Stephen King, Imperialist Ignoramus

Stephen King in 1977, the year he publishe
"Children of the Corn" and The Shining

Stephen King’s short story “Children of the Corn” pisses me off. There, I said it. King admits, in his collection Night Shift, that the story found him while driving through rural Nebraska: he found the miles and miles of corn, planted in ruler-straight rows, highly intimidating, largely because this clearly human landscape was seldom interrupted by anything as humane as houses. Note, he drove through Nebraska; he never mentions bothering to speak to actual Nebraskans.

I always dismissed this shortcoming as a fluke, though, an oversight by a busy, highly popular novelist who didn’t notice his own blinders. That is, until someone recently pointed out to me that, in King’s novel The Shining, the all-important Overlook Hotel closes for the winter. In Colorado. Let me repeat that: a hotel closes for the winter, during the peak of Colorado’s lucrative ski season. What the hell? That’s two states King gets wrong!

Thinking about this, I realized: in both cases, King projects Greater Northeast values onto the American West. In New England, where King lives, white colonial communities were deliberately planted within walking distance, because they were planted in the Seventeenth Century, when twenty miles was a time-consuming overland slog. Farmers lived in towns, and walked brief distances to their fields; human habitation is the norm, not the exception. (It gets more complicated inland, but not much.)

And, in the Northeast, resort hotels do close during winter. Partly, this reflects brutal Northeastern winters, where soil sometimes freezes solid, while blizzards isolate neighboring communities. But it also reflects the Northeastern tourist business, driven primarily by New Yorkers and Bostonians fleeing sweltering big-city summers. The Borscht Belt mainly offered tourists mild countryside temperatures. Even if people could visit tourist resorts during winter, they mostly don’t want to. Winter, in Northeastern cities, is almost pleasant.

Jack Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick's
adaptation of The Shining

King failed to understand that Colorado tourism derives from completely different drives. People band together through shared love of braving the cold to test their athletic endurance. In 1977, when King published both The Shining and “Children of the Corn,” inexpensive transportation was moving Colorado skiing from a regional pastime to a national destination. Formerly an agricultural state, Colorado was slowly transitioning to a tourist economy. Stephen King showed up right during that intermediary stage.

According to legend, which he propagated himself, King chose Boulder, Colorado, as the setting for his next novel by selecting a random location from an atlas. King and his wife spent one October night as the sole guests of the otherwise vacant Stanley Hotel, which inspired The Shining’s massive, sprawling, vacant halls. October is prime foliage-gazing tourism season in New England, where King lives; one wonders whether he even realized he’d chosen Colorado’s off season.

Thing is, if you understand Northeastern history, King’s Overlook Hotel makes perfect sense. He describes a run-down hotel of the 1970s that peaked during the Jazz Age. The building, basically a preserved museum of its heyday, is haunted by the ghosts of big-band musicians and bartenders passing liquor off the books. Jack Torrance stumbles into a tuxedo party and gets handed rotgut booze. The hotel King describes belongs not in Colorado, but the Catskill Mountains.

My memories of the Catskills are dominated by Cub Scout adventures, which is about all that happens there anymore. Ruins of grand hotels built between the world wars remain, but few still do business. Neither particularly tall nor unusually beautiful, the Catskills benefitted from being within driving distance of Manhattan and Boston; when plunging fuel prices before the Arab Oil Embargo made Colorado and Utah viable tourist destinations, the Catskills’ storied hotels fell into disrepair.

Steven Weber in Mick Garris's adaptation of
The Shining, with a script by Stephen King

Follow my reasoning: King can’t handle Nebraska because, in his mind, human habitation means towns; Nebraska’s spread-out human geography looks demonic to him. He can’t imagine tourist business that isn’t circumscribed by warm weather, or haunted by Jazz Age glory. In both cases, he projects regional values onto regions he doesn’t understand. Regions he can’t understand, because he doesn’t bother speaking with locals. If he did this to non-white people, we’d call him an imperialist.

I moved from California to Nebraska at age 18, so I understand the shock of transitioning to spaces sculpted by human activity, but vacant of people. It’s scary… for a while. But I didn’t have to live in Nebraska, near the Colorado border, for very long, to realize the circumstances King describes aren’t horrific. If he’d bothered meeting any Nebraskans or Coloradans, the horror would’ve worn off quickly. Instead, King looks like a world-class dick.

First of the Texas Troubadours

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part Six
Townes Van Zandt, Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas

Townes Van Zandt was a notoriously unreliable performer. Before his death in 1997, audiences reported he had only two modes: an unbelievable clarity and rapport with the audience, coupled with sublime lyrical sensitivity, or an absolute drunken mess. Throughout his career, his attempts to numb his bipolar disorder with substances always undermined his performance persona. But for four nights at a Houston dive-bar in 1973, he produced something unmatched in the history of Texas music.

Country music fans may remember Townes Van Zandt as author of such classics as “Pancho and Lefty,” “If I Needed You,” and “White Freight Liner Blues.” He produced six albums in five years between 1968 and 1973, often working at a feverish pace made possible only by mental illness and cocaine. His songs bespoke a bleak pessimism that, paradoxically, gave his cultish fans great hope that they weren’t suffering alone. He became an underground legend.

As this prolific period wound down, Van Zandt played four shows at the Old Quarter, a venue co-owned by his friend and bandmate Rex Bell. Producer Earl Willis recorded these shows on a portable four-track system, apparently for posterity, never intending to release them. However, Van Zandt descended into a creative dry spell, corresponding, probably not coincidentally, with a healthy new relationship. Without his malaise, and the drugs,he lost much of his creative motivation.

The recordings feature Van Zandt, alone on stage with just his guitar, uncharacteristically sober and receptive to his audience. The recording, chosen from Willis’ crude recordings, involves such concert business as announcements about where to find the cigarette machines, and apologies for the broken air conditioning. But it also includes some of the most tender and insightful recordings a damaged genius ever put forward. The austere arrangements and clinking background emphasize Van Zandt’s lyrical complexity.

Townes Van Zandt

He opens with “Pancho and Lefty,” his then-current single, about a Mexican bandit’s betrayal. Both Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson had hits with this track, but both embroidered it with radio-friendly flourishes highlighting their own celebrity. Van Zandt, playing solo, keeps focus on his lyrics, a mournful exploration of the forces with make a criminal into a folk hero. The idea that we need heroes only after their dead is poignant, coming from Van Zandt.

This track list reads like Van Zandt’s Greatest Hits. He plays several of his classics, like “Rex’s Blues” or “Tecumseh Valley,” with the unornamented authenticity of somebody producing work he loves. Between his own classics, Van Zandt also includes tracks by artists who influenced him, like Merle Travis, Bo Diddley, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. This remarkably inclusive set of influences goes heavily toward explaining Van Zandt’s unusual style, quirky songwriting, and widespread fandom outside genre circles.

Part-time fans and corporate executives long classed Townes Van Zandt as country music. This isn’t entirely unfair, considering how many of his songs have been covered by artists like Don Williams and Steve Earle. But like many artists most immediately impacted by his music, including Lyle Lovett and Gillian Welch, he fit poorly into country’s mold. The distinctive mix of country, folk, blues, and other roots genres has some fans speaking of just-plain “Texas Music.”

Because of its essential austerity, this album provides insights into not only Van Zandt’s influences, but also his artistic vision. His classic studio albums were larded with Nashville sidemen and sophisticated productions, presumably to create chart hits. But this overhandling not only produced no radio-friendly singles, it frequently pointed up Van Zandt’s weaknesses as a vocalist. Like Bob Dylan, Van Zandt had a vision, but wasn’t a pretty singer. What he had, was insight.

Van Zandt’s production team released this album in 1977, four years after it was recorded, five years after his last studio album. Basically, he needed the money. Though he’d pulled some songwriter’s royalties from cover versions, his period of happy inactivity left him functionally penniless. Van Zandt released only one studio album between 1972 and 1987. Unfortunately, his eventual return to the studio would result in more overproduced pablum, presumably to capitalize on increasing name recognition.

Standing between his career bookends, this album, the most stripped and honest he’d ever record, highlights not only Van Zandt’s artistry, but also the way he created a pinch-point of Texas music. Though others blended the state’s reach of country, blues, and folk before him, Van Zandt coupled that with raw poetry few peers ever approached. Without the studio crutch, this album makes plain his stylistic vision, and keeps his music alive for coming generations.

A Classic Comic Resurrection Beneath the Earth

Jon Rivera and Gerard Way, writers; Michael Avon Oeming, artist, Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye, Vol. 1: Going Underground

Former spelunker and part-time action hero Calvin “Cave” Carson hung up his spurs and became a family man several years ago. But the excavation company that now employs him has ulterior motives for keeping Carson on a short leash. When a ghost from his past appears on his doorstep, Carson realizes his adventuring days aren’t through. But his employers won’t let Carson go so easily… nor his daughter, either.

DC Comics introduced Cave Carson in 1957, alongside other adventure-oriented titles, featuring heroes without superpowers, like Challengers of the Unknown and the Sea Devils. But Carson never got sufficient traction to become his own franchise; he fought alongside Superman, but always as a sidekick. Lead writer Gerard Way admits he needed to consult a concordance of obscure classic characters to find someone worthy of reboot for his Young Animal imprint.

Newly widowed at the start of this story, Cave Carson struggles to maintain connections with his college-age daughter. He goes through the motions of workplace diligence, but they mostly keep him around for nostalgia: he taught his followers everything they know about underground adventuring, before they eventually outgrew him. Now Carson has the kind of slow, melancholy conversations we recognize from action movies, right before everything hits the fan.

And fan-hitting does occur. One night, tired, frustrated, and alone in his formerly full house, Carson hears a knock. A loincloth-wearing emissary appears at his door. Seems the Muldroog, a lost civilization of mole people, are under attack, and only Carson’s late wife, with her panoply of ancient secrets, can save the underground. But with her gone, apparently a blood quantum is sufficient, because they’ll accept Carson’s daughter instead.

Original promo art,
click to enlarge

It’s difficult to read this graphic novel without recognizing the debts it owes older stories. Besides reviving an almost forgotten character from the Eisenhower era, and connecting him to characters borrowed from Edgar Rice Burroughs, the art suggests a combination of Peter Max and Astro-Boy. The story has hints of old EC horror comics, a tendency emphasized by sudden jarring images of amorphous fungus people savaging the peaceful natives.

Yet this obsessive borrowing doesn’t undercut the story. Like many serial science fiction franchises that don’t bother concealing their roots, like Star Wars and Doctor Who, this story’s connection to older pulp traditions gives it a sense of continuity. We aren’t just reading something generated last weekend like the transient comics of the 1990s that are largely unreadable today. This story connects science fiction’s past to his evolving present.

The emissary at Carson’s doorstep warns him that his employers, EBX, committed the attack on his subterranean nation. So Carson doesn’t even bother bringing his bosses into the discussion. He calls his oldest ally, Wild Dog, an Uzi-wielding maniac who plainly copied his image from the first Quiet Riot album, and goes rogue. Getting off the grid proves easy for a scientist accustomed to caves. Bringing his daughter along proves harder.

Deep underground, the Muldroog have buried a secret for generations. Why else would a nation, apparently blessed by technology but attuned to natural rhythms, continue living in caves? Seems the Muldroog civilization is based upon a lie its people tell outsiders, a curse that keeps giving, provided nobody ever finds out. But what the Muldroog have spent centuries keeping locked up, EBX wants to make into a profit engine.

For all the sci-fi-adventure trappings, this story essentially isn’t about that. Cave Carson’s cybernetic eye, which sometimes goes unmentioned for several chapters, isn’t a driving force behind the story, it’s a metaphor for a man who’s seen things he cannot forget. Carson and his wife told their daughter lies to protect her from hostile reality. Now Eileen’s gone, Cave must bear punishment for those lies alone when truth rushes forth.

This book carries a “Suggested For Mature Readers” label. Please take this seriously. Besides violence, language, and very brief nudity, the themes of long-simmering family tensions shouldn’t be taken lightly. This story introduces themes that most grown-ups will recognize from their own families. Though we perhaps won’t discover our connection to forgotten mole-people civilizations, we all struggle to accept and understand our roots.

Cave Carson is only one among several classic DC characters getting reboot treatments from Gerard Way’s Young Animal imprint. Formerly lead singer of My Chemical Romance, Way’s recent reinvention as a genre writer has made visible several themes always implicit in his music. He admits his comics deal preponderantly with strained parent-child relationships. Well, this story ends in motion; it’ll be interesting to see where he takes these themes next.

Is Wonder Woman a Pro-War Superhero?

The group photo of Wonder Woman and friends that begins the movie

This essay contains spoilers.

Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman continues to enjoy mainly positive reviews, the first DC Extended Universe movie to enjoy warm reception. But not everyone agrees. Self-described Leninist author Jonathan Cook calls Wonder Woman “a hero only the military-industrial complex could create.” He backs this with something I thought common knowledge, that America’s security apparatus has leaned on Hollywood films before. But even by Cook’s own criteria, Wonder Woman would make very poor pro-military propaganda.

The term “military-industrial complex” comes from President Eisenhower, who warned Americans that a small cadre who got rich off violence would foment new wars as tickets for personal enrichment. Eisenhower primarily meant manufacturers of war materiel: the Lockheed Martins and Northrop Grummons of the world. But Hollywood has occasionally participated in the drum-beating industry. Illustrious directors like Frank Capra and David Lean have participated in creating frequently vile wartime propaganda. So have comic book publishers.

Yet this movie doesn’t support such interpretations. Consider a key sequence: leaving England, Diana, our heroine, watches soldiers returning to London with missing limbs and disfiguring scars. Nearing the front, she wants to rescue a wailing orphan, until she sees the refugee caravan. She feels for the refugees, until she discovers an entire occupied village. She liberates the village, but sees it destroyed by chemical weapons. She destroys the general who ordered the attack, and… noting improves.

This ascending pattern describes this entire movie. Apparently Cook believes that, because Jenkins depicts war in her movie, she perforce endorses it. But Diana, trained in single combat, thinks war morally vacuous and diabolical, hoping to uproot it altogether. Ultimately, Diana’s journey isn’t to defeat war; it’s a journey to discover war’s systematic nature. No one nation, army or general holds ultimate culpability for war. Rather, human power structures keep everyone fighting over diminishing scraps.

The real Erich Ludendorff, left, and Danny Huston as Ludendorff in Wonder Woman

Cook claims Wonder Woman positions the Allied leadership as virtuous and peace-seeking, compared to the murderously war-mongering Germans. Yet General Erich Ludendorff murders most of German high command when he wants the war to continue after they’ve lost hope. Meanwhile, when Steve Trevor warns that ignoring Ludendorff could cause thousands of soldiers to die needlessly, a British general, accustomed to leading from the rear, sneers: “That's what soldiers do.” Hardly the Manichaean dualism Cook purports.

Most important, the British and German leaders aren't negotiating for peace; they’re negotiating an armistice. A cessation of active hostilities, which would prove toxic. In reality, Ludendorff survived the war and proselytized the “Stab-in-the-Back Theory,” a leading intellectual justification for rising Nazism; see Christian Ingrao. The armistice didn't solve the underlying problem, it just punted everything onto the next generation. In the final reveal, the armistice serves supernatural war efforts; peace was never on offer.

Throughout the movie, Diana pursues Ares, the war god, whom she accuses of fomenting this violence. Cook takes this accusation so literally, I wonder if he actually saw the entire film. The climactic confrontation reveals that, while Ares put ideas in human heads, humans ultimately didn’t need supernatural incitement to war. Humans, Diana discovers, are a mixture of violence and kindness, of destructive and constructive capabilities. She could defeat war, but only by obliterating humanity.

In fairness, one of Cook’s criticisms holds water. Israeli model-turned-actress Gal Gadot has, as Cook writes, served in the Israeli Defense Force, and the IDF has a dismal human rights record. Working from known dates, Gadot probably participated in Israel’s illegal occupation of southern Lebanon. But Israel has compulsory military service laws; all Israelis, except ultra-Orthodox groups, must render two years’ service. Gal Gadot served in the IDF; so did Dr. Ruth Westheimer. So what?

This picture doesn't serve my theme; I just really like that it exists (source)

In my youth, I attempted (unsuccessfully) to join the Marine Corps. Later, after my views shifted, I waved placards in anti-war demonstrations. I’ve observed the military-industrial complex from the pro- and anti- camps, and friends, if Wonder Woman glorified war, violence, or nationalism, I’d say something. The events onscreen simply don’t justify any such interpretation. Throughout, we witness Diana’s dawning realization that violence, while sometimes necessary, never fixes humanity’s underlying problems. War is not praiseworthy.

Many movies have glamorized war, often at the expense of reality. From classics like The Longest Day to recents like American Sniper, Hollywood has often bought into myths of wartime glory, and peddled Security State drivel to unsuspecting young audiences. But Jonathan Cook’s accusation that Wonder Woman joins these ranks is so unsupported by onscreen evidence, one almost suspects Cook didn’t watch the movie, and reviewed other people’s rumors. Wonder Woman isn’t a pro-war movie.

The Samurai, the Chef, and the Sunset Strip

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 20
Juzo Itami (writer/director), Tampopo

A pair of rough-hewn truckers in Stetson hats pull up to a local business and defend the proprietress’ honor. Pretty standard Spaghetti Western fare. Except these truckers are Japanese, the proprietress operates a traditional roadside ramen shop, and the biggest trucker gets his ass kicked. We know we’ve ventured off the high-minded track from art house cinema. But don’t get comfortable— you’ve entered a roller coaster of upended movie conventions.

Writer-director Juzo Itami combines boilerplates from cowboy action movies and samurai films with Monty Python-esque slapstick, to create a rapid-fire comedy that has all the heft we associate with the words “foreign film,” and none of the tedium. His combination of Westerns and samurai traditions isn’t necessarily unusual; directors have frequently remade films from one tradition into the other. Itami breaks the mold, though, with his distinctly western-friendly humor.

That local business is a roadside ramen shop, which sophisticated Japanese cities have like American cities have coffee shops. They provide loci of community, places where people get together, share stories, make friendships, and scheme revolutions. Japanese communities lacking ramen shops try to lure new ones in. But this shop is failing, and its proprietress doesn’t know why. She needs a savior, and the truckers need a mission. Hmmm...

The lead trucker, Goro (“bull” in Japanese, played by Tsutomo Yamazaki, an Akira Kurosawa veteran), has drifted through Japan inside his truck, alone and bored. Like the best cowboys or samurai, Goro thinks he needs only himself, until circumstances trap him in one location. Rough-hewn and westernized, Goro doesn’t fit into the ramen shop’s clean white surroundings. Yet he feels a call to rescue the pretty young owner.

That owner, Tampopo (Japanese for “dandelion,” Nobuko Miyamoto, wife of director Itami), has fallen on rough times. Recently widowed, she struggles to keep her family business active while raising a precocious son unaided. But the pressures overwhelm her; her kitchen is a haven of comically misplaced food, which she occupies in a manner all flying elbows and panicked screams. She seems lost behind the counter, until the badly beaten Goro reawakens her passions.

Described in prose, the plot seems formulaic. This isn’t coincidence. Itami deliberately satirizes cowboy and samurai movies, the ways their conventions still dictate modern Japanese gender identities, and how trapped modern people are in traditional roles. Goro and Tampopo glom onto each other because they must, because they perceive their reciprocal relationship entirely in terms inherited from glamorous movies. Toho Pictures and Hollywood Boulevard circumscribe our life choices.

Nobuko Miyamoto (left) and Tsutomo Yamazaki in Tampopo

But Itami also introduces sly elements ridiculing those who’d break from convention, too. Between long blocks of his main plot, Itami offers quick sketches, timed with Monty Python briskness, of people trying, and failing, to change. A schoolmistress teaches girls to eat noodles quietly, like Westerners, but gets undermined by a noisy, slurping American. A junior businessman incurs his employers’ wrath by simply trying to order his own dinner.

The longest recurring subplot involves a flashy Yakuza (organized crime boss) and his mistress. In a string of scenes, many wordless, these two find ways to make sharing food an intensely erotic experience. Japanese culture has deeply conflicted traditions surrounding expression of sexuality, so these scenes feel transgressive. We feel weird watching their food-based intimacy, but they’re so genuinely inventive, and so altogether earnest, we’re also comedically hypnotized.

Goro and his boyish sidekick Gun (played by Ken Watanabe before his career got Americanized) gradually rehabilitate Tampopo’s restaurant, turning it into a gleaming citadel of home-cooked goodness. But the effort of rebuilding the business domesticates Goro; he becomes accustomed to sleeping in the same bed and having hot meals nightly. Like cowboys and samurai throughout film history, he both loves and fears the changes domesticity forces.

We spend the entire movie wondering whether Goro and Tampopo will ever escape the prefab roles they’ve fallen into. One moment, we think they’ll show some identity, then the next, they grab onto the familiar like a life preserver. Much of this movie’s comedy comes from these characters’ complete inability to know themselves. Life dangles happiness before their eyes, but they can’t imagine their lives different from anything prior.

With its mix of Western and Japanese elements, and its casual, conversational dialog, this movie has become a staple of college-level Japanese language courses. Though dubbed versions exist, please watch it in Japanese. The actors’ remarkably understated performances and deadpan delivery make this a comedy classic transcending language barriers. Its metaphors of food and relationship resonate, whatever language you speak.