Reckless Vows Near Ancient Ears

A few years ago, Barnes and Noble released a collection of stories that H.P. Lovecraft recommended in a famous essay on horror literature. I've been slowly making my way through the collection, mostly in Octobers, and to-day I read "The Venus of Ille", a nice, subtle tale of the supernatural from 1837 by Prosper Merimee. An aristocratic, Parisian archaeologist serves as narrator as he visits a remote village where a local, influential landowner has excavated a peculiar statue of Venus.

It's easy to see the story's influence on Lovecraft from the presence of an object that affects the viewer in profound ways through its shape alone.

But the expression of demoniac irony was perhaps increased by the contrast of the bright silver eyes with the dusky green hue which time had given to the statue. The shining eyes produced a sort of life. I remembered what my guide had said, that those who looked at her were forced to lower their eyes. It was almost true, and I could not prevent a movement of anger to myself when I felt ill at ease before this bronze figure.

The characters have an almost comic vivacity you won't find in Lovecraft, though. The man who discovered the statue is a gregarious fellow who happily invites the narrator to the wedding between his son and a girl who, the narrator infers, is forced into the marriage because of financial woes. The son, Alphonse, proudly shows the narrator the ring he intends to give his bride which the narrator finds gaudy and vulgar. After the wedding there's an extraordinary paragraph where the narrator reflects on what he sees as a horrible, unjust marriage of convenience.

All the scenes of the day passed through my mind. I thought of the young girl, so pure and lovely, abandoned to a drunken brute. What an odious thing a marriage of convenience is! A mayor dons a tri-colored scarf, a priest a stole, and then the most virtuous girl in the world is delivered over to the Minotaur! What can two people who do not love each other find to say at a moment, which two lovers would buy at the price of their lives? Can a woman ever love a man whom she has once seen coarse? First impressions are never effaced, and I am sure M. Alphonse will deserve to be hated.

This bit of psychological insight renders the horrific deed apparently perpetrated by the statue in a provoking light. The troubling juxtaposition between the narrator's thoughts and the terrible event compels the reader either to interpret a connexion or attempt to avoid seeing a connexion. Merimee leaves it unclear. More prominent is the fact that Alphonse had placed that gaudy ring on the statue's finger during a tennis match. Is this the reason for the statue's wrath? Are the two possible motives more related than they seem at first? In the actions taken by the statue there's a wonderful sense of how things may be connected in ways that can't be articulated by human language. It adds to the sense of this statue being a goddess.

Twitter Sonnet #1288

Colliding moons were ripples round the pond.
Another night repeats the muse's song.
In rhyming ode the marvel proves he's fond.
A burning lake affixed the devil throng.
A climbing foot replaced the inch's nose.
A hand for hand adorns the finger help.
A model shows the glue to hold a pose.
A priceless weed was really less than kelp.
Contagious pages spiked the wine and cheese.
Allowance granted late absorbs the cost.
Across the chocolate lake were coffee seas.
In sugar spray's a single sprinkle tossed.
A copper marriage fills the final bed.
A bronze conception woke the nervous dead.

Ghosts of the Bog

Another lovely tale of an ancient, inherited European estate by HP Lovecraft is "The Moon Bog". A very short story written for Saint Patrick's Day, this one is about a man named Denys Barry who inherits an estate in Ireland. Again, the consequences are tragic as contact with the past proves a too strange and horrible experience.

I've been thinking more about the strange conflict between Lovecraft's longing for contact with the past and the horror with which he portrays such contact actually achieved. I don't think this horror is necessarily a comment on the past itself but on the unnatural process of the present coming into contact with the past. Lovecraft uses the phenomenon of ancient bodies discovered in peat bogs to marvellous effect. The improbable preservation of corpses in this way, that nonetheless leaves them hideously altered, certainly stirs the imagination with ideas of the cost of traversing the centuries.

The wide plain, the golden moonlight, the shadowy moving forms, and above all the shrill monotonous piping, produced an effect which almost paralysed me; yet I noted amidst my fear that half of these tireless, mechanical dancers were the labourers whom I had thought asleep, whilst the other half were strange airy beings in white, half indeterminate in nature, but suggesting pale wistful naiads from the haunted fountains of the bog.

At the same time, this description has a strange prettiness to it. I don't remember Lovecraft mentioning naiads anywhere else. Most of the horror in what the narrator beholds can almost be imputed entirely to the narrator himself.

Over the bog was a deluge of flaring light, scarlet and sinister, and pouring from the strange olden ruin on the far islet. The aspect of that ruin I cannot describe—I must have been mad, for it seemed to rise majestic and undecayed, splendid and column-cinctured, the flame-reflecting marble of its entablature piercing the sky like the apex of a temple on a mountain-top.

It's not so much the things described as the fact of the things described, of the incongruity of their presence, that inspires the terror.

Not for the first time, I found myself thinking about Lovecraft's preference for minimal dialogue. The narrator in "Moon Bog" discusses interviewing labourers who experienced bad dreams. Other authors might introduce one labourer and try to paint a picture of his personality to lend a greater sense of credibility. Lovecraft's preference here to keep an academic tone gives a sense of isolation, of someone cornered in the coldness of his own mode of expression. Elsewhere, Lovecraft does invoke colloquial dialogue quite memorably to analyse personality as a specimen of horror, as in "The Picture in the House". That, again, is to show the unnatural quality of a preserved past. I find myself tempted to think there may have been some reflection on himself as someone who longed for the past, that the horror he was portraying was the horror of finding himself so out of step with time in which he lived. I don't think that's something he could have altered even if he wanted to.

Petty Time Theft

Farscape is a show about criminal fugitives in space. We know they're not bad people, but could you be sure if you'd just met them? One episode puts the question in a particularly tricky way to the fugitive crew themselves.

Season Three, Episode Nine: Losing Time

There are two unrelated stories in this episode, one set on Moya and one set aboard Scorpius' (Wayne Pygram) command carrier. Now that he's got the neuro-chip in his hot leather mitt, he's putting the knowledge into practice, experimenting with ways of using it to actually make that wormhole he's always wanted. So far things aren't going so well, as evidenced by a prowler that returns from one of the first attempts at making a wormhole. The fighter craft comes back filled with liquid instead of a pilot.

We've known all this time that Scorpius has mainly wanted the technology for the diabolical purpose of making a weapon. This episode throws some moral ambiguity on that motive by revealing it's part of an arms race with the Scarrans. It turns out the Scarrans believe the Peacekeepers already have a wormhole weapon and this is the only thing keeping an all out war at bay. The episode is obliged to show Scorpius brutally punishing some subordinates to remind us he's a villain.

Right decisions aren't much clearer on Moya where Crichton (Ben Browder) is attacked by some kind of spectral entity. He wakes up to find a pool of his own blood--only to later find it's gone when he tries to show everyone else.

Everyone else includes Jool (Tammy MacIntosh), Chiana (Gigi Edgley), and D'Argo (Anthony Simcoe)--Aeryn, Rygel, and Stark don't appear in the episode because they're still off with Crais and the other Crichton in Talyn. So the show is now split between two ships, two plots, two Crichtons.

As the title suggests, "Losing Time" has a plot element about lost time. Crichton's blood didn't just disappear--like an old fashioned alien abduction, he's lost a period of time without realising it. So's everyone else. But this plot element is resolved quickly enough when it's revealed the spectral entity has been "tasting"--temporarily possessing--members of the crew. Pilot (Lani Tupu) becomes possessed a little more permanently.

There are two of these entities. The one in Pilot claims to be pursuing the other, a criminal, and claims to intend no harm to Moya and her crew. When Crichton is finally able to confront the fugitive, he's told another story, that the fugitive is the innocent victim.

I don't know why it especially occurred to me while watching this episode except that I'm in the middle of moving out of my apartment but it seems to me Farscape is a particularly good show about dealing with change and instability. A lot of action/adventure shows don't spend the kind of time and poetry on just how difficult it can be to deal with change that Farscape does, or the time and poetry on how not all changes are for the better. Sometimes things just get worse and you have to struggle to hold the pieces together, something beautifully illustrated by all those shots of everyone running around Moya trying to keep bulkheads and cables in one piece while sparks are flying everywhere.

This episode has two changes--Chiana has her first premonition at the end of this episode, a power that will have a profound impact on her, and Jool gets a new costume. Obviously the latter is a bit trivial in comparison. It's another skimpy ensemble, which is great, but I kind of miss the excessive absurdity of her first costume. It amuses me to think there's an alien species that's more at ease wearing a huge rigid skirt, corset, and neck brace.

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

This entry is part of a series I'm writing on Farscape for the show's 20th anniversary. My previous reviews can be found here (episodes are in the order intended by the show's creators rather than the broadcast order):

Season One:

Episode 1: Pilot
Episode 2: I, E.T.
Episode 3: Exodus from Genesis
Episode 4: Throne for a Loss
Episode 5: Back and Back and Back to the Future
Episode 6: Thank God It's Friday Again
Episode 7: PK Tech Girl
Episode 8: That Old Black Magic
Episode 9: DNA Mad Scientist
Episode 10: They've Got a Secret
Episode 11: Till the Blood Runs Clear
Episode 12: Rhapsody in Blue
Episode 13: The Flax
Episode 14: Jeremiah Crichton
Episode 15: Durka Returns
Episode 16: A Human Reaction
Episode 17: Through the Looking Glass
Episode 18: A Bug's Life
Episode 19: Nerve
Episode 20: The Hidden Memory
Episode 21: Bone to be Wild
Episode 22: Family Ties

Season Two:

Episode 1: Mind the Baby
Episode 2: Vitas Mortis
Episode 3: Taking the Stone
Episode 4: Crackers Don't Matter
Episode 5: Picture If You Will
Episode 6: The Way We Weren't
Episode 7: Home on the Remains
Episode 8: Dream a Little Dream
Episode 9: Out of Their Minds
Episode 10: My Three Crichtons
Episode 11: Look at the Princess, Part I: A Kiss is But a Kiss
Episode 12: Look at the Princess, Part II: I Do, I Think
Episode 13: Look at the Princess, Part III: The Maltese Crichton
Episode 14: Beware of Dog
Episode 15: Won't Get Fooled Again
Episode 16: The Locket
Episode 17: The Ugly Truth
Episode 18: A Clockwork Nebari
Episode 19: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part I: A Not So Simple Plan
Episode 20: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part II: With Friends Like These . . .
Episode 21: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part III: Plan B
Episode 22: Die Me, Dichotomy

Season Three:

Episode 1: Season of Death
Episode 2: Suns and Lovers
Episode 3: Self-Inflicted Wounds, Part I: Would'a, Could'a, Should'a
Episode 4: Self-Inflicted Wounds, Part II: Wait for the Wheel
Episode 5: . . . Different Destinations
Episode 6: Eat Me
Episode 7: Thanks for Sharing
Episode 8: Green Eyed Monster

Creating Offspring and Parents

Two women claim to be the mother of a little girl named Janie and their battle takes place in dreams and visions in 1976's The Premonition. An intriguingly modest production, this film at first seems content with a pretty straightforward tale of psychic warfare. However, the story has some interesting subtext about the nature of meaning, of the conflict between symbolic and empirical reality.

We're introduced to a couple weird carnival performers--Jude (Richard Lynch) is established doing some kind of cross between ballet and Tai chi. I'm not sure if he's a mime or a clown. He looks really elegant, anyway, and wears a lot of pastels. His villainy is implicitly tied to gender nonconformity but he still comes off kind of cool. His partner is Andrea (Ellen Barber), an intense woman with psychic abilities. She's trying to steal Janie (Danielle Brisebois) from Sheri (Sharon Farrell) and Miles (Edward Bell). She wages a psychic war, causing Sheri to see visions of ice on her mirror and of Andrea herself.

The film takes its time before stating clearly that Sheri and Miles are Janie's adoptive parents and that Andrea is her birth mother. This is part of a general thematic conflict between the idea that reality is fundamentally conceptual and the idea that things exist outside our minds. The film's Van Helsing character, a "parapsychologist" named Dr. Jeena Kinsly (Chitra Neogy), is firmly in the camp of the former argument and tells Miles that reality is created by an unseen clairvoyant network. Intriguingly, the movie again and again undermines this idea, in no small part because Andrea's psychic connexion to Janie seems clearly based on the fact that she's her birth mother.

Sheri can't simply create herself as mother of Janie, she's unable to surpass the physical reality of Andrea having given birth to Janie. Similarly, when a frustrated Andrea kidnaps one of Janie's dolls instead of Janie herself, she's unable to make that doll into Janie, however much she coos over it and rocks it.

The film plays off the anxieties of a foster parent and also plays on the precariousness of matrimony with its suggestions that Miles sees no real reason why he shouldn't cheat on Sheri. He reflexively mentions the babies they'd lost in childbirth as losses Sheri experienced. The film dwells on the cruelty of reality that continually resists our attempts to organise it into some kind of meaning.

The film's cinematography is kind of nicely plain and cold and Andrea looks really striking in a bright red dress against a dull autumn background. The Premonition is available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1287

A thoughtful cop examines fallen cars.
No truer man commands a sheriff's realm.
A bag of cash could hide a man on Mars.
A shopping heist could crack the steely helm.
Deserted moors support potato guns.
Surrounding heath observes the yellow coat.
The silver suited man too swiftly runs.
A dodgy wig completes what action wrote.
A concert draws a flashing crowd of light.
As rolling beds began to drift we slept.
A jacket rain enclosed the arms and fight.
In precious stones the softened keys are kept.
The country food exceeds the beans and bread.
A giant mouse is better seen than read.

Sontaran Fashions on the Heath

Last time I watched The Sontaran Experiment, the Doctor Who serial, it was a pretty lousy copy. Last night I watched the pristine restored version, or as pristine as you can get with something originally recorded on videotape, and was a little amused by how obviously Tom Baker had a stunt double for the final fight scene.

What a bad wig. It's not quite as bad as some of the grey rugs on Pertwee's doubles but it's still pretty obvious.

A double was required because Baker had broken his collarbone during filming. Considering the character of Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter) was originally conceived when an older actor was intended to take the part of the Fourth Doctor so a young man would be around to do fight scenes, I wonder if it wouldn't have been better to rewrite the script to have Harry challenge the Sontaran to single combat. Though it would have been odd for Harry to come up with the idea on his own and unlike the Doctor to pass off the job on someone else.

The short, two part serial was filmed entirely on location on Dartmoor, standing in for London 10,000 years in the future. How pretty it is.

Will ye go, Sarah Jane, and pick wild mountain thyme all among the blooming heather? Or should I say time? It's hard to believe she manages to sneak around at all when the Doctor's captured by some South Africans in space suits when she's wearing all that bright yellow. I do love how her wardrobe assaults the eye, especially when she looks so comfortable.

Obviously the Doctor's a bit stiff in the episode with that neck brace hidden under his scarf. He still cuts an intriguing figure, though. I love how the serial concludes with the trio teleporting out and then the Doctor inexplicably teleporting back in a moment to make a comment. "It should be all right . . . but you never know, quite . . . do you?"

Robert Forster

I was going to write about El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie to-day but then the death of one of the film's stars, Robert Forster, occurred on the day of the film's release, yesterday. El Camino is pretty good but it can't help but be overshadowed by the death of such an incredible actor. His passing calls to my mind Twin Peaks and Jackie Brown, two of the greatest achievements in the history of film, the latter of which due largely to the performances of Forster and Pam Grier.

I didn't appreciate Jackie Brown the first time I saw it. I thought Forster was boring--I thought, sure, he might be a great actor, as everyone said, but he was great at playing a boring guy. I was a dumb teenager. Watching Jackie Brown years later, my least favourite Quentin Tarantino movie became my favourite Quentin Tarantino movie. Forster plays a character with age and wisdom, the kind that can be attained by a perfectly average but remarkably canny fellow. And it's this that makes his moments of vulnerability in the film so effective; his first glimpse of Jackie by which he's spellbound and then their final conversation where he admits his strength isn't enough to carry what she asks. When a young man has these reactions, they're inexperience or foolishness or even innocence. When a man like Forster's character has them, it's like moving a mountain because of all the little ways he built the character before our eyes.

So he was always a welcome sight after that. Even though the idea of continuing Twin Peaks without Michael Ontkean in the role of Sheriff Truman seemed like a bad step, I was okay with it because Robert Forster is such a tremendous presence. He's part of what makes the 2017 series, in part, about age.

He'd worked in television plenty of times and before Twin Peaks; he'd appeared on Breaking Bad in its final season as Ed Galbraith, a man who specialises in giving new lives to criminal fugitives. It's this role he reprises in El Camino.

Written and directed by Vince Gilligan, the movie goes unreservedly for the Spaghetti Western vibe the series evolved into. There's even a duel with lingering closeups. Flashbacks to Jesse Pinkman's (Aaron Paul) imprisonment and torture by a gang of criminals recalls Blondie's torture by Tuco in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and other films of the genre. Gilligan uses this slow, contemplative mode of filmmaking to bring us the thematic conclusion to Jesse's troubled story. The questions Jesse'd come to wrestle with about his guilt are given a bittersweet resolution in which Jesse's attempt to attain a new life certainly doesn't wipe the slate clean. This is of course impossible as Mike (Jonathan Banks) informs him in a flashback at the beginning. Viewers of Better Call Saul know he knows what he's talking about. But Jesse does seem to attain a kind of peace with having changed from ornery boy to a quiet and scarred man.

Forster, along with Banks and Bryan Cranston in a brief cameo, show Jesse his future. Forster's performance in the final scene goes a long way to making that point. Without him, El Camino wouldn't be half the movie it is.

The Thinnest Seaweed

Often the loudest voices in the room are the ones with the least conviction, which is what I think makes 1976's The Witch Who Came from the Sea so interesting. The idea of a woman becoming a serial killer because she was abused as a child isn't in itself an interesting idea but this film presents a woman fiercely defending ideals she herself has no belief in. With an effective and unrestrained lead performance by Millie Perkins, this exploitation film centres on an intriguing character study.

Molly (Perkins) is devoted to her two little nephews and believes part of a good upbringing for the lads is to buttress their faith in heroic male role models. Football players, TV stars, and especially her own deceased father, a sea captain she claims was lost at sea one terrible night before they were born.

The boys' mother, Molly's sister, Cathy (Vanessa Brown), irritates Molly by continually punching holes in the simplistic myths she weaves around their father. Cathy tells the boys that the man is actually buried in a cemetery, not lost at sea, and all but directly says he sexually abused both his daughters. Of course, one might justly wonder if Molly sets up the impossibly idealised stories specifically to provoke Cathy.

Molly's compulsion to craft heroic impressions of men in spite of the past Cathy alludes to is one of the many contradictions that make up her personality. She's known as a saint in the bar where she works as a waitress--a place with a nautical theme, of course. But she's a heavy drinker. She tells the boys she deplores tattoos and then later in the film is seen getting tattooed by the very tattoo artist who made her scream in terror at the very sight of him.

This is Jack Dracula (Stan Ross) and the scene has a broader significance for the whole movie in several ways. Most important is the conversation the two have in which Molly tells him how she made up her name at one point, she wasn't born Molly, and then asks him when and why he made up the name Jack Dracula. And he tells her simply that Jack Dracula is his real name. Molly, who loudly promotes the importance of fantasy, is confounded to meet someone who actually walks the walk. In practice, Molly builds fantasies with the intent to knock them down, ritualistically recreating the experience of a traumatic event undermining her faith in her father. So she seduces men by presenting a front of devotion and then she kills them in ways that generally involve some kind of emasculation, like cutting off their genitals.

One might argue there's nothing supernatural going on in the story, despite the title, except she does manage to break one man's wrist with one hand and also manages to subdue two football players. I would have liked at least one scene of Molly encountering a witch or something. But this is a decent movie as it is. The tragedy of someone who invests so much of her spirit into something she firmly believes is a lie is brutal but all too credible.

The Witch Who Came from the Sea is available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1286

A team of ducks conduct the goose to Greece.
Receptive sections group to scoop the press.
A lasting past pursued the night to peace.
For treaties heat absorbs the ordered guess.
Collected drops became the rain complete.
Assorted eyes converge to make the sight.
Again the pin exhorts the coarse repeat.
The oldest bulb reports the ordered light.
Tomato cars abut the cherry curb.
In reddish rounds the sunny star descends.
Selected wrecks decide to hide a herb.
For now, the tower step in time ascends.
The better said becomes a better day.
With sill a million things we're left to say.

Attack of the Giant Space Metaphor

Series star Ben Browder takes a hand at writing a teleplay for Farscape and does a pretty good job of it. An episode following half the normal cast, now stuck on Talyn, is about a strange journey through the belly of a space beast, all while the spectre of jealousy haunts the fledgling group dynamic.

Season Three, Episode 8: Green Eyed Monster

Crichton (Ben Browder), in his new bunk aboard Talyn, finds his favourite pulse pistol, "Winona", has been stolen. He goes to the cockpit to complain but finds the door locked whilst Crais (Lani Tupu) is within, trying to woo Aeryn (Claudia Black).

We've come a long way from the days when Crais exiled Aeryn for her exposure to alien culture and hunted Crichton for killing his brother. Crais is a much calmer, more thoughtful fellow nowadays. The episode doesn't really address Aeryn's potential attraction to Crais but frames it more as an issue of her believing Talyn needs to have/be a two parent home. Arguably, they do have a lot in common, being Peacekeeper exiles, trying to figure out how to live in this new life on the run.

I love the scene where Crichton intrudes after Crais and Aeryn have been discussing the idea of getting her a neural connection to Talyn like the one Crais has. The dialogue doesn't shy away from the implications that go well beyond sexual. As Aeryn puts it, she, Crais, and Talyn would become one. To Crichton's inquiring eye, both Aeryn and Crais look flustered, sweaty, and furtive. But Crichton is surprisingly cool about it--the green eyed monster isn't him.

Is it Crais? Is it Aeryn? Oh, yeah, is it the massive animal with literal green eyes that swallows Talyn whole? Having to deal with being stuck in the belly of a space whale gives some effective context for the romantic drama.

There's also an amusing dynamic between Stark (Paul Goddard) and Rygel (Jonathan Hardy), stuck outside in a transport pod. I love the detail that Stark is the only one who knows live budongs are dangerous because the only other people who know are dead. Stark's panic plays nicely against Rygel's heartless desire to cut and run.

The episode concludes nicely as the characters reach an uneasy agreement. Aeryn's position on becoming intimately involved with Crichton starts to waver; she finds herself surprised that it matters to her that John knows she hasn't "recreated" with Crais.

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

This entry is part of a series I'm writing on Farscape for the show's 20th anniversary. My previous reviews can be found here (episodes are in the order intended by the show's creators rather than the broadcast order):

Season One:

Episode 1: Pilot
Episode 2: I, E.T.
Episode 3: Exodus from Genesis
Episode 4: Throne for a Loss
Episode 5: Back and Back and Back to the Future
Episode 6: Thank God It's Friday Again
Episode 7: PK Tech Girl
Episode 8: That Old Black Magic
Episode 9: DNA Mad Scientist
Episode 10: They've Got a Secret
Episode 11: Till the Blood Runs Clear
Episode 12: Rhapsody in Blue
Episode 13: The Flax
Episode 14: Jeremiah Crichton
Episode 15: Durka Returns
Episode 16: A Human Reaction
Episode 17: Through the Looking Glass
Episode 18: A Bug's Life
Episode 19: Nerve
Episode 20: The Hidden Memory
Episode 21: Bone to be Wild
Episode 22: Family Ties

Season Two:

Episode 1: Mind the Baby
Episode 2: Vitas Mortis
Episode 3: Taking the Stone
Episode 4: Crackers Don't Matter
Episode 5: Picture If You Will
Episode 6: The Way We Weren't
Episode 7: Home on the Remains
Episode 8: Dream a Little Dream
Episode 9: Out of Their Minds
Episode 10: My Three Crichtons
Episode 11: Look at the Princess, Part I: A Kiss is But a Kiss
Episode 12: Look at the Princess, Part II: I Do, I Think
Episode 13: Look at the Princess, Part III: The Maltese Crichton
Episode 14: Beware of Dog
Episode 15: Won't Get Fooled Again
Episode 16: The Locket
Episode 17: The Ugly Truth
Episode 18: A Clockwork Nebari
Episode 19: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part I: A Not So Simple Plan
Episode 20: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part II: With Friends Like These . . .
Episode 21: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part III: Plan B
Episode 22: Die Me, Dichotomy

Season Three:

Episode 1: Season of Death
Episode 2: Suns and Lovers
Episode 3: Self-Inflicted Wounds, Part I: Would'a, Could'a, Should'a
Episode 4: Self-Inflicted Wounds, Part II: Wait for the Wheel
Episode 5: . . . Different Destinations
Episode 6: Eat Me
Episode 7: Thanks for Sharing

A Dubious Shelter

H.P. Lovecraft wrote very beautifully about things that frightened him. One of the fundamental achievements of his work is a compelling tension between love and fear, a good example of this being his 1924 story "The Rats in the Walls". Throughout his life, Lovecraft expressed admiration and longing for the past, especially his own past, his youth in a relatively wealthy family. Yet stories like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward or "The Rats in the Walls" are founded on the idea that it would be pretty horrible to come into some kind of direct contact with the past or ancestry.

The narrator of "The Rats in the Walls", an American descendant of an English family called De la Poer, returns to his family's ancient estate in England which, he informs us, hadn't been inhabited since the reign of James I, in other words the early 17th century. This follows from the death of the narrator's son, who first interested him in the estate. The son died from injuries sustained in World War I:

I bought Exham Priory in 1918, but was almost immediately distracted from my plans of restoration by the return of my son as a maimed invalid. During the two years that he lived I thought of nothing but his care, having even placed my business under the direction of partners. In 1921, as I found myself bereaved and aimless, a retired manufacturer no longer young, I resolved to divert my remaining years with my new possession.

World War I is infamously known as the first modern war, one that introduced the mass slaughter of trench warfare and chemical weapons, dehumanising and trivialising existence in hideous contrast to poetical ideas of the means and ends of human conflict, however terrible it had been in the past. In light of this, the narrator's interest in reclaiming a more beautiful and familiar past, one that interested his son, takes on a deeper significance. And so the horror, as the impression of that past is unravelled, is also deeply impressive.

The titular rats in the walls, first detected by the narrator's curiously heroic cat, are an effective precursor. Rats as plague carriers, as an impersonal, repulsive swarm, are a potent symbol of death that deprives human life of meaning. That they live in the very walls of the ancestral estate conveys the sense of a cold and mindless reality beneath the impression of a great and solid ancestry.

Much has been written lately about Lovecraft's racism but what fascinates me about the story elements pointed to as evidence of Lovecraft's feelings of repulsion for other races are often things which are ultimately connected intimately with the narrator or protagonist. This is clear in The Shadow Over Innsmouth and, to some extent, it's clear in "The Rats in the Walls". The story concludes with the erudite and cultured narrator discovering the animalistic nature of his Saxon and Roman forbearers.

God! those carrion black pits of sawed, picked bones and opened skulls! Those nightmare chasms choked with the pithecanthropoid, Celtic, Roman, and English bones of countless unhallowed centuries! Some of them were full, and none can say how deep they had once been. Others were still bottomless to our searchlights, and peopled by unnamable fancies. What, I thought, of the hapless rats that stumbled into such traps amidst the blackness of their quests in this grisly Tartarus?

Ultimately, this closes a circle--in an attempt to escape the cold, dehumanising impression of reality created by World War I, the narrator instead finds further confirmation of it. The ancient world was just as sinister as the modern and there is no escape, the existential horror of the revelation delivered by some beautifully terrible description.

Having grasped to some slight degree the frightful revelations of this twilit area—an area so hideously foreshadowed by my recurrent dream—we turned to that apparently boundless depth of midnight cavern where no ray of light from the cliff could penetrate. We shall never know what sightless Stygian worlds yawn beyond the little distance we went, for it was decided that such secrets are not good for mankind. But there was plenty to engross us close at hand, for we had not gone far before the searchlights shewed that accursed infinity of pits in which the rats had feasted, and whose sudden lack of replenishment had driven the ravenous rodent army first to turn on the living herds of starving things, and then to burst forth from the priory in that historic orgy of devastation which the peasants will never forget.

Comparing the rats to an army and the fascinatingly sexualised description of their movements invokes both trench warfare and the coldly biological nature of impulses to procreation. The idea of sexual gratification being just another automatic working of the rat horde. It is what might be called anti-sublime.

Vague Vampiric Plans

A strange and snooty minister reopens a church near Carfax Abbey; a trio of green skinned women go about murdering people; everyone seems listless, wandering wide eyed though dark, 16 millimetre footage. It's 1970's The Body Beneath from cult horror filmmaker Andy Milligan. Dialogue and performances dip into Manos the Hands of Fate levels of stilted and unnatural but there's some genuinely effective mood in this picture conjured partly by locations, the scarce lighting, and some decent wardrobe.

There are plenty of nods to Dracula though the famous vampire himself is never mentioned. Instead, we have the story of the Fords, a peculiarly prosaic name for an ancient family of undead. I'm not completely clear on the rules for vampires in this film but the minister, Alexander Algernon Ford (Gavin Reed), says he and his consort, Alicia (Susan Heard), reappear every forty years. Now he hopes to use a young woman, Susan (Jackie Skarvellis), in the "weakened" Ford bloodline, to revivify the clan in some unspecified way.

There are a lot of unresolved plot threads in this movie. A man who seems initially set up as a hero is established with a wife who always wears a red scarf around her neck . . . and we never see her again. A wealthy, conceited redheaded woman is captured by the vampires but she bargains with the resident Renfield, Spool (Berwick Kaler), to be released. Her plan is foiled when Spoor is caught and . . . we never find out what happens to her.

Susan's boyfriend, Paul (Richmond Ross), tries to rescue her at one point with the help of a rebellious maid from the vampire household who nods understandingly when Paul informs her the minister has no reflection.

The director's own interest in S&M is apparent though he overestimates the appeal of seeing two of the leads naked and pressed against each other in some vague approximation of sex. They're both beautiful people but they're both clearly uncomfortable and seem like they must have been introduced no more than two days earlier.

The lighting is sometimes quite professional, though, and always interesting, even when it's just a floodlight aimed at whoever's speaking, because the gloom of the grainy 16mm gathers around at all time, aiding the film in achieving a dreamlike quality complemented by the peculiar dialogue. The climax of the film is a creepy feast with some really interesting costumes, especially this woman's.

I don't think I could take a screenshot of her that didn't look like the cover of The Cure's Disintegration.

The Body Beneath is available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1285

In greener olives strength abides in salt.
Projected jokes became a bluer graph.
A thousand milks create the perfect malt.
We order wheat with hefty sides of chaff.
The wine remarks in taste on turning time.
A number guessed revealed the suited card.
Expressions very crude were yet sublime.
But iron echoes greet the roaming bard.
A lunar stream permits a swimming car.
A rumour printed piques the pointed ear.
Sure all the avenues were paved with tar.
And ev'ry throat was paved with rootless beer.
The grainy bats remove the foodless store.
The wineless taste rewards a careful pour.

The Treachery of Trustworthy Faces

Simply acquiring supplies is seemingly never easy for the people on Farscape. When the supplies happen to be urgently needed, getting them might involve political intrigue, violent sabotage, and wearing a lobster as a hat.

Season Three, Episode Seven: Thanks for Sharing

And there's still a leftover Crichton (Ben Browder) from the events of the previous episode. Aeryn (Claudia Black) compels one of them to wear what looks like a grey shirt to me (the Farscape wiki says it's green) so they can be told apart. Jool (Tammy MacIntosh), serving as a more ornery and selfish medical officer in Zhaan's absence, runs tests and, as far as she can tell, the two humans are perfectly identical.

That is until one of them is badly wounded by a bomb during a clandestine meeting with the impeccably dressed Sarova (Rebecca Gibney), daughter of the planet's ruler, Pralanoth (Robert Bruning). Having a bonus Crichton comes in handy when it becomes inconvenient for knowledge of the meeting to pass to the rest of the ruling family. A deadly lobster spider thing, which kills anyone for lying while it's sitting on their head, supports the other Crichton's statement that he was never at the meeting.

I love how it seems to be raining all the time on this planet. There's a vaguely Blade Runner vibe to the place (though this makes more dubious the idea that Aeryn didn't know what rain was in "A Human Reaction"). I also love that Rygel (Jonathan Hardy) is utilised for his negotiating skills again though he's undermined repeatedly, first when D'Argo (Anthony Simcoe) roughs up the security chief (Sandy Winton) for trying to molest Chiana (Gigi Edgley), then later when trying to negotiate directly with Pralanoth. Crichton mostly gets things done by force, at one point pointing Talyn's cannon right at the capital building.

The clear theme for this episode is trust. Crichton can hardly believe Aeryn is starting to trust Crais (Lani Tupu); Pralanoth learns he can't trust his son when the young man gets the lobster on his head (and consequences are swift and final for that); Crichton isn't sure he can trust his other self; Aeryn's mother (Linda Cropper) is in charge of the Peacekeeper squad hunting them, assigned with the idea of dividing Aeryn's loyalties; and no-one's quite sure yet if they trust Jool with a needle. The episode ends with an impressively horrific sequence of special effects and outstanding creature shop work, all to the purpose of showing one person was a shape shifter all along and definitely not to be trusted.

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

This entry is part of a series I'm writing on Farscape for the show's 20th anniversary. My previous reviews can be found here (episodes are in the order intended by the show's creators rather than the broadcast order):

Season One:

Episode 1: Pilot
Episode 2: I, E.T.
Episode 3: Exodus from Genesis
Episode 4: Throne for a Loss
Episode 5: Back and Back and Back to the Future
Episode 6: Thank God It's Friday Again
Episode 7: PK Tech Girl
Episode 8: That Old Black Magic
Episode 9: DNA Mad Scientist
Episode 10: They've Got a Secret
Episode 11: Till the Blood Runs Clear
Episode 12: Rhapsody in Blue
Episode 13: The Flax
Episode 14: Jeremiah Crichton
Episode 15: Durka Returns
Episode 16: A Human Reaction
Episode 17: Through the Looking Glass
Episode 18: A Bug's Life
Episode 19: Nerve
Episode 20: The Hidden Memory
Episode 21: Bone to be Wild
Episode 22: Family Ties

Season Two:

Episode 1: Mind the Baby
Episode 2: Vitas Mortis
Episode 3: Taking the Stone
Episode 4: Crackers Don't Matter
Episode 5: Picture If You Will
Episode 6: The Way We Weren't
Episode 7: Home on the Remains
Episode 8: Dream a Little Dream
Episode 9: Out of Their Minds
Episode 10: My Three Crichtons
Episode 11: Look at the Princess, Part I: A Kiss is But a Kiss
Episode 12: Look at the Princess, Part II: I Do, I Think
Episode 13: Look at the Princess, Part III: The Maltese Crichton
Episode 14: Beware of Dog
Episode 15: Won't Get Fooled Again
Episode 16: The Locket
Episode 17: The Ugly Truth
Episode 18: A Clockwork Nebari
Episode 19: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part I: A Not So Simple Plan
Episode 20: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part II: With Friends Like These . . .
Episode 21: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part III: Plan B
Episode 22: Die Me, Dichotomy

Season Three:

Episode 1: Season of Death
Episode 2: Suns and Lovers
Episode 3: Self-Inflicted Wounds, Part I: Would'a, Could'a, Should'a
Episode 4: Self-Inflicted Wounds, Part II: Wait for the Wheel
Episode 5: . . . Different Destinations
Episode 6: Eat Me

Disturbed Space Sleep

What can go wrong with being cryogenically frozen and shipped off through the vastness of space? Usually something worse and weirder than all of the many very probable accidents that may occur. In the famous 1975 Doctor Who serial, The Ark in Space, it's big alien bugs.

Having watched Robot last week, I was strongly compelled to continue with Tom Baker's first season as the Doctor. All the serials in his first season are linked so it almost feels like one big serial--you could go further and really say that there's a through-line from Three's final serial, Planet of the Spiders, to Terror of the Zygons, the first of Four's second season. One of the things I enjoyed most about watching through Doctor Who the first time was the inevitable sense of the time in which it was filmed and how the evolution of the show was subtly influenced by the changing culture. In some ways, to-day we're starting to get a reprise of some of the political and social issues of the 70s, particularly in terms of feminism and ruminations on the value of radical, orchestrated social change.

These issues are clearly present in The Ark in Space and touch the current nerve in ways it didn't when I last watched it. One of the Doctor's companions this season, Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter), is established as peculiarly old fashioned, using deliberately dated language and saying things that implied dated opinions. When a recording reveals that a woman was the leader of the human race in the future, Harry teases Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Sladen) that it must please her "female chauvinist heart".

A woman "was the leader of the human race in the future." There's a confusing sentence. On the trio's first voyage in the TARDIS together, they land in a space station thousands of years after solar flares have destroyed the Earth--or thousands of years after the stations occupants believe the Earth was destroyed, the Doctor's lines deliberately cast some ambiguity as to the state of our planet. The first human to wake up from cybersleep is a medical officer, Vira (Wendy Williams). Following her is the leader of the expedition, known by the nickname Noah (Kenton Moore). He's immediately more suspicious of the Doctor and his companions, possibly because his mind and body are being overcome by the alien menace, known as the Wiirn. He transfers command to Vira before he's completely overcome and there's a fascinating moment where everyone's listening to the recording of Earth's prime minister delivering an inspiring speech about the challenge of rebuilding civilisation that lay before them. A shot of Noah shows a look of profound anguish on his face.

Next to Harry's playful remark to Sarah Jane referencing Sarah Jane's ardent feminism (as seen in Robot and Monster of Peladon), Noah's despair that he's no longer able to take part in the mission, unable to fulfil his role as leader, because of his suddenly repulsive and different body evokes a poignant sense of displacement. Especially since here Noah's physical state is as dangerous as everyone supposes, placing the viewer, for a moment, firmly in Noah's point of view.

A contrast between new and old is also presented when the crew of the station, Nerva, refer to the Doctor and his companions as "Regressives". This has a particularly potent political resonance as being the opposite of "Progressives". Vira refers to Harry as a romantic when he responds to being asked whether Sarah is a person of any value by scoffing at the mere question. One would think that when the entirety of the human race has been diminished to the handfuls who escaped in spaceships that any human life would be of value. But Vira's reluctance to step outside her role as medical officer points to a society where roles are rigorously defined. So someone like Sarah, from outside the system, might indeed not seem to have any value because she has no assigned role. The bureaucratic delineation of human worth evokes Communism, particularly Communist China. Ironically, it's precisely this devotion to assigned roles that makes Vira reluctant to take command.

Vira is incredulous at first when the Doctor suggests something went wrong with the mission--the perfect cold storage of identically dressed human beings in sterile white couldn't possibly be foiled. No one expects the interstellar insect menace. Life, in the form of slimy green bubble wrap, gets in when you least expect it.

Baker here, appropriately, establishes himself further as a weirder and less predictable Doctor compared to Pertwee. His grinning glee at the thought of undertaking a dangerous project of attaching his brain to a dead Wiirn's eye in order to see things from the Wiirn's perspective suggests this Doctor's brand of dering-do will have something almost perverse about it. As such, he's a perfect foil for the people of Nerva.