Movie Catalog, Rick Moody's intro
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Yes, it's the summer of 1999, last of this particular
thousand years, and the Japanese nation has established
a special island on which to house all its retired film
stars: there's Godzilla, over in a special herbivorous
section of the island where he can get at the tops of
the taller shrubs and trees without having to stoop;
everything in Godzilla's section is made of
flame-retardant synthetics, and when he becomes irascible and
levels his death ray upon the topography the damage can
be contained and actually used to promote new deciduous
undergrowth; Rodin -- you remember, a sort of modified
pterodactyl -- has a helipad on which he can land after
one of his evening cruises over the island to
obliterate freestanding Doric columns that are
periodically re-erected for this purpose, and here's
Mothra, summoned from a larval underground cave area by
a pair of twelve-inch high pipsqueaky Geishas, Mothra,
that muslin and canvas caterpillar, now able to forage
in a system of former mine shafts. And so forth. Yet a
conspiracy of aliens from outer space has seized
control of this island of retired Japanese film stars,
and is using some really cheap laser or phaser type
popguns to broadcast their fiendish conspiracy upon the
land; wait, that's not all, that's just the beginning,
it's the summer of 1999, and a hydraulically-powered,
Civil War era arachnid is being used to overturn the
victories of the Battle of Northern Aggression, laying
waste to innocent civilians in Monument Valley as
though innocent civilians might really inhabit Monument
Valley, or an erotically-deprived husband has stumbled
upon a Gnostic mystery cult on Long Island where masked
men of wealth and power listen to Tibetan overtone
singing while models in thongs perambulate, or young
filmmakers on a low budget are getting ripple-sliced by
a coven of witches. And so forth. It's the summer of
1999 and a film has made back its investment without
opening at all, so that if this film sells one ticket
it has created an American profit: Quiet on the set!
What would American film be, if he were a character,
walking, disconsolately, upon the steppe in a sharkskin
suit and power tie, what would American film be like,
and how would he or she talk, with what idiom, with
what soothing tones, with what demographically-pitched
amalgam of voices and tastes; would he have a little
male pattern baldness and an excessive tan that he has
procured at a prohibitive cost from a tanning salon the
Valley, would he have a great difficulty staying
interested in a conversation after its initial
pleasantries are exhausted, and might he not like to
bore into the skulls of people, I mean, literally,
after dark, in certain deserted but affluent sections
of bicoastal pleasure centers, might he bore into the
skulls of moviegoers with a small, battery-powered hand
drill that comes in an leather overnight case with his
ergonomically-designed cellular telephone, might he tap
off a bit of the pink lemonade in which the human brain
is packed, after breaking through the membrane that
keeps this august jelly in its housing; there's a fair
amount of dust generated in the process; a little bit
of gelatinous gunk tends to be scattered about, as when
you forget, initially, to put the top on the blender,
but he's willing to clean up some of the mess, with
shredded copies of unpublished manuscripts and
unoptioned screenplays that he piles in the trunk of
his Corvette for this purpose; he's willing to lick the
drill bit, with the sort of delight that a child might
clean up after cake preparations have been completed;
and this all reminds me of The Crawling Eye, certainly
one of my personal favorites, in which the actor from
F Troop, Sarge, I think, is called in among a cadre of
guilty scientists in Switzerland to deal with a strange
and harrowing Alpine plague, namely, giant Volkswagon-sized
eyeballs, orbs with tentacles, really, who have
been ensnaring people, squeezing the life out of them,
and with what motivation, because there is nothing good
to watch? What would the crawling eyes watch if they
could watch? At the climax of the film, trapped on the
Swiss mountainside at the end of a mountain tramway,
Sarge struggles to hack off the limbs of the several
crawling orbs with a standard issue fireman's axe, thus
to save the world from future peril, and so forth; or
there was the creature from the black lagoon, another
favorite, whose menace only meagerly exceeded the
menace of your quotidian canal gator, really, let's be
honest here, what of the Cannibalistic Humanoid
Underground Dwellers, or the natural pestilence
subgenre, including The Birds, The Frogs, Anaconda, and
their kind; the best most frightening films
accomplished by the retired actors on the island of
lost monster movies involved transformation, not just
wildlife in profusion or extremely large animals (like
that one, the title escapes me now, with the extremely
large crab and the extremely large chicken, I mean what
damage would the extremely large chicken inflict on
western civilization, would she lift up succulent young
high school students into her beak and then regurgitate
their adolescent frames into the mouths of her
extremely large hatchlings?); no, transformation, as
in, of course, the last moment of The Fly, when the
poor mad scientist, having stumbling around the set
with his ridiculous fly head on, has now departed this
world, and yet there is a large stylized spider web
nearby, where his double, the tiny little house fly
with the human scientist's head, is entrapped, crying
out, unforgettably, Help me! Help me! A snippet,
origins unknown, from a monster movie of my childhood:
a village in flames, at the border of some fiendish
waterway (also in flames), guys bobbing at the surface
of the water, crying out for help; each time one of
their heads dips under the surface, their
transformation into monstrosity begins; when they bob
up again, they become some thing, and then down under
the surface and again in rising to the top, further
transformation, until there is nothing human left of
them, yet some flickering vestigial remembrance of
their mortality, a sense of dignity expunged, in the
thing they have become, just like in The Manster,
wherein the protagonist is given some kind of
vaccination, okay, I don't remember the details
exactly, but they're unimportant, he goes home, he's
trying to have a nice night in his apartment, and he
feels a searing pain in his shoulder, rips aside the
collar of his shirt, and there's a oblique angle in
closeup of the human eye that has suddenly grown into
his shoulder, right between shoulder blade and neck,
and it's blinking, wheeling this way and that as if
trying to get comfortable with its contact lens, and if
that weren't enough, he's out on a date with a woman,
later, and he notices his left hand has begun to turn
into some kind of claw, and not long after he grows a
second head, very unattractive, a dwarf head, with
limited vocabulary, condemned to walk the streets alone
with this homunculus, what's with all these
transformations anyhow, this horror that is always
mapped on limbs and sinews, is it the horror of an
inmost bestiality? Well, there are engulfment
sequences, too, like the beginning of The Blob, when
the guy who looks sort of like Slim Pickens is out
strolling in the woods, checking his traps to see if he
has caught any ermine, or trying to shut down the still
before the authorities arrive, he sees some of this red
Jell-O oozing nearby from the flying saucer that has
just plummeted out of the sky, and he thinks, Damn,
what is that Jell-O doing there, and he grabs a stick
and he probes at it, another lesson from the island of
retired Japanese film stars, Never probe the remains of
a flying saucer crash with a stick, and the Jell-O
immediately travels up the stick and onto the arm of
the Slim Pickens lookalike, moves pretty fast for
Jell-O, and he would not have done so badly, Slim -- encased
like bug amber by the fiendish Jell-O -- had he not been
out alone checking the still, up to no good, certainly,
it's not that some horrible flesh-eating streptococcus
just exists and there's very little that can be done
about it, no, the monster movie is retributive and
dignity and growth can only come after the blob is
airdropped over the arctic, unless, in the case of
Godzilla, this story is about the inability of
international cinema to display the concealed
reproductive apparatus of men, because that's
different; there are innumerable other examples, of
course, teenage werewolves lurching into puberty,
living dead and their consumer rampages, pod people
from the various interpretations of Invasion of the
Body Snatchers, vampires, mummies, poltergeists; I was
a boy in summer and I couldn't be bothered to mow the
lawn, or do my homework or talk to my mother or my
brother, instead I was encamped in front of the
television with that bowl of popcorn and a soda, to
make a liaison, again, with the blood-famished spectre
of American Film, in black cape, my familiar, he seizes
upon my night visions and my daydreams and confines
them to his three-plot structure and his studio system
and his galaxy of stars; I am again separated from my
cash; it's summer, the heat is pestilential, in
Tennessee or Alabama or Alaska or Iowa, all across the
nation, the kids are lining up in front of the downtown
theater to see the new one with the ghosts and the
special effects, long as it's cool, we just want to
pass these two hours in the highest possible state of
cool, I have goosebumps, get me some Jujyfruits.
Please.