Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968).

When we think of Ian Fleming (if we can remember that he even existed) then it's in relation to just one name: James Bond.  This is just about the single reason why the memory of pop culture can recall the creator of the world's most famous secret agent.  The explanation for why this should be is pretty simple.  Bond is the one creation out of all his other artistic efforts that got the best notice.  Double-O-Seven is the one character in the author's gallery of wonders who managed to capture the public's Imagination in what was somehow the right time and in just the right place.  Bond himself was the product of a number of influences.  Part of it came from Fleming's own experiences as a member of the British Secret Service during World War II.  Another and more important factor, the one which seems to have been the most influential in terms of the character's ability to leave an indelible footprint in pop culture, is down to the time period in which his name first saw the light of day.  The first adventure in which the world's premiere super spy made his debut was in Fleming's 1953 novel, Casino Royale.  It was this mid-century bestseller which introduced audiences to a world of deadly secret operatives, intrigue, seduction, and a combination of action thrills combined with an improbable yet impressive technological conceit in terms of gadgets and wheels that has pretty much gone on to shape the way we conceive of espionage in the realm of make-believe.  The key thing that made all of this work so well was how Fleming became such a major beneficiary of his own particular cultural zeitgeist.

Bond can be thought of as something very close to the ultimate manifestation of the Cold War period.  He was just the sort of hero that Western cinemas were looking for in a time when all of the major Atlantic nations were locked in a global competition with the Soviet Union for ideological supremacy of the hearts and minds of the public.  It seems to have been this conflict, which was going on even in the aisles of movie-goers that first gave Bond his fame, and then immortalized him as a pop culture staple; one of many, in point of fact.  It turned Fleming's creation, if maybe not it's author, into a household name.  The perfect irony that compliments this achievement is that, just like with so many other artists, it is the one, defining accomplishment that has swiftly erased any awareness of the author's other works.  It's the same fate that Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Lewis Carroll all met with.  Each of them, along with Fleming has managed to imbue one particular imaginary figure with so much Creative life, that it's as if the audience has decreed that nothing else they ever did matters.  Roald Dahl's has met with a kinder variation of this same fate.  If the name of this Swiss-English writer means anything to anyone, then it's as the creator of Willy Wonka.  Fate has been kinder to Dahl, in this regard, however.  Far from decreeing that he never wrote anything else of worth, Dahl's other writings, such as The Witches, The BFG, or James and the Giant Peach have become household classics just as well.

Fleming was never able to have that same luck of the draw.  He never got the chance to become known as the same level of versatile talent that Dahl is now still regarded as.  Instead, whatever else the rest of his literary output may have been, pop culture memory has seen fit to consign it all to the dustheap of history.  It's James Bond we want from now on.  If it has nothing to do with the adventures of 007, then what's there to give a rip about, anyway?  There's a mercenary style quality to such zero sum thinking, and it could be worthwhile to someday examine just how this particular factor shapes the nature of modern audience reception.  It might be able to tell us a great deal of how we can be so receptive to certain Creative Ideas at one time, while others from the same artist leave us cold to the point of hostile indifference for almost all the rest.  It's a fascinating occurrence worth paying attention to, yet that's not what this review is about.  Though there may be parts of the story under examination today which can help shed some light the questions asked above.  Before we can get to any of that, however, there's the background for how the tale under the microscope came to be made.  It all happened near the end.

It starts with a heart attack, one the author suffered near the end of his days in 1961.  Fleming had nine successes to his name by the time of March in that year, and all of them were due to just one man.  Bond...James Bond.  He'd written other non-related texts by this point, yet I think it's telling that most of them were of the non-fiction variety.  These include, in seeming total, one true crime book, a travelogue, and one semi-romantic short story (web).  The only other notable title to his name is the book adaptation under discussion here.  At least it allows the critic an answer to one part of the conundrum for why Fleming isn't known for much else besides Bond.  It really does seem to be the case of the author allowing himself to be defined by success of his greatest creation.  He's almost like a version of Conon-Doyle if he were willing to rest content, for the most part, with writing Sherlock Holmes stories and not much of anything else.  It's the author's apparent comfort with this state of personal affairs that makes Chitty Chitty Bang Bang stand out all the more as the great creative anomaly of the artist's life.

The book had it's genesis in the wake of the heart attack which Fleming can be said to have survived, yet just up to a point.  It was while he was convalescing that a friend did a personal favor for the author that, on the surface of things, seems like the last sort of gift you'd give to the writer of a book series centering around the exploits of a serial womanizer.  Fleming was given a copy of Beatrix Potter's Squirrel Nutkin to read while bedridden.  His immediate reaction is one that fans might expect from the creator of 007.  Fleming came away less than impressed.  What happened next is the part most audiences would never have expected.  For all intents and purposes, Fleming appears to have been seized by the idea that he could write a better story for children than that.  However unexpected or unprecedented the final results may seem, this is what happened.  He began to compose a story with the working title of The Magic Car, and proceeded to pack a lot of his own previous enthusiasms into the plot (web).  These include the tell-tale penchant for taking a simple yet stylish looking automobile, and then transforming it into a fantastical marvel of technical engineering.  This part of the author's repertoire should be familiar enough to longtime fans of the franchise's trademark Astin-Marten.

The car at the center of Fleming's single children's novel amounts to a toned down version of this same conceit.  It's possible to posit the author as creating a children's librarian version riff on the usual tropes that had defined his fiction in an up till then adult key.  The somewhat poetic irony is that this tale of a Magic Car that transports its owners on a grand adventure turned out to have been the very the last writing Ian Fleming ever accomplished.  On the 11th of August, 1964, the creator of James Bond passed away, as much a victim of the work schedule that sudden fame catapulted him into, in addition to a lifetime of hard living, both within and aside from the call of duty (ibid).  The story of how the author's single children's novel found it's way to the big screen is somewhat fitting considering that it was none other than Albert R. Broccoli, Fleming's longtime collaborator and producer of the Bond film adaptations, who was ultimately responsible for the film we're looking at here today.  The book was published in three installments after Fleming's death, and when Broccoli had the completed manuscript in front of him, his reaction probably mirrors that of a lot of longtime Bond fans who learn that Fleming also wrote for children (however briefly).  He came away less than impressed, thinking there was no way material like this would ever make for a good movie.  Then Walt Disney changed his mind.

The sudden breakout success of the Mouse House's freely adapted version of P.L. Travers Mary Poppins seems to have been enough of an incentive for Broccoli to swallow whatever doubts or misgivings he might have had about the manuscript, and instead hit the green light that got the ball rolling on this story's eventual road to the big screen.  The filmmaking process as a whole seems to have been time consuming on this one, as it was first in pre-production for almost two years, and that was all about trying to get the script right (more of which anon), and the production process itself seems to have dragged on for three whole months.  Whatever behind the scenes issues were going on with this picture, the movie adaptation of Ian Fleming's final novel at last made its feature debut on December 16th, 1968.  What remains to be seen now is just how well the film holds up after all of these many years.

The Manhattan Project (1986).

If you were born and raised at any point from the mid to early 80s, then there's a specific type of social phenomena you might recall from those glory days of childhood.  The way this scenario tends to work is you'll be going about whatever your daily routine is, and at some point or another, you decide to crash out on the couch in front of what used to be the reigning form of mass media back in the day, the television set.  It's what the Analog Generation relied on instead of Wi-Fi.  Just as younger age brackets can't fathom a life saturated with digital equipment more or less everywhere you turn, rest assured, it's still difficult for an 80s kid like me to figure out how the shows I used to watch on the Idiot Box could ever have been made in Black and White with the most primitive forms of broadcast technology imaginable.  I can even recall growing up among the detritus relics of the 40s, 50s, and 60s of my parents generation, and even with the proof of human development and the passage of time right in front of my face, it still took me a long time to put two and two together.  By the time I got old and (I hope) smart enough to be curious about all the items of days past that I came of age around, it was all too late.  Now what's left are just memories.  Anyway, part of the Analog Kid routine would be to crash in front of the Tube, and channel surf.

I'm pretty sure the process I'm about to describe is also something of a dying social practice.  It's the kind of thing that still might exist in a few household across the Nation, yet it's nowhere near the frequency it once had back in a time before the advent of Broadband.  The best way to describe it is that it was my age bracket's version of side-swiping.  The trick was that instead of just using your fingers to move the screen around, in order to make the display change, you had to use this mostly rectangular handheld device known as a TV remote control.  It was a battery-operated electrical box that fit in the palm of you hand.  It came equipped with all sorts of dials and buttons on it, some of which you used to change the channels on the television set.  The rest were all sorts of other functions that I'm sure most of us never bothered with, and so several decades of Analog Children coasted through our viewing life not knowing just what the hell all that other stuff was for.  I know I still don't, anyway.  The point is that this TV era ritual I'm talking about here would involve lounging in front of the Tube, using the remote to flip through various television channels.  One other built-in feature of those pre-Internet days is that there was a whole world of difference between the content you might have wanted to see, as opposed to whatever the broadcasters either would or could offer up to the viewing audience on the airwaves.

I can recall many occasions when I knew I'd rather be watching my favorite cartoons, and yet all channels like TNT, Nickelodeon, or the Big Three Alphabet Soup Stations had to offer were boring looking sitcoms, News at 10, or NBA matches.  As you get older, you learn to appreciate the latter, but when you're a kid, all you can think about is fun with Bugs and Daffy.  That's pretty much were my mind was at on a lot of those occasions when it seemed like there was nothing good on to watch.  This used to be something of a staple for 80s childhoods.  It was kind of like a general standard operating procedure imposed on the audience by the inherent dictates and limitations of the televisual medium. 

Sometimes, however, you got lucky, and it was here that what might be termed the Lottery flipside of TV channel surfing comes into play.  It's the shared social ritual that I'm talking about in and o itself, now.  The way it works is, sometime you'd be channel surfing the brain drain machine to see if there was anything good on, and your efforts would land you right in the middle of a snippet of action from a film you've never seen or heard of before, but that either managed to capture your interest, or else you might have wound up as one of that lucky fraternity of 80s kids who accidentally scarred themselves when the TV channel you flipped onto showed you the kind of films where it was clear the violence and gore levels were aimed squarely at the adults, and not the eyes and ears of little pitchers.  I've been on the receiving end of both sides of the channel surfing equation, and sometimes even the surprise discoveries that had me running for safety behind the couch have become longtime favorites as (what we must be jokingly referring to whenever we choose to describe ourselves as) an adult.  The film I want to talk about here today was one such example of a channel surfing catch.  It belongs to the former category of films caught in passing that can be described as Intriguing, rather than the latter section now known affectionately as Kindertrauma.  This was back during the 90s, on the Disney Channel.

I think the TV might have just been left turned on to that station, rather than any effort at channel surfing on my part, yet what I know for sure is that at some point during the end of the day, I came into my room, noticed the TV was on, and I saw Dr. Dick Solomon, from 3rd Rock From the Sun, helping this teenage Brat Pack looking kid (kind of a Ferris Bueller wannabe, if that makes sense) to make his way safely out of a military facility.  Both men had guns aimed in their direction, and they were carrying a fully loaded and armed nuclear device between the two of them. For better or worse, that's the sort of thing you might chance to happen upon if you came of age during the final glory days of broadcast television.  You could run across something that scared the wits out of you, or else be left thinking along the same lines I did when I saw Emilio Lizardo and Frasier Crane's dad in a race against a ticking nuclear clock as they tried to disarm a nuclear bomb before they all went up in atomized smoke.  In my case, that was the kind of cinematic scenario that left me thinking, "Well now that sounds interesting.  Too bad I just caught the tale end of this flick, though.  Sounds like it could be a lot of fun".  When an occurrence like this happens, a number of things can result with the viewer here.

It's like you're faced with a choice, if that's how you want it.  You can decide to let what you've just seen go as a nice yet momentary bit of diversion.  Just something to enjoy in passing, and not the kind of thing you need to give any further thought.  On the other hand, you can come away fascinated by just a few snippets of film caught in passing, to the point where you make a semi-unofficial vow to yourself to make sure and hunt down a copy of the movie to watch in full, so that you can get a clearer picture of what you just saw.  This is what happened in my case.  The ending of the film had just enough of the right of sort of nail-biter quality to it that it managed to leave a good impression in my mind.  It also didn't hurt that I could tell there was a nice bit of humor inscribed within the the film's writing, at least based on what I had seen of it in media res, and walking in blind.  It created just enough of the right sort of positive impact in my mind that the picture has always managed to linger around in the back of my thoughts.  It didn't take me too long to realize that the reason it kept hanging around was that some part of me was always curious to see the rest of the picture from start to finish.  So, recently, with nothing much on my plate, I sat down a re-watched a 1986 comedy, The Manhattan Project for the first time.

Dr. Sax and the Great World Snake (1952/59/2018).

Some artists can arrive on the scene and leave an impact so big that there's almost no choice except for their names and efforts to became part of the lexicon of daily life.  It's a specific shelf space reserved for the likes of Shakespeare, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, Kurt Russell, Rod Serling, Mark Twain, or Charles Dickens.  The one uniting element between all of them is that they've managed to carve out a place for themselves in our shared memories.  It also doesn't hurt that some of them did so through the talented use of motion picture images, meaning we'll always have tangible examples to point future generations toward, thus ensuring that their names are now destined to last for something close to forever.  Then there is the pop cultural shelf-space reserved for artists whose talent is by no means second-tier.  It's just that their names keep sliding off our memories more often than any of them might be comfortable knowing.  Everyone can recall Rod Serling and his Twilight Zone, for instance.  Yet how many people have ever heard of the name Richard Matheson?  There may be an avid subsection of the audience who are just about ready to tear their hair out reading the above question.  How can I forget someone as important as important as him.  The answer is that it's now impossible for me to forget who Rich Matheson was.  Yet that's just what a vast majority of the rest of the faces in the aisles have done.  Everyone has somehow managed to recall who Rod Serling is.  He's become one of the great National Icons of television.  Very few can remember who Matheson was, however, or why his name is one that's worth remembering.  

I think a similar fate has transpired with the writer under discussion here today.  If you say the name Jack Kerouac out loud, you're likely to be greeted with a mixed and muted response online, and with looks of genuine puzzlement out in the streets.  That's because we're dealing with one of those Names that was able to have it's one defining moment in the spotlight, only to sink back again into a kind of strange cult celebrity status of obscurity.  I'm willing to say this is the case even if a site like Google Trends consistently pegs the audience awareness of his name at a healthy ratio from around 60 to 80s% over the past five years.  Even if that's the case, there's still some explanation required for why anyone would remember the name of some nebulous sounding author from back in the days when Elvis Presley was just a strapping young truck driver with dreams of music floating around in his head.  A basic summary of the facts goes something like this.  Jack Kerouac was the son of French-Canadian immigrants who made their home in a section of Lowell, Massachusetts that is still sometimes known as Little Canada.  Le Petit, as it was sometimes known, was a predominantly working class community where English was the second, rather than the first language.  In fact, when it came time to transfer to his first school outside of the district, Kerouac's classmates thought him of him as somewhat backwards.

This was because he'd grown up in both households and neighborhoods where the only words he ever heard were French Canadian.  Kerouac's experiences of growing up in Lowell are comparable to a sense of experience that was shared by two other artistic sources; one of them well known, the other obscure.  Playwright and screenwriter Chazz Palminteri once wrote an entire one-man theater performance around his experiences of growing up in New York's Little Italy.  He spoke of the neighborhood in which he grew up as a place that the rest of the history seemed to just pass by.  This was most evident when the 60s rolled around, and any up-to-date longhairs and Hell's Angels traveling through the Bronx would receive an interesting form of temporal-cultural shock when they got to Palminteri's neighborhood  and discovered that everyone there still dressed as if Eisenhower had never left the White House.  A similar type of setup was in place for Kerouac's child era neighborhood.  The only real difference was the language and culture involved.  Yet even here there is an interesting sense of overlap with the kind of community ambience fostered by the author's childhood.  If Martin Scorsese had ever visited the Lowell of Kerouac's childhood, the first thing that might jump out at him is its familiarity.

That's because the two major hubs of the Petit District centered around either the Greek Orthodox, or else the Roman Catholic Church.  Just as in the Little Italy of Scorsese's younger days, the otherwise dour, New England Puritan ethos of Kerouac's original stomping grounds were decorated in various places with an entrenched sense of Old World Iconography.  The author even recalled a specific pathway where the local parish had laid out a series of encased plastic statues depicting the Stations of the Cross.  Kerouac had very vivid memories of being led by his mother down this pathway to a series of ritual steps, at the tope of which stood a giant Crucifix that was constructed out of either stone, plaster, or a little of both.  This was a ritual of the author's childhood that Kerouac returns to time and again during the course of the story that's under discussion here, today.  And the sense inherent obsession with which the image  of that pathway keeps cropping up in the narrative action is enough to put the reader in mind of any number of scenes out of a typical Scorsese movie.  The kind that would feature a portrait of the artist as an already guilt-ridden, lonely young man.  All that's missing is Tony Bennett or Louie Prima on the soundtrack to make the scene complete.  It wasn't the Big Band Lounge Lizard acts that captured Jack's Imagination however.  That honor went to the world of Jazz music.

This is a topic that we'll need to go into at better length in the review proper.  For now, it's enough to know that being exposed to Jazz, and the African-American culture that it emerged from proved to be something of a lightbulb moment for the budding talent.  It brought home to Kerouac the realization of what life was like beyond the narrow confines of his New England community.  This aspect of breaking away from the sort of dour Puritanism of one's childhood is what brings us to the second major aspect that would go on to shape the story that would eventually become Doctor Sax.  It's the sort of American Gothic Fairy Tale Tradition that is best typified by the part of Ray Bradbury's mind that was responsible for novels like Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes.  Much like the African-American culture of Jazz, this is a topic that will deserve its own space for discussion later on.  What matters most of all right now is that it was the artist's first major exposure to records of Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, and Charlie "Bird" Parker, and later on the works of writers like Herman Melville, James Joyce, and in particular Thomas Wolfe that allowed Kerouac to realize his talents for the written word.  It was these discoveries that made the most lasting impressions on him.

In later years, Kerouac summed up his early education in the following fashion: "the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night (23)"!  So, armed with the sense of revelation that most cloistered children carry with them once they've discovered how greater and multi-faceted the world outside the confines of narrow upbringings are, Kerouac eventually packed up what few belongings he had, and made his way to New York.  Once there, he began to find his way toward Greenwich Village's Bohemian scene, where he was able to meet and fall in with a group of like-minded compatriots such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and for a brief period at the start, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who acted as something of the distant founder of the literary movement that Kerouac would soon become something of the de facto face of, along with Ginsberg.  They called themselves the Beats, and the artistic circle that soon began to gather and take shape around them was later considered as the Beat Generation.  There's a lot that could and has been said about this group of writers, and the counterculture revolution that they helped to kickstart in the middle years of the 20th century.  Out of all the commentators of this literary circle, the best writings I've found still belongs to Theodore Roszak.

In his book The Making of a Counter Culture, he writes: "Questions about the quality and purpose of life, about experience and consciousness, about the rationality and permanence of industrial growth, about our long-term relations with the natural environment arose more readily in America than in the older industrial societies.  The United States was closer closer to the postindustrial horizon where issues of an unusual kind were coming into view.  Oddly enough, many of those issues could be traced to pre- industrial origins. They stemmed from a dissenting sensibility as old as the lament that the Romantic poets had once raised against the Dark Satanic Mills (xiii-xiv)".  Here is the point where David Stephen Calonne helps add to the picture by pointing out: " It may seem difficult to fathom how youth in a country enjoying unprecedented material prosperity would exhibit such restless discontent. Yet in addition to the threat of nuclear annihilation, the nation’s gross injustices – continuing and violent oppression of women, African Americans, homosexuals, and Native Americans – made it impossible for the Beats to avoid rebelling against their society’s hypocritical “values.”...The Beats challenged not only American homophobia and militarism, but also racism. During a time of violence and segregation, bridges between the white and black literary communities began to be forged in friendships (6)".

I'd argue it's Roszak, however, who gets right what Calonne still misses.  This is something that goes right to the heart of the literary, artistic, and social liberation that defined the New York and San-Francisco Poets and Novelists.  For Roszak, it all comes from the intellectual and artistic ethos that defined a creative movement inaugurated by the 19th century English Lake Poets.  "This perception of the world is the outstanding character- ordinary of the shaman, nothing is characteristic of primitive song, a trait that reappears in the poetry our society most readily designates as Romantic or visionary (248)".  In particular, Roszak theorized that it was the poetic efforts of William Blake that marked him out as something of the ultimate patron saint of the 50s and 60s underground rebels.  There's even a particular passage in his breakout book where the critic takes an example straight from the Beat writers to demonstrate the reliance on a fundamentally Romantic inheritance for about just about all of their major literary efforts.  In speaking of Ginsberg's poetry, for instance, Roszak notes how this essentially Romantic strain is "already there, giving Ginsberg’s poetry a very different sound from the social poetry of the thirties. From the outset, Ginsberg is a protest poet. But his protest does not run back to Marx; it reaches out, instead, to the ecstatic radicalism of Blake (126)".  I just have one more thing to add here.

In addition to Calonne's sense of nonconformity in the name of social justice, the fact that Roszak is able to pinpoint the ultimate origin of the Beats and the 60s in the writings and art of the Romantics leads me to the conclusion that all Kerouac and his friends got up to back during the Eisenhower Era was to find themselves falling into what I'd describe as a by then time-honored pattern, or tradition of dissent in American life and letters.  It's a strand of the National Character that I've discussed on this blog once before, something that goes all the way back to and during the events of this Country's Founding.  For me, this line of dissent has its origin in a moment of shared reaction to a specific moment in the Nation's past.  Perhaps a better way to phrase is it say that it was the culmination of a whole series of moral reactions that were startled out of succeeding generations of citizens due to the outrages perpetuated by this Country's unofficial first founding, with the arrival of the Puritans at Plymouth Rock.  This, to me, was an inflection point, or sorts.  One that set forth a pattern of compulsive-abusive behavior which crafted a modern sense of bigotry and prejudice on these shores.  From the landing of the Plymouth Settlement is the moment when the first modern form of white racism against both Native and African-Americans had its particularly American form of birth aftershocks.

Everything else that can be spoken of as not being allied to that inflection point is best thought of as a reaction against such abuse, in various ways and forms.  Perhaps even up to and including the official American Founding, flaws and all.  Looked at from this perspective, in addition to the likes of Blake, there are other forgotten artistic names that might be spoken of as pioneering this Tradition of Dissent into creative formats.  These would include lesser known talents such as America's first major poet, an African slave girl by the name of Phillis Wheatley, a pioneer of the Horror novel called Charles Brockden Brown, as well as more relatively well known names like Twain, Bradbury, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.  In fact, it's within the genre confines of the latter two names that Kerouac's work here today is best seen in light of.  As what we've got here is one of the most curious products ever to come out of the Beat Generation.  It's a bizarre piece of work called Doctor Sax and the Great World Snake.

A Tribute to Rob Reiner (1947-2025).

We first met through Stephen King.  I can't say I know how strange that must sound.  All I can do is tell you that this is the honest truth.  I knew about the writer before I ever became aware of the director.  Even then, it all came about through sheer luck.  What's even more remarkable to me is that it all happened when I was still at such a young and impressionable age.  This is how it all came about.  None of us ever met in person, to begin with.  Instead, all that happened is my parents thought it would be a good idea to allow me to watch a movie.  The exact details are a bit sketchy at this point, because it was so long ago.  Either they sat down to watch this film with me, or else they just slipped their old VHS copy of Stand By Me into the cassette player and then just let me take the whole thing on my own.  If I had to take a guess, then the second scenario is the most likeliest possibility.  Even as a child I was prone to being solitary, and my parents, to their forever credit soon figured out that was just how I liked things.  So, they left me in front of the Idiot Box with what had to have been one of the first home video copies of a book adaptation that has since gone on to become a priceless classic.  It should go without saying that it's earned all the praise it gets.  Rob Reiner's 1985 adaptation of a Stephen King novella with the unpromising title of "The Body" has to stand as one of the textbook examples of what happens when a page to screen translation somehow manages to please every single face in the aisles.

It doesn't hurt that the whole thing is anchored by a solid narrative throughline, one that is able to elevate the otherwise green performances of its young cast into something that has since rightly been regarded as iconic.  It also happens to be very quotable at the same time.  This seems to have been something of a running bonus with most of the director's efforts.  Rob's work always tended to have this way with words.  In almost every film he ever made, there would be these moments where the quality of the dialogue was able to carve out a permanent shelf space in the mind of the viewer.  There are so many out there, and I'm sure whoever is reading this might have their favorites: "These go to eleven"; "I'll have what she's having"; "Inconceivable"!, "You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means"; "You can't handle the truth"; "I'm your number one fan"; "As you wish".  And who can forget the perennial observation that "It's such a fine line between clever and stupid".  I think it's possible to pinpoint an explanation for why the director was able to turn his films into the kind of meme factories that have more or less guaranteed their place for all time in the memories of generations.  

There's also a bit of an irony involved with how Rob was able to do this, considering that it all relies on the kind of strategy that some might not expect.  It's because Reiner seems to have operated on a clear-eyed understanding that even the best composed image is mute without a good word to lend it its voice.  In other words, he seems to have had this intuitive understanding that all film relies just as much on the quality of the script (of the text, in other words) a whole lot more sometimes than even the pictures on the screen.  It's one of those artistic realizations which should be self-evident, yet it seems to confuse a lot of viewers for some reason that I still can't fathom.  We tend to create this artificial separation between words on the page, and images on the screen in a way that makes it difficult for a lot of us to to sift and weigh the value of either.  Perhaps it also doesn't help that sometimes this disconnect can be warranted under the right perspective.  My own take on this issue is that words take primacy over the image, and here's the reason why.  A line of prose is a description of something, while any attempt to dramatize the letters in the story will always have to amount to an approximation, no matter how much quality and craft is placed into the set decoration, camera angle, or the lighting.  To give a perfect idea of what I mean, ask yourselves how you would describe the secondary world of Florin, which is the main location for all of the narrative action in The Princess Bride?  I think we'd surprise ourselves on that score.

It might come as a shock to others when we each realize that we all have our own pictorial ideas of what the home of Westley and Buttercup looks like, and that all other attempts to picture it pail in comparison.  This is a rule that both readers and viewers seem to hold fast to as this unspoken form of ancient, and therefore binding writ.  It's something that just seems to happen of its own accord, even if some of us know how the Fire Swamp was decked out with complete eidetic recall.  Even with perfect memory onboard, there may come a moment when our own Imaginings take over.  Then the simple plastic trees and artificial vines of Reiner's set give way to a tangled mass or almost sentient web of vegetation out of a storybook.  The kind of enchanted glade that looks like it could either invite you in with open arms, or else swallow you whole.  To my thinking, the best image of the Fire Swamp would have to be one that combines both of these sentiments.  It just makes sense that the entire place is a combination of this lotus island spliced together with a Venus Flytrap and a Death Maze.  That's because each of those words provide as elegant a summary as any of us will be able to give about the setting.  It combines the best of both worlds, in a sense.  The magic of Reiner's production melding into the enchantment of the original words penned by author William Goldman.  All of which then get refracted back into the minds of the faces in the aisles to produce this ultimate, definitive storybook setting.

That to me is an example of fiction crafting at its very best, and both Reiner and Goldman's efforts on The Princess Bride are perhaps a textbook demonstration of how actual good storytelling functions.  That's a crucial, yet often overlooked, reason for the success of a book or picture like this.  It all comes down just as much to the audience participation as it does to the words on the page.  In the end, all entertainment is a group effort, and I'd argue that even the efforts of someone as talented as Shakespeare, let alone Marty DiBergi, still would remain mute for the most part, if it wasn't for the willingness of their audience to join in on all the fun.  That, to me, sums up Rob's main gift as an artist.  He was one of those filmmakers whose instincts as a born storyteller allowed him to arrive at this unspoken realization that the image remains static and silent.  Much like his friend and collaborator, Stephen King, Rob seemed to have figured out something that the author of Misery realized even when he was a kid.  He was talking about another movie entirely, of course (it was Creature From the Black Lagoon, for the record), not that it matters.  Because what unites the insights of The Stand author with that of the chronicler of Spinal Tap is the shared recognition that true Art is able to set the Imagination alight in a way that can transcend even the meagerest poverty row level production values.

In King's case, it was the old Universal Creature Feature that taught him this valuable lesson.  "I knew, watching, that the Creature had become my Creature; I had bought it. Even to a seven-year-old, it was not a terribly convincing Creature. I did not know then it was good old Ricou Browning, the famed underwater stuntman, in a molded latex suit, but I surely knew it was some guy in some kind of a monster suit.. .just as I knew that, later on that night, he would visit me in the black lagoon of my dreams, looking much more realistic. He might be waiting in the closet when we got back; he might be standing slumped in the blackness of the bathroom at the end of the hall, stinking of algae and swamp rot, all ready for a post-midnight snack of small boy. Seven isn’t old, but it is old enough to know that you get what you pay for. You own it, you bought it, it’s yours. It is old enough to feel the dowser suddenly come alive, grow heavy, and roll over in your hands, pointing at hidden water (103-4)".  If this bit of observation seems somehow disconnected to anything made by Reiner, then go back and consider the look and movements of the Rodents of Unusual Size, from the adventures of Westly and Buttercup.

For one thing, they have the same problem as Universal's Gillman.  They're not just a bunch of guys in suits, you can also sort of tell right away, with just one look, that these count as very cheap costumes.  It's clear to even a 10 year old that by the time this scene was scheduled for the day's shoot that most of the film's budget had dried up by then.  And that's being generous, assuming Rob ever had the funds needed just to pull the whole Fire Swamp chapter off.  Even the titular setting isn't that much to look at when you stop and think it over.  It's an obvious set, for one thing.  You can tell that there aren't that many wetlands out there that look quite so cheap.  The whole thing looks like the backdrop of a Muppet Show skit, and the only major difference is that now the audience gets a chance to see what that would look like through the eyes of a professional 45 millimeter studio camera lens.  The net result doesn't change all that much.  It might have looked impressive as hell to someone like Shakespeare, however even by 80s standards, the sets for Ridley Scott's Legend come off as a lot more impressive in terms of the visual department.  And yet the fact is that people still remember The Princess Bride more fondly than one of Tom Cruise's old missteps (and lets face it, you probably even forgot that Maverick was in the Tim Curry Fantasy film).  It's a fascinating result that cries for explanation, even from die-hard fans.

How on Earth does a film with cheap looking sets that probably would give a tenured Medieval archaeologist a headache still somehow go on to become a treasured classic?  I think King once more helps us to arrive at an answer to that problem, and the punchline seems to be that professionalism of imagery might be the least important aspect of what makes Rob's efforts still work so well.  The first thing to note about the "Inconceivable" Fantasy is that it fulfills a very specific artistic stricture, which King describes as "perhaps the perfect reaction, the one every writer of...fiction or director...hopes for when he or she uncaps a pen or a lens: total emotional involvement (104)".  That, I think, is the real gift that Rob was able to achieve, not just for himself as an artist.  He was then able to pass that gift along to others because, like King, he realized that the true strength of a story resides in the words of the script, and on the Imaginative sympathies of a receptive audience to be able to realize where the true magic a story like The Princess Bride comes from.  In that sense, it is possible to speak of Rob Reiner as a storyteller not just of the first rank, but also in the truest sense of the term.  He knew that all good films amounted to stories told regardless of how much or how little you could show, in the last resort.

While all this might seem fascinating, there may be some who are now eager to remind us all of the baleful elephant looming over the whole proceedings.  Rest assured, as much as I'd like to, as much as I wish I was writing words on a different topic in another timeline where Rob was still with us, I know that's not the case.  If it's a reason why this should be the case, then I'm not the one you should be asking.  I'm just here to try and see if I can provide some sort of compensation for a collective sense of shared grief.  All of the bit of fun reminiscences held above had two purposes in mind.  In the first place, the last time I checked, it was always considered proper custom to speak fondly of those who have gone on ahead of us.  This might be something of a double obligation in the case of a talent like Rob's.  Someone who was able to churn out such an incredible of amount of winning narratives for so long deserves to have others make sure that such gifts and efforts are never forgotten.  In the second place, all of those snippets of two cents were meant to do one other thing.  It felt necessary to try and give the reader a sense of what was normal and fun when it came to discussing Reiner and his life.  

In my opinion, it is always going to be the films which will determine the legacy of the man, more than anything else.  In a moment of shock such as this, when most of us are still just beginning to climb down from our initial reactions of horror, it seemed the proper thing to remind audiences of what made being a fan of the artist such a treat, while at the same time couching it in terms appropriate to a decent memorial, however meager.  That's why I'd like to leave off this short tribute with a story.  If this seems like a strange thing to do, then perhaps it might help to point out that the overarching theme of the tale seems to be the nature of grief; how it can shape and sometimes consume our lives; and also, strange as this may sound, how to fight back against it.  What I'd like to leave off with here is a simple YouTube video.  I think if taken in the right spirit, it can serve as some sort of balm, or tonic for the recent tragedy and scandal surrounding Rob's passing.  In order for the proper frame of mind to be in place, however, a few final words of explanation are needed here to make everything clear.  This includes the reasons why I chose this particular video, and why I think the content of a simple make-believe short story can work as good outlet for any needed catharsis on real life events.  It all goes a bit like this.

The main conflict at the center of this story is the experience of grief, and how to move on from it.  At the center of the story enclosed with this article is a widower struggling to move on from the loss of his wife.  There may be some who will make an interesting argument on this particular plot point.  They might say an outcome like this is normal compared to what happened to Rob and Michele.  Even if it's true that the wife of the main character in this short story had a sudden death, it was still, in the last resort, a natural enough occurrence.  What does the normal course of a grieving widower have to do with a tragedy like the one that befell the Reiner's.  Besides, this is a work of pure fiction we're talking about.  A make-believe situation featuring people who don't even exist, and never can.  How on Earth can fiction such as this address the problems of real life?  At least that will be the implicit assumption for some in the audience.  To be fair, I'm not sure what I can say in response.  Another implicit takeaway from such a viewpoint is that it maintains that if there's any compensation to be had when a tragedy like this strikes a family, then it can never come from the pages of a book.  This is a viewpoint which holds that Art has no real power to address such issues when they happen in the real world.  In that sense, my response won't be all that convincing to any who hold to this view.  Still, I maintain that it is the truth.

Experience has taught me that people can have a very interesting, even symbiotic relationship to the stories we like to tell ourselves.  To be clear, there have been plenty out there who maintain that stories serve no purpose other than entertainment.  So long as I'm being fair, I'd even argue that this is what any halfway decent story should stick to.  At the same time, it's like there's this weird dichotomy at work in how we relate to any decent work of fiction.  We'll decry fiction as mere moonshine in one breath, and then spend hours online sharing and reminiscing with others about what we liked so much in our favorite books and films.  In fact, the very existence of this blog and others like it is proof enough of how often this happens.  It may not be enough to make some believe there is any importance to it.  Yet it continues to happen, just the same.  It's as if some natural phenomenon of sorts is taking place, and we still have difficulties figuring it out.  Come to think of it, that might be the best explanation for why literary and film criticism even exists in the first place.  All of which is to say that even if the majority opinion turns out to be that most of us don't believe in the value of storytelling, there still remains a number of interesting facts which are left begging for some sort of logical explanation.  To start with, there was the revolution in modern sentiments and social mores sparked by the Romantic Movement.

Thanks to Lake Poets like Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake, we've come to view childhood and children not as mere resources to be exploited, by rather as genuine lives that deserve our protection, as best we can give it to them.  Then there is the work, not just of authors like Mark Twain, but also forgotten names such as Phyllis Wheatley, who used the Imaginative medium of Poetry to pioneer the first voice of African-American Civil Rights in this Country.  Then there is the further transformation of social life thanks to the efforts of a group of San Francisco poets and authors known as the Beats, and how they essentially gave voice to an attempt at living a more authentic life.  Going back further down the timeline, we have Henry David Thoreau penning some of the key texts of environmentalism, the chief text of which is still considered to be Walden.  No offense yet that comes off as a lot of positive impact for a bunch of people who were just sitting around spinning yarns to themselves.  Each of these artists has made enough of a difference to the point where it sort of has no choice except to belie the statement that fiction has no value in human society.  If that were the case, we wouldn't be busy rediscovering authors like Wheatley, and allowing her to once more have her voice both as an African-American, and as a woman.  You don't do that without believing in some value for the written word.

It all gibes well with something Stephen King once observed in Misery.  We're talking about the original book, now.  The passage that follows sadly didn't make an appearance in Rob's film adaptation yet it's worth repeating here for the sake of proving the kind of value that others seem to believe fiction truly does hold.  Somewhere in the middle of the misadventures of a hapless artist at the hands of a psychotic fangirl, King pauses to describe a curious phenomena that occurs when the writing is hot and the world within the words starts to leap off the page.  He describes it as what happens when "the gotta set(s) in.  Paul knew all the symptoms. When she said she was dying to find out what happened next, she wasn’t kidding. Because you went on living to find out what happened next, isn’t that what you’re really saying? Crazy as it was—shameful, even, in its absurdity—he thought it was. The gotta.

"It was something he had been irritated to find he could generate in the Misery books almost at will but in his mainstream fiction erratically or not at all. You didn’t know exactly where to find the gotta, but you always knew when you did. It made the needle of some internal Geiger counter swing all the way over to the end of the dial. Even sitting in front of the typewriter slightly hung-over, drinking cups of black coffee and crunching a Rolaid or two every couple of hours (knowing he should give up the fucking cigarettes, at least in the morning, but unable to bring himself to the sticking point), months from f finishing and light-years from publication, you knew the gotta when you got it. Having it always made him feel slightly ashamed—manipulative. But it also made him feel vindicated in his labor. Christ, days went by and the hole in the paper was small, the light was dim, the overheard conversations witless. You pushed on because that was all you could do...And then one day the hole widened to VistaVision width, and the light shone through like a sunray in a Cecil B. De Mille epic and you knew you had the gotta, alive and kicking.

"The gotta, as in: “I think I’ll stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I gotta see how this chapter comes out.” Even though the guy who says it spent the day at work thinking about getting laid and knows the odds are good his wife is going to be asleep when he finally gets up to the bedroom. The gotta, as in: “I know I should be starting supper now—he’ll be mad if it’s TV dinners again—but I gotta see how this ends.” I gotta know will she live. I gotta know will he catch the shitheel who killed his father. I gotta know if she finds out her best friend’s screwing her husband. The gotta. Nasty as a hand-job in a sleazy bar, fine as a fuck from the world’s most talented call-girl. Oh boy it was bad and oh boy it was good and oh boy in the end it didn’t matter how rude it was or how crude it was because in the end it was just like the Jacksons said on that record—don’t stop til you get enough (249-50)".  King then backs up this basic premise with a few choice anecdotes about the effects that storytelling can sometimes have on its audience.  

"It was crazy. It was funny. It was also real. Millions might scoff, but only because they failed to realize how pervasive the influence of art—even of such a degenerate sort as popular fiction—could become. Housewives arranged their schedules around the afternoon soaps. If they went back into the workplace, they made buying a VCR a top priority so they could watch those same soap operas at night. When Arthur Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach Falls, all of Victorian England rose as one and demanded him back. The tone of their protests had been Annie’s exactly—not bereavement but outrage. Doyle was berated by his own mother when he wrote and told her of his intention to do away with Holmes. Her indignant reply had come by return mail: “Kill that nice Mr. Holmes? Foolishness! Don’t you dare!”

"Or there was the case of his friend Gary Ruddman, who worked for the Boulder Public Library. When Paul had dropped over to see him one day, he had found Gary’s shades drawn and a black crepe fluff on the door. Concerned, Paul had knocked hard until Gary answered. Go away, Gary had told him. I’m feeling depressed today. Someone died. Someone important to me. When Paul asked who, Gary had responded tiredly: Van der Valk. Paul had heard him walk away from the door, and although he knocked again, Gary had not come back. Van der Valk, it turned out, was a fictional detective created—and then uncreated —by a writer named Nicolas Freeling.

"Paul had been convinced Gary’s reaction had been more than false; he thought it had been pretentiously arty. In short, a pose. He continued to feel this way until 1983, when he read iThe World According to Garp. He made the mistake of reading the scene where Garp’s younger son dies, impaled on a gearshift lever, shortly before bed. It was hours before he slept. The scene would not leave his mind. The thought that grieving for a fictional character was absurd did more than cross his mind during his tossings and turnings. For grieving was exactly what he was doing, of course. The realization had not helped, however, and this had caused him to wonder if perhaps Gary Ruddman hadn’t been a lot more serious about Van der Valk than Paul had given him credit for at the time. And this had caused another memory to resurface: finishing William Golding’s Lord of the Flies at the age of twelve on a hot summer day, going to the refrigerator for a cold glass of lemonade . . . and then suddenly changing direction and speeding up from an amble to an all-out bolt which had ended in the bathroom. There he had leaned over the toilet and vomited. 

"Paul suddenly remembered other examples of this odd mania: the way people had mobbed the Baltimore docks each month when the packet bearing the new installment of Mr. Dickens’s Little Dorrit or Oliver Twist was due (some had drowned, but this did not discourage the others); the old woman of a hundred and five who had declared she would live until Mr. Galsworthy finished The Forsyte Saga—and who had died less than an hour after having the final page of the final volume read to her; the young mountain climber hospitalized with a supposedly fatal case of hypothermia whose friends had read The Lord of the Rings to him nonstop, around the clock, until he came out of his coma; hundreds of other such incidents (257-58)".  There are other such examples out there than can be multiplied.  A the constant running theme threading its way through all of it comes down to what happens when some kind of positive symbiotic relationship is forged between story and audience.  However strange it may sound, it does appear to be explicable in clinical, analytic terms.  It does seem as if the Imagination works as a kind of natural safe-guarding function.  Part of the mind's ability to protect itself.  It's what allowed a burned out poet like Coleridge to hold onto a sliver of sanity in the midst of a mental breakdown, and what allowed a girl like Phyllis Wheatley to try and write her way to freedom.  All of it points to the occasional necessity of tapping into the Imagination for the purposes of mere survival.  

The net result of such ongoing strangeness seems to be that we're surrounded by oddities, all the while being haunted by this indefinable sense of normalcy, that somewhere out there everything is "just so".  In all honesty, I wish I knew if that were true or not.  What I think I can say with any degree of clarity is that I think King is onto something.  Nothing seems more possible to me than that well written books and films can be, not just a balm, but sometimes also even the cure for grief.  It's the medium's capacity for consolation that I'd like to turn to now as a way of paying tribute to the life and work of Rob Reiner.  If I had to give any other reasons for why I'm doing this, then they would go as follows.  A major part of the initial idea for this memorial came from just listening to the words and realizing something interesting.  Here's the thing, this is an article I never intended to write, and the video enclosed within isn't something I was expecting to have much in terms of worth commenting on.  Then a terrible tragedy struck both Bob and his wife, Michele.  So there I am in the wake of the whole thing, reeling from it all, just like the rest of us, and still trying to get my bearings.  I went back to look at this video with not much of anything in mind, it's just that you'd be surprised how you're perspective of the Art you read or watch can do a 180 degree shift based just on what's happening in the real world.

The first time I caught a glimpse of an unremarked upon short story with the equally unpromising title of  "Laurie", I didn't think it was any great shakes at first.  Now, with the passing of a legend forever lodged in the memory banks, I went back to it, only to be confronted with a peculiar thought.  It went a bit like, "You know something, if you were to cast someone like Tom Hanks in the lead role for a screen adaptation of this work, then you'd have a pitch perfect idea for the kind of film Rob Reiner used to make in his glory days".  I don't know how morbid that sounds, yet I'd also be lying through my teeth if I tried to claim that this isn't the idea that crossed my mind there and then.  It's a realization that I owe to the vlog proprietor of The Stephen King Book Club YouTube channel.  His creativity with computer illustrations, combined with the regular artistry of King's words, all came together to remind me of just how good Reiner and the original author of Stand By Me used to work so well together.  In fact, Rob's adaptations of the Maine scribe's writings seem to be one of those rare cases where the translation from page to screen has been met with near universal acclaim.  It was my share of this bit of collective pop culture film knowledge that seems to have caused Rob to creep into my thought the more I watched.

I began to see how all the elements of this story went together to create this kind of accidental, yet genuine tapestry of all the best Humanistic tropes that Reiner was great at incorporating into his films.  At the center of the story is a man who is still reeling from the loss of his wife.  He starts out the story spinning his own wheels in a constant, never-ending loop of regrets, bitterness, and self-recrimination.  All the time, he goes through a series of gestures and motions which tend to fall under the category of being a potentially self-destructive routine that can happen to those who take grief a step or two beyond the bounds of the normal.  Sometimes, harsh as it may sound, the experience of loss can be enough to serve as the mental trigger necessary for further, larger psychological issues.  The story's protagonist, Lloyd Sunderland, has never managed to get that far, to his enduring credit.  Yet it's clear he's stuck in the same familiar rut.  It takes an interesting sort of double surprise to first snap him out of his old routine, and then to get him to learn how to start caring again, not just for himself, but also for others.  Now here's the part where I have to make one statement very clear.  What I'm about to say next is meant to comfort, as best I can, anyway.  Disrespect is the furthest thing from my mind.  With that all said.

The thing is, as I was listening to the audio narrated version linked below, a funny thing happened.  It's like I just began arrive at a slow, surprising, yet genuine enough understanding of how this could have made for a good film adaptation.  Not just any page to screen job, either.  It would also have been the type of Humanistic yarn that Rob was just plain great at churning out way back during the good old days.  Indeed, there is even a sense in which "Laurie" can be spoken of as an interesting companion piece to a film like Stand By Me.  At their core, both narratives revolve around the idea of the confrontation with mortality.  Each features a protagonist who ends up venturing out into the wilderness to confront the shadow of the grim reaper.  Whereas Stand By Me tackles the concept from the viewpoint of youth, "Laurie" explores the same terrain from that of an older, more adult perspective.  It's one of those literary tropes or conceits that goes as far back in this Country to the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne.  The idea of the Fateful Journey into the Woods has its origins in fairy tale and myth.  Yet here in America, at least, the archetype seems to have found it's longest lasting legacy within the field of the Modern Gothic.  This is what turns out to be the mainspring of King's short story.  It's a key note that he has played to either exact or near perfection more than once in his career.  The best novel-length example of the author playing this note to the hilt can be found in the pages of Pet Semetary.  How well Lloyd fares on his own version of this same journey I'll let you discover.

The curious notion I can't seem to shake is the sense that the story's content somehow just manages to fit in well with the ideas and themes that undergird a lot Reiner's more serious works.  There's this quiet, contemplative tone to the short work that allows us inside the head of the main character in such a way that makes him likeable to the point that you want to root for him and hope he turns out alright.  There are even moments of genuine excitement and suspense, even if these are all handled in the typical Gothic fashion.  What makes even these moments fit in with Rob's regular oeuvre, however, is the strange yet endearing note of authentic warmth that King is able to find in the midst of what is essentially an example of what's known as the Southern Gothic.  It seems to have been this note of warmth, even of consolation that might have helped to place me in mind of Rob and his collaborations with King in the past.  This seems to be because what we're dealing with here is a case of the author pulling off a remarkable, yet unremarked upon achievement, of sorts.  King seems to have been able to tap into that same note of warm Humanism that animated Stand By Me, and then somehow transplant it intact into another with a totally different cast of characters, and plot situations.  A lot of the reason for the author's success seems to be because both works share themes of death, and how to deal with loss.

It might have been the realization that "Laurie" shared these same plot elements with the Reiner film which made me think this could be the type of story that Rob might have been able to appreciate, even if we all got a lucky break, and nothing had ever happened.  It's easy for me, at least, to imagine Rob leafing through the pages of "Laurie" in the collection You Like It Darker, and also being struck by the parallels between this relatively new work, and what he and Steve cooked up together in Oregon, way back when.  Yes, it's true there's an obvious disconnect going on here between a work of fiction and a very sad facto of life.  The thing is I came away from this story thinking that I'd found at least as close to a way for audiences to deal with it.  "Laurie" seemed to offer something like an "Inigo Montoya Moment", for lack of a better word.  Yeah it looks stupid, even on paper, yet it's the best I got here.  It was as if King had tapped into that bit of Inspired oddity that allowed first William Goldman and then Mandy Patinkin to place one of the best examples of grief ever committed to page or celluloid.  The fact that people still come up to Patinkin just to thank him for giving an outlet for dealing with the loss of their own loved ones has to be some kind of testament to the power that words have to allowing some form of healing to take place.  If you're looking for an explanation for how that is, then the best I can offer is that it must be one of the functions of the Imagination to help sow up a lot psychic wounds.

It's one of those ideas that probably has no choice except to sound strange as hell, until you stop and recall that the main function of the Mind is the preservation of the human subject.  When it comes to survival chances, nature doesn't seem to like leaving a matter of that importance up to a roll of the dice.  So we have this Art making function in our heads that conjures up images and scenarios that possess the ability to tap into the best of our emotions in an effort to keep ourselves stable and healthy on more than just the physical level.  Last I checked, scientists are still scratching their head over how a mental service like this could have come about.  All we know is that it's there, and this is what it sometimes does.  It's weird as hell, I admit.  It can sometimes also save lives, so maybe there's something to be said for being born with these left-field curveballs inside our skulls.  If it keeps me living longer and healthier I got no cause to complain.  This goes double for all those times whenever the right yarn is lucky enough to snap a real, living soul out of a coma or a personal funk in the wake of tragedy.  That's why I've chosen to celebrate Rob's life with a story.  In addition to containing just enough of the right elements to act as a fitting tribute or memorial to a great artist, the work also tackles death head on.

There seems to be this implicit theme in the story which argues that it is possible to tackle not just grief, and the sense of loss that comes with it.  There may also be a way of squaring off against our fears of death, and somehow managing to not let any of it conquer us in the last resort.  This is the one part of the story where King seems to be tackling a more complex subject than I'm used to here.  It looks very much like the writer had got hold of a genuine notion in the ultimate fate of Lloyd Sunderland, yet it's also the part where I appear to have difficulty finding the right words.  Perhaps even that's fitting, in a way.  It means that if even a story with such a simple narrative as this can achieve that kind of sublimity, then that's got a be some kind of a good sign.  It can mean that the writer has managed to strike some of the right key chords that allow even a mere prose description to achieve some kind of poetic effect.  The best way I can describe the key idea for this story goes back once again to the text of The Princess Bride, and the moment on the set of the movie where Patinkin admitted he used his own personal pain to carry a crucial scene through.  It's a sentiment that this short story seems to share in spades:  "I want my father back, you son of a bitch".  It's crude and inelegant as hell.  It's also perhaps the best any of us can do or say in a case like this  If this is so, then is that such a bad thing?  All I can do, therefore is repeat what I've said already.  The final result left me with something of a surprise gift on my hands. 

It's a story that functions as a tonic for bad times, one that the author himself perhaps never even intended.  In a way though, that counts as yet another point in the story's favor.  The best stories, in my opinion, are the ones where all the artistry remains unintentional on the part of the artist.  I don't set much stock in the idea that you can make Art with a capital A just by choosing to do this.  For whatever reason, the whole process just never seems to work out for the best that way.  J.R.R. Tolkien never set out to create Middle Earth.  Instead, all the happened was he ran across the title of his most famous secondary world as a line of prosody in an old Anglo-Saxon poem, then somehow this word generated another, "Hobbit", in the writer's mind, and from there all that happened is he got curious about what it all meant.  In the same vein, King has often spoken of how a lot of his ideas just come to him out of the blue.  It's a claim that's met with a lot of skepticism by even his most constant of readers, yet I've been a bookworm long enough to be able to state that this is what other authors as disparate as Edmund Spenser, Lewis Carroll and W.P. Kinsella, to Tobias Wolfe and Peter S. Beagle have confirmed as being their Standard Operating Procedure.  I'm convinced that's how all the best works of fiction are made.

Any real story amounts to a Creative Idea waiting for the right artistic mind to discover it.  Part of the reason some of them stick so well is that they can serve a function in helping us to cope with some of the worst aspects of real life.  I'd argue that this is what Stephen King's "Laurie" is able to do when it comes to discussing the tragic event that took the life of one of the greatest directors in all of Hollywood history.  It's the kind of story that has become an accidental yet fitting tribute to the Humanistic themes of living that both Rob and Steve were capable of exploring, whether separately in their own respective mediums and genres, or else together as collaborators with on another.  It's for all these reasons that I not only recommend that you give "Laurie" a read.  I also felt it right to include the story below.  With that in mind, there's not much else to say, except the obvious.  Here's to you Meathead, we miss you something fierce, man.  Thanks for the memories.  If you want us to smile again, then, "As you wish".

 

Pullman Car Hiawatha (1931).

I've talked about him once before, yet more as a jumping off point, rather than as an artist in his own right.  Not too far back, last year, I did an article on a book called The Bridge of San Luis Rey.  I might have done at least some kind of decent enough job in covering the story and themes of that novel.  However, if you go back and take a look at that article it becomes pretty clear real soon that all I did was use that novel as a means to an end.  I used the The Bridge of San Luis more as a jumping off point to discuss one of the overarching themes in Stephen King's Dark Tower series.  I blame the creator of the fictional realm known as Castle Rock, Maine, for that choice of focus entirely.  As I also made clear in my Bridge review, it was King himself who set me on a trek through that book by his choosing to highlight that it was a keystone text when it came to the author's obsession with questions of Fate and Free Will, or Ka as he chooses to label it in the pages of his Mid-World saga.  As a result, while I was able to give the this now obscure work of Modernist literature its due day in the spotlight, it's also a fact that my main focus in explicating its meaning was by and large in relation to King's fiction.  I never even bothered to spend much time focusing on the author of The Bridge.  Neither in terms of who he was, or whether he was the kind of talent that deserves to be remembered for anything, except as part of King's writer's toolbox.  I'd like to see if I can remedy that, at least somewhat, with this review today.  

The key challenge here will lie in seeing just how far Thornton Wilder stands on his own, as much as how he relates to King's work.  The best place to start is with a formal introduction to the life of the artist, and for that I've been lucky enough to stumble upon a very helpful summary provided by Mildred Kuner.  In the very first chapter of her study, Thornton Wilder: The Bright and the Dark, she has given as good a summarization of the facts of the writer's life as I am able to find or offer anywhere.  So with that in mind, I'll let her make First Introductions.  In describing her subject, Kuner, writes: "Regardless of what he writes, he generally celebrates the music of the spheres and, simultaneously, what he regards as its inevitable counterpoint - the rattle of the dishes.  Thornton Niven Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 17, 1897.  His father, Amos P. Wilder, son of a clergyman and a devout member of the Congregational Church, was a Yale graduate who had become a newspaperman and who eventually entered the diplomatic service during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt.  His mother, Isabella Thornton Niven, was a woman equally dedicated to...intellectual pursuits.  

His elder brother by two years, Amos Niven Wilder, became a professor of theology and the author of several books dealing with the influence of religion on contemporary poetry; a sister, Janet, became a zoologist; another sister, Isabel, became an author (she has written three novels and also has coauthored several articles in collaboration with her brother Thornton) and in later years has generally served as th buffer between him and the world whenever his engaged in one of his literary projects. Significantly, he dedicated his sixth novel, The Eighth Day, to her, for when he retired to the Arizona desert for twenty months, determined to communicate with no one until he finished his work, it was she who looked after his interests in his absence.  In her he has found a spiritual twin to compensate for the loss of his actual twin who died at birth.

"In 1906 Amos P. Wilder took his family to Hong Kong, where he served as an American consul general until 1909.  For a short period young Thornton attended school there - a strict, German-language school - so that at the age that at the age of nine he had already been exposed to both the world of the Orient and the culture of Europe, equally alien to all he had previously known.  (One wonders how much this early experience contributed to his later artistic interest in exotic settings.)  After six months his father sent the family back to the United States, not to Wisconsin, but to Berkeley, California, where Thornton attended the public school.  By 1911, when Amos Wilder was serving in Shanghai, the family had returned to China, where Thornton was enrolled first in another German-language school, then at the English Mission School in Chefoo, until 1913.  At that time the family came back permanently to California, where Thornton attended the Thacher School in Ojai, graduating from the high school in Berkeley in 1915.  At the age of eighteen he had seen more of the world than many people do at forty-eight and he had learned early that a home is based not on a physical location but on human relationships.  Not surprisingly, his books have no strong sense of property or of material things; everything he writes is permeated by a vivid feeling for family ties (1-3)"  Kuner sort of walks right past the real crux of Wilder's fiction here, while at the same time catching a fleeting glimpse at its.

There'll be plenty more to say about how the author treats the subject of families when it comes to a proper discussion of the play at the center of this review.  For the time being, it will be enough to note that trying to separate the themes of Wilder's fiction from that of Steve King is going to be perhaps harder than I expected.  That's because there is one shared element between both artists that unites them on a certain fundamental level, and it impacts the ways in which each writer tackles the subject of familial and social ties.  For the moment, lets continue on with getting to know a bit more about one of King's lesser known Inspirations.

"When it came time to enroll in college, Thornton chose his father's university, Yale, but Amos Wilder, finding his alma mater too worldly for his son, insisted on Oberlin, a small Ohio college known for its splendid music department and its religious character.  At Oberlin young Wilder began writing seriously; in his two years there he contributed several pieces to the literary magazine.  In addition, he was fortunate enough to study with Charles Wager, a teacher with a passion for literature who kindled the imagination of his students.  Wager's interests, which, unlike those of some academic minds, were not narrowly confined to a minute area of specialization, struck a responsive chord in Wilder, for Wager's learning ranged over many countries and epochs.  It was probably from him that Wilder developed his own intuitive appreciation for writings of the past, for tradition, for history, for legend.  And Wilder's natural inclination in this direction was supported by precedent: both Shakespeare, who represented the end of an era, and George Bernard Shaw, who represented the beginning of one, deliberately selected for their material subject and characters that had already been exposed by artists before them.  Perhaps what most impressed Wilder was the discover that genuine masterpieces are timeless: in the words of ager, "Every great work was written this morning," or, in the modern parlance, is relevant.

"At Oberlin, too, Wilder first came into contact with that school of criticism known as...humanism.  A number of American critics...had grown contemptuous of that parochial kind of naturalism characteristic of American literature.  Such writers, for example, as Theodore Dreiser, who appeared to scrutinize only the petty, sordid, materialistic details of everyday life, seemed to the humanists to be abandoning all that was best and intelligent in man, to be concentrating on the gutter instead of the stars.  They felt that...the great classics provided the answer to literature and to life; books that stressed despair and deprivation could contribute nothing of lasting value.  This was a view that the young Wilder found very easy to accept (3-5)", yet I think it's best to pause here and add a qualification born of hindsight right here.  Everything I've learned about this guys leads me to believe that he qualifies as something of an American Renaissance Man.  The fiction of Wilder displays a very careful understanding of the Classics that Kuner talks about.  At the same time, a closer examination of the writer's output reveals a gap in her knowledge about his themes and meanings.  For one thing, Wilder seemed to know that even the gutter has its place, and that sometimes it can even send up flares or messages that people like the academe of places like Oberlin would do wrong to take for granted.  That's a mistake that Wilder never seems to have made.  In fact, there are elements in the play to be reviewed in a moment that tell otherwise.

Rather than revealing himself to be the Ivory Tower snob that Kuner seems to mistake him for, Wilder once more proves how he could have served as the Inspiration for a working class author like King.  The way he does this can be demonstrated if you go and take a look at an old 1943 film called Shadow of a Doubt.  Wilder wrote the screenplay for that film, and it was directed by some guy called Alfred Hitchcock.  The best way to describe that movie is this.  To look at it, to place the whole picture under a microscope is to get a fair enough idea of where a lot of the themes and plot points in the cinema of David Lynch originally stemmed from.  It's also the kind of film that might have left an impact on a young Steve King.  Shadow of a Doubt is a film that shares a great deal of thematic overlap in common with a movie like Blue Velvet, or a novel such as Salem's Lot.  Each vehicle takes a somewhat jaundiced view of small town Americana.  It's an idea that Wilder shares in common with the creators of Twin Peaks and Castle Rock.  There's the same sense of easy familiarity with the frailties, hypocrisy, cruelty, and sometimes even flat-out danger associated with living in a small town.  In the case of the Hitchcock film, Wilder treats his audience to the story of what happens when a serial killer played by Joseph Cotton returns to his idyllic seeming small town in an attempt to hide from the police on his trail.

Even the basic nature of that plot summary, stripped down to its essence, is enough to telegraph to veteran Horror fans the kind of tale we've got on our hands.  What it boils down to is that an outside evil descends upon the inhabitants of Anytown, USA, and in doing so proceeds to draw back the curtain on the dark side of American life.  It's something that artists like King and Lynch have in common with Wilder, and it's a trait he shares in turn with artists like Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor, and above all, Mark Twain.  I'll have to admit that last name signals an aspect of Wilder's fiction that I don't recall anyone ever bothering to take notice of.  It's a bit concerning, because something tells me that if we could single out just what (if any) influence the author of Huck Finn had on the creator of Our Town, then we could go a long way toward figuring out what made Wilder tick.  All of which is to say that this artist's exposure to the ethos of Liberal Humanism seems to have had a way different effect than the one Kuner believed it to be.  Rather than making him into some disconnected, ivied academic, the writer turned out to share a certain kinship with the likes of Tom Sawyer.  Like Mark Twain, he "knew the average all around".  Unlike Sam Clemens, Wilder remained a lot more open-ended about human nature.  Twain once held that "The average man is a coward".  Wilder knew that cowardice is something any of us are capable of.  He was also willing to place his bets on this not being the whole story, either.

Instead, just like the Renaissance Humanists who Kuner identifies as his main Inspiration, Wilder tended to see people as any number of possibilities (some good, others bad) waiting to be realized.  His idea of the "average all around" encompassed the notion that people make or break themselves upon the wheel of life.  You can scale all the way up to the very roof peak of the stars themselves, and you can just as easily fall to a level beneath the beasts that perish.  That was always a question of mere human choice.  The one thing that Wilder seemed to have the most impatience with were those human failures that tried to blame fate for their own self-imposed predicaments.  Like I said, it's proving to be more difficult to separate the nature of Wilder's fiction from that of King.  From here, Kuner continues:

"In 1917 Wilder transferred to Yale, a move that was not entirely to his father's satisfaction; about the same time, the latter resigned from the consular service and with his family took up permanent residence in New Haven.  At Yale Wilder interrupted his education for eight months in order to serve with the First Coast Artillery at Fort Adams, Rhode Island; though he did not see overseas duty during World War I, he at least participated in his country's involvement with it, as he was again to do later, in World War II.  Leaving the service as a corporal, he returned to Yale in 1919 and, the following year, earned his Bachelor of Arts degree (5)". In all, it's possible to list at least two major influential moments in the author's life.  The first stemmed from the way both Wilder and his siblings were treated as a family by their father; more of which anon, as we get into the review proper.  The second counts as the most unremarked upon aspect in the development of the artist's mind.  However I'm convinced that, like King and Twain, the second major shaping factor in Wilder's talent was his growing awareness of how a lot of what was awry in his own household found its reflection in the troubles plaguing the larger microcosm of his original New England society.  Both of these influences count as negative impacts.

It was the third one, however, which Kuner talks about next, which seems to have acted as an organizing principle, of sorts.  Something that helped the writer give shape and form to a lot of what he witnessed, and that maybe helped him to gain some kind of perspective on it all.  It seems to have chimed with the writer's introduction to the content and toolbox of Classical Humanism that he imbibed in college, and hence acted as something in the way of a kick off point for Wilder's artistry.  "In 1920 Wilder went to Europe on a fellowship and studied at the American Academy in Rome.  It was there, he tells us, that one of the most memorable experiences of his life came to him: as a member of an archaeological team he helped excavate an Etruscan street, buried centuries ago.  And suddenly his awareness of this lost civilization, which had existed even before the Romans, had collided with his own moment in time clarified and confirmed all his previous thought processes: there was no past, present, or future to be considered separately; no geographical limitations could be taken seriously when an ancient culture could be laid bare by a modern American shovel.  As he was later to explain it in The Eighth Day: "It is only in appearance that time is a river.  It is a vast landscape, and it is the eye of the beholder that moves (5-6)".  It's not much to go on, yet it might be enough to start out with, at first.

So to recap, here we've got this simple New England kid who grows up with something of an outsized Imagination, and he's lucky enough to be born into one of those households that tend to have a healthy enough dedication to artistic pursuits.  This positive influence is offset by the fact that Wilder seems to have experienced his own version of the stifling and corrosive Puritanical atmosphere that Stephen King discovered for himself growing up on the streets of Durham, Maine.  Mark Twain experienced his own version of the same social maladies coming of age in the American South.  All of these negative impacts are once more off-set by a number of other factors.  The first is that his stint as an exchange student in China left Wilder with an inescapable experience of the vastness of the world, and the differing cultures that we as humans have been able to construct for ourselves.  It was this exposure to other societies (the Asian-Pacific, in his case) that allowed Wilder the chance to avoid the kind of limited provincialism that Mark Twain struggled with all his life, even when he knew he was just a small fish in a large ocean.  This was a form of knowledge that was brought home to Wilder in a greater fashion as he made friends with those on the lowest wrung of Chinese society.  It was this exposure to ways of living that were outside the box of his time that was then added onto by his exposure to Classical Literature in college.  This broad-minded approach to things seems to have struck home when he dug up a piece of the past.

When you put all of that together, what you seem to get is the kind of literary career that has gone on to have one of the quietest, yet impactful legacies in the history of American Letters.  It resulted in the kind of work that would later find echoes in the writings of J.D. Salinger as much as it could the Fantasies of Ray Bradbury.  It's a combination of literary realism that wouldn't have been out of place in a play by someone like Arthur Miller or Reginald Rose.  There are also moments where you have to wonder just how much this guy might have influence Magical Realists like Jorge Luis Borges, as well as Gothic Pastoralists like King.  To give a sample offering of what showcases as the best introduction to this man's work, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at a one act play that Wilder composed during his journeyman years.  It might not seem like much now.  Yet something tells me this piece functioned as an important stepping stone in the history of the author's career.  With that in mind, this is an examination of a work known simply as, Pullman Car Hiawatha.