A Tribute to the UPA Cartoons (1943-1970)

This article is really best thought of as a sequel, of sorts.  For a while now, I've been on something of a self-reflective kick here on The Club.  It's not anything like a mid-life crisis sort of deal.  Instead, it's more a case of a critic being reminded of a lot of the reasons for why this blog ever got started in the first place.  I've been reviewing a lot of films and books on this site for a while now.  What I'm not so sure I've done quite as good a job at, however, is laying out, or getting readers to see the vantage point from which all of this stuff is critiqued.  In other words, whenever I've looked at a book or movie on this informal digital diary, everything I write, and all the judgment calls I make (whether it be a major blockbuster like Ready Player One, or an out of the way episode of an obscure radio show, or forgotten short story), all of it is based on an aesthetic philosophy, or at least a rough idea of what Art or storytelling is, and what it can accomplish.  To be fair, though, none of this is anything that any of the best critics out there have to work with.  Even Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert tend to give away hints of their ideas about movies and films over the course of their careers.  Kind of like an open secret.

What I'd like to do now is not just toss off the occasional hint in the midst of talking about something else.  That's something every critic winds up doing over the course of any review.  However, my focus today is going to be just a little bit different from all of that  Instead, I'd like to take some time to actually share one of the tenets that underlies the work done on this blog.  And the interesting thing is I know just the subject that will help me share all of this with you. It all has to do with a cartoon studio.

Rated K For Kids (1986-88).

This next entry in The Scriblerus Club is somewhat unique, and calls for a special kind of introduction.  I'll have to backtrack just a bit in order for any of what I say next to make sense.  A good way to start out is by stating the simple facts.  This article is written in something of a reflective mood.  No need to worry, however.  There's not going to be any grand, Wordsworthain rhapsodies here.  I may be a sentimentalist, yet I'm also smart enough to know when to reign it in.  Instead, it's more that the last review I did contained a lot of food for thought.  It was enough to get me thinking on my role as a blogger, and what that means in terms of wanting to be the kind of critic who reviews books and films for a living.  I have Martin Scorsese to thank for this (believe it or not as you will, I'm telling nothing less than the truth here).  His work on The King of Comedy, with its cautionary fable about the wages of fame and notoriety made me aware of how much of an ethical responsibility is needed on the part of not just the artist.  It's a moral imperative which appears to also be demanded of both the audience in general, and of any actual, legitimate critics there might be somewhere in the aisles.

I'm not sure I can even pretend to fit the role of a legitimate critic by any stretch of the imagination just yet.  It's the job description I want to have someday.  Until that moment arrives I'm just a journeyman, at best.  However, what Scorsese's film made me realize is that even a trainee isn't exempt for seeing if they can do a proper job well, even if it's just at the beginner's level.  Scorsese seems to be arguing that there's a lot of responsibilities that comes with being a critic, just as much as there is with being a storyteller.  And it is with this brief moment of insight that the last film I reviewed set off a spark in my mind.  Because a lot of the themes he and De Niro tackled in their little comedy project goes right to the heart of what a blog like this is all about.  The Scriblerus Club is a digital space concerned with a number of interlocking topics.  The first is relatively straightforward.  This is just a place where I can satisfy my own myriad fascinations about the making and telling of stories.  This includes what they are, where they come from, and what they mean to both writer and reader.  The other part of this blog concerns the latter half of the equation mentioned in the previous sentence.  In addition to an incurable wondering about stories, I've grown increasingly aware over the years of the role of the audience.

This was a topic whose importance I first began to realize maybe as soon as 2015 or 14.  The irony is it was an exposure to online troll culture that brought this to my attention more than anything else.  It was through stumbling across the work of "internet personalities" like Doug Walker and a host of copycat imitators that first made me aware of the various kinds of roles and outlooks that the audience can adopt or embrace in their dosing or intake of art.  It also brought me to a slow growing realization of just how much of a problem this kind of toxicity is for any possible discussion of the arts.  The good news is that it does at least seem as if the vast majority of the audience is aware of the issue as well, and really does wish for a healthier social space in which to discuss our enthusiasms for the art of stories.  So that's been one aspect of my concerns as a reviewer.  The other one has sort of taken me by surprise.  I also don't seem to be the only face in the crowd whose noticed a kind of collective fumbling when it comes to something like telling a mere story on the silver screen.  I can't even begin to give you explanation for why Hollywood in general seems to be going through its own moment of  existential crisis.

As of this writing, there is a mass walkout strike in all of the major motion picture studios, and television companies.  There seems to be talk and rumors on the street and in various chat forums that the American film industry is headed for a collapse of some kind.  At the very least, it won't surprise me if the entertainment complex undergoes some kind of shake-up transformation as a result of all of these events.  What the fallout of the Hollywood strikes will be, whether it will reshape American filmmaking, and what new form (if any) this next phase of cinematic storytelling may take, I couldn't really say.  If I had to go out on a limb, then I do wonder if one possible result could be a new democratization of making movies.  In other words, one potential outcome could be the either reduction or rebirth of motion pictures on a worldwide independent basis.  In other words, we could see all movies in the future as the product of a worldwide indie filmmaking model.  One with no real studio system to speak of anymore, and instead its all just various artists, actors, and crew coming together to create what they can on an open, crowdfunded environment.  At least this is one possibility out there.

This article, however, can't hope to begin to address all of these matters; or at least not all at once.  Instead, for this entry, I've decided to tackle another issue, and set my sights more on the way audiences take in the art and stories that they enjoy.  Part of the reason for a blog like this is a growing curiosity about what people are thinking when they either enjoy or dislike an offered story, and what this information might be able to tell on a broader level.  I'm wondering if maybe a review of the audience can help us figure out what kind of stories we like to tell ourselves, and see if this, in turn, can tell us something about the state of the arts.  Now, in order to do that, I've chosen the help of an old TV show.

The King of Comedy (1982)

There are some artists who are difficult to talk about.  This is not for any of the usual reasons.  There's little in the way scandal or gossip to go around here.  Nor has the artist ever done or said anything controversial or incorrect.  In fact, he's gone on the record of making a number of worthy comments, and donating to generous causes.  Instead, the real challenge comes from having to deal with a filmmaker who has built up such an artistic reputation for himself, that any attempt to so much as tackle even the least of his films is intimidating to the critic.  This goes double for when you're trying to talk about the cinematic career of Martin Scorsese.  It's reached a point where just saying his name can sometimes make even the boldest of cinemaphiles speak in hushed whispers, as if some long honored potentate had entered the room.  Bear in mind, this is the response that he manages to get out of all of the major headline critics out there (however little of them remain).  Now can you imagine what kind of an impression he's bound to leave on someone who is literally just a face in the aisles?  The prospect of knowing where to begin with a director like him is discouraging, to say the least.  This stems from the fact that it seems in order to talk about Scorsese, or his films, one would have to talk a little bit about everything else there is in life, or whatever it is you choose to call an experience like this, such as it is..

Or at least this is crippling sense of obligation that his reputation is bound to leave the average critic saddled with.  The reaction is a purely psychological one, and it probably has even less basis in actual fact.  Odds are even the man who helped create Travis Bickle is a smart, mostly even tempered and mild, magnanimous sort of person if you ever met him.  It also doesn't help to keep a maxim of Stephen King's in mind, even when talking about the guy who made Goodfellas.  King said he has to put his pants on one leg at a time, every morning.  No doubt this inescapable fact applies to Scorsese as well.  It still leaves the critic with a formidable challenge.  Where do you begin to discuss the art of someone who is held to be the American Filmmaker?  Right now, the best place I can think of is with a brief history of the development of the artist's mind.  For Martin Charles Scorsese, the entire process of thought began on the day of November 17th, 1942.  His city of birth, the main setting of his life which would go on to become something of a recurring major character in all of his work, was New York City.

To claim that the Big Apple has left an impact on the kind of artist Scorsese has become is a bit like saying that Charles Dickens knew how to write about street life in London.  Both statements are true, and therefore don't even begin to take into account the ways in which an early exposure to the often perilous street life of a gritty urban center went on to shape the aesthetic approach of each of these creators.  In both cases, what the reader or viewer is confronted with is a pen or camera that can't seem to help showing off the Best and Worst of Times.  Whenever Dickens or his New York counterpart focus the lens in on a particular incident, it doesn't take long for either of them to start recounting all the important narrative details with an immediate, visceral quality that either makes the characters jump off of the page, and directly into your mind for all time.  Or else the imagery and the incidents depicted will grab you by the jugular, and then not let go for the entire runtime.  In Scorsese's case, his camera always winds up lingering on matters of transgression, guilt, and the held out possibility of redemption.

These appear to be the three intertwined themes that have haunted the stage of his particular brand of cinema, from the very first.  In every movie he's ever made, he returns to these three hands in the tarot card deck, and then will always proceed to play a constant stream of variations on these ideas with a passion that borders on the obsessive.  What's important to realize is that it was New York itself which seems to have taught him his first important lessons in exploring these related ideas.  It's a cinch to say he grew up in a pretty rough neighborhood.  For whatever reason, his parents, Charles and Catherine, moved into the Little Italy district of Manhattan.  Both of them deserve a bit of credit here, before we continue to look at the way NYC molded the artist's imagination, because in a very real sense, it started with the both of them in a way I never would have expected.  Both of his folks worked in New York's Garment District, yet each of them also moonlighted as (very small) part time actors.  Now this was something I wasn't aware of until I started doing research for this article.  It's one of those minor details that tend to jump out at you from left field.  It's the puzzle piece that helps to complete the picture.

Knowing that Scorsese's parents were actor paints his childhood in a light that I'm not sure how well known this was.  Although it's possible this crucial snippet of information probably is known among his most ardent fans.  Whatever the case, one key fact remains.  It is now possible to assume that the director was the product of an artistic household.  If this is the case, then we have an important answer in terms of figuring out where Scorsese originally got his artistic temperament from.  It was nurtured in him almost from the start, by the very people who helped create him together.  His parents were able to pass along their shared enthusiasm for the arts along to their son.  He, in turn, appears to have gone on to put some very good use to it.  The city itself, meanwhile, has gone a long way to conditioning the type of art that Scorsese utilizes in his stories.  Most of the director's films contain a heightened sense of gritty urban realism.  The major focus always tends to revolve around life on the street in various capacities.  It almost makes sense to describe the director as one of the major poet's of the City.

The way this aspect of his career got started appears to stem from a bout of childhood illness.  Scorsese was the victim of asthma as a boy, and this meant that he often was unable to participate in sports, or a lot of the other extracurricular outdoor activities that children were allowed to get up to in a more permissive age.  This meant the director was often confined to his room, or else the stoop of his apartment complex; the closest thing he had to a family household.  It was from both of these enforced vantage points that the young Martin was turned from a participant, into a viewer.  It might have even turned him into an accidental sort of voyeur, though never in the usual sense of the term.

Instead, his asthma had the effect of turning him into an often unwilling observer of New York street life.  Here's the part that's difficult to write about because of the relative lack of information.  This is one of the few topics that has resulted in a certain reticence on the part of the filmmaker.  It's clear that the time spent staring out the window of his own childhood room has left one of the final decisive impacts on Scorsese's cinema.  It appears to be the first vantage point that gave him an unwanted insight that the world could sometimes be a violent place.  One is reminded of a few early scenes in Goodfellas where the young Henry Hill sometimes catches sight of the brutal and violent crimes that are committed on the street, whether in broad daylight, or the darkest side of night.  While that film is based on the autobiography of another person, it has been implied, here and there, that the event of a young mind witnessing acts of violence on the "mean streets" is something that both Scorsese and the real life Hill share in common.  This also accounts for the director's seemingly natural indirectness, whenever he's seen fit to mention (he's never truly discussed) the criminal acts that crossed his path.

Unlike Hill (both on screen and in real life), Scorsese was never allured by gang land life as it played out in front of him.  Instead, much like Stephen King, it drove into his impressionable young mind that he should always watch out for the bad men, while also giving him the nagging curiosity of wanting to understand how seemingly normal people can be driven to such heinous acts.  If there is any influence that one should point to as perhaps the final determining factor in the kind of artist Scorsese has since become, then any future scholar on his life would do well to focus in on that childhood window.  For strange as it may sound, it was this location that might be cited as one of the crucial inflection points for the development of the street poet's mind.  It is just possible to look at that whole real life scene, and realize that one is looking at a reality which is also a kind of symbol, perhaps even a parable.  The image of the young child at the window conjures up the curious notion of the young man almost as the accidental spectator of an ongoing pageant play.  For a brief moment, it's almost as if Shakespeare's notion has taken on an ironic life of its own.  All the world has become a stage for the child, and all the men and women in it merely players with their entrances and exists, some of which are violent.

More than this it's impossible to say or comment on.  Scorsese's exposure to New York gang life appears to stem from the time when a bad chest turned him into a spectator of the mean streets.  It's clear enough that it left a mark on the young artist, and that a lot of his art stems from what he saw from his bedroom window as a boy.  In this, Scorsese's experience bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Robert Louis Stevenson, of all people.  The Scottish writer was another artist for whom the bedroom window became a kind of natural proscenium looking out onto a real world stage.  The difference is Stevenson's experience resulted in giving him a lifetime of inspiration for Romantic adventure.  While it's a mistake (even a gross simplification) to call Scorsese the Mr. Hyde to Stevenson's Jekyll, what can be said is that with the director of Taxi Driver, it's almost as if the childhood theater window has been flipped on its head, or else the "entertainment program" consisted of a far gritter kind of drama.

From his experiences at the window, the artist soon learned not just the reality of both personal and gang land related violence, but also the stirrings of wondering why and how such things occur in the first place.  What is it that could drive a human being to go so far out on a limb as to be in danger of losing himself?  It's a question that serves as the driving engine for just about every one of the director's films.  And while he seems to have arrived at his own answers to this obsessive question, there seems little doubt that it all got started by both the window and the street.  The final ingredient in the artist's development is the most straightforward.  Once again, it was the product of asthma, more than anything else.  Since young Marty couldn't just go outside and play like the other boys, his parents took pity on him, and escorted him through the streets to the location of their own favorite pastime, the local movie house.  It's the last piece of the puzzle that is Scorsese's mental storehouse, and it could almost speak for itself, if everyone in the audience had a greater knowledge of the history of the movies (web).

The fact is Scorsese is one of those people who are best described as a walking encyclopedia of film.  He's seen and is knowledgeable about more films that most of our parents have forgotten by the time they got out of college.  Scorsese is the one with an actual devotion to the medium and its history.  Something tells me that if you want to know the contents of the director's min,d you should either ask him to show the world both his library of books and films.  If a list or catalogue was ever made of those items, it would go a long way toward giving us the literal inside of the director's mind.  When it comes to catching a glimpse of the other directors and artists who have shaped Scorsese's mind, and hence his art, then a basic roll call would give you the following names: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, Samuel Fuller, John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Roberto Rossellini, Akira Kurosawa, Elia Kazan, Alexander Korda, David Selznick, Roger Corman, Orson Welles, and John Ford.  Now there are two ways of reacting to a casting call like that.  One of them is optional, the other isn't.  

The optional one is open to anybody in the aisles who winds up taking more than just a passing interest in the narratives that unfold up on the screen.  These are the people who don't just treat films, or storytelling in general, as a passing moment's diversion.  Those who believe the Arts to have an objective life value of its own will often wind up studying the narratives they love.  Their reasons for doing this all come down to one motivation.  They found something they enjoyed.  This enjoyment has reached a level in them that it doesn't for the rest of the audience.  Sometimes an exposure to the right story at just the right time can be enough to help the cinemaphile set their own course in Film Studies, and from there, they go on to learn all they can about the directors listed above.  They'll study their careers, which means acquainting themselves with all the films they made.  They'll grow a familiarity with the history of the movies beyond the current, late stage blockbuster era, which seems to be all that the rest of us know.  They'll learn about all the different types of stories you can tell, and of all the possibilities for artistic creativity this can lead to.  This is the kind of thing that guys like Scorsese, and later his friends such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg did when they were growing up.

They've since been labeled as The Movie Brats, and that's how they were as kids.  These were the geeks tucked away in the corner of the classroom who often took the brunt of bullying in school, weren't all that popular with the girls, and always they tended to be considered kind of "out of it".  There was pretty much no way in hell someone like young Marty was going to be Mr. Popular growing up.  He, Steve, or George might have their own circle of friends, yet if you'd been around back then, you could have told from just one glance that they were the original Geek Squad, and their reputation back then wasn't as improved as it is now.  Basically they were all just a bunch of lonely outcasts who often went to the movies as a means of escaping from the hassles most of their classmates put them through.  The ironic outcome is that in looking for a place to escape to, all three of them found a shared way of plugging into reality.  It was the movies that gave them a sense of purpose, and above all, a future.

That's what separated them from the rest of the faces staring back up at the screen.  If you mention names like Sam Fuller or Kurosawa to the average person on the street, odds are even that person won't have much choice in the matter.  All he or she will be able to do is give you a puzzled look and maybe ask you why you're wasting their time?  Or if they're the Good Samaritan types, then they'll say maybe I can help you look for them.  Is your friend lost?  In either case, the result is the same.  Both examples are good enough snapshots of what became of Scorsese's classmates after they all left high school and college.  They all became Mr. and Mrs. Next Door, and have gone on to have lives that devotes little time to people like Melvin Van Peebles, or Frederico Fellini.  It really does seem to need a proper artistic temperament, like the one Scorsese has, in order to give those names a real appreciation.

And so, that is a pretty good beginner's summation of the career of a guy who is still regarded (in most pop culture circles, anyway) as the premiere filmmaker in America to this day.  Also, here I'm still left with the question I opened this article with.  Where do you even begin to talk about a director who has gone on to cast as big a shadow as that of Martin Scorsese?  As with every monumental task, the greatest advice on hand to offer seems to be that it's best to start out small, and then work your way up as you go.  That's why I've decided to begin my discussion of  Mr. Goodfellas by talking about one of the more obscure pictures he's made over the course of his career.  It's also something of an oddity in the director's filmography in that it's one of the few comedies he's ever tried to tackle.  The only other films of his that fit this description are After Hours (1985), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).  The one I'm here to talk about counts as the first time Scorsese ever tried to make the audience laugh.  It was a minor release that happened way back in 1982, starring Robert De Niro, called, The King of Comedy.

Renfield (2023)

I can remember the first time I met Count Dracula.  I might have been no more than six to eight years old.  At the time, I was being carted around by my folks in between a business errand, and we had some free time so they let me step into one of those old, now long defunct brick and mortar indie bookstores.  What made this place unique is that it was one of those bookseller-toy shop combos that I don't think you see much of these days.  Progress, and all that, especially where a person's childhood is concerned.  Because: reasons, or so say the "grown ups", anyway.  Whatever the case, I was browsing around the book racks and these quaint looking Playmobile display cases.  At some point I wandered around to a small corner bookcase, tucked away somewhere near the glass windows at the front of the store, and there he was, glaring balefully out at the reader from the cover of an old, children's beginning reader's edition.  The pale ashen face, those eyes that have a way of boring into your skull.  And then of course, there was the mouth pulled back into a feral snarl, revealing those deadly sharp teeth.  No question about it, I was eye to eye with one of the indisputable greatest icons in the entire history of the Horror story.  A legend, in essence.  And yet here he was, presenting his story in a way that was sure to capture a young genre fan's attention.

It was copy of a book series whose imprint was known as Ladybird Classics.  Has any veteran reader out in the audience ever heard of these?  They were really no more than just one in a long line of what might be labeled as Junior Primers.  I think you still see variations on the format to this day.  It's little more than an attempt to instill in the child an interest in the great classics of literature.  The way they do it is by packaging them in a format that youngsters can understand.  In that sense, a book like Bram Stoker's Dracula is a natural candidate for this type of venture.  It's the kind of narrative that has all the right ingredients for a built-in page turner about it.  Yes, it's one of (perhaps even the) premiere works of Gothic Supernatural fiction.  Yet the way its written, along with how the actions builds and progresses as the plot unfolds makes it one of the great "ripping yarns" of old capital L Literature.  In many ways, despite all the critical readings that have raised its esteem in the public's eye throughout the years, the essential seems to remain that behind all the book's Gothic trappings and machinery, what Stoker has given the public is something that is very much a kid's own adventure novel.  It's almost like a dark, modern day version of a fairy tale, complete with heroes, a villain, and and incredible quest.

In other words, it's exactly the kind of story that can survive, and even thrive from being condensed into an easy to read format for children.  I just turned out to be one of the lucky recipients that day.  I bugged my parents to get the children's version, and they proved just how good sports they were by letting me take it home, where I immediately dived into the pages.  Perhaps it's only in retrospect that we recognize whatever Rubicons might exist in our lives.  It took a while before I began to look back on my life as a reader (and hence the ultimate reason for this blog, I suppose), and it wasn't perhaps until just now (as I write this, in other words) that I begin to realize just how much of a turning point the choice of picking up that old, by now defunct Ladybird edition of Stoker's novel really was.  

In fact, I've just realized something.  It was a few years after reading through that Junior version that I soon began to take greater strides in the kind of author's I read.  Not long after that Ladybird book, I found out about Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, followed not long afterwards by Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, and from there it was on the to the likes of Stephen King, Peter Straub, Richard Matheson, Rod Serling, Richard Matheson, and Ray Bradbury.  In other words, I'd watched, listened to, or paged through some titles in the Horror genre before then.  Yet with the exception of Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, most of it was geared toward younger audiences.  That Ladybird edition might have been the first one that encouraged the reader to aim higher, to venture further up and further in to the type of more mature stories that were out there, waiting to be read. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is that this was the book that showed me it was possible to expand my tastes in terms of reading material, that I lot of what I liked as a child could still following along with me as I grew into adulthood (whatever that it), and would always provide me with some type of companionship through the years.  At least there's one other explanation of why I continue to enjoy reading of things that go bump in the night even after all this time.  And I suppose this means I have the figure of Count Dracula to thank for everything that's come along since that day in the little toy shop.

That's quite the feat for a literary monster whose really supposed to be the villain of his own story.  In a way, time has been both cruel and kind of to Stoker's greatest creation over the years.  He's been kept alive (or undead for those in the know) in the public consciousness ever since the character's ink and paper debut way back in 1897.  Since then, the character's proliferation in popular media is perhaps best described as a mixed blessing of abundant generosity.  Even people who've never read the book or seen any of the films have at least this curious working knowledge of who the Count is, seemingly based on little more than the general grapevine of pop cultural awareness.  It's a form of ubiquity that few Set Texts are able to garner in a life where the only constants are either change, or at least the nagging desire to get away from something.  This makes Stoker's creation nothing less than a genuine achievement, both artistic, and otherwise.  For those who don't know of the world's most famous vampire from the original source material, there remains several shelves worth of movie adaptation to choose from.

These movies appear to span the entirety of the history of cinema, from its beginnings in the Silent Era with F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) all the way up to the current film we'll be looking at today.  There's even been a recent indie attempt (made with the cooperation of the Stoker Family estate) to recreate the original Victorian novel in the style of the Digital Diary Unfiction format.  This kind of makes sense if you go back to the book, and realize its entire narrative (and even the title character himself) is made or composed of a series of fictional letters, newspaper clippings, and personal journal entries written by various members of the story's cast.  It might not seem like much.  In fact, the whole conceit of a novel written in such a fashion might even seem quaint to those who don't pay close attention to the nature of what they're reading.  That's when the details tell an intriguing story. 

Any pop culture nerd whose also a dedicated bookworm, probably can't help noticing that what Stoker has done in those pages is to craft a narrative which is told in what was, for the time, the only known form of documentary storytelling that human beings were capable of at that particular moment of history.  It was the equivalent of what Sanchez and Myrick did when they schlepped a crew and a couple of battered Circuit City cameras into the backwoods of Maryland, and created the Blair Witch Project.  Looked at from this perspective, it is perhaps just possible to say that you can have Bram Stoker to thank for that.  As he's given us an example of one of the very first Found Footage stories ever told in a successful, full-length format.  That's not too shabby for a two centuries old pulp novel.

The say that the Count and his story has been a trail blazer, in these sense, is a bit of an understatement.  Out of all the adaptations ever made of Stoker's book, however, it has fallen to just a handful of films to stand out as the best remembered examples of that epistolary novel's legacy.  Aside from the Murnau film mentioned above, the other two notables are the star making turns done by Bela Lugosi's Universal Studios classic of 1931, along with Christopher Lee's breakout performance as the King Vampire a decade or so later in 1958.  There also seems to be a small cult following for the Francis Ford Coppola version from the 90s, featuring Lee Harvey Oswald and one half of Bill and Ted, from The Matrix.  

However, that's a venture that still seems to exist within the twin shadows cast first by Lee, and yet more so by the figure of Lugosi's pop cultural osmosis performance.  In between exists the honorable mentions (such as Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein and The Monster Squad, two very respectable and fun entries in their own right), and the cheap knock offs, such as the later sequels and cash ins that Lee wound up having to do in order to just stay in the acting industry, and which he always looked back on in shame and derision as unworthy of Horror as a genre altogether.  The latest entry we're here to look at was the brainchild of none other than the Walking Dead's Robert Kirkman.

Somewhere along the way, it seems as if his mind turned from the subject of Walkers, to that of vampires.  Specifically, his imagination seems to have got caught on a very particular creative hook found within the overall myth.  To be specific, Kirkman got to thinking about what it must be like to be the servant of the world's most famous vampire, and that seems to be the beginning of the story.

Jonathan Lethem's The Spray (2004).

I've talked more than once on this site about the concept of Writer's Collectives.  It's what happens when a number of different and disparate author find themselves assembling together in these kind of informal, off and on again groups that will sometimes meet up together, sometimes just to chat, though more often than not, the real goal of these literary gatherings of for the purpose of "talking shop",  or to "compare notes", as the sayings go.  It's roughly the same thing that happens whenever car enthusiasts gather together and discuss the finer details of makes and model, and how well you can get them to run.  The major difference is that here, the topic of discussion often turns to the mechanics of storytelling.  What's the right sort of phrase to use, does this particular scene play well, or does it need some work?  How good is the story at telling itself?  Is it okay, or does it need some sort of shot in the arm?  These are the types of questions that few of the majority in the audience will ever have cause to ask themselves.  The reason for that is because, by and large, most people out there will never have any intrinsic reason to bother themselves about what is the right way to tell a story.  It's a writer's concern, more than anything.

I suppose that's as good an explanation for why guys like Coleridge and Wordsworth would tend to meet up often to critique each others works.  For better or worse, a story never really exists unless it can find an audience.  That's the only way to tell if a creative idea has any life in it, when you can see the reaction of the crowd, and whether they like it or not.  If there's ever any moment when the author has managed to make them smile, laugh, scream, or else just hold their attention spellbound, that's when you know you've at least started to do something right.  Good luck trying to find out whatever that is, because most writing is a lot like a dice game.  You have to throw your hand out there and hope you've landed a good roll.  I guess that's a further explanation for why you get so many cases of ink stained wretches congregating together.  Sometimes you just need someone out there who can tell you whether out not you're doing right or wrong.  An unspoken rule of every one of these collectives that I'm familiar with is that if you want a sympathetic ear that's not just willing to listen, but also have some kind of idea of what it is you're even talking about with your novel or short story (or even something as simple as a mere piece of poetry) then the best person to turn to is someone who toils the same trench.

Hence, history is full of folks like Wordsworth and Coleridge forming the nucleus of the Romantic Movement.  Or else you'll get T.S. Eliot and James Joyce inaugurating what's now known as Literary Modernism.  Or else its Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Dylan Thomas forming the Beat style of writing.  That seems to be the case with the writer I'm here to talk about today.  Jonathan Lethem is best described as one of those obscure household names.  He is (or was?) regarded as kind of big deal amongst "Book People" back in the day.  This was around the time that Neil Gaiman was helping writers see just how many heights a literary artist could scale, provided they had the talent, and, above all, the Imagination necessary to pull a groundbreaking feat such as The Sandman off.  Lethem seems to have been one of the many new creative voices that were emerging roughly at or about the same time, along with other luminaries as Jonathan Carroll, Alan Moore, or Dave Mckean.  The one thing that unites all of them is the type of fiction that they have all helped spawn thanks to the informal Writer's Collective that they each belong to in varying ways.  They are known as the New Wave Fabulists.

I've talked about their efforts here and there in the past on this site, and now with today's offering by Lethem, we have our latest entry from this particular creative group.  There is a bit of a trick involved here, though.  It turns out we're dealing with one of those cases where in order to talk about Lethem's fiction, it kind of helps to know something about his life.  It's a key piece of useful information to have tucked away under the cap if you want to go in with any chance of making sense of his writings.  This is not the same as saying that Lethem is  one of those writers whose books are to obscure for his own good.  That's far from the case.  Instead, one of the first things that became clear to me is that Lethem is one of life's great, unaplogetic, literary avant-gardists.  It's not that his books are difficult to understand, he just likes go a bit "out there" with some of his plots.  How far out are we talking about here?  Well, his first novel is a Science Fiction story with a private eye Noir plot at its center, and one of the recurring characters is a cigarette smoking kangaroo that talks, wears three piece suits, and has fondness for whiskey.  This is something that actually happens in the author's first debut novel, and he just puts it all out there with no apologies, and expects the audience to just roll with it.  It's the kind of fantastical surrealist touches that dot the pages of all his work.  His plots tend to be straightforward for the most part, it's just that now and then, it's like walking through a landscape made by Salvador Dali.

All of this is explained by paying attention to Lethem's childhood.  His was a fundamentally artistic upbringing.  Lethem himself has described it as a bohemian experience that was "thrilling and culturally wide-reaching".  His dad was an avant-garde painter, and while he grew up in Brooklyn with his family, the way his mother is described puts me in mind of a particular type of artistic activist. You know, the kinds of youthful, bright faces that used to dot the landscape of New York's Greenwich Village back in the day.  In other words, Lethem's mom strikes me as the kind of woman who would spend her nights trying to find out if Bob Dylan was playing at any of the local folk music joints, and then by day she'd be keeping in touch with whatever contacts she might have in the Civil Rights movement.  His mother was also Jewish, and if you are unaware of the contributions they made toward the fight for equality in this Country, then someone's obviously been withholding the whole story from you.  The point is Lethem was born, in some ways, into something of the best possible idyllic household for a kid raised in New York.  His mother gave birth to him in 1964, and as was fitting for the time, Lethem's folks were part of an artistic community in what is now the borough or district known as Boerum Hill.

It was there that the future writer was introduced to the realm of the Arts more or less from the start of his existence.  His upbringing meant that by the time he'd entered the school system, Lethem was bound to have already had a pretty good head for reading, painting, and writing on his shoulders.  He lucked out once more in fourth grade, at NYC's P.S. 29.  That's where he met Carmen Farina, one of those teachers who seem to be an unaccountable blessing from on high.  She not only recognized Lethem's burgeoning talent, and encouraged him, she might have also taught of the future author a few of the ropes and tricks he later employed in his published works.  Lethem has listed the music of Bob Dylan, Star Wars, and the fiction of Philip K. Dick as the major influences on his life and books (web).  I think there's one more element that helps explain the way he writes, and its a bit more diffuse and intricate.  The simple way of putting is to claim that Lethem is a product of the entire artistic zeitgeist of the 1960s in or itself.  It was and remains (to my thinking, at least) perhaps the last great time of artistic expansion and experimentation.

It's like there was this kind of willingness to see how far you could get away with pushing the boundaries of artistic expression in all of the major fields; from music; painting; film; books; and cinema.  It's the kind of envelope pushing that required a much more open mindset than the one we currently labor under today.  And no, for the record, there's very little in the way of daring to be had in our current selection of storytelling.  When it's possible to claim that there's a kind of lock-step rote quality to a lot of the major releases and franchises going around, then the last thing we are dealing with is innovation, much less the kind of mindset that would allow artists to break out of the mold and explore new vistas.  It's a further example of the way in which Lethem, once more, just seems to have gotten lucky.  He was able to imbibe the sights and sounds of pop-culture in a way that allowed him to mix high and low art forms together in a method that has since been described as "genre bending".

I think it says something about just how much we've allowed our imaginative capacities to shrink when the search for the perfect free form of literary expression is described in such an unimaginative term.  Lethem himself later came to see it as a label of momentary convenience, and just explained that all he was trying to do was find out how to tell the kind of stories he either wanted or felt he had to write, in whatever way they were meant to be written.  In that sense, all of his works can be described as the search for the perfect form of open art.  In his case, this just tends to result, time and again, in the appearance of occasional surrealistic, inter-textual, meta-commentary touches populating the pages of his secondary worlds.  A good place to start with all of this is by looking at the story up for discussion.

The Curator (2023).

I think I found out about this one quite by accident.  It was in the aftermath of rather euphoric literary rush.  I'd just completed a successful read through of the latest Stephen King novel (which is a story for another day), and I guess the pleasant stock response I was left with must have made me curious to see if there was anything else similar to it lying around.  Either that or I stumbled across the news about the novel I am here to talk about today quite by accident.  Whichever one of these events turns out to be the truth, the upshot is that somehow, I found out that a book titled The Curator, by Owen King, was set to be published in March of 23.  Seeing as how I'd just had, not the first, but definitely one of the best experiences of pouring through a King book in recent memory, it only made sense to think I'd found the next book that would pick up where the previous one had left off.  The name sort of helped in this case.

It's not a complete accident that the author's byline caught my attention, either.  The reason for that is because Owen King happens to have a famous father named Stephen.  Nor is Owen the only literary progeny of the reigning Monarch of American Frights.  For all intents and purposes, it seems as if Stephen King has been blessed with a certain amount of luck.  When it comes to the case of writers in general, the basic rule of thumb is that most of them tend to be one-offs, the genetic equivalent of an on-going series of freaks of nature.  There's a sense in which they can be described as natural occurrences.  Yet most are willing to swear on a stack of Bibles that there's something out of the ordinary about a mind that can create entire imaginary worlds and personalities out of whole cloth, or whatever fabric the Imagination is made out of.  Nor is that the only weird thing about the scribbling arts.  Perhaps the strangest part is that it's possible for some of them to make a kind of actual living off peddling lies for whatever meager sum any of them can get.  The only thing that can match that, to my reckoning, anyway, is that we're willing to be entertained by these fictional, secondary worlds.

It's one of the few constants that any of us are able to say or figure out about literary artists.  For the most part, by and large, they're not the sort of figures you can set your watch by.  Each of them keeps to their own erratic hours, hunched over a keyboard or word processor, and just hoping against hope that whatever words they need to get the job done will be there when they set down to their peculiar task.  The only other definitive thing you can say about the species amounts to just two maxims.  The first is that the vast majority of them seem to be at the mercy of the Imaginative faculty, in and of itself, 90 to 99 percent of the time.  The second is that, as a rule, most writers are by and large isolated occurrences.  They'll crop up here and there like creative runts in an otherwise normal looking litter.  While the arrival of an artist on the scene may be taken as a matter of course (up to a point, anyway) the fact is that this natural, solitary nature of most of their existences tends to mean that there's always this lingering sense of isolation about them.  It wouldn't surprise me to learn that all the writer's in the world combined would amount to no more than just one percent of the total population.  Hence, this lingering sense of solitude, which seems to emerge almost as a natural byproduct of their chosen profession.

It also seems that most authors tend to have a kind of sub-basement level awareness about their lives.  Each member of this solitary collective can often be found congregating in various types of writer's groups, some of which can sometimes manage to form the various literary movements that go on to bear their name, such as the Romantics.  There seems to be at least two good reasons for why this happens.  The first is relatively self-explanatory.  It turns out that art can't exist in a vacuum.  If a story has no audience, it remains mute, and therefore may as well not exist.  Hence the need for the artist to always be putting "the work" out there for consideration of the crowd.  It's one of the few times a writer can be said to emerge from their half natural solitude.  Yet even there, the peculiar function of the Arts in general means that this tends to heighten the sense of isolation that most writers tend to have in comparison to whatever normal people are supposed to be (and good luck trying to define something like that).  The other reason has to do with the awareness of the insular, retiring nature of writing.

This is the second reason why writers can sometimes feel the urge to seek out the company of fellow liars.  Just because the best writing is often done all by their lonesome isn't the same as meaning they like to be alone.  Hence you find scribbler's collectives like the Modernists.  The San Fransisco Beats, the Algonquin Round Table.  Even a writer like Stephen King has found himself part of an informal group of authors known as the New Wave Fabulists.  What makes it all interesting in King's case, however, is that he eventually turned out to be never as alone as he might have thought he would.  Far from conforming to type, the major writer of American Gothic fiction has turned out to be something of an exception that proves the rule.  It turns out there are (as of this writing) not one, but three published authors in the King family tree, and each of them were fathered by the same guy who wrote about stuff like a girl getting cover in pig's blood at the prom, or a demonic clown living under the sewers of a small town.  These literary off-spring are his two kids, Joe Hill and Owen King.

The curious part is how both of them have managed to find their little niches, both in terms of personal success in a tough market, and also as writers with something of a family legacy to carry onward.  This is perhaps the main feature of King's life that makes him so unique.  It's not often you get a case where creativity runs in the family.  It's like you have to go way back in time in order to find something like this.  The most famous cases that I know are all clustered around a small span of time from the 19th to the start of the early 20th century.  There are the two Bronte Sisters, Charlotte and Emily.  Then there was a brother and sister act with Dante and Christina Rossetti.  And of course, there are a pair of brothers known as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who wound up giving some guy named Walt Disney an entire career later on.  The most curious case I've uncovered belongs to none other than Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  It turns out he had one niece and a daughter whose own talents extended to carrying on his legacy in poetry, and philosophy.  So in that sense, you could say that Owen King and Joe Hill are part of a very informal, and haphazard tradition in which Imagination tends to run a bit in the family.

As of this writing, it seems like Hill is the closest one with any kind of genuine brand recognition to his name.  Stephen's oldest son seems to have done pretty well in carving out his own space in the pop culture landscape.  His breakout success came in the form of the still popular Locke and Key graphic novel series.  In addition, he is a published print author in his own right, whose titles include a 2005 anthology, 20th Century Ghosts (one of whose tales has since been turned into a successful motion picture not too long ago), and a series of novels such as Horns (2010), Heart Shaped Box (2007), N0S4A2 (2013), and The Fireman (2015).  He's also written a more or less decent short story with his dad, that was itself later turned into a film that deserves a lot more credit than it's gotten, known as In The Tall Grass.  By and large, the best way to sum up Hill's accomplishments is that it looks like he's well poised to one take up the mantel of King of Horror from his own father.  Indeed, it seems like Hill is set to inherit the same secondary world that made Stephen King famous, and that he'll one day pick up wherever the creator of Derry, Castle Rock, and Salem's Lot leaves off.  That just leaves us with the figure of Owen King to discuss.  And perhaps here is the point where the task becomes a bit difficult.

In distinction from Hill, Owen seems to be very much the writer in the family who often gets overlooked.  Part of the reason for this is because of the relative sparseness of his output compared with that of his dad or brother.  So far to date, Owen has been responsible for an entry known as We're All in This Together: A Novella and Stories (2005), Double Feature (2013), Sleeping Beauties (2017, which was also a collaboration with Stephen King), and finally there's the book that's up for discussion today, 2023's The Curator.  The danger here is the risk of turning him into a cliche, and that's something that's best avoided.  Right now, perhaps the best thing to do is to try and examine Owen's latest text, and see how it holds up on its own merits.  With that in mind, The Curator seems like the best place to start.

Cocaine Bear (2023).

Sometimes a critic gets lucky, and is able to claim they were part of the audience when word of mouth first began to spread about a must see film.  That's sort of what happened to me in the case of the picture up for review today.  I was one of the many who were bombarded with advertisements for this movie, and all of it was set to the dulcet tones of Melle Mel's White Lines playing on the soundtrack.  That's pretty fitting, considering what the subject matter of this flick is.  In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a marketing campaign for a cinema release conducted with such slick and consummate skill as I have on Cocaine Bear.  Yes the title is ridiculous, and the premise sounds like something tossed off by Mad Magazine during its drug fueled, 70s hey-day.  And yet I'll be darned if the promoters of this film didn't find the right way to at least get me interested in their product.  Which begs the question, how well does it hold up?