The Red Flower (part 1)

The first part to a short story by this nineteenth-century Russian writer.  You can read the original here.

To the memory of Ivan Turgenev.

I.

"In the name of His Imperial Highness, Emperor Peter the First, I declare an inspection of this psychiatric hospital!"

These words were uttered by a loud, sharp, ringing voice.  The hospital clerk registering the patient in a large, dilapidated book on a table covered in spilled ink could not restrain a smile.  But the two young men accompanying the patient were not laughing: they could hardly stay on their feet from forty-eight hours without sleep, as well as the madman they had just led in from the train station.  At the penultimate station his attack of madness had grown even more intense, and they had pulled out the strait jacket from somewhere, summoned the conductors and police, and gotten it on him.  In this way they had taken him into town, and in this way they had reached the hospital.

He was a frightful sight.  Cut broadly from rough canvas, his gray jacket had been torn to shreds in the attack and now partially covered his frame; long sleeves pressed his arms across his chest and were bound behind him.  His inflamed, pinned-open eyes (he hadn't slept in ten days) burned with a hot and motionless luster, nervous convulsions made his lower lip twitch, and his curly unkempt hair fell in a crest upon his forehead.  In quick, heavy steps he paced from one corner of the office to the other, examining with great curiosity some old document cabinets and oilcloth chairs, and now and again stealing a glance at his companions.  

"Take him to the ward.  On the right."

"I know, I know.  I was here at your hospital last year.  We took a look around the whole place.  I know everything and it will be very hard to fool me," said the patient.

He turned towards the door.  The guard swung it open before him.  With the same quick, heavy, and decisive gait, his mad head raised high, he left the office and almost took off in a run to the right towards the ward of the mentally ill.  His companions barely managed to follow him.   

"Call ahead.  I can't.  My hands are tied." 

The concierge opened the doors and the companions entered the hospital.

The hospital was a large stone building, the product of some old public works.  The ground floor was composed of two large rooms – one a dining room, the other a common area for calmer patients – a wide hallway with a glass door leading to the flower garden, and twenty-two separate rooms in which the patients lived.  Here two dark rooms were also built, the first lined with straw mattresses, the other with boards, in which the rowdier patients would have to sit, and an enormous, gloomy room with arches – the bathroom.   The upper floor was for women; from there came discordant noise in howls and yelps.  Originally the hospital had been designed with a capacity of eighty people.  But since it was the only hospital serving a number of surrounding districts, up to three hundred patients would stay there; a few smaller, closet-like rooms were fitted with as many as four or five beds.  In winter, when the patients were not allowed out in the garden and all the windows were tightly locked behind iron bars, the hospital grew unbearably stifling.    

The new patient was taken to the room that housed the baths.  To a healthy person the impression that it made was not a pleasant one, so it took even greater command of a disturbed and excited imagination.  It was a large room with arches and a sticky stone floor lit by a single window in one corner.  The walls and arches were painted in dark-red oils, and on the level of the dirt-blackened floor two stone baths had been built that resembled oval pits filled with water.  A large copper stove with a cylindrical cauldron for warming up water and a whole entanglement of copper pipes occupied the corner next to the window; to the disturbed mind, all this possessed a fantastic and extraordinarily gloomy character.  The fat guard running the baths always seemed to be chuckling to himself, his own dark physiognomy heightening the impression.

So when they took the patient into this frightful room to give him a bath and, in keeping with the hospital director's system of treatment, to place some Spanish fly on the nape of his neck, he suddenly became furious and horrified.  Stupid thoughts, one more monstrous than the next, swirled around his head.  What was this?  The Inquisition?  A place of clandestine punishment, where his enemies had decided to do away with him?  Perhaps even hell itself?  Finally it dawned on him that this was some kind of trial or ordeal.  They stripped him naked despite his desperate resistance; yet with his strength doubled by his illness, he wrested himself free of several guards who fell on the floor.  Four of them ultimately seized him by the limbs and laid him in the warm water.  To him, of course, the water seemed boiling, and in his mad head flashed a disjointed notion about trials, boiling water, and red-hot irons.  He choked on the water and convulsively thrashed his arms and legs about, which only led the guards to grip him more tightly, and, gasping for breath, he screamed something discombobulated which no one could properly hear, much less understand, but it contained both prayers and imprecations.  He screamed until he was at the end of his tether and, finally quiet, burst into hot tears.  Then he uttered a phrase completely disconnected from what he had been babbling about before:

"O Saint and Great Martyr Gregorii!  Into your hands I deliver my body.  But my spirit – no, no, no!"

The guards held on to him even though he had calmed down.  The warm tub and the bubbles with ice caressing his head had taken effect.  Yet when they pulled him out, now almost unconscious, from the water and placed him on the stool so as to apply the cantharides, the remainder of his strength and mad thoughts again erupted.

"For what?  For what?" he cried.  "I never wished any harm upon anyone!  Why kill me?  Oh oh oh!  O, Lord!  O, you martyred before me!  I beg you, save me!"

The stinging touch to his nape made him beat himself in despair.  The helper could not hold or manage him and did not know what to do.

"There's nothing you can do," said the soldier conducting the operation.  "It needs to be wiped clean."

These simple words drove the patient into convulsions. "Wiped?  Wipe what?  Whom do you want to wipe?  Me!" he thought, and in mortal terror shut his eyes.  The soldier grasped a rough towel at both ends and, squeezing with great force, quickly rubbed it over his nape, ripping off the cantharides and the top layer of flesh from the blister, leaving a bare red indentation.  The pain from this procedure would have been unbearable for a calm and healthy person, but to the patient it seemed like the end of all things.  His whole body burst forth, out of the hands of the guards, and his naked body tumbled upon the stone slabs.  He thought they had cut off his head.  He wanted to scream but could not.  They took him to his cot in a state of oblivion, which led to a deep, long, and almost death-like sleep.

II.

It was night when he awoke; all was quiet.  From the neighboring room he could hear the breathing of the sleeping patients.  Somewhere far off a strange monotone voice was talking to itself – the voice of another patient ensconced for the night in a dark room; and from above, from the women's ward, a hoarse contralto was singing some savage tune.  The patient listened closely to all these sounds.  He felt an odd weakness, almost ruin, through his limbs; and his neck was aching horribly.

"Where am I?  What's wrong with me?" were the thoughts that occurred to him.  And with uncanny clarity, the last month of his life came to him, and he understood he was sick and what his illness involved.  A series of silly thoughts, words, and acts came to him as well, causing his whole body to convulse. 

"That's it, of course, thank God!  That's it!"  he whispered and then once again fell asleep.

The open window with the iron bars looked out upon a small back alley between some large buildings and a stone fence.  No one ever ventured into that back alley, and it was thickly overgrown with some shrubs and lilac blooming gloriously at that time of the year ... Behind the bushes and directly across from the window a high fence shimmered in the darkness; behind it stared the elevated treetops of the great garden, translucent and flowing in the moonlight.  On the right a white building shot towards the sky – the hospital – with its windows and iron bars illuminated from within; on the left was the blank white, moonlit wall of the morgue.  The moonlight trickled through the bars of the window into the room and onto the floor, and lit part of the bed and the pale, tortured face of the patient and his closed eyes.  Now there was nothing mad about him.  There was only the heavy, dreamless sleep of the tortured, without the slightest movement and without almost any breathing.  For a few moments he woke up in full possession of his memories, as if he were healthy, but in the morning he rose again from his bed in his prior state of madness. 

III.

"How are you feeling?"  the doctor asked him the next day.

The patient was still under the covers and newly awake.

"Great!" he replied.  Then he jumped up, put on his shoes and wrapped his robe around himself.  "Excellent!  There's just one thing – this here!"

He pointed to the nape of his neck.

"I can't turn my neck without pain.  But that's alright.  Everything's fine once you get it – and I get it."

"Do you know where you are?"

"Of course I do, doctor, I'm in an insane asylum!  But you see, if you get it, nothing else really matters at all.  Really nothing."

The doctor looked him straight in the eye.  His handsome, well-groomed face with his arrogantly combed little golden beard and his calm blue eyes staring through gold glasses was unmoving and impenetrable.  He was observing.

"Why do you keep looking at me?  You will never peer into my soul,"  the patient went on, "but I can clearly peer into yours!  Why do you do bad things?  Why have you gathered this band of unfortunates and kept them here?  But I care not: I understand everything and am serene; but they?  What purpose do these tortures serve?  He who has understood that there exists a great and common idea in his soul cares little about where he lives or what he feels.  Or even whether or not he lives ... Do you see?"   

"Perhaps," the doctor replied, sitting down in the chair in the corner of the room so that he could watch the patient, who was pacing quickly from corner to corner, slapping down his enormous horse leather shoes and waving the flaps of his robe in wide red stripes and bright colors.  The doctor was accompanied by the medical assistant and the guard, both of whom were still standing at attention in the doorway.

"And I have it!" the patient exclaimed.  "And when I found it, I felt like I had been reborn.  My feelings became sharper, my brain was working like never before.  What once I  would achieve through a long road of deductions and guesses, I now recognized intuitively.  I really did attain what has been worked out by philosophy.  Within me I endure great ideas that say that space and time are merely fictions.  I live in all centuries.  I live without space, everywhere and nowhere, as one wishes.  And for that reason I don't care whether you keep me here or release me, whether I am free or bound.  I noticed here others like me.  But for the rest of them such a position is horrible.  Why don't you free them?  Who needs ..."

"You said," the doctor interrupted, "that you live beyond space and time.  Nevertheless, would you not concede that you and I are in this room now –" the doctor took out his watch, "on May 6, 18*** at 10:30?  What do you think about that?"

"Nothing.  I don't care where I will be or how long I will live.  If I don't care, does that mean that I am always and everywhere?"

The doctor smirked.

"Odd logic," he said, getting up.  "Perhaps you're right.  Goodbye.  Would you like a cigar?"

"Thank you."  He stopped, took the cigar, and nervously bit off the end.  "This helps me think," he said.  "This world, this microcosm.  On one end you have alkalis, on the other acids ... Such balance in a world in which opposite beginnings neutralize one another.  Farewell, doctor!"

The doctor moved away.  Most of the patients were waiting for him leaning out of their bunks.  No authorities would ever demand such honor from their subordinates as our doctor-psychiatrist asked of his madmen.  

Left alone, the patient continued pacing sporadically from one corner of the room to another.  They brought him tea.  Without sitting down, he downed a large mug in two gulps and ate a large piece of white bread in what seemed like a split-second.  Then he left the room and for several hours, without stopping at all, he walked with his fast and heavy gait from one end of the building to another.  The day was rainy and the patients were not let out into the garden.  When he began looking for the new patient, the medical assistant was directed to the end of the corridor.  He stood there, his face pressed to the glass of the glass garden door, staring at the flower.  His attention was drawn to its extraordinarily bright scarlet color, one of the types of poppy.

"Please weigh yourself," said the medical assistant touching him on the shoulder.

And when the patient turned towards him, the medical assistant almost recoiled in fear: what wild malice and hatred burned in those mad eyes!  Once he saw the medical assistant, he immediately changed his expression and obediently followed him, not saying a single word as if he were immersed in deep contemplation.  They went on into the doctor's office.  The patient stepped onto a platform of smaller, decimal weights; the medical assistant weighing him entered one hundred nine pounds in his log book next to the patient's name.  The next day it was one hundred seven, and on the third day, one hundred six.

"If this keeps up, he won't survive," said the doctor and ordered him to be fed in the best ways possible.  But despite this order and the patient's unusual appetite, he was getting thinner every day, and every day the medical assistant would enter an ever lower weight in his log book.  He barely slept at night and spent the day in uninterrupted movement. 

Poor Things

Whatever they claim to be doing, those who study economics are involved in the worship of money.  True enough, a select few wish to gain a better understanding of market mechanisms in order to help those who cannot help themselves (a subject broached earlier on these pages).  Yet the majority will more or less admit to being convinced of money's principal weight in the matters of man: everything can be understood as having a monetary value, as bearing a sum, as a credit or debit.  The most egregious offender is the aphorism time is money – as if the most precious thing in the universe could be equated with the basest.  Such an error is not made, however, in this fine book. 

The premise will be familiar not only to students of literature: the pursuit of earthly immortality, a recurring topos in the work of this writer, whose daughter produced yet another work involving eternal life, and who himself inspires the name of one of our novel's protagonists.  These actors are the narrator, Archibald McCandless, a bastard son and medical doctor, and his brilliant colleague, Godwin Baxter, also a bastard son – but of the most famous doctor in Scotland.  Their vocational prowess notwithstanding, the two men have one thing in common: they are miserably, horribly alone.  At least Baxter has an opinion on how to better their lives and those of others:

'If medical practitioners wanted to save lives,' said Baxter, 'instead of making money out of them, they would unite to prevent diseases, not work separately to cure them.  The cause of most illness has been known since at least the sixth century before Christ, when the Greeks made a goddess of Hygiene.  Sunlight, cleanliness, and exercise, McCandless!  Fresh air, pure water, a good diet and clean roomy houses for everyone, and a total government ban on all work which poisons and prevents these things.'

These ideas are neither original nor morally unjustified; they are, in few words, the essence of socialized medicine and the hardly novel concept that health care should not be a profit-generating industry.   There are political debates intrinsic to the works of Gray that are unavoidable but, importantly, they are not regrettable.  His works may be manifestoes, but they are manifestoes of the human conscience.  Is it right that we, the privileged we, have so much while so many have so little, while millions starve and ache and bleed, often in the factories that cater to our basic material needs?  Oh, this does indeed sound like a parable, especially when it comes to a young woman who shall be called Bella Baxter.

I spoil nothing of the plot nor its curious resolution in stating that Bella Baxter is a fiction.  That is to say, she is a Frankenstein's monster in the guise of a lovely young lady of about twenty-five with a Mancunian accent and good French.  She arrives at Baxter's clinic in pieces or a suicide, it is never belabored until much later in our story, as well as thirty-six weeks pregnant.  There then occurs a macabre experiment the likes of which we may see in our lifetime but whose result could only develop under the nebulous rubric of science fiction, and the result is both Bella and the existence Bella kept within her, cloven from the world at large.  She cannot speak or write or read like a normal adult because she is practically the farthest thing from a normal adult.  She gazes in admiration upon her maker, Godwin, whom she calls God, and his assistant McCandless, who will become Candles or just a solitary Candle, as well as her betrothed.  A God, a Candle and a Beauty – these are our lovers, our players and the manufacturers of a triangle that ends as all triangles do, in three disparate, unconnected points.  The triangle becomes a trapezoid with the appearance of someone we cannot trust, a rakish attorney by the name of Duncan Wedderburn, and despite her engagement to Candles and her rapidly improving speech and abilities, she elects to elope with Wedderburn so that they may wed and burn passionately every night and day.  Wedderburn writes a fantastic letter to Baxter that McCandless only hears read aloud.  Bella then sends another letter that clarifies their honeymoon around Europe, at which point something of Bella's past returns, something that she might have always known she had – and we will end our exposition right there.      

Gray has an obvious agenda to push, but the wheels of his handcart do not squeak.  Instead we witness the slow emergence of a fable of titanic proportions, an open window to a Victorian quilt of medicine, morality and questions that may be more easily tackled in retrospect.  If Poor Things suffers from one weakness, it is doubtless its reliance on the already-happened, the verifiable facts, the insertion of historical figures (such as this French pathologist).  A collection of notes by another Alasdair Gray, the harmless Scottish writer who happened to edit this single remaining copy of some old doctor's memoirs, serves more to distract than instruct, and the effect of the closing sequence may leave the odd reader a tad disappointed if perhaps not surprised.  Bella is the centerpiece and the metronome of the tale, which goes and thinks only as fast as she can.  How strange then to consider her past life, her life before God and Candles, a life more ordinary than it first appeared to her and to her father:

'You adored him – worshipped him,' cried her father, 'you had to love him!  He was a national hero and cousin of the Earl of Harewood.  Besides, you were twenty-four years old and he was the only man apart from me you had been allowed to meet.  You were the happiest woman in the world on your wedding-day.  I hired and decorated the entire Manchester Free Trade Hall for the reception and banquet, and the Cathedral choir sang the Hallelujah chorus.'

Who is the subject of her father's diatribe?  That may require some reading.  Thankfully, Gray tells a story the way some people eat, by savoring the best parts and not making too much of a mess.  One wishes the same were true of the vast majority of our poor and miserable species. 

La Double Vie de Véronique

Students of literature will readily admit that the theme of the double has been given, to put it mildly, its fair share of stage time.  I will spare you the dull modern interpretations of such a phenomenon because they invariably reflect their proponents' neuroses; what we can say is that the double has allowed writers to explore different realities for their characters without resorting to much-maligned 'dream' passages.  A more analytically productive approach, and one that covers more ground than merely the last century, is to consider the advantages and disadvantages of bilocation.  Being in two places at once may sound dandy to a child who wishes to play truant while simultaneously sitting at the back of a boring class, but with such a proposal comes dual responsibility (a topos taken to an extreme in this book reviewed earlier).  Another well-worn aphorism is that life offers us lucky souls a plethora of opportunities, the majority of which we must naturally forsake, otherwise we would not do anything at all.  The third possibility involves people who are and are not the same person – what we have called identical twins but which in the future could entail genetic replicas of the same being – often bestowed with the title "separated at birth."  Yes, the subject sounds quite hokey.  Nevertheless, there are moments in existence where we sense that our steps are not uniquely our own, where another path seems to parallel ours with fatidic residue.  A curious take on this sensation forms the core of this much-acclaimed film.

We begin in newly non-Communist Poland with Weronika (Irène Jacob), a young singer whose astral voice will haunt the whole film.  Her life is a plain but good one: choral practice, chats with her aunt, and in between, a blossoming love affair with a fellow called Antek.  Young, unkempt, and unremarkable apart from his motor scooter, Antek is only attractive to women of certain inexperience.  He looks at Weronika – a gifted and sensitive woman who is not hard on the eyes – like someone disappointed that she could have a life of her own.   Weronika is beautiful and has slept with him gladly, and those are the only two facts about her that matter.  Interspersed with vignettes showcasing her talent, Weronika is seen clutching her chest in agony and since she is only twenty-five or so, an explanation must be forthcoming.  We get it from her aunt: "Everyone in our family died while in good health; my mother, your mother.  It's about my will"; the subject, obviously one discussed regularly in their house, is taken no further.  Weronika makes a few mysterious comments about "feeling like [she's] not alone in the world," wins a singing competition in music-obsessed Poland despite her relatively modest credentials, and on the evening of her marquee performance, in front of hundreds and under the watchful eye of the old maestro who plucked her from among many other candidates, she starts to feel dizzy.  The solemnity that precedes her solo tells us that what we are hearing is the voice of an angel and also a prophecy.  Then something very strange happens: the other singer who had been passed over for Weronika looks to her left.  The look is voluptuous and evil and never explained.  Is she actually looking at Weronika, who is standing to her left but off-screen, or to someone else, to what lurks in the sinister shadows?  Soon thereafter Weronika collapses to the floor, and before she is pronounced dead we see the camera hover momentarily above the crowd.  It does not take much imagination to think that her spirit has left her body; where it goes, however, may or may not comprise the latter two-thirds of the film.

I have omitted one important detail: before her performance, Weronika wanders down to one of the prominent squares in this old city.  Here riot police abound against the protests of youth (the specter of Communism, as evidenced by the hauling away of a massive Lenin bust at the beginning of the film, has yet to be exorcised) and Weronika spots a tour bus of foreigners still inebriated by the fall of the Wall and eager to snap pictures of any type of manifestation of civil liberties.  Yet on that bus she sees something she cannot quite believe: a young woman who looks exactly like she does.  In many cultures the sight of your Doppelgänger means that death is near, and we are overcome with ill ease at what may take place.  That scene will resurface in part as the film draws to a close and the political undertone of such a juxtaposition is clear enough, but the artistic one is far superior.  What Weronika sees is an alternative to her own existence, and if the rest of the film drags a bit, it is in part because of the swiftness of its first third. The dynamic arrangement of Weronika's life, her seemingly unlimited potential, her unexpected demise, all this contrasts the slow labyrinth in which the girl she saw on the bus, a Frenchwoman called Véronique (also Jacob) finds herself.  

Véronique is Weronika's foil: while the latter is a virtuoso, the former teaches music to children.  She too feels that something is amiss in her life, and when Weronika dies, she mourns against her will and reason.  Her boyfriend is pretty and feminine, the exact opposite of Antek, but she will find someone else in one of the more unlikely nooks of contemporary existence: a puppet show.  In a wonderful scene destined ultimately for children, we see an armless hand move across a magic box.  This hand belongs to the puppeteer who will enthrall Véronique because he can make lifeless dolls move like human beings, dance just like ballerinas, and for a few brief moments we are manipulated by his movements into thinking that what we are watching is automotive.  At length an old woman puppet appears and Véronique notices, in the reflection of a mirror on the side of the stage, the ecstasy of the manipulator as if she had seen the face of God himself.  The puppet is shrouded in white and rises again from the earth to music that sounds eerily like the arias that Weronika had mastered, becomes a butterfly, spreads her wings and then the eyes of Véronique and the Creator (Philippe Volter) finally meet. 

The true motives of the Creator, who goes by Alexandre Fabbri, will not be revealed here, but you may be reminded of a similar structure to another Kieślowski film starring Jacob; Preisner's score will also sound very familiar to Kieślowski connoisseurs.  But a little old lady stopping to regather her bags who rebuffs Véronique's offer for help may be the finest touch of all.  Old people want to rekindle memories not be reminded of their frailness.  And Véronique's vision of the old woman puppet becoming a butterfly demonstrates her own mortality and the cycle of rebirth in which we think we feel that we have been – or still are – someone else.  In Greek, we recall, butterfly and soul are both psyche, so should we really be that surprised at this double existence or are they but two of many Véroniques hovering about?  We'll let our Creator and puppeteer answer that.

Under the Pyramids

When I first encountered the name of this author in the context of this film, I quite logically assumed it to be a pseudonym; I would marvel at one of literature's finest aptronyms only much later.  And while Re-animator horrified me as a child, I did not approach Lovecraft for many years for the simple reason that he was always recommended to me by the oddest among my classmates.  His creations appeared to inhabit the same escapist realm as the machinations of endless role-playing games and works of high fantasy, epitomized by the writings of this famous author.  Now I never played Dungeons and Dragons and other such time-gobblers, nor could I really read much Tolkien without drifting off in inattention.  But Lovecraft has gained in appeal, as in the terrible weirdness of this story. 

Our narrator is alleged to be none other than this renowned illusionist, which will explain presently the odd course of events.  Seeking a respite from his fame, Houdini and his wife travel to Egypt before the discovery of this tomb, with the mystery surrounding its ancient secrets at its hoopla's height.  Equally secret and equally publicized was Houdini's identity, which he takes pains to conceal until at length a mediocre magician evokes the perfectionist in the master and prods him to reveal his skills.  This proves to be a fateful error of pride.  Houdini finds a tour guide in "a shaven, peculiarly hollow-voiced, and relatively cleanly fellow who looked like a Pharaoh, called himself 'Adbul Reis el Drogman,' [and] appeared to have much power over others of his kind."  Abdul Reis takes the foreigners on a broad tour of Egypt's sacred sites, and the descriptions regale themselves on lush details apparently only gleaned from academic and travel books – a most incredible feat of literary imagination.  He glimpses the Libyan desert, thinks himself again in "the extinct capital Memphis," and contemplates what had been erased from the countenance of the most famous of all monoliths and replaced four thousand five hundred years ago by King Khephren.  And it is in this last monument that Houdini senses an implacable power:

Presently we descended toward the Sphinx, and sat silent beneath the spell of those terrible unseeing eyes.  On the vast stone breast we faintly discerned the emblem of Re-Harakhte, for whose image the Sphinx was mistaken in a late dynasty; and though sand covered the tablet between the great paws, we recalled what Thutmosis IV inscribed thereon, and the dream he had when a prince.  It was then that the smile of the Sphinx vaguely displeased us, and made us wonder about the legends of subterranean passages beneath the monstrous creature, leading down, down, to depths none might dare hint at – depths connected with mysteries older than the dynastic Egypt we excavate, and having a sinister relation to the persistence of abnormal, animal-headed gods in the ancient Nilotic pantheon.  Then, too, it was I who asked myself an idle question whose hideous significance was not to appear for many an hour.

Combine these observations with Houdini's anxiety regarding what a German team of archaeologists might be hiding from public consumption, "a certain well in a transverse gallery where statues of the Pharaoh were found in curious juxtaposition to the statues of baboons," and you have what is plainly known as a conundrum, and what others may view as a conspiracy.  A conspiracy of what, precisely?  Conspiracy is hardly the right term; rather, it is the perception which has crossed far greater minds than Houdini's that the original civilizations may have worshipped things not altogether benevolent to the affairs of man.  These thoughts are safely stowed away by nightfall as the Houdinis retreat to their hotel.  At which point, of course, the illusionist begins another adventure.

A militant anti-spiritualist and among the least susceptible to the wiles of mediums and necromancers, Houdini the historical figure might never have been affected by the arcana of Ancient Egypt in the way his ghostwritten counterpart suffers and muses.  So when Lovecraft's Houdini decides to reenter the night in the company of the unscrupulous Abdul Reis – Arabic for "slave of the leader" – the latter gets into a scuffle whose only resolution turns out to be a fistfight on the raised mesa of the Great Pyramid.  From there we proceed to an inevitability that someone like Houdini would surely have foreseen, and what happens could be deemed a nightmare, although it is depicted in colors and sounds unlike what we might encounter in the peaceful darkness of sleep:

From some still lower chasm in earth's bowels were proceeding certain sounds, measured and definite, and like nothing I had ever heard before.  That they were very ancient and distinctly ceremonial, I felt almost intuitively; and much reading in Egyptology led me to associate them with the flute, the sambuke, the sistrum, and the tympanum.  In their rhythmic piping, droning, rattling, and beating, I felt an element of terror beyond all the known terrors of earth – a terror peculiarly dissociated from personal fear, and taking the form of a sort of objective pity for our planet, that it should hold within its depths such horrors as must lie beyond these aegipanic cacophonies.  The sounds increased in volume, and I felt that they were approaching.  Then – and may all the gods of all pantheons unite to keep the likes from my ears again – I began to hear, faintly and far off, the morbid and millennial tramping of the marching things.

Passages like these challenge the claims – buttressed by statements from Lovecraft himself, a notorious obfuscator – that our author did not believe in anything beyond himself, but let us not digress.  The fictional Houdini by dint of his reputation suddenly endures a test that the historical Houdini might not have survived, and we gain an impression of an ending that will not satisfy the reader (I must admit I guessed that we would wake up on a stage in one of Houdini's European parlors).  Lovecraft's prose is worthy of Houdini's legerdemain, and we would do well to accept that some tricks are not available for mass explanation.  Nor should we forget just how far the Sphinx's feet extend.        

The Thin Blue Line

While watching this film recently, I had the distinct impression that certain moments had been part of an earlier existence.  Perhaps it was Randall Adams’s sidelong look, a look of unswerving doubt; perhaps it was the gruff humbug muttered by one local official after another.  Logic would dictate that I must have seen The Thin Blue Line on cable some dark and stormy night many years ago, but logic also megaphones that the universe created itself out of absolutely nothing.  Some more perspicacious minds might suggest that it is the film’s seminal value that renders it familiar, although there have been many documentaries about true crime before and since.  What then sets it apart?  Perhaps that Adams is now a free man, and according to the data presented, he should never have been anything else.

Thanksgiving, 1976: a drifter by the name of Randall Adams moves to Dallas from some other part of Texas and gets hired in a workman job not fully described until later on.  He reminds the viewer that these were hard times and getting employed that easily had to be considered nothing less than a good omen.  Adams is staying with his brother, who will provide the police with an unheeded alibi, but is otherwise alone in the world.  For that reason – no other implication is made although we may guess what that implication might be – he decides Sunday morning of that fateful holiday weekend to hitch a ride with a sixteen-year-old runaway called David Harris.  Even if we are occasionally shown still pictures of both men from that year, there is little in the way of suspicion; that is to say, we cannot look at younger versions of Adams and Harris and foretell their actions, much less their fates.  It is the older Adams – gone is the bushy hair and beard, as well as the naïve layer humidifying his features – we behold, a middle-aged man who, while not particularly well-educated, has a special talent for conveying a very blunt point.  But the key to the film lies in the contemporary Harris, the Harris rotting still shy of his thirtieth birthday on death row in a Texas federal prison (Harris was executed in 2004 for an unrelated murder).  The old adage about book covers should not impede observation: one cannot escape the impression that Harris, a man who cannot make eye contact, who smiles at small, cruel details of his past, who in his words has no respect for anyone including his own person, is of a certain bent that does not cater to societal structure.  We can also assume that he has always made that impression, and that no prosecutor in his right mind would dare use David Harris’s testimony as the basis of a murder charge.  Yet in the case of Randall Adams that is precisely what took place.

And not just murder.  The impetuous slaying of Robert Wood, a police officer who was approaching a blue Mercury Comet at midnight on Sunday, November 28, 1976 with the sole intention of informing its passengers that the car’s lights were not on.  In what we have come to call a reenactment or dramatization (also made famous on this eighties program), the murder is shown maybe forty times throughout the film from at least a dozen different angles.  At the time the officer’s partner, “one of the first women to serve on the Dallas police force,” was rumored to be sitting in the car sipping a milkshake instead of doing what was procedure (“in a two-person unit, when one person approaches the car, the other comes up the right rear so that they can watch everything that's going on in the car”).  The female officer is ultimately exculpated of any wrongdoing by internal affairs, yet not before her story has changed.  Originally she had stated that there had been “only one person in the car,” with “longer hair,” a “fur-lined collar” – an almost uncanny detailing of one of the photographs extant of a teenaged David Harris.   By the time she made it to Adams’s murder trial, however, some other person “with bushy hair” had gotten behind the wheel.  Such obvious perjuries are interspersed with incomplete vertical blurbs from the papers: “Robert Wood, officer killed Sunday”; "Wood .... 12:30 am .... stopped for"; "driver's window .... 'Oh my gosh' .... firing"; "with the .... no description .... could not be .... assailant was”;  "November 29, 1976” – a coy modern poem.  We meet a host of Dallas law enforcement officials, all of whom seem to believe that Randall Adams, a man with no priors, no history of violence, and the very plausible alibi of having spent the night at his brother’s, was a cold-blooded murderer who “sensed no remorse for what he had done.”  We also listen to three “witnesses”: a salesman who that night had been out cheating on his wife, driven by the two parked cars, and not seen anything out of ordinary; and a mixed-race couple who turned out to be unemployed drug abusers with checkered pasts embroiled in a domestic dispute and willing to say anything to make a fast buck.  This includes, of course, pointing at Randall Adams in the dock and stating without a shred of hesitation that they saw him pull the trigger.

The title of our film is the invention of Douglas Mulder, the Dallas prosecutor, as a twist on a line from this poem and “the only thing between us and anarchy.”  The same prosecutor, mind you, who prided himself on getting death sentence convictions not because fewer scumbags roamed the streets of Dallas, but because such justice was his path to becoming a demiurge of his own realm (Mulder does not appear on camera, perhaps because he quickly understood that the director was not planning a biopic).  But the most telling statement in The Thin Blue Line comes from one of the Dallas policemen.  He recalls the Thanksgiving Sunday murder with the following observation: “It was getting awfully close to Christmas.  We had never really gone that long in Dallas without clearing the murder of a police officer.  We'd had several killed, but we'd cleared them pretty quick.”  You may also have heard of Mulder’s pet psychiatrist in death penalty trials who invariably swore that, if released, the accused would continue to kill and destroy.   His methods – laughable even for the puerile circus that is psychiatry – include the copying of shapes and explanation of idioms such as “a rolling stone gathers no moss,” and “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”  Yet he forgets the most important catchphrase of all, as uttered by Harris with one of his sinister, lazy-eyed grins, “criminals always lie.”  I suppose that lying is always easier than facing a demon or ten.