Even children can get a handle on divining subtext and collective symbolic anxieties via the movies on Saturday afternoon television, especially if they're 1950's giant bug movies. I love them giant bugs... TARANTULA is tops, THEM the coliseum and even BEGINNING OF THE END the start of a full-on pawty. Of course not all the big monsters of Atomic Age America are bugs, i.e. BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS or IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA - I love them both more even than the bugs, but since an old girlfriend once woke up around five AM to find me having high time watching TARANTULA in the other room, high as a kite, and asked (rather redundantly): "ugh, you're not going to stay up all night drinking whiskey and watching those giant bug movies are you?" I think of them that way, oh so fondly. I've been sober for years but just popping in one of these gems gives me a Pavlovian warm fuzzy feeling.
One of my earlier memories: I'm three, in a Philadelphia hospital for a minor ear operation. I had no idea what was going on and I scared out of my wits by the cold clinical strangeness of it all. My parents abandoning me there for the night; the black nurse was cold and mean, like a prison warden. But my roommate was cool and the TV was showing the EARTH VS. THE SPIDER (1959) and the older kid, a teenager I think, in the other bed was insisting on changing it because I'm too young. Too young? I would have killed him if I could. The dickhead didn't understand, I was scared of the hospital and of him and of everything else and the only source of comfort, of relief from the anxiety, lay in the image of a giant black tarantula creeping around a 1950s suburban neighborhood, in glorious black and white.
Nowadays I can conjecture that my feeling of powerlessness as a three-year old lost in the hostile uncaring white-walled institutional world of rectal thermometer-wielding nurses was allayed by seeing those humble creatures--that man, in his snobby superiority, squashed and subjected to draconian bed times== grown now large enough to tromp on man in just as callous a manner. If I was the size of the AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (1957) I could find that cold evil rectal thermometer nurse and drive a giant hypo needle through her chest, pinning her to the ground, and ditto that kid who tried to (and maybe did) turn the channel from EARTH VS. THE SPIDER.
It's no coincidence perhaps that the main deal breaker for me in giant monster movies is the presence of a kid, especially in the films set south of the border or in the Mediterranean, where for some reason the presence of an incorrigible beggar boy who latches onto the visiting white scientists or cowboys is inescapable, be it Mexico for THE BLACK SCORPION or VALLEY OF GWANGI, Greece for 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH, this brat keeps me from ever owning these on DVD (there are other reasons, the cruelty and indifference visited on the Ymir or Gwangi, where being a reptile and weird looking is reason enough to be treated like a monster and forced to fight with another imprisoned, abused abducted creature, a circus elephant.
It's no coincidence perhaps that the main deal breaker for me in giant monster movies is the presence of a kid, especially in the films set south of the border or in the Mediterranean, where for some reason the presence of an incorrigible beggar boy who latches onto the visiting white scientists or cowboys is inescapable, be it Mexico for THE BLACK SCORPION or VALLEY OF GWANGI, Greece for 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH, this brat keeps me from ever owning these on DVD (there are other reasons, the cruelty and indifference visited on the Ymir or Gwangi, where being a reptile and weird looking is reason enough to be treated like a monster and forced to fight with another imprisoned, abused abducted creature, a circus elephant.
Things like bugs, and cephalopods however don't bother to earn our compassion, and I love them for it.
Later memory: living in mid-town Manhattan over a Pita Grill in the mid 90s; my only cure for the drunken blues was the music of Leadbelly and a six-hour SLP video tape I'd made a decade earlier of TARANTULA followed THE DEADLY MANTIS followed by IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA followed THE GIANT CLAW. My roommate had his hot Ukraine fashion models and his coke and soon his cool million dollars in the dot.com bubble. I had my whiskey (and his, when mine ran out) and those big ass bugs. The warmth of the whiskey making the repetitive black-and-white sense of authority united against a purely abstract foe as comforting as TRIUMPH OF THE WILL probably would be to Rico's Roughnecks.
Now, sober, I love these bugs, for their abstract destructive force. Bugs are innocent of all malice. You can't hate them even as they smash the building down upon you. They don't have the brains to be evil. There is no fifth column saboteur working for the giant bug. At the same time you don't need to have sympathy for them either. Sympathy is not something remotely in their wheelhouse. And as a twentysomething struggling to stand out in New York, I longed for the kind of even playing field a giant bug attack could provide. All you had to do to be a hero and shag a buxom 50s research assistant was be cool under pressure, which all good drunks are. Watching with my hand over one eye to not see double, I would cheer every attack, on either side, over and over, warm and amniotic and safe.
But they're now on DVD, ready to seen all clear and restored, and I'm sober, and so the films are missing the fuzzy static (either from UHF 'noise' alcohol, or just childhood 'fill in the blanks' imagination) they needed to seem 'alive.' They're still soothing, but not fuzzy warm soothing. You can see clearly now the sad ghost town emptiness of the sets, the smears of make-up on once-manly men of action and science, the gaffer glove left unnoticed in the corner of the frame.
So why go back? The amniotic abdominal sac days are gone. Why stick with the 50s' atomic age anxiety? Having learned in THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) that for God there is no zero, no high or low, I now know the life of a dung beetle equal in scope and importance to the life of an emperor. I know now that my giant bug hospital moment will come again. And for me at least it's essential to have a fantasy escape wherein a common enemy unites all peoples, especially one that has no vocal cords with which to defend himself in the courts of our nation. Without such an enemy, Uncle Sam must dress up its own foot in Muslim robes and blow of its own toe like that old campfire tale of the scared farmer.
There is one film that I like even more now that I can see it in a theatrical aspect ratio: THE GIANT CLAW (1957). Jeff Morrow--with his hair of slick oily blackness-- is my new cranky idol. And that amazing bird / on a wire is no longer laughable, but truly psychedelic, wondrous and eternal.
Not to make this all about me, but I look at that face below, and I see a little bit of myself, and maybe, of us all, even that rectal thermometer-in-the-middle-of-the-night-trauma-inducing nurse. As the atomic bomb's loving father, Robert Oppenheimer once said, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." He was quoting the Baghavad Gita. He never imagined what the real destroyer would look like - that it would have turkey wings and a bobbling marionette neck. From its Shiva flame flapping, all clouds part, like a flimsy sun before the soothing narcotic American night.
Now, sober, I love these bugs, for their abstract destructive force. Bugs are innocent of all malice. You can't hate them even as they smash the building down upon you. They don't have the brains to be evil. There is no fifth column saboteur working for the giant bug. At the same time you don't need to have sympathy for them either. Sympathy is not something remotely in their wheelhouse. And as a twentysomething struggling to stand out in New York, I longed for the kind of even playing field a giant bug attack could provide. All you had to do to be a hero and shag a buxom 50s research assistant was be cool under pressure, which all good drunks are. Watching with my hand over one eye to not see double, I would cheer every attack, on either side, over and over, warm and amniotic and safe.
But they're now on DVD, ready to seen all clear and restored, and I'm sober, and so the films are missing the fuzzy static (either from UHF 'noise' alcohol, or just childhood 'fill in the blanks' imagination) they needed to seem 'alive.' They're still soothing, but not fuzzy warm soothing. You can see clearly now the sad ghost town emptiness of the sets, the smears of make-up on once-manly men of action and science, the gaffer glove left unnoticed in the corner of the frame.
So why go back? The amniotic abdominal sac days are gone. Why stick with the 50s' atomic age anxiety? Having learned in THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) that for God there is no zero, no high or low, I now know the life of a dung beetle equal in scope and importance to the life of an emperor. I know now that my giant bug hospital moment will come again. And for me at least it's essential to have a fantasy escape wherein a common enemy unites all peoples, especially one that has no vocal cords with which to defend himself in the courts of our nation. Without such an enemy, Uncle Sam must dress up its own foot in Muslim robes and blow of its own toe like that old campfire tale of the scared farmer.
Not to make this all about me, but I look at that face below, and I see a little bit of myself, and maybe, of us all, even that rectal thermometer-in-the-middle-of-the-night-trauma-inducing nurse. As the atomic bomb's loving father, Robert Oppenheimer once said, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." He was quoting the Baghavad Gita. He never imagined what the real destroyer would look like - that it would have turkey wings and a bobbling marionette neck. From its Shiva flame flapping, all clouds part, like a flimsy sun before the soothing narcotic American night.
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