it is the characterization of Godzilla as what director Koji Hashimoto calls “a living conflict of evil and sadness” that ultimately makes the new Godzilla an effective beast. Though critics have dismissed Godzilla’s slow movement in this movie as aimless, dawdling, and boring, the monster seems more sympathetic, and more interesting, when interpreted as a confused, hapless, and hungry creature struggling to understand the world around it. Neither a conquering embodiment of sheer, malicious onslaught or a swashbuckling, child-friendly superhero, Godzilla appears here as a tragic, doomed figure, lost in a baffling and hostile environment. This iteration of Godzilla speaks to the confusion and helplessness felt by many in the face of the absurd yet terrifyingly real nuclear threat.

The deliberate strategy of positioning Godzilla 1984 as more grown-up, more aesthetically mature, is an attempt to refurbish Godzilla’s reputation, to wipe away the embarrassment of the increasingly goofy Shōwa years. Many fans (myself included) love the more freewheeling 1970s films, with their wackier stories and more outré characterizations—such as the space cockroaches using an amusement park to infiltrate human society in Godzilla Vs. Gigan (1972), the sentient robot Jet Jaguar who helps Godzilla destroy an avenging hollow earth cockroach in Godzilla Vs. Megalon (1973), and the dog-god King Caesar who helps destroy Godzilla’s metal doppelganger in Godzilla Vs. Mechagodzilla (1974). But Steve Ryfle, in his book Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star, speaks for many when he calls the post-Destroy All Monsters (1968) movies Godzilla’s “dark days” because of the dramatic drop in both seriousness and production value.

And it is true that these later stock footage-laden sequels were made on lower budgets, catered to a younger audience, and saw decreasing ticket sales. The rise of TV kept audiences away from the cinema, and genre competition from the likes of American import Star Wars, rival studio Daiei’s turtle kaiju Gamera, and TV sensation Ultraman dethroned Godzilla from his status as King of the Monsters, demoting him into a mid-field also-ran no longer able to dominate at the box office. This reduction in quality is reflected in the critical consensus around these later movies, which very often dismisses them as tacky pop culture crap that reflects poorly on the brooding arthouse gravitas of the 1954 original. “Americans in particular,” writes Den of Geek, “were coming to see Godzilla films as a punchline, as the cheapest of the cheap and the dumbest of the dumb.” The child-friendly animation series by Hanna-Barbera (1978-79), with its fairy-tale tone, grating levity, and the Scrappy Doo-esque mini-monster Godzooky, did nothing to counter this reputation.

These judgements about the cultural value of entertainment clearly influenced the creative process of Godzilla 1984. If this new incarnation was to be taken as seriously as its creators felt Godzilla deserved, the film needed to comprehensively parade its seriousness. It has its moments of humor and brightness, of course, but the movie’s color palette is dominated by blacks, grays, and reds; its soundtrack is an opulent mixture of the heavily percussive and the orchestrally mournful; and its conclusions (both narrative and philosophical) are somber. For some critics—notably the condescending Roger Ebert, who said in his error-filled one-star review that the movie deliberately echoed “the absurd dialogue, the bad lip-synching, the unbelievable special effects, the phony profundity” of the original—this was not a task worth taking time over. But for others, the return to darkness is a return to form, and the movie was successful enough to initiate a run of six increasingly flamboyant sequels. From 1989 to 1995, a new series of “versus films” would feature wild, bizarre plots worthy of the Shōwa era and a newly threatening, grimly charismatic Godzilla.   

Your Favorite Fire-Breathing Monster… Like You’ve Never Seen Him Before! 

Godzilla’s history is, to an extent at least, a history of cross-cultural communication. As Japan modernized rapidly in the decades after the Second World War, its popular cultural export business, including anime and manga (from the surreal darkness of Akira and Ghost in the Shell to the melancholy whimsy of Studio Ghibli), extreme horror movies by auteurs such as Takashi Miike (whose 1999 Audition and 2001 Ichi the Killer pushed the horror envelope at home and abroad), video gaming platforms and characters including Nintendo, PlayStation, and Pokemon, and popular toy lines such as Gundam Wing and Bandai’s two brands Transformers and Machine Robo (known in the West as Gobots), constituted one of the most important aspects of its economic recovery. Tokusatsu—special effects movies, including kaiju movies—were no small part of this outpouring of soft power.

But Godzilla’s history in the West is also, in large part, a history of bowdlerization. Godzilla: King of the Monsters! (1956) was a tonally sympathetic adaptation of the 1954 original; it retained a great deal of the original performances and much of the best effects work, adding Steve Martin (Raymond Burr), an American journalist functioning as a focalizing character who narrated the plot more or less directly to the audience. For years, however, Toho’s poor grasp of overseas licensing meant that US distributors (keen to exploit the films financially, but utterly unsentimental about their content) were often free to butcher subsequent movies willy-nilly, adding stock footage, new music, and comically bad dubbing. Though the rationale for these editorial intrusions was usually that such changes were intended to make the films more accessible to non-Japanese audiences, some of the interventions seem brutal and ludicrous to later viewers, many of whom prefer to see the films as close to the way their original creators intended as possible. Godzilla’s first sequel, Godzilla Raids Again, was recut and retitled Gigantis! The Fire Monster (1959)—as well as stuffing it with stock footage and giving it a patronizing explanatory voice-over, the adaptors even changed Godzilla’s name—and sequel number two, King Kong Vs. Godzilla, had vital scenes of exposition, comedy, and characterization stripped out and replaced with a talking head newscaster who directly and listlessly explained the plot to the audience.

Compared with rough handling like this, Godzilla 1985 is a mostly thoughtful and considerate adaptation of Godzilla 1984. Much as the Japanese version is a blank slate reboot of the original Godzilla, the American recut is a direct sequel to Godzilla: King of the Monsters! And, like its predecessor, Godzilla 1985 features a light-touch streamlining of the narrative, a reasonably proficient dub, and the retention of much of the original score. That said, Godzilla 1985 has its share of problems. Reviews were generally poor, with critics often targeting the special effects, which seemed old-fashioned and underwhelming to US audiences now used to the visual wonders experienced in films like Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982), and The Terminator (1984). “Though special-effects experts in Japan and around the world have vastly improved their craft in the last 30 years,” wrote the New York Times, “you wouldn’t know it from this film.” Elsewhere, the adaptation process itself took flak. A redundant sub-plot featuring American military characters, which is shot on a visibly flimsy set and padded with silly jokes, was added. On this count, Steve Ryfle is particularly withering, noting that this narrative element makes Godzilla 1985 “a dead serious Japanese monster movie interrupted every ten minutes or so by pointless vignettes featuring (mostly bad) American actors, including a wisecracking military punk who should be shot.”     

But this is the least of it. Godzilla 1985 is now notorious for its extraordinarily heavy-handed Dr Pepper product placement. Dr Pepper stumped up a proportion of the cash for the reshoots, and they demanded a lot in return. As a result, the American characters approvingly sip the beverage in the war room and converse in front of a dazzlingly bright vending machine. In the campy tie-in promo adverts, Godzilla attacks Tokyo in search of the soft drink, and his picky girlfriend Lady Godzilla demands the diet version. Though the tonal reset of Godzilla 1984 sought to distance Godzilla from the sillier aspects of the monster’s reputation, the studios responsible were clearly happy enough to exploit this reputation for marketing and promotional purposes.       

Perhaps most importantly, however, Raymond Burr reprises his role as the journalist Steve Martin, appearing here as a world-weary father figure summoned by the US military for his insight into the original disaster. Legend has it that Burr had a profound influence on the project, rewriting or extemporizing lines, refusing to drink Dr Pepper, and forcing the production team to take the subject matter seriously. Whether or not these stories are apocryphal—a recent piece in fanzine Kaiju Ramen suggests that there is little evidence to actually support such tales—Burr definitely brings a certain hammy seriousness to the new scenes without which they would be much the poorer. Much as the Japanese Prime Minister is the voice of conscience in Godzilla 1984, in Godzilla 1985 Martin is a grizzled and wise elder who dampens the youthful enthusiasm of the American military officers with his cynical testimony from the past. Martin offers nuggets of expertise about Godzilla’s behavior, expertise gained from his exposure to the beast but also, it is implied, from years of thoughtful reflection on the matter. He is clear, for instance, that military force will yield no results. “Firepower of any kind or magnitude is not the answer,” he states. “Godzilla’s like a hurricane or a tidal wave. We must approach him as we would a force of nature. We must understand him, deal with him, perhaps even try to communicate with him.”

The movie closes with an ominous monolog delivered by Burr, which is rich in metaphysical claims about humanity’s inability to challenge the colossal natural forces that Godzilla represents:

Nature has a way sometimes of reminding man of just how small he is. She occasionally throws up the terrible offsprings of our pride and carelessness to remind us of how puny we really are in the face of a tornado, an earthquake, or a Godzilla. The reckless ambitions of man are often dwarfed by their dangerous consequences. For now, Godzilla, that strangely innocent and tragic monster, has gone to her. Whether he returns or not, or is never again seen by human eyes, the things he has taught us remain.

Godzilla 1985 is, then, much more didactic than Godzilla 1984, and by hammering the message home so hard it also loses a lot of its subtlety and sophistication. Much of the complexity of the negotiation scenes is stripped out, for example, replacing the debate among the Japanese cabinet with a straightforward refusal to countenance nuclear weapons. This retains the superficial anti-nuclear message of Godzilla 1984 but cuts out the discussion of Japan’s right to participate as an international equal, reducing the thorny discussion of Japan’s delicate geopolitical position to a flat and peremptory rejection of nuclear weapons. Removing these scenes and inserting far less interesting pontifications on man’s relationship with nature—“Godzilla’s a product of civilization. Men are the only real monsters,” says Professor Hayashida—may make the film more palatable to international audiences (although it’s not clear how we would know whether this is really true), but they do so at the cost of dampening and impoverishing the movie’s political insights. Godzilla 1984 gives us a glimpse into Japan’s Cold War position; Godzilla 1985 gives us pompous platitudes about the power of nature.

This distortion is found throughout other American adaptations of Godzilla. In Emmerich’s Godzilla, the monster is awoken by French nuclear testing in the Pacific, and Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla (2014) reframes US nuclear testing in the 1950s as attempts to kill Godzilla. Edwards’s film (as well as its sequel, 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters) does feature Dr. Serizawa’s father’s stopped pocket watch, a family heirloom from Hiroshima, but in general there is a tendency in US adaptations to minimize American historical responsibility for the actual use of nuclear weapons against human targets. Godzilla 1985 is notable in this regard, as perhaps its most striking change is that the Russians are transformed into nuclear aggressors. Where the Russian officer tries desperately to stop the launch in Godzilla 1984, in Godzilla 1985 this scene is subtly recut to indicate that the Russian’s dying struggle is in fact motivated by his desire to ensure that the missile is launched. To the last breath, the Soviets are murderous villains.   

This extraordinary political about-face, in which the movie is changed from a piece of anti-nuclear pacifism to a piece of Reaganite anti-Soviet propaganda, is explained, in part at least, by the conservative politics of the owners of New World Pictures. Originally started by B-movie legend Roger Corman, by 1985 New World was owned by execs Larry Kupin, Harry E. Sloan, and Larry A. Thompson, whose conservative affiliations led to the studio cutting out valuable scenes examining Japan’s right to refuse the demands of the two nuclear superpowers, as well as cynically turning the Soviets into villains. For many viewers this change is not only nonsensical and ridiculous but actively undermines the longstanding political commitments of the Godzilla franchise. Another reviewer writes that in Godzilla 1985 “the Russians take the place of all those goofy alien races that populated the 1960s and 70s-era Godzilla movies.” The Kilaaks and Xiliens were, I have written elsewhere, allegories for aggressive imperial powers; in this light, it is particularly disappointing that Godzilla 1985 makes this change. Where Toho’s previous films—and, indeed, Godzilla 1984—are critical of imperialism, Godzilla 1985 is a piece of imperial propaganda directly engaged in the Reaganite public relations project of demonizing Communism.

In the final analysis, however, Godzilla 1985 is perhaps more interesting than Godzilla 1984. Its distortions of the Japanese version throw light on what is most compelling about the original, and there is a lot of apocrypha to go around to boot. It is fun, for instance, to imagine the trepidation of the production staffer tasked with asking Raymond Burr to approvingly quaff Dr Pepper before delivering a line about man’s fragility in the face of the overwhelming mystery of nature. And home video sales of Godzilla 1985 were a major success, contributing massively to the continued overseas popularity of Godzilla. It is only a shame, then, that no official home video release of Godzilla 1985 exists, at least not here in the UK where I’m writing from. While Toho is putting out Godzilla hot sauce, Godzilla coffee, and Godzilla drinking chocolate, it remains the task of amateur preservationists to ensure that the films themselves remain in circulation. 

Godzilla 1984 generated six sequels over the next eleven years, with a revamped Godzilla battling old foes King Ghidorah, Mothra, and Mechagodzilla, as well as new creatures Biollante, Spacegodzilla, and Destoroyah. These Heisei-era versus films represent the franchise’s first sustained attempt at the sort of inter-film continuity that modern audiences recognize and expect, with a consistent set of characters, later films following up on previous movies, and something of a long-term narrative arc. For me, this sequence of films also represents some of the highest points of the entire franchise, as they feature glittering and pyrotechnically adventurous practical effects at their most wondrous, monster design that is iconic and inventive, and some of the most interesting themes in the series, from the dystopian vision of bioweaponry and espionage in Godzilla Vs Biollante (1989), to the hopeful environmentalism of Godzilla Vs Mothra (1992), to the detonation-heavy antimilitarism of Godzilla Vs Mechagodzilla II (1993). The late Cold War oddity of Godzilla 1984, then, and its much-maligned recut Godzilla 1985, would be the catalyst for a resurgence in Toho’s tokusatsu fortunes that continued long after the tensions the movie took as its subject matter were permanently transformed. The world may change around the monster, but the monster itself is immortal.

Alex Adams is a cultural critic and writer based in North East England. His most recent book, How to Justify Torture, was published by Repeater Books in 2019. He loves dogs.

Sam Moore / November 18, 2021

When an older piece of art comes back into the world, one of the first impulses is to scan through it and look for the ways in which it has aged: outworn ideas and attitudes, characters who might be seen as quote-unquote bad representation. Lynne Tillman’s Weird Fucks — originally published in 1982 and recently reissued by Peninsula Press — is instead striking for how prophetic it is. And while it might be easier to simply assume that a novella about relatively anonymous sex with a revolving door of partners would mostly speak to the ways in which cruising and hooking up have gone digital, the truth of the matter is much more complex than that. 

Each one of the novella’s chapters centers on a different relationship that the nameless protagonist has. Even as she moves from one partner to another, the supporting cast — friends, discarded boyfriends — float around in her orbit. Early on, she catches the eye of an ex, and when their eyes meet, she thinks, “George looks guilty and embarrassed. I feel wanton and he is history.” The idea of history floats as aimlessly through Weird Fucks as its cast of characters; it’s only in the latter half of the book, when the 1972 Olympics are mentioned, that the story/ies are rooted in a specific moment in time. What’s fascinating is that, rather than taking the personal and writing it large, Weird Fucks takes the macro — the relationship between power and desire; the deliberately vague references to “murders, ‘the political situation,’ as it was called” — and draws it deeply into individuals, making these people pieces on a chessboard too vast for them to comprehend, and the center of the universe all at once. 

As she moves between men and around the world, what’s interesting isn’t just the way in which this kind of shuttling between partners — while old ones still exist in the background of your life — prefigured the ways in which technology changed the way we look at, and for, desire, but also the things that have stayed the same. The tension that exists in a contemporary (re)consideration of Weird Fucks is both how much the world has changed, and how little it has. One of the narrative cores of the novella  — which informs so much of its (mis)communication about sex and desire  — is the double standard existing between men and women when it comes to sexual agency and freedom. Tillman writes: “It was difficult, very difficult, for men to understand and appreciate how someone could fling herself around sexually and not know the terms, the ground, on which she lay,” a line that could be repeated ad nauseum decades after first appearing in print and still capture something true about the ways in which men expect women to behave. The language of “the terms” here captures something that runs through much of the book  — that these relationships are microcosms of a kind of conflict, that the terms in question are really rules of engagement. 

It’s easy to oversimplify any story about the relationships between men and women as being a “battle of the sexes.” The term is most frequently applied to romantic sitcoms that have the genders of their casts divided down the middle; shows like Friends in the US and Coupling in the UK draw a line between man and woman, trying to understand what it is that keeps them apart, even when they’re endlessly getting together. But in Weird Fucks, the word “battle” feels most emphatic and important; less a battle of the sexes than a battle of sex. So much of what defines the relationships in Tillman’s novella is power — as it relates to BDSM, consent, gender. All of this is rooted in the experience of the protagonist; there’s something liberating about diving this deeply into the experience and feelings of an individual, rather than using sexual tastes and dynamics exclusively as a way to make a broader, more abstract statement. As much as these things all work across multiple levels, TiIllman never simply leaves something as merely an intellectual idea; everything is felt deeply, and that’s what gives the book the power to speak both for and beyond the experiences of the characters. 

The protagonist is full of contradictions: narcissistic enough to see herself as the center of the universe, and naïve enough to make her deeply uncertain about why her relationships go the way they do. As a lot of contemporary fiction struggles to grapple with the ins-and-outs (so to speak) of sexuality that’s informed explicitly by ideas of power and violence, there’s something striking about the acknowledgement of how these dynamics work, and the way people struggle to understand their own place in them, all packed into this one line: “I couldn’t understand why a man would want a woman in pain. I wasn’t sophisticated about sadomasochism.” In a way that’s both liberating and surprisingly naive, carrying with it an air of innocence. She often seems uncertain of how the games around her need to be played, existing outside of expectations for better or worse.

This lack of understanding goes both ways, and underscores the melancholy that runs throughout Weird Fucks. It isn’t that the novella’s protagonist is sad because of the fleeting nature of her relationships. The thing that makes the book work so well as a kind of dispatch from the frontlines on power, masculinity, and desire as something performed, is the fact that these relationships are brief but vivid — seemingly through a shared lack of the ability to communicate and understand one another. That gulf between man and woman is a dangerous space to try and move between. The other women in the book are seen as backup performers in one way or another by the protagonist, who says of one of them: “I felt she had some sympathy for me, and had watched, from her position in the chorus, other, similar young women.” If men and women can’t understand each other, the protagonist of Weird Fucks is insistent, desperate, to understand herself. In a small moment of revelation near the end of the novella, prompted by the idea that not being attracted to a certain type of a man is a personal failing, she says, “I tend towards men who aren’t as nice.” 

And it’s fair to say that the men in Weird Fucks aren’t as nice; they seem more than willing to use the women around them, and have a fuzzy understanding of how consent works: “he thought, because I hadn’t resisted, that I liked it.” This lack of understanding, and the stripped back brutality of its consequences, capture the loss of innocence, and the price of knowledge, that defines the protagonist’s journey through these strange relationships. Early on, she’s more than willing to describe herself in ways that are performative, saying “I was a slum queen and in college” in an early story, before saying, at the beginning of the end of the book: “I should have known better.” These five words echo through a lot of Weird Fucks: what she should have known, what her partners should have known; it speaks to a lack of knowledge, obviously, but also an inability to learn about one another. Knowledge doesn’t come easily or freely in Weird Fucks. Across so many of these stories, knowledge is power, and the characters are constantly trying to work out if it’s a price worth paying.

The men of Weird Fucks, as much as they simply strut and fret their hour upon the stage, are all vividly drawn through Tillman’s eye for minute details. It’s this ability to create specifics for the men that move in and out of the orbit of the protagonist — one “looked something like Richard Burton,” another is simply “blond and weak” — that makes them explicitly different, but also magnifies their similarities. The specter of violence goes beyond those not understanding consent when the protagonist has a strange entanglement with a married man: “his enthusiasm grew as I retreated inside, and as if to draw me out, reach me, he whispered bloodlessly, “‘I’d like to kill you with my cock.’” What’s prescient about Weird Fucks is how everything both is and isn’t a matter of life and death; violence is an undercurrent, and every breakup may or may not be the end of the world. The world is ending and being remade seemingly every moment, from the nameless political tension to the endlessly changing ways that people define themselves and their relationships to each other. The surface of the world changes, but all the things that lurk beneath the surface stay the same. Weird Fucks captures the world that Tillman was writing in, the world the book is set in, and a new world — that isn’t that new — all at once.

Sam Moore‘s writing on queerness, politics, and genre fiction in art has been published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, Little White Lies, Hyperallergic, and other places. Their poetry and experimental essays have been published in print and online, most recently in the Brixton Review of Books. If their writing didn’t already give it away, they’re into weird stuff.

Eve Tushnet / November 8, 2021

Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985
Edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre
PM Press, 2021

Disclosure: This collection includes an essay by Kelly Roberts, editor-in-chief of We Are the Mutants.

In troubled times, we must be grateful for every touch of the ridiculous. And so let’s raise a glass to psychologist and pop scientist Steven Pinker, who in his most recent book burbles forth: “Rationality is uncool.” Pinker pledges fealty to Reason, the chaste goddess, even though he “cannot argue that reason is dope, phat, chill, fly, sick, or da bomb.” This delightful complaint evokes a vanished era in which we all were just vibing on reason, knowledge, hexagons and vaccines and supercolliders and, I don’t know, eugenics. But this timeline, if it ever existed, ended long ago. For the authors whose works are explored in PM Press’s new collection, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985, cool rationality was the old religion — and they were the acolytes of the strange new gods who displaced it.

Dangerous Visions is the third in a series, edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre, exploring the radical elements in pulp and genre publishing of the Cold War era. (We Are the Mutants has reviewed the first volume, on postwar youth culture, and the second, on revolution and the 1960s counterculture.) Like the first two installments, this one combines short essays with plentiful examples of weird, enticing cover art — such as a 1955 cover for 1984 that looks like nothing so much as a juvenile-delinquency pulp. The book is punctuated with little round-ups, less like essays and more like annotated lists of sci-fi on subjects like nuclear war, drugs, or animals, which show how cover illustrators could depict similar themes as dream or nightmare, action-adventure or inner journey. The “dystopias” list, for example, includes a threatening cover for Stephen King’s The Long Walk (1979) and an eerily seductive one for Mary Vigliante’s The Colony (also 1979).

The book begins with the opposing open letters published in 1968 in Galaxy Science Fiction, one supporting the war in Vietnam and the other protesting it. This contrast offers an obvious political gloss on the word “radical” in the book’s subtitle: “Radical” means left-wing politics; it means the antiwar stance of Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Kate Wilhelm set against the conservatism of the pro-war Marion Zimmer Bradley, L. Sprague de Camp, Robert A. Heinlein, and Larry Niven. But an early mention of the transition from the term “science fiction” to “speculative fiction” is a more accurate guide to the kind of radicalism Dangerous Visions celebrates. Both Heinlein and the pro-war R.A. Lafferty get thoughtful essays in this volume, suggesting that they, too, were in some way radical visionaries.

There’s little explicit effort to tie the works together or nail down what makes something radical, dangerous, or new. It’s a wise choice that allows the essayists to avoid fixed narratives and Procrustean politics. The new world is a place where a new kind of person lives — although many would argue that this new and dangerous person was always the only kind of person around. The old SF hero was that rational man you used to hear so much about: the imagined actor in liberal political philosophy, the person without dependents or dependencies, who confronted the stars with reason, self-control, and a spirit of adventure. He travels, as the introduction puts it, “from the suburbs to the stars.” The old guard’s heroes were white, even when they were green. The old SF hero might die, but he’d never worry about getting pregnant. Mind and body were manageable; desires were reasonable, inspiring, and above all intelligible, both to the hero himself and to the reader. Whether this is a fair description of the old-school hero, I can’t say. I only like this kind of guy when he’s played by William Shatner — in a book, I just can’t see the appeal. I can say that the works explored in the PM Press collection are rebelling against this hero. These books are populated by mystics and criminals, artists and threatened children, even animals and creatures who are some blend of human and Other. The political apparatus of the state does not enable constructive action; it provokes fear or anger. In these books knowledge is less like an equation and more like a hallucination.

Speaking of Samuel R. Delany, Dangerous Visions avoids the more thoroughly-trampled pathways in his work in favor of a 1979 memoir of his brief stint in a commune called Heavenly Breakfast. Daniel Shank Cruz highlights not only novel sexual arrangements (“they all get gonorrhea […] because intra-commune sexual encounters are commonplace”) but the group’s economic strategy of drug dealing, and its belief — perhaps even more touching and necessary now than then — “that people have value aside from their financial status, and that it is worth living with someone… even if they are unable to contribute their ‘fair share.’” “It is inaccurate to say that its members shared funds,” Cruz writes, “because many of them had no funds to share, but they all shared in the work of caring for one another.” The whole thing only lasted one winter, which the book’s subtitle calls The Winter of Love. Cruz argues that the winter with Heavenly Breakfast taught Delany that he could live in a fully new way, and infused his later work with communal values and greater “sexual openness.” Delany always insisted that the polymorphic sexual community, no matter how perverse, can offer a postsecondary education in love. Sex is his means of reasoning, not his means of getting beyond rational thought; it’s his language, not his apophatic and apocalyptic self-immolation.

And so he is the happy radical, whereas J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick represent more lacerating visions. Erica L. Satifka’s essay suggests that Dick’s work “reflects the at times bizarre course of his own relatively short life more than any radical political beliefs” — but if you’re literally approached by the FBI to spy on your fellow students, it’s not your life that’s weird, it’s your times. Dick lived out many of his age’s forms of altered consciousness, from psychotherapy to amphetamines; his experience with alternative homemaking was also harder than Delany’s, as he went through five divorces and found himself “invit[ing] hippies and/or junkies to live with him on a rotating basis,” which is sweet but not nostalgia fodder. All this touched his work with a poignant separation between the self and some true hidden knowledge. Ballard, by contrast, led a stable domestic life, deranged only by the surrounding culture. He expressed this derangement in funhouse-mirror worlds, dreamscapes and projections, where the shock of the real could only be attained through technology-enabled violence. And these worlds were not future but present, because, as Ballard said in the 1960s, “We live inside an enormous novel…The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.” The more your world is manmade, shaped by technology and terraforming, the more you live in dreams and fetishes: the substance of our inner lives. (I’m sitting in my bedroom and I can’t see a single object I know how to make.) Delany probes wounds and bruises with his tongue and likes the taste; Ballard gets a mouthful of blood and chromium menace, the taste of a self-discovery that’s also a self-loss. Delany winds up a contented eminence grise, replete with memory like a bee with honey; Dick possibly broke into his own house, blocked out the memories, went on a paranoid tear against fellow SF luminary Stanislaw Lem, and a year later entered rehab after a suicide attempt. I love Delany’s work but his luck is too good — it veils some of the harder truths.

As with any collection, Dangerous Visions is uneven, both in the quality of its own essays and (more intentionally) in that of the works it surveys. The experiments in rebellion and discovery conducted by the books’ motley heroes (and by the authors) brought results that were sometimes exhilarating, sometimes disturbing, and sometimes both at once. An early essay on “sextrapolation” includes a lot of taboo-breaking that just seems silly or gross. The best I can say for the quotes here from Bug Jack Barron is that without them maybe we wouldn’t have actually good stories like “Aye, and Gomorrah…,” in which sex is less of a Sharper Image store and more of a mystery play. Meanwhile, a few essays in Dangerous Visions show individual style, like Nick Mamatas’s feverish, slightly aggro tribute to R.A. Lafferty, but the entire first column of Maitland McDonagh’s essay on gay adult SF is bland boilerplate. Stronger editing would have allowed McDonagh’s camp humor to emerge earlier and with less padding. Scott Adlerberg offers an essay about the radical SF of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, authors of Roadside Picnic (later adapted by Andrei Tarkovsky as the 1979 film Stalker). The critical assessment emerges through biographical data about the grinding, increasing conflict between the brothers and the Soviet censorship apparatus: the Strugatskys seem attuned to fun, adventure, and playful anti-bureaucratic humor in the Douglas Adams vein, but the censorship and fear of a totalitarian system, including a harrowing encounter with the KGB, led them into sharper satire and more hallucinatory blurs of dream and reality. But Michael A. Gonzales’s similarly biography-focused essay on Octavia Butler avoids any real critical engagement with her work’s themes. Her mentors within the genre are listed, which is useful as part of the collection’s overall portrayal of radical SF as a community relying on particular institutions (New Worlds magazine, the Women’s Press) and central figures (in Butler’s case, the author and writing teacher Harlan Ellison). No effort is made, though, to place Butler in dialogue with larger movements, from Afrofuturism to Afro-pessimism; there’s no real exploration of her work’s vision of the body’s metamorphoses, her portrayals of youth and inheritance, her prose style — the texture of her work dissolves and she’s left as a generic Black Woman Pioneer.

Dangerous Visions, as its understanding of “radical” SF emerges, suggests unexpected links between authors: Mamatas’s essay on the gonzo Catholicism of R.A. Lafferty finds a home beside Iain McIntyre’s homage to the anti-imperialist mysticism of William Bloom, whose Himalayan action-adventure hero Qhe is a “cosmic [James] Bond.” A late essay by Donna Glee Williams contrasts the visions of anarchism in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. These two novels suggest possible syntheses between old and new. They both offer metaphysics and political reasoning, while still being recognizably “radical”: both take place in criminalized communities and depict alternatives to the liberal state.

The anthology opens by noting that the radicalism of its authors didn’t vanish, but disseminated itself throughout mainstream SF, suggesting a longing for some synthesis; some recognition of the poignant beauty of human reason and the quest for knowledge, alongside a taut awareness of reason’s propensity to serve violence; some hope for new communal forms of life, new mysticisms in the face of new apocalypses.

Eve Tushnet is the author of two novels, Amends and Punishment: A Love Story, as well as the nonfiction Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith. She lives in Washington, DC and writes and speaks on topics ranging from medieval covenants of friendship to underrated vampire films. Her hobbies include sin, confession, and ecstasy.

Alex Adams / October 6, 2021

In Toho’s 1965 tokusatsu spectacular Invasion of the Astro Monster, humanity makes contact with ruthless hive-mind aliens from Planet X, a new stellar body discovered on the far side of Jupiter. The aliens who inhabit this cold, bleak planet—the Xiliens—are a technologically advanced but blankly unemotional civilization, a race of grey-clad scientists whose remarkable intellectual development has allowed them to live safely underground in the hostile, unwelcoming environment of Planet X. They propose an interplanetary trade: if the world’s authorities—Japan, the US, and the UN—will lend them Godzilla and the fire-hawk Rodan in order to fight off the murderous three-headed space dragon King Ghidorah, who has, of late, become the scourge of Planet X, the Xiliens will provide humanity with the cure for cancer. This trade sounds like a win-win, a blessing, as Earth will simultaneously be rid of its two most troublesome inhabitants and gain a medical miracle. But, of course, it is a cynical double-cross: by stealing Godzilla and Rodan, the Xiliens have captured Earth’s only defences against Ghidorah, who is in fact a living weapon under their control that they plan to use to colonize Earth. Though the “superior” race comes offering gifts, they in fact seek to subjugate and exploit.

Invasion of the Astro Monster is a potent blend of alien invasion, mind control, and interplanetary blackmail. This story, retold several times in the Shōwa era of the Godzilla franchise, is a clear engagement with themes of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism that were very much current across the globe in the mid-1960s, a decade featuring a panoply of gruesome colonial wars the world over in Algeria, Vietnam, Angola, Kenya, and elsewhere. It is widely acknowledged that Godzilla is, as Ian Buruma writes in the BFI DVD booklet for Ishiro Honda’s original Godzilla (1954), “a profoundly political monster.” But Godzilla’s many sequels are often written off as cheap and goofy cash-ins. Big mistake. Much as US sci-fi movies like The Blob (1958), The Thing From Another World (1951) or Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) used alien encounters to think through themes of cross-cultural contact, colonialism, and communism, the Shōwa Ghidorah movies are a rich engagement with world-historical themes of Cold War antagonism, first contact, and imperial manipulation.

A History of the Dragon

Godzilla has long been understood as a powerful symbol of nuclear devastation and the horror of war. While this is true, Godzilla has taken many forms over his seventy-year career, and he has symbolized a great many things. Philip Brophy writes that Godzilla is “less a vessel for consistent authorial and thematic meaning as he is a shell to be used for the generation of potential and variable meanings.” This is true of many of his adversaries too. Monsters have always been tremendously flexible and evocative ways of digesting ideas, fears, and emotions, and Toho’s Kaiju are no exception.

King Ghidorah, an enormous three-headed golden dragon inspired by Yamata No Orochi—a fearsome eight-headed dragon from Shinto mythology—is perhaps Godzilla’s most frequently battled adversary. Along with Mechagodzilla, Rodan, Mothra, and Godzilla, King Ghidorah is one of the cornerstones of the Kaiju Big Five, and his antagonism with Godzilla headlines eight movies, with further variations on Ghidorah also appearing in Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) and the Heisei Mothra trilogy (1996-1998). In the Shōwa period (1954-1975), he is a villain in Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster (1964), its sequel Invasion of the Astro Monster, the blockbuster monster brawl Destroy All Monsters (1968), and, as a supporting character, in Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972). In the Heisei period (1984-1995), Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991) would see Ghidorah inflicted on Japan by time-travelling saboteurs—not to mention his cyborgic resurrection as Mecha-King-Ghidorah at the film’s climax. Ten years later, Ghidorah’s role was reversed when he teamed up with Mothra and Baragon to save humanity from Godzilla in Shusuke Kaneko’s Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001). Later in the twenty-first century, King Ghidorah once again features as Godzilla’s arch-nemesis in The Planet Eater (2018), the climactic movie of the Polygon Anime trilogy, and King of the Monsters (2019), the second movie in the ongoing Legendary MonsterVerse. No other monster confronts Godzilla so many times and in so many forms. His Cold War appearances are, thematically, particularly rich and rewarding.

King Ghidorah’s first movie, Ghidorah: The Three-Headed Monster, is a crossover sequel that, through its incorporation of other successful Toho monsters into the Godzilla franchise, was the Avengers: Endgame (2019) of its day. In Rodan (1957), aggressive mining operations awaken a species of enormous and destructive prehistoric birds, and in Mothra (1961) a scientific expedition to Infant Island incurs the wrath of a colossal and beautiful winged insect. Both of these monsters would return in Ghidorah, meshing together their continuities with Godzilla’s and building a wider fictional universe overflowing with Kaiju. Both Rodan and Mothra had a clear environmentalist emphasis, but Mothra is particularly explicit with its political themes. Through its characterization of the greasy capitalist Clark Nelson as an amoral and exploitative villain and its satire of the imperialist nation “Rolisica,” the movie comments on Japan’s geopolitical conundrum: caught between the two nuclear superpowers, striving for more independence from American influence, and balancing the demands of economic prosperity and modernization with the desire to preserve traditional Japanese values. After the runaway success of King Kong Vs. Godzilla (1962/3), which fused monster spectacle with a satire of the advertising industry, Rodan and Mothra too would have their opportunity to confront Godzilla, enriching the franchise with political commentary.

The central themes of power and violence are developed iteratively through the Shōwa monster movies, from the nuclear allegory of Godzilla, the environmental anti-imperialism of the two Mothra films, and on into the Ghidorah movies, which comment much more explicitly on imperial violence and conquest. Mothra’s first sequel, Mothra vs. Godzilla (retitled in the US as Godzilla vs. The Thing) was released early in 1964, and later that year Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster hit cinema screens as a winter blockbuster. The movie’s bombastic plot saw the virtuous Mothra persuade the quarrelsome Rodan and Godzilla to team up against the alien peril Ghidorah, a beast more threatening and dangerous than anything anyone had seen before.

Perhaps the single most notable aspect of Ghidorah: The Three-Headed Monster is its lighter, more family-friendly tone. Where once they represented different flavors of doom, Rodan, Mothra, and Godzilla now come to humanity’s aid and are openly celebrated as the triumphant heroes of the hour. This broader tonal appeal has sometimes been read as a disengagement from political themes, as the movie’s crowd-pleasing entertainment value is seen as overriding any attempt to sermonize on social or political matters. Noted Godzilla investigator Steve Ryfle, for instance, writes that in this movie “high-brow issues like nuclear weapons and commercialism are abandoned in favor of pure, fast-paced escapism.” But the central antagonism in the film—the clash between the alien Ghidorah and the trio of cooperating Earthly Kaiju—in fact extends the series’ engagement with international politics even more boldly than the previous entries in the Godzilla series.

In a short tongue-in-cheek article in a 2000 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Janne Nolan writes that Ghidorah’s first movie works as a compelling example of the benefits of international security cooperation. The movie “is a clear demonstration that even mutants, despite tiny brains and a Darwinian environment, can understand the imperatives of cooperative security when survival is at stake. Maybe policy-makers will be next.” Though Nolan is writing playfully here, this interpretation in fact has much to recommend it. Japan’s post-1945 constitution was written by the occupying US forces, and it placed firm restrictions on Japan’s ability to form an army of any kind. Over the following decades, this constitution and various additional security treaties that were added to it became increasingly controversial and unpopular across the political spectrum, culminating in violent protests in 1960. And there was plenty more happening abroad: China’s regional influence and nuclear weapons program were growing, and China tested its first atomic weapon two months before Ghidorah was released; the USSR was a strong and expanding regional presence; memory of the Korean War was painfully fresh; war raged, bloody and bitter, in Vietnam. Cooperative security, then (however reluctant and fragile), would be a theme that was at the forefront of many Japanese audience members’ minds in 1964.

As we have seen, the sequel Invasion of the Astro Monster (originally titled Godzilla vs. Monster Zero) followed in 1965, omitting Mothra and sophisticating the narrative. Where in his first appearance Ghidorah’s arrival on Earth had been a freak accident, in his second Ghidorah is cynically used against the Earth as part of an overtly imperialist venture by the Xiliens. Similarly, in Destroy All Monsters the Kilaak aliens hijack Earth’s monsters and unleash Ghidorah with the explicit aim of blackmailing humanity into submission. The Kilaaks announce that they come offering peace terms that humanity must accept or die; sacrifices must be made if the Kilaaks are to build the perfect world.

This rhetoric of peace is a particularly evocative element of the films’ representation of imperialism. Roman historian Tacitus famously wrote in Agricola, his history of the Roman conquest of Britain, that the Romans “make a desert and call it peace.” These words are spoken by Calgacus, a Caledonian war leader and resister of Agricola’s conquest, a “barbarian” Briton who Tacitus turns into an eloquent critic of the violence of the Roman Empire. Calgacus’s insight is that the bloodthirsty and warlike Romans, who conquer the entire world through slaughter, slavery, and pillage, cynically describe themselves as benevolent peace-bringers. Indeed, little has changed in the vocabulary of warlike empires: to this day, devastating imperial wars are justified as liberatory and civilizing, as the necessary violence that will bring enlightenment to the dark places of the world. Toho’s Astro-colonizers, too, repeatedly speak the language of peace and cooperation while preparing to annihilate or enslave humanity. In 1972’s Godzilla vs. Gigan (originally titled Earth Destruction Directive), Ghidorah is sidekick to the sinister robotic space-chicken Gigan, and once again both monsters are used against the Earth by an invading force of alien beings, this time the Nebula M aliens. In this one, huge cockroaches masquerading as humans are “striving to bring absolute peace to the whole world.” By this, the Nebula M aliens actually mean that they are plotting the eradication of humanity and the extractive exploitation of Earth’s environment and resources. 

“Oh Glenn, I am governed by electronics”

This masquerade, in which alien cockroaches appear indistinguishable from ordinary humans, is an interesting thematic overlap with a particularly politically charged Cold War form: the espionage thriller. It is of course no coincidence that the monster stories in Ghidorah movies are often complemented by espionage stories involving the human characters. This was due both to the explosive popularity of 007—Sean Connery had swaggered and snogged his way through Dr. No in 1962 and From Russia With Love in 1963, initiating a global sensation still going strong in 2021—and the rise of Japanese Yakuza crime films that were beloved by audiences. Importantly, many generic elements of Japanese crime and espionage stories (and their Western counterparts) translated particularly well to science fiction, including mind control, subterfuge, infiltration, and double-cross.

Some of the movies’ women are particularly important elements of the Cold War politics of the Shōwa Ghidorah stories. In Invasion of the Astro Monster, American astronaut Glenn’s (Nick Adams) Japanese fiancé Namikawa (Kumi Mizuno) is revealed to be in fact a Citizen of Planet X, where all women look identical—she has been sent by the ashen-faced Commander to seduce and surveil Glenn with the aim of recruiting him to the Xilien cause. Like a sexual temptress from an Ian Fleming novel, she has used her feminine wiles to compromise and manipulate our wisecracking male hero. However, in a campy yet emotionally powerful scene, she defies her programming to declare her authentic love for him—for which crime she is vaporized by her superior. “Our actions are controlled by electronic computers, not by human emotions,” explains the Xilien who coldly murders Namikawa. “When that law is violated, the offender is eliminated.” Likewise, in Destroy All Monsters, Kyoko Manabe (Yukiko Kobayashi) has a small metal receiver implanted into her earrings, and, robotically, she follows the Kilaaks’ every broadcasted command, blithely sowing destruction wherever she goes.

Brainwashing was a major cause of political panic in the late 1950s and early 1960s. American POWs, horribly traumatized by their torture in communist re-education camps, were filmed falsely accusing themselves of war crimes, refusing repatriation, and regurgitating communist propaganda. This extreme ideological indoctrination was dehumanizing, depersonalizing, humiliating, and appeared particularly terrifying because it seemed to show that the human brain could be rewired or manipulated to the extent not only that the prior personality was eliminated but, worse, that the victim appeared either blissfully unaware of or sycophantically grateful for their transformation. Very soon, however, the focus of the political panic sharpened, shifting from the suffering of the captured Americans to the possibility that repatriated soldiers could be reprogrammed into secret assassins whilst appearing, from the outside, to be respectable and well-integrated citizens.

In Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate (famously adapted by John Frankenheimer in 1962), for example, the stepson of a prominent anti-communist senator is brainwashed and used as a remote-control communist assassin. The double agent, unaware of his own programming, is memorably described as “Caesar’s son to be sent into Caesar’s chamber to kill Caesar.” Soon enough, of course, this would shift once more into a more generalized scaremongering about Soviet indoctrination, sleeper agents, and totalitarian mind control that clearly influenced Toho’s Ghidorah movies. The enemy who seems concerned for our safety but who secretly plots our violent demise—the double-crossing double agent, the indoctrinated infiltrator—was a very widespread Cold War bogeyman, and he remains with us today in the modified form of the secretive “lone wolf” terrorist living and moving among us.

“The standard message” of the science fiction film, writes Susan Sontag in 1966’s Against Interpretation, “is the one about the proper, or humane, use of science, versus the mad, obsessional use of science.” Later: “Science is magic, and man has always known that there is black magic as well as white.” The black magic of mind control is one of the most enduring aspects of Cold War political panic. In their attempts to “scientifically” understand Communist brainwashing, the CIA developed the MKUltra program, a set of gruesome torture sessions masquerading as scientific investigations into the limits of human endurance. This program (and the assumptions about the scientific possibility of directing the human mind that underpin it) has continued to have terrible ramifications into the present, as psychologists were brought in to develop the post-9/11 torture program, pseudoscientifically dignifying scandalous mistreatment by presenting it as a controlled and methodical process of scientific investigation. In each of these cases, black magic is not magic at all, but simply, and sadly, torture. Of course, it is overreach to suggest that the Shōwa Ghidorah movies are about CIA torture; but it is clearly true that brainwashing and mind control have always been deeply political concerns.

King Ghidorah: A Political Demonology

The four Shōwa movies featuring Ghidorah are, then, remarkably thematically consistent. Alien invasion, subterfuge, mind control, and monster cooperation (a kind of Kaiju anti-imperialism) are central to each of them. Most fundamental, however, is the theme of power. Ghidorah is, after all, a King: a total sovereign, breathing fire, exercising absolute and arbitrary power over everything he surveys. It’s true that there is a lot of knockabout fun involved, but the Shōwa Ghidorah movies are also vibrant explorations of authoritarian power, of the political totalitarianism that was so powerful and such an omnipresent concern in the mid-20th century. Importantly, too, a major part of the appeal of the films is their ambiguity. It’s difficult, after all, to say exactly which empire Ghidorah’s villainous commanders are supposed to represent, and, in any case, pinning it down to one definite answer would only diminish the sloshy, sticky generosity of the metaphor.

But it is nonetheless interesting to think it through in terms of concrete possibilities. Since the relationship to the US was a matter of considerable controversy in 1960s Japan, the Astro-colonizers in these movies could well represent America—that most powerful and potentially violent of international actors, the occupier turned ally whose boot was slamming down heavily and noisily in Vietnam. The USSR was also a significant political concern, another expansionist superpower bearing down upon Japan; as we have seen, brainwashing was seen as a specifically communist tactic. But the Cold War period was also marked by precipitous decolonization and rapid, blood-soaked political reconfiguration. The French suffered humiliating and ruinous defeats in Indochina and the Maghreb, most notably in the Algerian Revolution, a bitterly violent conflict abroad that caused the downfall of the Fourth Republic at home. Britain fought dirtily in harrowing counterinsurgency wars in Kenya, Aden, Cyprus, Malaya, and elsewhere. Portugal, too, prosecuted a gruesome campaign in Angola that ended in ignominious defeat. Japan, of course, had its own share of Imperial shame.

Invasion of the Astro Monster makes explicit reference to this global unrest in a startling montage of documentary photography that follows the revelation of the Xilien betrayal.

In the 1960s, cities the world over, including Tokyo, were the stages of protests, unrest, and heavily militarized police crackdowns as groups representing a wide array of new political forces rose up against the established order. This clear visual reference to the global reconfigurations of power that were taking place in the long wake of World War 2 unambiguously situates the Xilien conquest in the tradition of Earthly political upheaval. The Xiliens could be the French, the Soviets, the US, Perfidious Albion—the British Empire—or even the militaristic Japanese Empire of recent memory. Destroy All Monsters, too, set in the utopian future of 1999, shows the fragility of international peace and its vulnerability to imperialist aggression. The futuristic society at the end of the Millennium, dedicated to cooperation and scientific discovery, is still easy prey to the calmly, arrogantly seductive Kilaaks, who are an amalgam of every negative trait ascribed to imperialists: parasitic, violent, manipulative, and smugly convinced of their own superiority. In the final analysis, it is precisely the fact that the Kilaaks, Nebula M aliens, and Xiliens represent imperialism in general, rather than any specific historical constellation, that gives these movies their power.

This condemnation of empire, of course, raises an interesting contradiction, or tension, with relation to the US. One of the defining ideological contradictions of postwar America is that it has managed to present itself as somehow “not an empire” despite its constant projection of militarized power across the planet. The demonization of the tactics of the duplicitous aliens in Invasion of the Astro Monster—a Japan-US co-production—is, for example, clearly in harmony with the political ends of American Cold War neo-imperialist ideology, and serves to cement US-Japan relations as much as it does to criticize them. That is, by using the Xiliens to caricature the crimes of the dying 19th century empires and showing the countries of the democratic capitalist West as an anti-imperial coalition defeating the villains, US-led imperial aggression is painted as a form of humanistic anti-imperialism. The fetishization of anti-imperial resistance is, after all, a core component of contemporary imperial ideology: think Star Wars or any number of similar genre pieces in which plucky Davids smash brutish Goliaths. 

In summary, then, the Shōwa Ghidorah films are extraordinary documents of Cold War politics. As they were being made, the old empires were being smashed to the ground, and in the process imperial power itself was problematized and condemned as never before. In this context of global transformation, imperialism itself took on the appearance of senseless, cruel, and openly manipulative barbarism, and imperialists were known more openly as blackmailers, villains, and torturers—or, as Glenn puts it in Invasion of the Astro Monster, as “double-crossin’ finks.” What better metaphor, then, for the arbitrary despotism of empire than a colossal golden hydra remotely controlled by forked-tongued extortionists?

Alex Adams is a writer based in North East England. He writes widely on popular culture and politics, and he is currently writing Godzilla: A Critical Demonology for Headpress Books. Follow him on Twitter at @AlexAdams5 and @GDemonology, or visit his website to read more.

Mike Apichella / September 23, 2021

Outside of David Cronenberg’s work and stray oddities like 1980’s The Changeling, the Canadian horror and sci-fi movies of the 1970s and ‘80s often get overshadowed by their counterparts from the US and Europe. Unlike gory scares from other nations, these films reflect the fears of a society deeply impacted and alienated by the goals of close political allies. When viewed through the prism of the Canadian diplomacy that helped diffuse tension during some of the Cold War’s most dangerous moments, America’s patriotic vanity, the remnants of Old World imperialism, and other messy political controversies appear self-destructive and excessive at worst, futile and absurd at best. The 1988 film The Brain presents a grotesque rumination on suburban neurosis, mass media, and Canada’s place in the tangled mass of global politics. A film whose complex special effects, creature designs, dangerous stunts, and high-speed pacing place it a step above many other ‘80s horror works, The Brain is a seamless hybrid of sci-fi adventure and insane spectacle with political symbolism burning at the core of every scene and characterization.

The Brain was directed by Ed Hunt and written by Barry Pearson, two indie stalwarts who’d been active for the better part of two decades by the time of the film’s release. Los Angeles expat Hunt didn’t begin his film career until relocating to Canada in 1969, where his twisted vision brought life to sci-fi/crime hybrid Point Of No Return (1976) and the cult-classic “documentary” UFO’s Are Real (1979). Hunt and Pearson collaborated on several interesting cheapies, including the convoluted but colorful Starship Invasions (1977) and the kids-on-a-rampage flick Bloody Birthday (1981). The Brain premiered in Toronto on November 4, 1988, generating little interest before quickly fading into the blurry late-night glare of cable TV and the home video market. 

Much of The Brain was shot on location at Ontario’s Xerox Research Center, a gargantuan example of architectural modernism that looks like a cross between an alien spaceship and a megastadium. Interior scenes are shot with the stark ambience of a morgue, which emphasizes the building’s grim fictional repurposing as headquarters of the P.R.I. (Psychological Research Institute). The faux medical facility functions primarily as the secret hideout for the film’s titular alien monster, a huge, tentacled, telekinetic mutant brain with gaping jaws, beady bulbous eyes, and an insatiable hunger for human flesh. The Brain works hard to control Earth’s population via a hypnotic P.R.I.-produced TV program called Independent Thinking, which is hosted by the creature’s smooth-talking lackey Doctor Blakely (David Gale of Re-Animator fame) in the guise of a Tony Robbins-like motivational speaker. Unbeknownst to its loyal viewers, however, the broadcast progressively drains their free will whenever it airs.

This process is illustrated when mischievous science prodigy Jim Majelewski (the smirking, Ferris Bueller-ish Tom Brezahan) is punished by his high school principal after one prank too many. The uptight administrator (Kenneth MacGregor) orders Majelewski to get psychiatric treatment at P.R.I. or face expulsion from school. When Jim arrives at the site, he’s greeted by silence and the cold stares of line upon line of emotionless Independent Thinking audience members and P.R.I. “patients,” his wisecracks answered only by the surly mumbling of security guards. P.R.I. isn’t so much a medical entity as it is a psychic meat processing plant where victims are primed for consumption by the operation’s grotesque mastermind.     

The giant Brain draws power from the sheep-like “independent thinkers,” whose loyalty springs from the desperate search for an efficient solution to everyday suburban problems—workplace stress, financial woes, marital dramas, and, most of all, raucous teens and juvenile delinquents. Much of the program’s loyal fan base is made up of educators, school administrators, police, and parents, who represent the authority figures who struggle with huge moral decisions that can make or break young lives. They flock like lemmings to the fluffy pop psychology of Independent Thinking and its glorious potential as a universal stress remedy.  

Even before Majelewski discovers the grim secret of P.R.I.’s “therapeutic” behavioral modification, he’s shown to be one of the few people who refuse to watch Independent Thinking, and he frequently tries to stop friends and relatives from watching once he notices the show’s damaging mental effects. When P.R.I. thugs and other local authoritarians take note of his disruptive influence, the teen becomes a target and is forced to go on the lam. In the film’s most 1984-esque twist, there’s even a short, PG-rated love scene that occurs while Majelewski and his girlfriend Janet (Cynthia Preston) hide from pursuers in a shuttered school library, a structure dedicated to knowledge and enlightenment—both of which are subverted when Majelewski wakes up the next morning to find Janet watching TV, mesmerized. The latest episode of Independent Thinking comes on, featuring a false portrayal of Majelewski as a psychotic serial killer. Janet starts screaming her head off and rushes out of the library to alert authorities, revealing that the Brain’s power can instill emotional instability just as well as destructive passivity,

Although The Brain does offer something of a critique of the power of television, it does not demonize the medium, much to its credit. The plot revolves around the idea that mass media can only be destructive in a society that refuses to question its authority. What saves Ontario (and ultimately the world) from mass zombification is not technology or Luddism, but Majelewski’s emotional concern for the well-being of his community. Conversely, the monstrous Brain and its violent appetites are cold-blooded and antisocial in the extreme: the creature treats people—from TV audiences, to unsuspecting home viewers, to Dr. Blakely and other acolytes—like interchangeable tools to be used and abused at will (that is, of course, when it’s not busy eating every living thing in sight). The monster is ego and gluttony, a combination of crazed dictator and rabid animal. 

That brutal inhumanity is fleshed out in growling, spitting, drooling visuals inspired by a patchwork of iconic sci-fi influences: bits of Audrey II from Little Shop Of Horrors, rubberized ‘50s sci-fi monsters (with nods to 1957’s The Brain from Planet Arous and 1958’s Fiend Without a Face), and Dark Crystal-esque acid nightmares all congeal in the gooey weirdness of the effects work of Mark Williams and Daniel White. Roaring aerodynamic attacks tear across the screen thanks to “brain operators” Chris Thiesenhausen and Phillip M. Good (who doubled as assistant producer), the monster’s cartoon fury providing a perfect contrast to the tragic vulnerability defining many of the characters who fall under its telekinetic death spell.  

The Brain’s predictably noisy, ultraviolent demise is contrasted by an unexpectedly subtle final scene. All we see is a quiet, overcast day in an inconspicuous suburban development as victims and protagonists decompress. It works equally well as the set up for a sequel or as an extra layer of political symbolism. There’s no fanfare, no triumphant hard rock anthem blasting over the end credits. Grey skies and contemplation are all that can accompany the calm and unease—and vigilance—born of the Brain’s strange aftermath.

Mike Apichella has been working in the arts since 1991. He is a writer, multimedia artist, musician, and a founder of Human Host and the archival project Towson-Glen Arm Freakouts. Under his real name and various pseudonyms, his work has been published by Splice Today, Profligate, Human Conduct Press, and several DIY zines. Mike currently lives in the northeast US where he aspires to someday become the “crazy cat man” of his neighborhood.