X is for Xanax: THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES (1963)

Bartender: Mister Birnim, this is the mornin'...
Don: That's when you need it most, in the morning. Haven't you learned that yet? At night this stuff's just a drink... but in the morning it's medicine! --Ray Milland - LOST WEEKEND (1945) 

Dr. X: "I'd give anything! Anything to have dark!"  -Ray Milland - X-THE MAN W/X-RAY EYES (1963)

Science has proven our senses capable of far more than the limited strata and spectra of processed information we know as collective reality. Like radios tuned to one station, our brains screen out the static and noise of whatever channel isn't immediately relevant for survival. After we have everything we need and want to feel safe and secure, 'set and setting' in place, we may want to slip the dial a smidge, drop a tab or chant some AUMs - see if we can pick up some other station, inside, outside, within / without the Known channel. We might find some beautiful music, sometimes by chance a heavenly voice of an angel (or a devil in disguise), but sooner or later we're deafened by the holy static, terrified by unearthly yowls, no volume knob can possibly reduce the infernal bells. Spinning the dial quickly back to the starting point, we hope we can find our safe channel again before we wake up the neighbors and wind up carted away gibbering in a straitjacket. If we can't, we wind up in the psych ward laughing at transmissions no one else can hear. If we do, we've just had a successful 'voyage' beyond the confines of collective 'reality.' We can try to transcribe what we heard, or paint it, but until we flip the dial again, we're back safe and sound, and back.

William Blake once wrote that if the doors of perception were cleansed the world would appear as it really is, infinite... but Lovecraft might add that--once the novelty or holy glow wears off--the infinite is a hard thing to live with day-after-day. We may after awhile finally remember, on some deep cosmic level, why the doors of perception aren't cleansed very often. Quickly we wish for a bucket of mud to splash upon them.  Unable to 'turn off' the infinite blazing through, we can only hope the 'finite' blinders come back quick. If they don't, we may find ourselves strapped to a gurney, trying to claw our eyes out, begging the nurse for a sweet, sweet Xanax and/or Ativan drip.

More than likely though, we'd just get rip-roaring drunk, and finally "get to see the world in real black and white," as Tiny Dr. Tim says in "W.C. Fields Forever." Eventually, the colors fade; Oz wears off back down to simple homespun sepia Kansas, and there we are, ready to don the yoke and slog forth into the world once more, a worker among workers.

Yeah, you need to be insane and/or holier than hell to live with those cleansed doors all the time, the X-ray eyes. And you need to know that I didn't even have to look up the above quote from LOST WEEKEND, also starring Ray Milland, because I know those lines by my drunken black X-ray heart, which makes me uniquely qualified to discuss X. For, like Don Birnim in LOST WEEKEND, and Dr. Xavier in X (also Ray Milland), I see too much, feel too deeply, and sometimes have the power to see right through my own eyelids, so that I see the same thing whether my eyes are closed or open. At those points, I grasp for anything to numb the mind, to shrink the aperture. But nothing works for long, leaving me eventually a twitching, hungover mess on fire with thirst and delirium tremens... welcome to the poison path!

It's hard to believe in hindsight that 1963's X (AKA- THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES) prefigures the psychedelic explosion of 1966-68 by a good four years, putting it way ahead of its time, as if Roger Corman could himself could see far into the future. It's still light years more 'true' to the psychedelic experience (especially the 'bad' trip) than nearly any other film trying to actually capture it, including Corman's own THE TRIP from 1967. While Corman's thrifty sets and leftover costumes and props give X-RAY an air of hackwork, that actually works for the overall effect, as if against such force of vision the world's clapboard paltriness is revealed, as if the full wave spectrum reveals, in addition to God's singular cyclops eye staring back at you, that the city you live in is just painted plywood fronts. This makes it hard to tell whether it's a nouvelle vague deconstruction (the French flag colored light bulb/balloons in the photo atop would fit right at home in MADE IN THE USA) or a brilliant inquiry into the 'gaze,' buffeted by waves of post-modern accidental Brechtian cheapness. Since we can't see the difference, we feel sure the difference is there. That's the kind of faith poor Mr. Birnim Wood Xavier doesn't have anymore -- he knows. 

Here's the plot: Dr, X-- grumpy as Don Birnam on Yom Kippur--feels skittish about the experimental eye drops he's invented and which he administers to himself as experimental subject. His colleagues tell him he mustn't! It's unethical! He kills one of them, because doctors who'd rather kill dozens of innocent animals than risk being their own guinea pigs are fucking chickenshit. Milland, who played an alcoholic so well in LOST WEEKEND he became one in real life, captures Xavier's sociopathic surliness in a way that spills outside the script until we're not sure if he's acting or the script was changed because that was easier than trying to change Milland's foul mood. The medical staff at X's hospital of course try to stop him, but it's too late. He sees it all: everything from under a women's skirts to inside their organs, to behind cards in poker and eventually to the chewy tootsie roll center of the universe. He goes from saying to hell with anyone who gets in his way in the pursuit of visual clarity to to hell with anything that gets in his way of driving headfirst into the desert on a quest for glorious opaqueness.

Then again, there's hot chicks scattered all over, so hey -- just dig that crazy looking girl in the photo below, with that awesome Cyd Charisse-meets-Vampira-style black cocktail dress. Note the swingin' way Milland has with a martini! Oh, Ray knows his way around a cocktail party.

Attractive Dr. Diane Fairfax (Diana Van Der Vlis, below) is Xavier's love interest, though he doesn't pay her much attention. In fact he tries to hide from her once he's wanted for murder, but she follows him around like that girl with the leopard coat in LOST WEEKEND. I say give him a break, Nat. Poor Xavier is so busy seeing through things that he can't even sleep! You can't EVER sleep if you can see through your own eyelids! Have you ever woke up and not known whether it's six at night or six in the morning? That's the devil of it, Nat! Without a Valium or a bottle of Nyquil you're finished! And Nyquil hasn't even been invented in 1963! And for Valium you need a prescription. Why, Why Nat?!

Luckily for every wanted-by-the-cops freak like Dr. X there's a sleazy sideshow barker who'll hide him in a fortune teller tent and put him to work making medical diagnoses sans X-ray machine. As with past Corman carny films (remember CARNIVAL ROCK!?), there's very little attempt to convince that the interior threadbare sound stage sets are anything but sketches meant to support the thesis, but what a thesis! And Don Rickles--a regular of AIP's Beach Party films--is a natural impresario of see-through-itiveness, alternating compassion and hucksterism in a way that lets you loathe him and love him in alternating waves.

Diane and Xavier later have to split for the glitzy neon exteriors and the threadbare casino-set interior of Las Vegas, where his see-through card abilities parlay into a small fortune, but 'crowds' are attracted by his luck, leading to casino scrutiny, and Xavier's a surly sod who doesn't take his huge sunglasses off even in the dark of the casino, so ere long a police helicopter is chasing them through the desert after Xavier's car crashes because he can see through the road. So he runs around the desert while engaging in a staring contest with the eye in the center of the world and well...  I won't tell you who wins... I will say that the impressionistic free-form Les Baxter jazz score runs under everything like it's a drum-legged magnet pulling Milland by his giant dark glasses through the rattling sets.

Truth be told, like Milland's grumpy character, X is a hard film to love. Ray's just not the well-meaning basketcase he was as Don Birnam, but the film is still impressive and balls-out original in the way Corman just goes for it, and by it I mean the infinite trip -- pre-2001. I mean, there was no precedent in 1963 for this kind of way-out-there psychedelic trip. Corman was inventing yet another micro-genre in the exploitation universe.

Milland's career was off the rails anyway by the 1960s, meanwhile, due to his own penchant for mood-altering substances... he was taking whatever he could get, role-wise, even if it meant his head had to be sewn on the the ample frame of sensitive linebacker Rosie Greer (THE THING WITH TWO HEADS) just for a post-op recovery shot of Demerol. But even straining to appear less hungover than he was, Milland is never less than compelling and Dr. X as a character benefits from his peevishness. He makes us feel every ampere of his grouchy pain.

 The film's Richard Matheson-like script was penned by Ray Russell, whose credits are not otherwise impressive (MR. SARDONICUS? Yeeesh!) and Robert Dillon (FRENCH CONNECTION II). But it compares well with THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN in its gutsy exploration of the yawning abyss of the fourth dimensional existence, in its going beyond the illusory atomic structures of our familiar universe; and in its leaving sanity behind like a nagging wife, and--with a beatnik beanie in lieu of swim cap-- diving into the center of the known universe to prove its pasteboard flimsiness.

"I just do eyes!"

I'll share two personal anecdotes at this juncture:

1) In autumn of 2003 I was struck by a huge electro-magnetic freakstorm crown chakra third eye lightning bolt which enabled me--albeit briefly-- to see the same image with my eyes closed or open. The black-electric gray field of inner vision behind my eyelids had come into perfect alignment with the 'real' world around me. It was a moment both terrifying, exhilarating, liberating and mercifully brief.

2) I once was (circa 1987) talked into taking two tabs of blotter acid when a half would have been too much. I found myself walking down the middle of the street, clutching my hair and screaming and laughing at my own terror at the same time. If you can imagine being on a terrifying roller coaster plunging straight down, nonstop, for hour after hour, getting faster exponentially but never hitting bottom, maybe you can get an inkling. I was hoping a car would run me over and free my twisted soul from its melting shell. I saw through everything and I saw the skin cells flaking off all the bodies of the world; I felt the breathing of every living (and nonliving) thing; my breath was the murderous exhaust of cars and my thoughts the howling jackal-like yelps of playing children, buzzing engines cutting through the once sacred cake of my mind with their chainsaw mindless exuberance. With everyone's ape faces dissolving and aging in spiral movements I could barely even dare to look at my shoes. I walked on instinct towards the park, with my dog, who took one look into my eyes and moaned piteously, as if seeing the devil.

It took a long time, but in each example of my own experience -- the good and the terrifying-- I eventually got back to normal's soft gray field of blandness blanket. So I can feel Dr. X's pain at never being able to get back to that. It's the inability to turn it off that makes the schizophrenic seek the shelter of madness, and cigarettes. You can try to get drunk, but your senses are so heightened that even water tastes too strong for your senses. A shot of bourbon is so strong you can't get it to within six inches of your lips without gagging. And lord, I've tried. Such Roderick Usher-style morbid acuteness of the senses is not for lightweights. At the very least, you need a chaser.

I first saw X-THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES one afternoon on local TV in the early 1970s, with one of my first babysitters, 'Toots,' a blue jean-jacket and straight blonde hair 16-year old hippie runaway from the shelter where my mom volunteered. Ten minutes after mom left, Toots's boyfriend was over, the TV was on, and though they made out between commercials they snapped back for the film, and between the three of us, we talked of it avidly. In my first grade brain it lay as a cornerstone of mythic, intense older kid power. They explained what was going on in ways no other parent or babysitter ever could. It seemed strange, this film, savage, like an episode of BATMAN beamed in from a much more inhospitable, terrifying adult reality. Still, as with the above narrative about the two tabs, I was glad when mom came home, Toots left, and Ultra-Man came on. The soft gray blanket of banal space-time uniformity never feels so sweet as when it's returned after being momentarily ripped away.

So in short, X is a film that needs a sweet Xanax. It's the raw truth of God's eye staring you down through the center of all things. A Lacanian like Slavoj Zizek could have a field day with it. But it's over, it's gone. The magic and mystique of being able to 'crack it wide open' has been lost in our simulacratic age. No parent in their right mind would let a hippy runaway chick babysit their seven year-old today, or probably even allow them to watch a film like X in the first place. Now the TV eye has seen through us, not vice versa, and if anything it is the characters on the TV who will one day squirm in horror at the awful truth when their vision is no longer blocked by the fourth wall and they can finally peer out of their hole in the screen at us on our couches. Offended by our blank impassive eyes, they shall reach out from the screen to pluck them out! Our worst fear? We can still see!!

 NOTES:

For further reading check out my 2005 opus, Mecha-Medusa and the Otherless Child from Acidemic Journal of Film and Media #3