Monsters: Aliens versus editors: if only the latter party could have won the battle

The story goes that Gareth Edwards pitched the idea for his monster movie set in a world where the aliens have been quarantined, got green-lit without a script, went into production with a skeleton crew, shot guerilla style, worked his largely impromptu cast into a frenzy of adlibbing, went home to cobble from a hundred hours of material and insert copious CGI, and delivered the final product for under $500,000. Good, even great movies have been born of such reckless confidence, but one shouldn’t assume Edwards’ bravado was matched by any blessed combination of talent, intelligence, or luck. Though it already has its champions, not to mention six BAFTA nominations, Monsters offers a solid case study in what happens when you don’t plan much: with way more coverage than actual inspiration or purpose, your story winds up sliding into cliché at nearly every turn. There's some fun to be had here, but it's mostly drowned out by hokeyness.

A cynical US photojournalist (Scoot McNairy) is ordered to escort his wealthy publisher’s idealistic daughter (Whitney Able) out of Mexico, an enormous chunk of which is “infected” with giant prawns from outer space—presumably the same galaxy as the quarantined aliens in District 9. So Monsters might be a border-crossing parable if it had any real ideas to it, or any real surprises. Yes, the couple meet-cute, the photographer resents his mission, but the girl speaks better Spanish, which comes in handy when they encounter all that Mexican monster bait. Getting back to America proves tricky, and they come to depend on each other, maybe even fall in love, blah, blah, blah. The plot twists itself into pretzels to keep them together, even going so far as to contrive a prostitute who steals a passport from the photographer’s hotel bedroom yet somehow doesn’t think to steal his $3,000 camera, which, by the way, you’d have to be an idiot to keep dangling around your neck all the time while traversing rural Mexico anyway.

But then Edwards’ Mexico isn’t the same one familiar to most Earthlings. Apparently the northern deserts have been replaced by jungle, and somebody moved Tepoztlán up toward the US border when nobody was looking. There are numerous such cultural and geographical oddities in Monsters, all of which could be forgiven if the movie had more energy or ingenuity, instead of dopey scenes of dumb white kids looking out on (displaced) Mayan ruins, abandoned suburbs, or alien convoys and uttering what amounts to a unanimous “Wow.” Maybe it’s true what they say about Americans not traveling enough.

My dearest fiend: on finally reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Richard Rothwell's portrait of Mary Shelley

There’s that moment which occurs near the halfway point in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when Victor Frankenstein is finally reunited with the monster. Frankenstein has entered university, dazzled his mentors and, in secret, created his artificial man through some unholy marriage of archaic magic and scientific method. He’s fallen ill following the completion of his creation, like a mother weakened by the physical torments of birth. He’s utterly neglected to determine the monster’s whereabouts, and has gradually discovered its capacity for murder. He’s wracked with guilt over having breathed life into the monster’s piecemeal flesh, yet, foreshadowing all that follows, assumes no responsibility for the crimes the monster commits, crimes which Frankenstein, one of the worst parents in Western literature, could arguably have prevented.

The monster’s return is illuminated by a flash of lightning—the same phenomenon at which the 15-year-old Frankenstein marveled so fatefully. It approaches and, to the great shock of those familiar with Boris Karloff’s famously inarticulate manifestation, it begins to speak. “Do your duty towards me,” the monster beseeches his maker, “and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you in peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends… Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed… I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

Theodor von Holst's frontispiece to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

The monster asks Frankenstein to hear his story, and so begins this landmark novel’s most astonishing and moving section, the testament of this eight-foot wretch, who begins his biography by trying to describe the memory of coming into this world fully formed, cognizant and sensitive to basic needs, yet mystified by every new occurrence, and from the start orphaned. He takes to the wilderness, eventually learns to observe and imitate humans, is stirred by music, beauty, and familial love, comprehends the importance of interdependence and the inevitability of disappointment in others, and even educates himself into literacy with the help of volumes of Milton and Goethe. By the time the monster is able to converse with Frankenstein he’s become as eloquent as any character in the novel. This might seem unlikely, even more unlikely than the fact of the monster’s creation, given what we now appear capable of producing nearly 200 years later. But eloquence of any sort can seem unlikely when weighed against the savagery that mankind continues to prove capable of. This novel itself seems unlikely, a succinct, surprising, and imminently durable masterpiece, whose ostensible flaws obey the logic of dream on which the whole is founded, whose epistolary structure of stories within stories within stories reads as so completely modern, and whose magnificence was brought into the world by someone all of 18 years of age.

The draft of Frankenstein

I’m a lot older than 18 and have only now finally gotten round to reading Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus in a handsome hardbound edition (Everyman’s Library, $21), so you’ll have to forgive my rapture. Obviously, I was perfectly aware of Frankenstein’s immeasurable influence, but I somehow failed to anticipate just how fascinating and strange its structure is, how evocative and often poetic its language, and how rich and diverse its themes or motifs, which constitute the region in which Shelley conveyed her highest level of sophistication.

Walton, the Englishman who is ultimately the novel’s only (perhaps unreliable) narrator, seeks adventure and glory in the Arctic, and his letters to his sister speak repeatedly about the preciousness and rarity of friendship—a concern mirrored exactly in the confessions of Victor Frankenstein, whom he encounters during his arduous travels and whose tale he records. Walton longs for the companionship of his sister, and this longing too is mirrored, with more explicit creepiness, in Frankenstein’s story, which iterates again and again Frankenstein’s abiding love for his adoptive sister, to whom he’s inescapably betrothed. And in the story of the monster too these same themes dominate: loneliness, and the desire for a lady companion born of the same fault-laden parentage. (I had no idea that right here in Shelley’s Frankenstein lie the seeds for Hollywood’s Bride of Frankenstein.)

The Bride of Frankenstein

So Frankenstein is a story of absent mothers, ineffectual fathers, men without women. But where this gets really interesting is in Frankenstein’s own participation in his undoing. The monster is the product of Frankenstein’s own hubris, yet it could also be interpreted as a whopper of an excuse for Frankenstein’s perpetuating a fearful avoidance of consummation. If Frankenstein fails to fulfill the not entirely unreasonable requests of the monster—to my eyes the novel’s most sympathetic character—to produce for him a female counterpart, the monster promises to return to ruin Frankenstein’s life precisely on the night of his wedding. What better way to prolong bachelorhood! Frankenstein’s anxiety surrounding marriage is subverted by an act of masculine immaculate conception and the brutal and terrifying incidents that accumulate as a result. There are multiple morals to be gained from Shelley’s tale, and I wonder if among them is something about the immense power of sheer procrastination, which in the hands of the wrong genius can itself prove monstrous.

Burning trails, driving under the influence, with man and beast and man-beasts: new books from Sam Shepard and Jim Harrison

When I was a teenager I’d hop in my father’s rattling old work van, or later on the used Jetta he and my mother had helped me buy, and kill hours just driving along back roads alone, around Olds, Cochrane, and Black Diamond, or across the foothills toward Dead Man’s Flats and Canmore. It was a form of escape, the forging of a connection with a landscape, and a way to figure out how to write. My mind was able to stretch out on these short treks, and the stubborn words I sought with little fortune in my parents’ house or in the high school hallways where I’d hide while ditching class would finally emerge, often just a few a time, and I would carefully write them out with my right hand while steering with my left. Driving around aimlessly in rural areas with pen and pad by my side seemed like a magic method for coming up with ideas, and my suspicions seemed confirmed when I’d read about how Sam Shepard, whose plays kind of blew my mind at an early age, was supposed to have done the same thing.

Sam Shepard

Times have changed, I’ve gotten a little more disciplined about working at a table, and I don’t even own a car these days, but, if the many brief stories, poems and fragmentary prose collected in Day Out of Days (Knopf, $32) are any indication, it seems Shepard, now in his 60s, still acting, still writing, has kept up the habit of driving all over the place, without destination, and writing, a sort of endless existential commute to work. (Though he portrayed US Air Force Major General Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, Shepard is to this day famously uncomfortable with airplanes, and thus drives himself to all his filming locations. His insistence on roadways over airways was endearingly transferred to the protagonist of the Shepard-scripted Paris, Texas.) Several pieces in Day Out of Days could be attributed to the same narrator, someone most often found behind the wheel of a truck on a road somewhere in North America, someone who apparently is and isn’t Sam Shepard, who shares Shepard’s occupation, age and Midwestern roots, if not his exact experiences or sensibility. An aging actor becomes so disinterested in his work that he can’t even remember which movie he’s working on. A man returns to his hometown many years after fleeing and becoming famous and finds another man who never left and still resents him. A traveler stops in a motel during a blizzard and meets an emotionally distraught woman who claims to be a lover from his days in New York in the 1960s. Ghosts from this narrator’s past keep materializing, generating anxiety, and interrogating his sense of identity. The result is often funny, and sometimes spooky.

Not as spooky, perhaps, as a series of tales, dispersed throughout Day Out of Days, involving a seasoned professional assassin hired to cut off someone’s face, an activity which forces him to reconsider his vocation. Nor as spooky as the story of the nervous man who finds a head in a basket while walking along the side of a highway. The head speaks to the man, and asks him for a favour. Savage, incomprehensible violence is a recurring theme here, with characters pondering events far off in the Middle East, or closer to home, in the drowned suburbs of New Orleans. In an especially hilarious story, a man talks about floating to safety in the wake of Katrina with Chubby Checker, his bodyguard, and his beloved piano. Fantasy, memoir, and essay blend together in this absorbing, strange, and elegant collection, an ode to restlessness, stray human connections, and what genuinely open spaces we still have left to wander upon.

Tensions between urban and rural space, between movement and stasis, between solitude and togetherness, are also a key feature in Jim Harrison’s most recent collection of novellas, The Farmer’s Daughter (Anansi, $29.95), which also consumes a lot of highway mileage, covering much of the continent in just a few hundred pages. It’s a spry, sensitive, sometimes sex-crazed book, which frequently drifts into evocative reveries centering around its author’s love for nature and sport, an homage to basic instincts and refined tastes.

Sarah Anitra Holcomb comes of age in the titular tale, set in rural Montana. She’s a smart and highly literate girl, quietly lusted after by the amiable old farmer who becomes her best friend. A keen observer of nature, she witnesses numerous blood rituals that transpire in the wild, and eventually becomes familiar with similarly bestial encounters between men and women, which prompt an act of revenge. The sudden, somewhat incongruous swerve toward crime drama halfway through ‘The Farmer’s Daughter’ nearly upsets the tender tone of the whole, yet Harrison’s eye for detail keeps things balanced, his attention to animals and humans and they way they sniff each other out, negotiate their terms of survival, violate their tacit contracts, and meet with some natural form of justice.

Jim Harrison, with friend

‘Brown Dog Redux’ marks the return of Harrison’s horny Chippewa as he tries to flee Michigan social services with his stepdaughter, who, born with fetal alcohol syndrome, is to be placed in a home of disabled youngsters. Brown Dog gets dumped by a lady in Toronto before touring the prairies with an Indian rock and roll band and gradually winding up in Michigan all over again. His journey is fun, if not the most memorable of Harrison’s latest narratives—that accolade would be reserved for ‘The Games of Night.’ This final tale concerns a lycanthrope, afflicted as a boy after being bitten by a Mexican hummingbird, now living out his adult life largely in isolation so as to sequester himself from others during his monthly moonlight rampages. But our protagonist wearies of being a lone wolf, of only reading about romantic love in the poems of Ovid. He wants a girlfriend. So Harrison renovates a familiar mythology to investigate the extremes of desire, and in doing so facilitates our suspension of disbelief by simply requiring us to recognize the network of impulses dictated by the beast within all of us.

Half man, half beast, half measures: The Wolfman

The family has already suffered the untimely demise of its beloved, beautiful matriarch and the institutionalization and exile of one of its boys for mental illness. As our story begins tragedy strikes once more with the gruesome slaughter of another Talbot son on the eve of his marriage. He’s cut down one night along the moonlit moors by something that seems both beast and man. When Laurence Talbot returns from years abroad to find out what happened to his fallen brother, he’s reunited with John, their father, still lurking in the gloom of the family’s decrepit rural mansion, who advises Laurence to forget the past. It is a “wilderness of horrors,” he says, and best left ignored. Of course we know Laurence will do no such thing, since gothic tales such as this feed on obsession with the echoing creaks of old traumas that never die.

The Wolfman is itself an exercise in looking back, referencing a long tradition of lycanthrope flicks, mostly notably Universal’s own 1941 classic The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney, Jr. This latest entry isn’t set in the present or even in 1941 but rather in 1891, setting it just a few years after the Jack the Ripper murders. It doesn't really set out to renovate any aspect of the werewolf legacy but rather subscribes devoutly to the established rules and tropes of the familiar myth. Yet it feels uncertain as to how fully it wants to surrender to the spell of old things. Victorian England is made to look artificially caked in soot, and while early scenes thrive on the anxiety of the unseen, such as one riveting sequence that plays out in the terrifyingly insufficient firelight of a fog soaked gypsy camp, the movie, helmed by Jumanji director Joe Jonston, gradually makes concessions to contemporary demand for souped-up gore, offering flamboyant decapitations and buckets of organ spillage. The Wolfman boasts make-up design by the legendary Rick Baker, yet its transformation scenes, heavily accentuated by smooth and slick CGI, have nothing on the ferocious tactility of Baker’s precedent-setting work on 1981’s An American Werewolf in London. (You just don’t squirm the same way watching this newfangled stuff, perhaps because the horror isn't located in the body or even some likeness of the body but rather in some hovering screen of synthetic imagery.)

So I’m going to have to go with what seems to be the critical consensus on The Wolfman as a movie that can’t quite make up its mind about what it wants to be, a moody and mysterious homage to the subtler chillers of old, or an iconoclastic, bracingly modern monster mash. It shifts uneasily from sinister to silly, from brooding to camp, especially once we’re thrown into one of these insane asylums where the torture treatments are administered by drooling, grinning maniacs. Yet for all that I was still pretty engaged with and entertained by The Wolfman. The perfectly cast Benicio Del Toro, who also produced, is arguably a bit wasted on Laurence for lack of rigorous character development, yet the character is just inherently interesting. Laurence is an actor, known for his Hamlet. He's perhaps psychologically unstable, and bears a confused but deeply-rooted Oedipal grudge against his father, played for kicks by Anthony Hopkins; he's drawn to his dead brother's fiancée, played fairly straight by Emily Blunt, who's made to resemble the brother's dead mother; and the hairy situation he finds himself in may be as much the product of repressed rage as a disease contracted from a particularly nasty animal bite. It just goes to show that certain monsters endure for a reason. No matter how often they’re overwhelmed by kitsch, no matter how often we recycle them, they still maintain the power to fascinate us by virtue of their primacy. You might chuckle at the conceit of a werewolf running loose in London, but it’s no great leap to buy into the metaphorical potency of the beast within.

Unwanted body hair, unwanted parents, unwanted metal massacre: three from the 1980s

The 1980s were strange years for horror—strange and deliriously productive. The production code was a distant memory, boundaries of taste had already been pushed past their breaking point, the home video market exploded. The inevitable result was the transformation of carnage into camp. Horror always lent itself to humour, its premises so often silly in the cold light of day. Hysterical fear collapses easily into hysterical laughter. The dismal side of this was that audiences were frequently encouraged to take distance from rather than become absorbed by the stories, to stay on the surface. Don’t shudder to consider the terror onscreen when you can smugly look down on the terrorized—the victims are so dumb!—and admire the nifty special effects. But with the remake industry now gobbling up rights to ’80s titles, reconsideration is facilitated through fresh releases of the originals on DVD.

The new comedy-horror equation was apparently still in its infancy when An American Werewolf in London (1981) debuted. Critics felt the film couldn’t make up its mind. This seems more of a slight to writer/director John Landis than a genuine assessment—following Animal House (78) and The Blues Brothers (80) doubts about Landis’ earnestness with regards to the genre may have been in doubt. Yet the film feels lovingly invested in werewolf mythology and the gravity of its protagonist’s dilemma. The humour emerges naturally out of the situation, even if the use of every popular song with “moon” in the title feels awkward and ham-fisted in its irony.


It’s a story about friendship. Two horny, likable, ordinary young guys in puffy coats backpacking through Northern England stray too far from the road and onto the foggy moors. They fall victim to the local lycanthrope. One dies, one lives. The survivor is taken to London, is taken home by a hot nurse, and encounters some unnerving side effects once the full moon rises. The dead friend, lacerated flesh now growing putrid, pays regular visits. He’s stuck wandering the earth until the final trace of his werewolf-killer has been extinguished, so he asks his best pal to suicide, and get it over with. There are captivating dream sequences. Griffin Dunne is terrific as the dead friend with deadpan humour. “Ever talked to a corpse?” he asks. “It’s boring!” And the legendary transformation scene is hideous and completely fixating, you can't take your eyes off of it, a testament to the allure of well-made (by Rick Baker), tactile rubbery effects over blandly smooth CGI.

He always says grace, makes birdhouses in the basement, and gets choked-up while giving a speech at a neighbourhood barbecue. He’s also prepared to butcher his whole family if they can’t realize his demented Republican fantasy of the perfectly wholesome household. But we know that from the beginning, when we see Jerry Blake alter his appearance and close shop at one such failed residence. Inspired by the real case of murderer John List and scripted by crime fiction maestro Donald Westlake—whose own father, like List, once lost his job and didn’t tell his family—The Stepfather (87), directed by Joseph Ruben, is a model of taut low-budget crispness, marred only by the laughably illustrative score from Yes synth-man Patrick Moraz.

There’s no fatuous attempts to explain Blake’s psychosis, while the best subtextual elements—the parallels between Blake and his teenage stepdaughter, the vaguely unseemly romantic vibes emanating from the stepdaughter’s fatherly psychiatrist—remain always just present enough to read without being too winky. There are references, especially to Hitchcock—the newspaper scene, Norman Rockwell setting, and central relationship recall Shadow of a Doubt (42), while the clean-up scene, the shower and the big knife echo Psycho (60)—but these enrich rather than detract from the film’s distinctive mood. The film made a cult star of Terry O’Quinn, whose performance is so committed, so nuanced, so inside the character of Jerry Blake it’s positively chilling.

Trick or Treat (86), by contrast, probably wouldn’t frighten a small child, unless that child is terrified by big hair. But it uses the genre to generate something so sensitive to teenage experience, so merrily immersed in a subculture, it hardly matters. A much-bullied high school head banger who calls himself Ragman—played by Marc Price, aka Skippy from Family Ties, a masterstroke of casting—starts to dabble in the occult after his favoured metal god dies in a house fire. To the first of many pitch-perfect tracks from Fastway, the opening montage is a tour of Ragman’s tormented adolescent mind, the bedroom lined with handcuffs, action figures, studded collars, a Priest calendar, candles, and a poster of his beloved Sammi Curr—who most closely resembles Dead or Alive’s Pete Burns—gazing down at him from high above. “I can’t believe they cancelled your Halloween concert,” Ragman writes in his fan letter to Sammi, choking back tears. “It’s like you say: Rock’s chosen warriors will rule the apocalypse… I’ve got thoughts in my head that only you would understand…” Identification is total.

“Do you even care who’s running for student council?” a big-haired teen inquires, assuring us that the gulf that separates Ragman from his schoolmates is unbreachable. The question is posed just before the menacing Aryan jocks throw Ragman into a public pool, yet another scene of humiliation from which our hero stamps away, his sneakers squishing loudly with water, as he sputters “Bunch of fucking assholes!” in front of the one popular girl who’s on his side. This attention to detail is characteristic of Trick or Treat. Its narrative’s beyond ridiculous, and the last act, devoted mostly to killing the ultra-queer, ballet-trained metal beast unleashed from Pandora’s box—actually a slab of vinyl which offers advice on revenge plots and conjures the dead if played backwards—gets a little tiring, but the writers and director Charles Martin Smith (the guy from Never Cry Wolf) never let a moment go by without some sharp shard of wit intervening, while There Will Be Blood cinematographer Robert Elswit surveys the suburban scenery in dusky tones.

Unlike the aforementioned films there is no new, or even good DVD of Trick or Treat. I first saw it as a kid on Super Channel. I taped it and watched it until it suffered from video-rot. The crappy pan-and-scan version I bought for ten bucks off the internet sports no special features, and the cover makes it seem like Ozzy Osbourne—who plays a televangelist—and Gene Simmons—who plays Ragman's DJ/father figure, modeled after Simmons' childhood hero Wolfman Jack—are the stars of the movie when the two of them together make up about three—brilliant!—minutes of screen time total. I write this in the hope that this sorry state of affairs will one day change. I'll do the audio commentary track for a case of beer!

Sleep, shadows, secret lives: Murakami, Hoffmann, Stevenson

Sleeping Beauty Edward Burne-Jones 1870

The days close early, and soon they’ll change the time on us and darkness will fall before we even leave work. October brings with it a surplus of night, but not, for some of us, any extra sleep. Me, I wake up in the wee hours, and most often pass the time reading. Come autumn I get hooked on spooky stories, and I got to thinking on stories about sleep itself. A favourite from Haruki Murakami—you can find it in The Elephant Vanishes—is actually called ‘Sleep.’ A seemingly normal middleclass woman stops sleeping. She reads Anna Karinina. The problem is that she never catches up—I’m told by experts that no one ever actually “catches up” on sleep, but it’s a handy expression—and she kinda likes it, the freedom, the hours no longer spent idly—think of all the gigantic Russian novels to read. She feels energized, renewed, as though undergoing some transformation. But into what?

E.T.A. Hoffmann

I don’t know if E.T.A. Hoffmann had trouble sleeping, though it’s easy to imagine how the writing of ‘The Sandman,’ first published in 1818 in a collection entitled, aptly enough, The Night Pieces, might have troubled his rest of the author. “Something terrible has entered my life,” writes Nathaniel to his dear friend Lothario—the first part of the story is delivered through a series of letters. He recounts a childhood marked by his mother’s nightly demands that he be off to bed lest the sandman come and find him, and indeed, he hears him mounting the stairs as he lay awake in the dark. This sandman is eventually discovered to be a lawyer—like Hoffmann—and colleague of Nathaniel’s father, a man with hairy hands who scares children away with the mere threat of his touch, “a repellant, spectral monster bringing misery, distress and earthly and eternal ruination wherever he went.” Nathaniel believes him to be the murderer of his father. Now Nathaniel is an adult student, living in another city, but he claims the sandman has reappeared in his life, posing as a seller of barometers.

Hoffmann, with friends

Clara is Lothario’s sister and Nathaniel’s fiancée. She reads the letter intended for her brother and writes back to Nathaniel, assuring him in so many words that he’s basically just a little crazy. She suggests that he simply endeavour to “be cheerful.” But Nathaniel’s caught up in something clearly beyond Clara’s understanding. He’s convinced his will is subject to some power mysterious and vast. He’s confronted again by the barometer seller, who covers a table in glasses, and later telescopes, one of which is purchased by Nathaniel, who begins to feel foolish about his suspicions and becomes fascinated by the object. And it strikes me as interesting that this fascination with seeing, specifically with seeing through the aid of a mechanical object, is what seems to lead Nathaniel to his downfall. He falls in love with another woman, one not so cheerful as Clara, but whose strange stillness is transfixing. She’s more like a coveted object than a person. Something inside of Nathaniel begins to split apart. The ending of ‘The Sandman’ is rather ambiguous, and brilliantly chilling. It’s referenced at length in Freud’s ‘The Uncanny.’

Grave of Hoffmann

Hoffmann himself has been characterized as a guy with two distinct faces, and the theme of man’s dual nature is given further expression in ‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry,’ his most famous story, one often considered the prototype for detective fiction—it predates Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ by 20 years. It certainly must be the first example of this odd convention of having mysteries solved by old ladies—its title character petitions numerous local authorities to reconsider their assumptions about the murder of a celebrated maker of jewelry named Cardillac in 1680 Paris. Cardillac is actually the story’s most memorable character, with Hoffmann’s portrait compelling us to draw parallels between virtuosity and villainy, art and evil. Cardillac claims to have been followed all his life by an “evil star,” and we start to see how the jewels he so admires twinkle just like that heavenly eye. Of course ‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry’ isn’t terribly macabre, which is what I’ve been in the mood for and, with Halloween approaching, what I aim to steer you toward. But it led me to finally read a horror classic I’d previously neglected, one regarded as the definitive narrative investigation into the multiplicities of self, and the beast within.

Portraits of Stevenson by John Singer Sargent

Imagine you have an old friend so beloved to yourself, held in such high esteem by others, that were he to change radically, to alter his behaviour in a wildly grotesque fashion, you wouldn’t even recognize him standing before you. That’s one of the questions that lingers with you after reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson was inspired by the true story of Deacon Brody, respected businessman by day, burglar and thief by night. But the story of Dr Jekyll and his slow surrender to his shadow self also lends itself to being read as a parable of drug addiction, and it’s notable that after having his manuscript destroyed Stevenson rewrote the whole thing during a six-day cocaine binge. The work lends itself to so many interpretations, and nearly all of them work because Stevenson’s storytelling is so geared toward realistic detail and the rich evocations of its relationships. His is a world of bachelors, of intense male friendships, allegiances that defy law or even logic in the actions that inspire. (There’s surely a queer reading out there, too.)


“I have lost confidence in myself,” Jekyll tells his friend Utterson—another lawyer. Indeed his self is not what he thought it to be. The cruel and murderous Mr Hyde is the result of some fantastic experiment, but he was surely waiting within Jekyll’s psyche all along. It takes a drug to shake “the fortress of identity,” but the more important ingredient in Hyde’s birth was surely Jekyll’s urge to let loose his demons and to do so without punishment, to have his evil other hide in plain sight. Stevenson closes the novella with Jekyll’s own words, which elevates its horror by leaving us not with Utterson’s “I thought I knew the man…” but with something rather more frightening: the man never really knew himself.

Giant Steps

The titles or authors I can’t recall, the content only barely, but the photos in my elementary school’s surprisingly bountiful selection of Bigfoot books spring back into memory as though only days, rather than decades, have passed. The thing lived on the peripheries of the visible, so naturally it was the images that really mattered. The elusiveness of the creature could not have seemed more carefully designed. The iconic, infinitely reproduced stills from the 1967 Roger Patterson film, sensuously grainy, as though the creature’s fur were mottled with blur, and that pose, looking back over its shoulder like a wounded lover bidding a dramatic farewell, fascinated me like it did millions of other kids, and, I guess, almost as many adults. Bigfoot was already so perfect, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to alter its allure by trying to prove its existence, or by, most appallingly, trying to hunt it down and kill it. Bigfoot—or Sasquatch, to use the more noble-sounding and proudly Canadian term—would only ever be Bigfoot so long as it remained in the shadows, off the grid, never quite seen by prying eyes.

Author Joshua Blu Buhs

Much to the chagrin of those determined to usher the creature into the annals of legitimate science, Bigfoot lends himself quite nicely to being placed within the universal myth of the wild man, a potent symbol of our primal conscience. If he does exist, would Bigfoot be the product of nature, or would be some manifestation of the collective unconscious, a shared desire to believe that something almost human could persevere uncorrupted by the domesticating and soul-deadening effects of civilization, a Frankenstein’s monster built not of disparate body parts but of fragments from our vast cultural swamp? Such questions, however ridiculous the subject matter might seem to some, can yield complex and revealing answers, and I can’t imagine anyone providing better ones that Joshua Blu Buhs does in his engrossing read Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (The University of Chicago Press, $34.95). The book is a biography of a figure whose existence is extremely dubious at best—and Buhs, while remaining respectful of true believers, makes clear from the outset that he’s not among them—and is thus in essence a biography of the conditions under which this figure was cultivated and came to thrive. Buhs tells a great story by weaving together a multitude of interrelated stories taking place over two continents and the better part of a century. There are countless terrific anecdotes: the man who shot Bigfoot and listened to him tell his life story as he lay dying; a guy being abducted by a Bigfoot and held captive in a cave with an entire Bigfoot family, the implication being that he was destined to become the boyfriend of Bigfoot’s daughter; Jimmy Stewart agreeing to smuggle a Yeti paw from Nepal to England. Bigfoot spawned a lot of things, among them great stories, heated arguments, and a hugely profitable industry. But along the way he also spawned a community of misfits, some passionate and articulate, some cynical, some cracked. The story of their formation is one of the book’s highlights.

“What accounts for Bigfoot’s popularity?” Buhs asks. Perhaps it is that the possibility of its existence “was evidence that the world was not yet fully explored, that there was still room for man to test his mettle, to touch the really real behind the false front of consumer goods and scientific arrogance.” This angle, of modern man—and we are talking mostly about males here—alienated by an intellectualized, feminized, materialistic or reductive culture lies at the heart of Buhs’ thesis. The men who made Bigfoot what he is were mostly white, working-class and rural, loggers, hunters, small town reporters, disgruntled scientists and more than a few outright con men, Patterson, as most reports attest, being one of them. Following the emergence of sensational Yeti reports in the Himalayas, sightings of Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest and of Sasquatch in British Columbia, as well as reports of traces of the creature, such as hair, feces and, most famously, footprints, began to accumulate in the 1950s, leading to an explosion of Bigfoot related material in the 60s, the overwhelming majority of it turning up in magazines devoted to a blend of traditional masculine interests and the paranormal. As Buhs traces the development of Bigfoot iconography a compelling case is built around the creature fulfilling a deep need, becoming a figure of authenticity in a world where so much of what constitutes daily life is composed of the overtly phony, and mass produced.

Yet from almost the very beginning Bigfoot seemed ready to be co-opted. The creature represented a tireless resistance against consumerism within the very culture in which consumerism was born, yet this same creature was all too adaptable not only to the dictates of literature and movies, but to New Age ideologues and people trying to sell more Canadian Club and Kokanee—like a good many backwoodsmen, Bigfoot, it seems, is a heavy drinker. He would with time become safe, cuddly, a best friend to the Hendersons. He would be the poster monster for environmentalists, and a sort of prototype for the teachings of Iron John and Women Who Run With the Wolves. The creature has never been captured, but he has been stuffed with fire-repellant materials and can be frequently found enjoying a wild ride at Disneyland. By taking a closer look at the cultural history, Buhs suggests that with the demise of the primitive Bigfoot and the ascendance of the new, hip, fully tamed one, we can trace some sort of gradual surrender to the unstoppable juggernaut of modern artificiality. The stalwarts, meanwhile, have not given up their vigil. The creature may still be out there, immune to polluted streams and deforestation, smacking his feet into some soft earth as a way to say “I was here,” and laughing at us as he returns to his cave to watch free cable.

Tokyo gall

This triptych sets each of its tales within the titular Japanese capital, but unlike similarly conceived recent tributes to Paris, New York and Toronto, the filmmakers arrive on the scene to reveal far more perverse invention than touristy affection toward their host city. Here, here! Tokyo!, now available on DVD from Liberation Entertainment, is no more a cohesive masterpiece than your average omnibus feature, but, helmed by two mischievous Frenchmen and a Korean—talk about courting contentious international relations—it is bold, strange, fun and occasionally thought provoking.

Transplanting Gabrielle Bell’s graphic novel Cecil and Jordan in New York to the other side of the planet, Michel Gondry’s ‘Interior Design’ finds a typical Gondry self-appointed creative genius hoping against the odds to make it big in the big, crowded city with his ramshackle, no-budget apocalypse disaster flicks—screened with smoke machines for that twee theatrical edge. The real protagonist here however is the fledging auteur’s girlfriend, played by Steven Segal’s daughter Ayako Fugitani, who by contrast is a sort of non-being, a person with no significant ambitions of her own. She eventually seems to vanish altogether in a surreal twist that’s best discovered in the moment. I enjoyed the film, but I couldn’t help but question Gondry’s subconscious motives and the ostensible inventiveness of creating this character of a Japanese woman who only finds herself by being transformed into the perfect object of servility.

Most memorable by far is Leos Carax’s ‘Merde,’ the director’s first film in a decade and a wildly caustic bit of politically hostile monster movie chaos. Everyone’s favourite nutcase Denis Lavant, who I'd like to nominate for an Oscar, crawls out of the Tokyo sewers like some demented offspring of a violent, racist French leprechaun and Harpo Marx driven insane by painful cataracts and years of living underground. In an opening sequence of inspired anarchy he terrorizes the local citizenry by gobbling cash and flowers, stealing smoking cigarettes and then tossing the burning butts into baby carriages. He’s finally captured and put on trial, defended by one of the only people on earth to speak his language—though once everyone knows what he’s saying this only serves to make the creature even more unsympathetic. He’s condemned to death, but monsters never die easily in the Japanese cinema, nor do martyrs of its bureaucratic processes (see Oshima’s Death by Hanging for the climactic sequence’s basis). Sequels are promised. Shit!

‘Shaking Tokyo,’ directed by The Host’s Bong Joon-ho and starring Tokyo Sonata’s wonderful Teruyuki Kagawa, is as obsessed with apocalypse as its predecessors, but is as sweet and sensitive as ‘Merde’ is grotesque and outrageous. Taking the national xenophobia under fire by Carax into a much quieter place, the film concerns a hikikomori—Japanese for shut-in—who’s solitary life of reading, shitting, sleeping and building orderly walls of pizza boxes and toilet paper rolls is interrupted by the possibility of love with a pizza delivery girl in danger of becoming just as reclusive as he is. The narrative naturally lends itself to a predictable climax of classical emotional liberation, but Bong, with great help from the tightly wound but finely expressive Kagawa, does a lovely job of making the journey distinctive and compelling.