Walking the Nightmare

Posted on October 9, 2024 by Brad

This is an old paperback. It’s been with me for what seems forever, accompanying me through ten different moves between cities, provinces, states, and countries. It’s an essential relic of my teenage years; specifically that moment when I began the first steps to seriously consider becoming a writer. Every time I open it for a re-read it always reveals something new about its contents, about the time it was purchased, and about myself.

It was spring 1987. I had been first bitten by the Stephen King bug the previous August when I saw Stand By Me, based on his novella The Body (already detailed in Celluloid Heroes Part III). I purchased this particular paperback at Leeds County Books, then one of only two bookstores in Brockville. The other, a Smithbooks, was situated in the Thousands Island Mall in the city’s north end, and a second-hand store, Seekers Books, was, like Leeds County, situated on the main downtown thoroughfare of (ironically) King Street. Of those three bookstores as far as I know only Seekers remains, having stopped there on a swing through Brockville back in 2022.

I don’t remember what prompted me to go shop for my first Stephen King that day though I suspect my Grandmother, herself a big horror fan, had something to do with it because she’d liked his books (I recall being morbidly curious of the garish paperback cover for Cujo on a visit a few years previous). While I had read The Body in the Different Seasons collection I borrowed from the Brockville Public Library (the basis for “Stand By Me”) I hadn’t yet spent my own money on a King book. In 1987 there were plentiful options: that day alone I scoped everything from Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, and The Shining, to then recent offerings like Pet Sematary, Christine, and Misery. But my eyes gravitated to The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King. I gave the back cover a read. These were four short novels written by King and published post-The Shining by King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman drawing its nomenclature from author Richard Stark – itself a pseudonym of Donald Westlake, one of King’s favorite writers – and Randy Bachman of Bachman Turner Overdrive, a song from which was playing on the radio when King was brainstorming surnames.

The idea, as King outlined in his introduction “Why I Was Bachman”, was simple; he was worried about oversaturating the market with his books so he and his agent devised Bachman, to publish small runs of some early novels written by King while still in High School and later College. To King these for short novels were “pretty good” but clearly not horror. Two of them, The Long Walk and The Running Man were Dystopian sci-fi, both centering around nightmarish gameshows in a futuristic fascist America (indeed they could have been set in the same universe). The other two were suspense/character studies; Rage, which centered on a high school student who shoots his math teacher and takes his class hostage, and Roadwork, a bleak tale of a man who’s lost everything – his wife, his son – but his house and soon find himself embroiled in a fight to keep that as well.

I decided to take the plunge, figuring four novellas for the price of one book (with taxes, around $7 and change Canadian) a deal too good to pass up. I paid, dropped it into my backpack, and biked home. I cleared the homework deck, stretched out on my bed, opened the book and began to read.

Of the tales in Bachman, Rage left the strongest impression on me as its protagonist, troubled teenager Charlie Decker, was only a few years older than I. Because it was the oldest of the books – written by King while he himself was a high school senior – its voice felt closest to authenticity in all of King’s work especially in its capturing of the teenager’s voice (contrast that with the teenaged protagonist of his more recent Fairy Tale who feels like a 75 year-old man writing a teenager which, frankly, it was). Rage is all anger and self-righteousness; Decker, already facing suspension if not expulsion and possible jail time for attacking a teacher with an adjustable wrench, decides one day to “get it on”, brings a gun to school and shoots his math teacher in the head. Another teacher is shot trying to stop Decker. Then the door is locked, the school evacuated save for the other occupants of his math class. Over the next several hours Charlie will hold court, airing grievances, the whys and wherefores of who he is and what he’s done, and the other students will do the same with their own messed up, miserable lives.

Rage also left an impression I think because of my age. We’d moved to Brockville the previous August after a horrible year and a bit in Greensboro North Carolina (detailed elsewhere on this website; click the “Greensboro” tag for all the gory details). While I’d been friend-less in Greensboro, Brockville was almost the flip-side. Within the first few weeks of eighth grade I’d been invited to the cool kids’ parties, I landed my first (lame eighth grade) girlfriend (she wasn’t lame; just the idea of having a girlfriend in eight grade) shortly after, and was pretty much welcomed. By springtime things had settled, I was no longer the mysterious new kid, and while still abundant with friends and well-liked overall, could sense storm clouds on the horizon.

Those storm clouds? High School. You see, in Greensboro I’d been in a more typical middle school environment, where in Brockville eighth grade was pretty much like kindergarten through seventh; the same class of kids, the same classroom, the same teacher, the same school. These were kids who largely had been with each other since kindergarten; these were friendships and relationships going on nearly a decade in some cases. But with high school, a new building, new faces, teachers, classes, and classmates that was all about to change and change dramatically. I knew from the Greensboro experience what high school was; an alienating world of cliques, popularity contests and conflicts. I knew it was going to be rough and expressed as much to the friends I did have. They scoffed; things wouldn’t change that much, right? Well, I won’t go into all the details but it was once of those instances where the new guy was right on the money.

Rage was notorious for many reasons; perhaps the biggest was King’s decision to pull the book from publication following a string of school shootings that the perpetrators had either owned copies of the book or spoken glowing of it. Even today it’s a tough one to track down unless you head to eBay where a paperback identical to the one I own will set you back thirty dollars at least (some listings go up to fifteen hundred dollars, with a rare paperback of Rage in its original release asking an astounding eight thousand dollars). I would wager the inclusion of the hard-to-find Rage the main reason for such prices. As for King’s explanation for Rage (initially titled “Getting It On”) being pulled from print, well, the debate is ongoing, but any book involving a school shooting was inevitably bound to hurtle into the unyielding brick wall that is Life in America, one nation under gun, at some point. [1]

But if Rage was the primer then The Long Walk was the detonator. It was the characters; the interplay between all of them. With nearly a hundred named and numbered participants on the Walk naturally some fade into the background but King manages to juggle well over thirty speaking parts and have them all register on the reader. It’s also the world-building; the half-track, its stone-faced soldiers, the numbered participants, the three warnings, and the “ticket” delivered from the barrel of a carbine rifle. The premise is simple: the hundred participants of The Long Walk do just that, beginning at a marker on the Maine-new Brunswick border, traverse Maine, and enter New Hampshire before it all comes down to two finalists outside of Danvers Massachusetts. Set in an alternate version of 1970s America, John Travolta references and all, the history woven through the tale – oblique references to an East Coast blitz during the dying days of a World War II that continued into the 1950s indicate a much different outcome – remains part of the scenery familiar enough to us in the here and now (or in Walk’s case, there and then) while just skewing slightly off-kilter. The second longest tale in the collection after Roadwork, of all the Bachman Books it remains my favorite, as well as a top ten-top tier King for me.[2]

So I was all-in on King but after finishing The Long Walk I needed a break myself. School was winding down, I had assignments to finish, tests to pass. I shelved The Bachman Books with the intention of getting back to them when summer arrived. And that indeed happened, though the circumstances of that revisiting felt, in the moment, like something out of a King story.

Because the summer of 1987 would go down in my memory as the summer my face fell off.

We’d visited my cousins that July, and I had plans to be dropped off at my buddy Mark’s home to accompany him to their timeshare up in Muskoka. The visit went well but the night before leaving I started feeling under the weather. Like, really under the weather. I sparked a fever, I went to bed early, and when I awoke my face was covered in pockmarks.

Yes, friends, at the ripe old age of fourteen I had my first case of the Chicken Pox; late for most kids but right on time to fuck up my summer vacation handily. My four year-old cousin had just gotten over a case and was highly communicable and so I got it. Bad. Obviously there’d be no visit to Muskoka. There’d be no summer vacation at all. Instead I got to go home and get used to both the itchiness, and the smell of calamine lotion.

I was miserable. Trying to avoid any scratches or breaks that would leave me scarred. I was semi-successful – one pox formed under a pimple already formed on the bridge of my nose leaving a scar that’s still there to this day – but the worst part of it was the monotony. Being hit with the pox left me highly contagious so I couldn’t go anywhere or see anyone. Our house wasn’t air-conditioned either so that just added to the uncomfortable misery. I took to hiding out in our basement where it was cool and comfortable, like some hideous monster from, well, from a Stephen King story (or a Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont one; two writers whose work I would discover through King and his non-fiction book Danse Macabre).

In the basement there was distraction aplenty. There was the TV and all that a wonderous 13 channels could afford me which in the daytime pretty much meant game shows in the morning, soaps in the afternoon, and nothing else until roughly 4pm when Video Hits on CBC would begin its daily run.

To be fair Samantha Taylor was 50% of why I watched Video Hits and I’m not alone there either.

My parents’ old record player and stereo was down there also, so I got acquainted with their music collection; Gordon Lightfoot, Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Diamond, The Guess Who, and Creedence Clearwater Revival were in constant rotation along with a freshly acquired copy of U2’s The Joshua Tree . Seeing as the basement was the most comfortable place in the house that summer I asked if I could sleep down there on the fold-out couch. For July into August I pretty much never left except to go to the bathroom and meals. To keep myself distracted as I slowly recovered, I exercised and I read. The exercise was to keep moving, and keep active. That combined with the sheer amount of weight shed while fighting off the pox meant I really slimmed down. The reading thing; well, since bitten by the King bug I had found increasing interest in the strange, the unusual, and the unexplained. My birthday gift earlier that year had been a subscription to the Time Life Enchanted World series of books; a must have after seeing the iconic TV commercials featuring Vincent Price.

Those Enchanted World books remained with me in the basement, but having read through Wizards and Witches, Ghosts, Night Creatures, and The Fall of Camelot enough times over my brain craved more stimulation and with not much else to do I once again picked up The Bachman Books and read the second half of the stories.[3]

Of the remainder Roadwork was probably my least favorite, not because it’s a bad story (technically speaking it’s the best of the bunch being the then most recently written of the pack), but because its story of middle-aged Barton Dawes fighting back against a world that seems determined to grind him to dust were the most remote from myself and my life at age fourteen. Identification with the protagonists of Rage and The Long Walk was easy when you were within three years spitting distance of them, and The Running Man’s schlocky enjoyment was bolstered in large part by just how different it was from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie “adaptation” released that same summer.

But Dawes’ dilemma in Roadwork was too distant for me to really appreciate; a father grieving the death of his child, estranged from his wife, unable to function outside of his own self-destruction and finding himself increasingly out of touch with a world racing to profit at all costs was too remote. Reading it in 2024 though I was shocked to find how prescient King/Bachman was in our modern age of late-stage capitalism, “enshitification”, the loss of our third places, homes, bars and nightclubs, movie theaters and bookstores bulldozed to erect more stacked shipping-container luxury condominium boxes. The interstate about to be rammed through Dawes’ home is itself a big con; relentlessly constructed without actual need so the unnamed state can continue receiving federal funding. Even knowing the outcome on my later reread I almost wanted the resolution of Roadwork to find Dawes triumph at the end, but it was not to be. While in the present day one empathizes with Dawes’ situation, the guy remains an unrepentant, unlikeable asshole. Not even the revelation all of this has transpired in part because of the death of Dawes’ young son from cancer humanizes him.

All the Bachman stories share one common thread in how bleak they are.[4] Two end in the deaths of their protagonists (I won’t say which ones), two end with their protagonists alive but quite possibly driven insane from their separate ordeals (again, I won’t say who). In point of fact Roadwork hews closer to King’s run of crime stories like Billy Summers, and the Finders Keepers series; taut suspense thrillers with vivid characters and pages that self-turn. Roadwork’s biggest problem though remains in its protagonist himself; while his story is a compelling narrative Dawes is just too miserable to enjoy spending time with. It was reassuring in a way to see that even in the early 80s King was still learning his craft as well.

Thanks to the pox I couldn’t see The Running Man in the theater and had to wait for video before I could. The movie and the story it’s based on are night and day. The latter is a glum, grim, very serious dystopian nightmare whose protagonist Richards must compete in a grueling game-show that sees him pursued across the northeastern US in a fight to the death, all to be able to afford the life-saving medical treatments his sick daughter needs. Contrast that with the garish Arnold flick where he squares off with just as garish gladiators in a hellish Los Angeles while Family Feud’s Richard Dawson plays a nightmare version of his genial real-life game-show host. Corny, campy, and contrasted with that same summer’s far superior Predator, The Running Man, with its cameos from musicians Mick Fleetwood and Dweezil Zappa, and wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura as a retired gladiator turned color commentator seems to be having more fun than I did watching it. As for the Bachman book, the relentlessness of the tale culminated in a fiery climax that while spectacular – and inevitable – left a sour taste in my mouth. In it I can easily see why Bachman never really took flight. What “Bachman” never learned, having died of “cancer of the pseudonym” when he was finally outed by an enterprising journalist, is what King did; that even the darkest of stories need some glimmer of hope in the end. Yes, even Pet Sematary.

The most interesting thing about these Bachman books is they all feel of the very same world. The Long Walk and The Running Man could share the exact same (“what if the Nazis won WW2”) universe, and it’s easy to see a kinship between Charlie Decker of Rage and Barton George Dawes of Roadwork: two unyielding objects who refuse to bend and end up broken as a result. I think though what makes these grim, gloomy Bachman protagonists fascinating is how believable they are. Who hasn’t driven past their own childhood home and found it re-painted and landscaped beyond recognition or torn down and rebuilt into a multi-unit modernist monstrosity? Who, in their teenage years, hasn’t felt like a misfit unable to fit in anywhere? Where the characters in these two more grounded in reality Bachman Books leap off the page is in the violent means in which they resist the roles thrust upon them; Decker kills two teachers and takes a classroom hostage. Dawes undermines his place of employment, shatters his marriage, and uses violent means to disrupt the eminent domain about demolish his home for a freeway extension that was unnecessary to begin with.

When finished with Bachman that first read in 1987, and still dealing with the pox (which was just beginning to fade), I asked my mother if she could go to Seekers and see if any Stephen King books were available I didn’t have any specific titles in mind so when she came home later that day with lightly used paperbacks just dropped off paperbacks of Cujo and Carrie I was set. Later that summer came Different Seasons – the book I’d already read from the library – but now a copy I could call my own and still own to this day. Cujo was lost when lent to someone who I legitimately can’t recall, but this copy of Carrie – a rare first edition paperback as it happens – is the one I still possess.

While I probably would have become a die-hard horror fan eventually, it was that summer my face fell off that really sparked my interest and my fandom of King; being stranded and temporarily disfigured at home was certainly an identifiable catalyst for that fandom. Neither horror nor King have really left my life either. There was a period in the 90s I drifted away from him, until 1997 – a decade on from that fateful summer of 1987 – when, working a dull as dishwater summer job I found myself hitting up the local used bookstore where I purchased and finally read the doorstops that are The Stand and It respectively. That return to Castle Rock, and Derry, soon led me to Jerusalem’s Lot, Dark Score Lake, and Little Tall Island; fictional locations very familiar to King’s constant readers and Greek to everyone else. After 1997 I never stopped gorging on King and while my interest has waxed and waned now and again every new King book is a must-read for yours truly. He’s in his 70s now and I hope he’s still writing when I’m in mine.

Sitting poolside this past summer I dove back into The Bachman Books for a month-long re-read and found those familiar names and characters waiting for me, ready to perform in my theater of the mind yet again. I held court with Charlie Decker in Rage, took The Long Walk with Garraty, McVries, Stebbins, Olson, and mad, mad Barkovich. I holed up in my house with Dawes in Roadwork, and followed The Running Man on his nightmarish journey through a New England landscape familiar to me now after six years as a transplanted Yankee. I’m nearly forty years removed from that teenager who picked The Bachman Books off the Leeds County bookstore shelf and decided to take the plunge, but reading those stories again made me feel fourteen all over again.

There remains a particular alchemy in re-reading some old favorites; treading familiar ground yet discovering something new every time. That’s why stories are important. That’s why they resonate, echo and ripple through our lives.

That’s why they matter and why they always will.

ADDENDUM: a reader asked if I was familiar with The Stephen King Book Club on YouTube. The answer is yes, and it was their step-by-step “broadcast” reporting on The Long Walk that inspired me to pick up the Bachman Books again for a summer reread. I recommend the channel and the first episode of their Long Walk Recap, linked right here:

[As an addendum, this will be the final website update of 2024. I’m busy on a couple of other projects, one of which I hope to formally announce here in January. Until then …]

[1] I have one myself – a thriller titled Underneath – that begins with an act of gun violence in a high school and gets even bleaker from there. Small wonder agents have given it a hard pass without even reading the thing. A pity too, as it’s one of my better efforts.

[2] The remaining ten (in no particular order) are ‘Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, Bag of Bones, The Stand, The Body, Apt Pupil, 1963, The Mist and, of course, On Writing. Honorable mention to his non-fiction book Danse Macabre; a big inspiration for my Celluloid Heroes book and web series.

[3] I still own that complete set of 21 books by the way and they remain one of my most prized collections.

[4] The Bachman books not included in this collection – Thinner, Blaze, and The Regulators – are all similarly downbeat. Small wonder Bachman wasn’t a blockbuster of an author …

Celluloid Heroes Part VIII: The Drug Of A Nation

Posted on August 29, 2024 by Brad

Everybody has that one magical, occasionally momentous summer: the one that lingers in your memories decades later. For me that was the summer of 1994: the first summer I spent the totality of in Toronto. I was living in a house on Ossington Avenue with a bunch of other Film School nerds – Alex Boothby, Marcus Moore, Warren P. Sonoda, and a theater student named Jason Jones (later of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart among other impressive credits). I served as production coordinator and unit manager on two music videos Warren directed that summer for a Nova Scotia band named Fire Rooster:

Summer 1994 was also the last great summer of the Lollapalooza line-up, which I attended at Molson park in Barrie Ontario just north of Toronto.

Owing to the fact I had money in the bank and a loose schedule with work it was in July post Lollapalooza that my buddy Mark, whose family was away on an Alaskan cruise, to come stay at his place in my old Scarborough stomping grounds, to grill burgers on the barbecue, to partake of the in-ground swimming pool, and to just enjoy being twenty-one years old. To this day exactly thirty years later the summer of 1994 remains the best summer of my life. Possibly because – and I have reflected on this before – it was probably the last truly care-free summer of my life which would become more complicated as the decade wore on. In my mind and memory the years of 1989-1994 reflect a certain moment in time and in my life almost diametrically opposed to the 1995-2000 stretch that was a lot less fun by comparison (though it had its moments as well).

In a strange way the summer of 1994 was a reflection of Generation X as well; we’d enjoyed a pretty good run the preceding decade or so as we moved to the forefront of the cultural focus. Our music, our movies, our media was dominating the marketplace with no signs of slowing. But as always on those clear summer days and warm summer nights you often miss the storm clouds gathered in the distance. But at the time t hey did feel distant to me. I was having the time of my life. Hanging out, hitting the bars, and watching movies. lots and lots of movies.

If there was jewel in the crown that was the Toronto movie theater scene back in the 1990s the Uptown Theater on Yonge Street just south of Bloor had claim to the prize. The Uptown, specifically “Uptown One” was the largest, most cavernous space with the largest screen short of the IMAX one at Ontario Place, and accompanied by earth-shaking THX-certified sound. For years it was the theater for the Toronto International Film Festival, hosting premieres, and the entirety of the Midnight Madness Film Series where my film school pals and I gorged ourselves on horror, sci-fi-suspense-action films during the glorious ten days of TIFF that kicked off that first week or so of school. It also hosted regular Midnight Movie screenings every Saturday; big-screen movies you needed to see on the big screen to fully appreciate them. Here was an opportunity to catch those movies we missed in theaters the first time around like Jaws, Die Hard, and The Shining.[1] And we availed ourselves of that opportunity every chance we got.

Front row, center, resting your feet on the apron were the best seats in all of Toronto by the way …

The great thing about these midnight screenings was they were almost always packed. Not just a few weirdo movie random types; these were large, diverse movie going crowds willfully denying themselves a good night of sleep to spend two hours beginning between 11:30 pm and 12:00 am to watch a movie they could have easily rented on video because they loved film. I will never forget the bloodcurdling shrieks of one woman sitting a few rows down from me during a screening of Aliens, as a face hugger was slowly picking its way towards an unawares Newt during the Med lab sequence. Same as I’ll never forget that moment in The Shining where I knew (through repeated viewings on video) which column Jack Torrance was hiding behind with his axe as hapless Dick Halloran approached and just had to wait for the audience to jump in their seats and scream.

The Uptown felt like a movie theater; a Movie Palace to be exact, for the main auditorium was enormous, dwarfing everyone who sat inside. The people who ran the Uptown seemed to genuinely enjoy their work too; so much so that on occasion they would surprise audiences with performances from local busker/fringe mayoral candidate Ben Kerr, who once serenaded a packed crowd of filmgoers with a song written for and about the Michael Bay film we were all there to see; Armageddon. The Uptown casts such a long shadow over the collective memories of all who went there that even today there are those in Toronto who mark its closing and eventual demolition (for a condo tower, natch)[2] as the beginning of the decline of Toronto’s movie going scene. All of the great – and to be fair not-so-great – theaters began to fall like dominoes in the early 2000s. The Uptown. The York. The Eglinton. The Hyland. The Hollywood. All replaced by glossy and garish multiplexes that promised Big Screens, Big Sounds, Big Experiences but always felt less special than a movie at the Uptown. Sure they had stadium seats, and state-of-the-art sound. But their lobbies were noisy, garish places with video games and attractions that cheapened the theatrical experience.

Put simply: The Uptown was the theater you went to when you wanted the best possible movie-going experience. When a highly anticipated movie was scheduled to play there, the line to get in routinely stretched around the block, which is where I, along with elementary school friend Mark and high-school/college friend Nathalie and hundreds of others found ourselves on Saturday August 29, 1994 as we queued near the front of that line to see a new Oliver Stone film called Natural Born Killers.

Outside of John Carpenter has any filmmaker has had as impressive a consecutive run of movies as Stone? Beginning in 1985 and ending just ten years later he directed Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK, Heaven and Earth, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon. Stone was very much a filmmaker of his time; that mid-80s to mid-90s run. In that decade he had his finger as firmly on the pulse of the movie-going public as Spielberg and Lucas had from 1975-1985; not as a box-office juggernaut but for sheer gallons of ink spilled in discussing the controversial filmmaker’s body of work.

Controversy has been Stone’s thing pretty much from the start of his mainstream career. He had a spotty, unremarkable run as a low-budget schlock director in the 1970s before breaking out with his screenplay for Midnight Express, followed by ones for Conan the Barbarian and Scarface sparking that now perennial conversation of whether movies have become too violent. But his landmark Platoon put him on the map and again courted controversy with its depiction of soldiers doing less than honorable things in the jungle, most notably in the film’s central My Lai-inspired village massacre. But it was also a powerful metaphoric tale of seduction, of the embodiments of good (Willem Dafoe’s Christ-like Sgt. Elias) and evil (Tom Berringer’s brutal Sgt. Barnes) vying for the soul of wide-eyed youth Taylor (Charlie Sheen). Platoon, which I saw in the theater in Lake Placid NY while on a ski trip with my parents, knocked me on my ass. I wasn’t the only one: as the credits rolled my dad and I stood up to leave and realized we were the only ones in the packed cinema who were standing.

Stone seemed to dial back on that aspect of his work, and what’s remarkable about his subsequent films is in how tame they are. The heroes and villains of Wall Street (greed), Talk Radio (racists), Born on the Fourth of July (an indifferent government) and even The Doors (excess) are both conventional and easily identifiable. Nobody in a Stone film is an innocent though; all of them are tainted by their original sins, even Born’s paralyzed vet turned anti-war activist Ron Kovic, who joins the army to fight the commies in Viet Nam and is “enlightened” by a single VC bullet to the chest.

Stone dealt in broad strokes drama; subtlety was never his strong suit nor was it his intent. His messaging was graffiti sprayed over the steps of the US Capitol; a message best communicated by being shouted to the masses. How well that worked for you was all a matter of opinion. Some hated his proselytizing; others embraced it because it was so clear-cut obvious. It was blunt, straight-forward, lacking in nuance. It was an internet-era filmmaking before the internet really took hold.

But audiences were unprepared for 1991’s JFK; his propulsive, occasionally convincing, always thrilling deep dive into conspiracies revolving around the assassination of the president on November 22, 1963; a date that loomed as large in the Boomer psyche as September 11, 2001 would in the memories of subsequent generations. JFK was unforgettable both for the subject matter but also for the way the film was presented, in a dizzying montage of varied film formats, aggressive narration, flashbacks, and newsreel footage including the famous Zapruder film showing the back of the president’s head blown out over and over and over (“Back and to the left … back and to the left … back and to the left”) again.[3]

Had JFK been a sluggish historical drama it might not have garnered much notice; to that point Stone’s films had earned respectable dollars at the box office but never blockbusters. JFK changed that with its top-flight cast a virtual murderer’s row of talent; Kevin Costner, Sissy Spacek, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman, Walter Matthau, Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Kevin Bacon, Laurie Metcalf, John Candy, Michael Rooker, Jay O Sanders, Sally Kirkland, Wayne Knight, Tony Plana, Vincent D’Onofrio, Bob Gunton, Donald Sutherland (in one of the greatest single-scene performances in film history), and Joe Pesci. The $40 million dollar JFK earned $200 million worldwide, making the three-hour plus film a genuine success. In late 1991 it was the movie you had to see; I recall attempting on two separate occasions to see it in Kingston, and the film being sold out by the time we got to the box office window.[4]

But even to my impressionable teenaged mind Stone’s JFK was hokum, albeit entertaining hokum; a mix of narration, fast cuts, mixed media, all of it creating a propulsive story that’s convincing because it moves so fast. And had I seen JFK in the theater in 1991 (it wouldn’t be until 1994 that I, along with Warren, went to see it at the Paradise Cinema not far from the rental we were sharing) I would be writing about it and not Natural Born Killers, which came along barely than three years later and proved to be an even more controversial film. As though Stone himself was saying: “You want controversy!? I’ll give you controversy!”

Natural Born Killers feels born from the response JFK received in the mainstream press and the often vicious, vitriolic attacks Stone himself received from politicians and pundits, not to mention what I am sure were many angry letters sent to his production office. Stone was personally affronted by the JFK backlash and identified the news media as the main culprit, accusing them of whipping up negative reviews and creating controversy all at the behest of their corporate masters. The news media who, in Stone’s mind, had for three decades perpetuated the “myth” of Kennedy’s assassination, toeing the Warren Commission’s line about Oswald being the lone gunman.

And yet Stone himself even identified that while the old guard hated JFK, it tested and played very well to the filmgoers born after the assassination: Generation X. The ones much more willing to cast a wary, distrustful eye to their governments, their leaders, even their parents. Like he too saw this next generation as more willing to ask tough questions of what the news deigned to show them.

If only there were a project he could make to draw from that audience …

It took a little while to figure out what that project would be. Stone followed JFK with Heaven & Earth, the “third part” of his loosely connected Vietnam trilogy, this time focusing on the experiences of a Vietnamese woman caught up in the war. The film’s mixed critical response and box office failure seemed an additional rebuke. Here was Stone addressing his critics and attempting to tell a woman-centered story about the horrors of war, only to have it be soundly rejected, presumably as an additional punishment for stirring the conspiracy pot. The failure of Heaven & Earth seemed to light a fire in Stone. All he needed was the right project.

Then producers Don Murphy and Jane Hamsher passed Stone a screenplay they’d optioned by a young writer on the up-and-up named Quentin Tarantino. Natural Born Killers was an incendiary black comedy about two thrill-killers, married couple Mickey and Mallory Knox, and how they become media superstars, aided and abetted by the same tabloid news media that depends ratings-wise on their exploits. The 90s saw the rise of tabloid and “Reality TV” which was another “only in the 90s” innovation that would rise to dominance beginning in the early 2000s beginning with MTV’s The Real World – a “documentary” about a group of 20-something GenX-ers cohabitating in a NYC loft – that made minor celebrities out of “normal” people (until the next season’s cast came along, and the next, and the next …)

“Reality TV” extended to the actual real world, and incendiary criminal acts became daytime news fodder as well. Court cases like Eric and Lyle Menendez, Lorena Bobbitt and – in a bit of real-life-to-showbiz synergy nobody saw coming, OJ Simpson, captured the public’s attention whether we wanted it or not. You couldn’t avoid knowing who Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan were because the nightly news blasted you with every bit of information about them. The Goldman-Simpson Murders occurred earlier the summer of Natural Born Killers’ release, prompting Stone to add in a shot of OJ – still a year away from his trial – at his arraignment to the film’s closing montage weeks before release. With the first Gulf War resolving itself too quickly for the news media to really make bank it was looking for something – anything – to draw in viewers and keep them there as 24-hour news network CNN made its bid for dominance and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News was waiting in the wings, lunching its 24-hour channel in 1996.

Stone loved the script. It represented his chance to take some retaliatory shots at the media who had eviscerated him and make them, not the killer couple, the true villains of the story. In Stone’s mind (and in his massive rewrite, aided by Richard Rutowski and David Veloz, of Tarantino’s screenplay – the budding auteur only got a story credit), Mickey and Mallory are victims of the same trash media and insidious reach of television that made Stone himself Public Enemy #1. Mickey’s fleetingly glimpsed childhood is one of abuse and murder and suicide. Mallory lives in a home under constant physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her domineering father (Rodney Dangerfield) and doormat of a mother (Edie McClurg); that flashback plays out as a deranged sitcom with laugh track called “I Love Mallory”, filmed on a soundstage with big bulky TV cameras. Mickey’s entrance is to audience applause, and tasteless jokes get the laugh-track treatment.

Mickey and Mallory were young punks (and killers, let’s be clear) but are simultaneously the only three-dimensional characters in the film. The rest of the main cast – Tom Sizemore’s media-savvy super-cop Jack Scagnetti, Tommy Lee Jones’ prison warden Dwight McClusky, and Robert Downey Jr.’s trash tabloid reporter Wayne Gayle – are all cartoon characters played to an even more cartoonish hilt. The only actor who comes close to projecting any sense of gravitas is activist turned actor Russell Means, who cuts a sympathetic, short-lived figure in his brief role as a Native American who takes Mickey and Mallory in during their desert wanderings.[5]

Natural Born Killers is a surreal road-trip through the American psyche, or at least that’s how I imagine Stone described it. Everything in it is played to the nth degree, from teenage serial killer groupies proclaiming Mickey and Mallory “the biggest thing in murder since Manson” to the Superbowl Sunday prison post-game broadcast interview an incarcerated Mickey gives to Gayle that ends up stirring the prisoners to riot by speaking some hard, harsh truths about America, about human nature, about life and how all of ours are exploited by wealthy parasites who get rich off others’ miseries. It’s a crude film in violence, in action, in dialogue, but it is never boring. Viewed in the present it sometimes feels and looks like the pre-internet-pre-cell phone-pre-social media outrage cycle world that it definitely is. Yet it also reads as a warning about where America was heading with its obsession with fame and fortune and celebrity. Gazing about the current hell-scape of influencers and social media stars and provocateurs stirring up outrage in an attempt to go viral and boost their own SEOs, the world Natural Born Killers prophesized has become our reality.

But in one particular area Natural Born Killers genuinely stuck the landing and one must give credit to producer Jane Hamsher, who assembled a series of mixtapes for Stone to listen to while driving around scouting locations through the US southwest. Tapes loaded with the crème of the crop of angry, aggressive GenX-centric music. The idea being this was the music and these were the bands people like Mickey and Mallory would have grown up with, who expressed the rage of a generation crying to be heard. Stone responded with genuine enthusiasm; despite being nearly fifty years old, the film he produced was squarely dropped into GenX territory. Its soundtrack, produced by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, was an exercise in audio overload featuring L7, Jane’s Addiction, Cowboy Junkies, Dr. Dre, Leonard Cohen, Rage Against The Machine, Diamanda Galas, Marilyn Manson, The Specials, The Melvins, and Duane Eddy that played out in the film and on its accompanying soundtrack album as one long uninterrupted fever dream of music, like an Adderall-addicted teen scanning through the radio station settings. And it was that soundtrack that led to Natural Born Killers becoming one of those “of the moment” movies that captured the imaginations of its intended audience; GenX.

As to why it hit so hard, one has to look at Natural Born Killers in the context of the year in which it was released for 1994 was a volatile year for GenX beginning with the suicide of Nirvana front-man Kurt Cobain. Alternative Nation had been shattered to pieces and it was looking for something to grasp onto with the same spirit Nevermind had brought to the mainstream. Bands like Oasis, Blur, and Green Day tried to fill the void and while soon to become megastars in their own right, they all lacked that rage Cobain delivered in his guttural howl so well; unlike Cobain, these artists wanted to be superstars.

TV was no help either, at the time preoccupied with the ongoing OJ Simpson saga. The movies of that summer had also been a bit of a letdown. Yes, there were megahits like The Lion King and Forrest Gump and Speed, but for young adults culturally immersed in nose-rings, tattoos, dyed hair, and loud aggressive music they were all pretty safely mainstream. While Tarantino’s next film, Pulp Fiction, astounded everyone by winning the Palm D’Or at that summer’s Cannes Film Festival it wasn’t due to be released until that October. That was the environment Natural Born Killers was about to cannonball itself into.

Seeing Natural Born Killers on opening weekend truly felt like participating in an act of generational rebellion. The film was already being called “dangerous” and “incendiary” and “irresponsible”; naturally we had to see it in the best theater possible. As already stated the line to get into Uptown 1 stretched around the block but Mark, Nathalie, and I were near the front. We had tickets, but what we didn’t have were the best seats in the house. That was my job to secure and I knew, from numerous screenings at the Uptown that they were in the first row. Normally the first row is where you don’t want to sit as it’s right up against the screen, but the Uptown’s design was as such that the first row put you up against a lengthy apron leading to the screen further back, and you could put your feet up on the edge of it and stretch out (if there was one failing in the Uptown’s design it was the lack of leg-room).

So I was ready to do my part, and once they tore our tickets and let us inside the building I was off like a shot, racing up the long staircase while the rest crowded onto the escalator. I was in the theater, bounding for the front row, and managed to secure the three seats in dead center before either Mark or Nathalie knew what had happened to me. On locating me right where I said I would be, they were amused, but appreciative for having the best seats that night for what would be an epic experience.

And to be fair, if the experience of seeing Natural Born Killers was better than the actual movie, you couldn’t fault it or us for feeling that way. We did enjoy the movie because we were all the right age – in our early 20s – for its blend of satire, violence, humor, and anger. The audience was fully on-board, laughing at the blood and gore, cheering when the villains got their just desserts, and just tripping out on the truly wild visuals; even compared to JFK, Natural Born Killers looks and feels like no film Stone – indeed anyone – had made before or since.

There was a definite split in reactions to it as well and the split happened right along generational lines: in short GenX loved Killers and Boomers loathed it. In hindsight it’s not difficult to see why in both cases. What the movie and Stone seemed to be saying was this is the world we’ve created for ourselves. A world where ratings, where profit, drives all, and as long as Mickey and Mallory promise Big Ratings and Ad Revenue they’re not only safe but dare we say necessary to keep that spice flowing even if it means a few people get killed along the way.

Stone’s film ends with a roll-call of then sensational media figures Erik and Lyle Menendez, Lorena Bobbit, Tonya Harding, and the Big Kahuna himself OJ Simpson – at the time just arrested and charged with the murder of his estranged wife and her friend – everybody in that audience at the Uptown recognized them because we’d been inundated with news stories courtesy of the tabloid culture that came to infest mass media discourse in the 1990s and never really went away. Every week a new outrage, every year another Trial of the Century and on and on and on. Fiction became fact by sheer repetition. TV gurus like Oprah elevated shills like Drs. Phil, Oz, and for all I know Frankenstein as well.

In short, the world Natural Born Killers depicted was a Boomer Creation, and a world GenX had no choice but to live in. What Stone and company were pointing to was something we all had come to realize; that the media was not our friend. That the days of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Dan Rather were coming to an end. Truth was less important than ratings, allowing the Rupert Murdoch’s and Clear Channels and Sinclair Broadcastings of the world to buy up the competition was a genuinely bad thing that was just the first salvo in a decades-long decline in independent voice and independent everything.

Natural Born Killers marked the end of the Stone Decade. Never again would the filmmaker capture the public’s imagination and ire in quite the same way. His post-Killers output of Nixon, U-Turn, Any Given Sunday, (multiple cuts of) Alexander, W., World Trade Center, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Savages, and Snowden, while all possessed of their own merits just didn’t have the same zing as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, and Natural Born Killers. Those movies put him on the map, and simultaneously made him the punchline to many lesser types’ jokes.

Viewed through the passage of time though he was a filmmaker unlike any other working at the time with the possible exception of Martin Scorsese. But whereas Scorsese’s obsessions were of the rot in the human soul, Stone’s was the rot at the heart of American Identity, extending to his early 2000s documentary series “The Untold History of the United States” which blames American interventionism for every ill and evil of the twentieth century (while simultaneously hand-waving away the crimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot as aberrations of rather than features of totalitarian communist ideology).

In a similar way Natural Born Killers ended up marking the end of the GenX era as well – the angry, volatile brand of it anyway that had dominated the discourse and culture for that first half of this tumultuous decade — which was always a minority, albeit a vocal one. That rage of being a rat in its cage which began in 1989 had lost its way by the end of 1994. Kurt Cobain was dead, the economy was improving, things were looking better than they had at the beginning of the decade. Britpop took the wheel and promised happier, bouncier times. Grunge would soon become a footnote; an outsized one in GenX memory to be fair, but still a footnote. Music was becoming lighter, brighter, peppier, and spicier.

Yes, GenY was making its voice heard and they had the internet as their megaphone. The next five years would look very different from the previous five. Grungy black and white was becoming Gen Ys boy bands and pop princesses. It all made NBK feel like the last hurrah for Alternative Nation as well. I would go back to see the movie in the theater two more times, and I’ve since seen it numerous times more on DVD. Somehow we (my roommates and I) acquired a big bus-shelter sized NBK poster for the living room wall where it hung pretty much until we all moved out at the end of 1996. I’ve revisited in times since but I’m a much older man now and it doesn’t posses that lightning in a bottle it did in 1994. Life looks a lot different in your fifties than it did in your twenties and while I’m still angry at the state of the world I work hard on my side to improve it in whatever ways I can. Certainly not through the barrel of a gun. Definitely not by staring at a screen.

And despite 1994’s summer weighing outsized in my mind there have been great summers to follow, not coincidentally all of which have occurred since my son was born. Nothing makes you appreciate summers more than your child to share them with you. His experiences become your re-experiences, from summers on Cape Cod (1982 and 2024 respectively) to relaxing poolside (1994 and 2024), movies, museums, activities and adventure. Life is what you make it and that applies too to summer.

Looking back today, as dangerous, incendiary and irresponsible as Natural Born Killers may have seemed one cannot deny that it was onto something. What seemed an exaggerated cartoon portrayal of American life in 1994 has sadly become more prescient now as we’ve hurtled into the third decade of the 21^st Century. There’s a full laundry list of atrocities – Columbine, Newtown, Uvalde, Tr**p – that have come to pass since Natural Born Killers’ release to be met with a largely benumbed gaze as “just another day in America ending with Y”. Mass media has given way to social media and its amplification of everyone’s voices to little benefit. Because of algorithms always seeming to hand a bullhorn to the very worst aspects and voices in society it keeps people watching and sharing and scrolling. It makes celebrities of stupidity and ignorance, it platforms cruelty and delivers hatred to an audience addicted to its flavor. If Killers was made today Mickey and Mallory would have been social media stars, broadcasting their crimes on TikTok to millions of adoring fans and spurred countless of copycat murderous couples killing for Internet clout.

In one of life’s many ironies the then-present day critics of Stone’s film would likely admit now that as offensive to their sensibilities the film was then, in the cold hard light of today it looks positively quaint compared to the daily outrage and insanities we carry around in our pockets everywhere we go. It’s a shame Stone is more or less retired from filmmaking; he could make a hell of a movie about our present day nightmare.

[1] The Uptown staff were also big movie fans, so much so that the tickets for that screening of The Shining were deliberately misspell to read “The Shinning” in reference to a popular spoof from The Simpsons TV show.

[2] The reason the always profitable Uptown closed? It was sued for not being wheelchair accessible. When the court ordered them to make it compliant, the prohibitive cost of a retrofit led the Famous Players chain to shutter the building and sell the property to a developer. In a tragic twist to the story, during the demolition of the building a wall collapsed onto an ESL school housed next door, killing one.

[3] So mainstream was JFK that it was parodied in an infamous episode of Seinfeld.

[4] Think of that: a three-hour plus film about the investigation into the Kennedy assassination selling out multiple times. We’ve come a long way, baby. Or not. It wouldn’t be until sometime in the mid-90s I finally saw JFK on the big screen, at a rep screening at Toronto’s Paradise Theater with my roommate (now president of the Director’s Guild of Canada) Warren Sonoda.

[5] In this post-The Doors film Stone hadn’t quite let go of his obsessions with Native American mysticism.

ADDENDUM:

A reader asked about the significance of this entry’s title. It comes from a great song by the great 90s hip-hop group Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy “Television, The Drug of a Nation”, the message of which might just as well apply to the internet culture of today.

Celluloid Heroes Part VI: In The Pale Moonlight

Posted on June 19, 2024 by Brad

Summer always seems endless when you are younger and the first week of summer vacation was always my favorite. School was wrapped up for another year, and the memory of those hallways, those lockers, those desks lingered fresh in the mind as we embarked on what was two full months of freedom from pencils, books, and teachers’ dirty looks. Living in Brockville Ontario at that time was a definite advantage; being a river town swimming and boating on the St. Lawrence were the norm and I recall many afternoons spent piloting the small outboard boat we owned around the bays and inlets lining the Canadian side of the river (and occasionally the American side as well – you could do that pre-9/11).[1] Before July and the official start of the summer season began, that last week to handful of days remaining in June were an oasis of calm before summer “really” started, with its jobs, its family trips, its obligations, and with its hopeful leisure time.

Summers for me back then was also extra-special because that was when the best movies were released. Not “best” as in critically because they frequently were pretty mediocre or downright bad, but “best” as in “this is a movie where you munch popcorn and allow yourself to be transported”. Unlike now where a “summer movie” can be released in the dead of winter) back then Hollywood made us wait until the warm months to unleash a horde of summer-friendly cinematic fun upon us. They didn’t have to be all-time greats; they just had to be good enough to be a good time[2] and I, like so many others of my generation, were fortunate to have lived through the Golden Age of the Summer Movie: Jaws, Star Wars, Grease, The Empire Strikes Back, The Shining, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Dragonslayer, Superman 2, Conan the Barbarian, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Poltergeist, The Thing, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Tron, Blade Runner … and that carries us up to only 1982.

By 1989 movies were very much at the forefront of my mind as well as I was very much focused on pursuing a career in the entertainment biz. But doing so back then was difficult verging on impossible when you were a kid in a small-town far from the bright lights big cities of New York, L.A. and Toronto. There wasn’t much in the way of opportunity for a Brockville teenager like there was one who hung his or her hat in Studio City, Van Nuys, or Santa Monica. There also wasn’t much opportunity to learn the ins and outs of moviemaking, in this pre-DVD behind the scenes and audio commentary world of 1989. Learning the ins and outs of the movies themselves meant going to the cinema, renting the VHS, or watching every movie-related program TV had to offer.

Thankfully I had two great lifelines courtesy of TVO – TV Ontario to those of you not from Ontario Canada. If you are from Ontario though, those three letters will signify something. TVO was and remains the province’s public broadcaster, airing special interest programming, news, multilingual documentaries, children’s programming, all of it funded from the public purse. It is, like PBS in the states, one of the finest examples of our tax dollars at work we can genuinely see and access. TVO was also producer of two informational TV shows I watched pretty religiously.

The first was Prisoners of Gravity, created and produced by Mark Askwith; a well-known comics luminary (who I would come to know quite well as my career took off) who later went on to become a segment producer at Canada’s Space: The Imagination Station – Canada’s answer to the Sci-Fi, later SyFy Channel. Along with host Rick Green (of the famous Canadian comedy troupe The Frantics), Prisoners of Gravity chronicled the happenings in the sci-fi community with an emphasis on literature and comic books. Interviews with luminaries like George Clayton Johnston, Robert F. Sawyer, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Julie Czerneda, Tanya Huff, William Gibson, Harlan Ellison and Spider Robinson. Prisoners of Gravity (or “PoG” as fans referred to it) aired weekly on TVO between 1989 and 1994 on Friday nights and I watched it any chance I got. PoG dug deep into the art of writing, of ideas, of crafting stories that genuinely provoked thought rather than just passive distraction. Outside of Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson I wasn’t a huge sci-fi and fantasy literature fan when I started down the PoG road, but by the end I was a full convert.

The second TVO show was actually a block of films that aired Saturday nights titled, appropriately, Saturday Night at the Movies, hosted by a kindly looking elderly bald man with glasses and a broad grin named Elwy Yost.

Elwy was what we would call one of the great ones; a man clearly in love with films, and whose love of them was infectious. The program for Saturday Night was simple; two films aired back to back, with an intermission comprised of interviews with the actors, filmmakers, and behind the scenes personalities behind those films. Hitchcock and Ford, Hawks and Curtiz, Donen and Wise were favorites of Elwy’s, but he also introduced me to the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Billy Wilder, and Francois Truffaut among others. Saturday Night excelled in introducing you to the movies that in some cases you couldn’t see elsewhere. While home video was certainly well-entrenched in the late 80s I would never had a chance to see 1968’s The Swimmer or 1964’s The Americanization of Emily without Saturday Night at the Movies.

This is all to say I spent many a Saturday night at home, watching Elwy and TVO when other teenagers were out cruising the strip, getting drunk, and getting laid. It wasn’t uncommon to make up some excuse to friends as to why I couldn’t go out on a particular Saturday, just so I could stay home and watch Matewan with an accompanying interview with its director John Sayles, or Jason and the Argonauts because Elwy’s guest that night in conversation was none other than fellow Canadian James Cameron, who himself looked as delighted to be talking with Elwy as Elwy was with him.

The films aired without commercials and uncut, and my home library of video tapes back then included many episodes of Saturday Night at the Movies. I could have just set the VCR to record and gone out but for me watching them in the moment was a lot more satisfying, in the same way see in a film in the theater always is. It was the immediacy, the “blink and you’ll miss it” element that to this day has me leave my phone locked in the car or left on the dresser at home when going to a show.

My interest and education in film was largely self-taught, through Starlog and Premiere magazines, through video rentals and newspaper reviews but also by going to the movies. Summer movies were a big deal back then and had been since Jaws devoured the box office in 1975. Up until Jaws movies were generally slowly rolled out across the country, opening first in the larger markets like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Toronto. You would frequently hear about a movie like The Godfather or The Exorcist for months before you got to actually see it. But with Jaws and then Star Wars the movies began to open bigger, and wider. Throughout the 80s the summer movie season became Hollywood’s Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, and Birthday rolled into one two-month stretch where you could more or less make your year. And if one of the many movies released became an all-time classic of its genre like Dirty Dancing, Ghostbusters, or Beverly Hills Cop, you would continue to rake in the dollars on home video. Over the intervening fifteen or so years since Jaws the summer season became bigger and longer, with the first “summer” movies debuting in mid-May and running more or less through August.

In the list all-time Legendary Summers of my lifetime, three from the 1980s stand out. 1982 gave us Star Trek II, The Thing, E.T., Poltergeist, Blade Runner, Conan the Barbarian, and Tron. 1984 had Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Ghostbusters, The Last Starfighter, Gremlins, The Karate Kid, Purple Rain, and The Terminator.[4] 1985, with Back to the Future, The Goonies, and Cocoon seems almost quaint by comparison. The trajectory by then was well-established, and movie critics would groan collectively as Hollywood dumped its biggest releases into the summer months, and pine for the relatively calmer, saner, “better” films of autumn.

But the Summer of 1989 was different and everyone recognized those differences in the moment. Dubbed “The Summer of the Sequel” we had Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Ghostbusters II, The Karate Kid Part III, License to Kill and Lethal Weapon 2 among the pickings, along with Honey I Shrunk The Kids, The Abyss, When Harry Met Sally and Uncle Buck.[5]

But to look at 1989 and the Summer Film in general, we have to look at the third film from a quirky filmmaker who, after Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) and Beetlejuice (1988) was handed the reigns of a comic book character best known to audiences as the star of his very campy 1960s TV show. And while Tim Burton’s Batman, released to theaters 35 years ago this day of publication, is campy in numerous ways, it ably demonstrated especially to me the role a director played in turning the everyday into the extraordinary, in those rare cases when the right director meets the material best suited for him. Simply put: Batman 1989 would have been a very different film if it had been directed by anyone other than Burton.

Now let me add a quick little 2024 aside: I love Batman. I love the character, I love Gotham City and its Rogue Gallery of Villains. Heck, the wallpaper of my iPad is, you guessed it …

But in 1988-1989 Batman was kind of hokey to me. My prevailing memory of watching the old 60s Batman TV show likely dominated this belief, as did the old Superfriends cartoon series. And while friends in Brockville had talked up The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, and Batman: The Killing Joke as being dark, adult stories, I had yet to be converted.

Burton’s film would change all this.

Like many of us, Burton was the weird kid. Growing up in sunny suburban Burbank California, he was obsessed with Universal horror, Vincent Price, Edmund Gorey, German Expressionism, and monster movies on TV. Graduating from Cal Arts he became an animator at Disney before branching out into directing. His unique visual style was his calling-card, and crossing paths with comedian Paul Reubens, Burton’s star would climb when Reubens picked him to direct Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. He followed that with Beetlejuice; a truly odd film that proved to be a big hit, and introducing Gen X to one of its seminal poster girls (and personal movie crush); Winona Ryder. I saw Beetlejuice with a group of kids from school, and could hear the girls we were with unimpressed by Winona’s Goth Lydia Deetz, calling her gross and weird and creepy but those preppy teenage girls just didn’t understand the appeal of being strange and unusual.

It was shortly after seeing Beetlejuice in the theater in 1988 that a friend mentioned that Burton was directing the upcoming Batman movie. That Michael “Beetlejuice” Keaton would be playing Bruce Wayne, with Jack Nicholson taking on the role of the Joker. At first I thought this friend was having me on, but an issue of Starlog confirmed it all later that month. In that pre-internet age news traveled slowly; movie news particularly so. It wasn’t uncommon to learn a movie even existed until you plopped down in a theater seat and saw the trailer pop up on the big screen. This was the case when in early 1989 when going to see a movie whose title escapes me now, seeing the trailer for Batman. You can still find it on YouTube and it’s quite a stark difference from the slickly produced trailers of today (and to be fair even back then). There was no music, basic production sound, no narrative. Just clips from the film which looked like nothing any of us had seen before. It looked dark, gothic, expressionistic, seeming to straddle multiple eras all at once, with the duster coats and fedoras of the criminal gangs contrasted with the Batman’s hi-tech gadgets and car:

Bat-mania developed slowly over the first months of 1989. We all knew the Batman movie was coming, but so too were the returns of the Enterprise Crew hot off the smash success of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and the Ghostbusters were back as well. Even Indiana Jones had his Last Crusade, indicating this third film would be the final entry in the Indiana Jones series.[6] So yes, Batman; but would it be a hit? Would audiences who grew up on Adam West and Burt Ward and the notion that comic books were kid’s stuff respond?

In that sense, the decision to have Prince record songs for the movie, and be so enamored with the Batman mythos the Purple One recorded a whole damn album of songs was a masterstroke. Prince’s Batman album is widely derided now and even was so on its release, but you cannot deny it helped usher people – particularly the teens who made MTV, Much Music, and CBC’s Video Hits a staple of afterschool viewing. The “Batdance” video in particular was a real banger in that regard, with Prince appearing as himself, as a character calling himself “Gemini”, with dancing Batmen and Jokers and Vicki Vale’s cavorting about an obvious soundstage while music punctuated by audio clips from the movie. It’s one of those “only in the 80s would this work” moments in pop culture that burned itself into the memories of every GenX kid who watched it. It also made every school-age kid who saw it want to see Batman.[7]

I was looking forward to Batman like most summer filmgoers, but more so because by 1989 I was a big comic book fan. I had been one since 1984 when I discovered the G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero comic series but my tastes had matured though by 1987 as I discovered books like Hellblazer, The Shadow, and Sandman. Brockville’s first comic book shop, The Comic Cave, opened in 1988 and I spent many hours there browsing the racks discovering a new favorite book almost every week. A friend finally convinced me Batman was cool when lending me his paperback editions of Batman: Year One, The Dark Knight Returns, and most particularly The Killing Joke. That book was what made me most interested to see Batman, especially when in an interview in Starlog Burton made mention of it being an influence. It’s no surprise the version of Batman occupying my brain was a much different beast from the one we got.

I actually didn’t see Batman opening day despite it actually arriving at the Parkedale Cinema in Brockville on day of release, because opening day and night were spent at my friend Casey’s lakeside cottage outside the city. Being teenage boys being boys the “sleep-over” became a “let’s stay up all night and play poker and burn shit in the camp-fire” so by the Saturday afternoon when I and my buddy Mark visiting from Toronto staggered back to my house to crash, we somehow decided seeing Batman that night was the much more prudent course of action than, you know, sleeping. But movies were important back then. They were cool back then. And back then you had to see it on opening weekend so you could say you had seen it. And so, after a hasty dinner of pizza the two very bleary-eyed of us staggered to the Parkedale to stand in line for tickets and crowd into the sold-out theater to take our seats and try to get through Batman without nodding off.

Doing anything while sleep-deprived is a challenge. Seeing a movie while sleep-deprived makes for a wholly different experience. And I noticed it from the beginning as the Warner Brothers logo transitioned to a gloomy landscape as the credits rolled and Danny Elfman’s now legendary score played over what would eventually be revealed to be the Bat-symbol. The movie was dark, and it was dim, and while I was attentive to it, in its most gothic moments – the opening in Crime Alley, the raid on Axis Chemicals and the (re)birth of the Joker, all the way to the operatic showdown atop Gotham City Cathedral, I couldn’t be sure I was in the theater watching Batman, or having a dream about being in a theater watching Batman. As I recall afterward Mark felt the same way, and on the way home we quizzed each other (“Did the Joker really pull a massive gun from his pants and shoot down the BatWing?”) to confirm that yes we had actually seen Batman and hadn’t been dreaming the entire thing.

So I’d seen Batman. But did I like it? To be honest I couldn’t be sure, so I saw it again a second time in a state of full waking to make sure what I’d seen the first time was what I’d seen. And at the time I was kind of mixed. It certainly had atmosphere to spare, but the story was thin, the action clunky (Burton is many things but a director of action is not one of them). That’s not to say it wasn’t good because deep down it did what every film should do which is to transport you to a time and a place where you do not exist. Where you are just some silent presence observing the trials and tribulations of these characters and their world.

In Batman’s case the world is Gotham City, and what a dingy, dreary world it is; possibly the best representation of the city outside of Matt Reeves’ The Batman in 2022. Bolstered by Anton Furst’s gothic production design, the Gotham of Batman is very much that “third main character” after Nicholson’s Joker and Keaton’s Dark Knight.

As for the plot, well, there really is none. It’s an origin story. For the Joker. For Batman. And for the dominant form of blockbuster moviemaking that would really kick into gear in the late 1990s with Blade, the X-Men series, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, all of which paved the way for 2008’s Iron Man; a modest hit that ended up kicking off a cinematic universe to spread across screens big and small over the following fifteen years.

It’s surprising looking back even now to consider just why Burton’s Batman hit so hard because it’s so damn weird. Not weird like Batman Returns would be in 1992, not weird as in the “what the hell were they thinking” weird of Batman and Robin of 1997. Batman is a loose, almost plot-less film carried along by its stunning production design, moody cinematography by Brazil‘s Roger Pratt, loopy score by Oingo Boingo’s Danny Elfman, snazzy costumes by Bob Ringwood, and diametrically opposed performances by Keaton’s brooding, slightly off-kilter Bruce Wayne/Batman and Jack Nicholson’s very off-kilter Jack Napier/Joker. The premise of Batman – Batman must stop the Joker from poisoning the citizens of Gotham City – is pretty much the plot. The vibes are funhouse mirror though, with Nicholson chewing scenery and camping it up to the hilt while the normally just as loopy Keaton in the straight role of “man who dresses as bat”

Batman is an exercise in style and in mood. It is a brooding, shadowy nightmare of dark alleys, Lovecraftian architecture, and gothic styling. More than any movie I’d seen up until that point, Batman made me truly understand and appreciate what a director brought to the table. A Batman film by Tim Burton is diametrically opposed to one from Joel Schumacher, Christopher Nolan, Zach Snyder, or Matt Reeves. And while all of the latter films are very much their own things all of them owe some of their vision to Burton’s first film. We certainly see shades of it in Batman Begins’ expressionist jumble of tenement slums and in The Batman’s nightmare version of Gotham. We even see it in 2023’s box-office bomb The Flash, which resurrected Keaton’s Caped Crusader for an extended cameo and did absolutely nothing interesting with him.

Batman 1989 was also quite campy, becoming more so as the Joker begins his campaign of terror. Like he’s hijacking the narrative, tearing away the brooding noirish atmosphere of the film’s first act and giving it a dose of his Smylex gas. Street mimes become Tommy-gun-blasting maniacs. Trenchoat-and-fedora goons get makeovers with snazzy leather jackets bearing a Joker logo. Gotham’s mayor, police chief, and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Billy Dee Williams) break the fourth wall and look to the Joker on his TV screen as he interrupts their TV-screened press conference. The criticism of Batman from its fans; the heavy use of Bat-machine guns, Bat-bombs, Bat-missiles would seem to fly in the face of the legacy of a character who never used a gun, but this isn’t the comic book Batman; this is Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman is a Tim Burton movie.

In the wake of Batman’s extraordinary success, what was truly surprising though was the lack of any films Batman inspired. We really didn’t get any other “comic book movies”; no new Superman, Flash or Wonder Woman, no Spider-Man, Captain America, or X-Men either (Marvel’s finances were in a general shambles throughout much of the 1990s). Instead what we got were movies starring characters whose origins were pulled from the same Great Depression era as Batman and Superman. 1990 saw Dick Tracy, 1991 gave us the retro throwback The Rocketeer, 1994 gave us The Shadow, 1996 The Phantom. It was as though Batman’s enormous success somehow convinced studio execs that the movies the kids of the 1990s were desperate to see were the characters their grandparents grew up with back in the 1930s while listening to their exploits on the radio. None of these Batman-inspired follow-ups hit in the way Burton’s film did (and most of them bombed outright). What was even more surprising was that Batman didn’t inspire that wave of comic book movies; all the 90s brought us outside of modest hits like 1994’s The Mask and outright flops like Barb Wire were three more Batman movies.[8]

As to why it was such a hit though, I wouldn’t point to comic book fans, which even then were not a major force in a box office success. I would suggest instead that because so many of that summer’s movies were sequels audiences were just looking for something new even when “new” in this case meant a character first created in 1939 who’d been a recognizable piece of pop culture for the intervening fifty years. The Bat-Logo was hip. It was cool. Using it as the principal marketing hook was a master-stroke, and one that you can credit producer Jon Peters with; he alone may be the one most responsible for changing how movies were marketed and you can see the simplicity of Batman’s logo poster throughout the next thirty-five years of film. All throughout that summer and well into fall a Batman logo t-shirt was considered to be a “cool” fashion choice, even among the girls. Batman may not have been a great film, but it was a fun one, and one that just happened to be the right film at the right time for it to take flight.

I remain a Bat-Fan to this day. I have a massive Lego Bat-Wing mounted on my office wall. I have a collection of Lego Batmobiles spanning the Adam West-Burt Ward TV series through Robert Pattinson’s incarnation. I even grabbed a Michael Keaton as Batman circa 1989 from McFarlane toys just to have him on my shelf of 70s-80s movie-inspired action figures. To me Batman is the most malleable of the superhero figures comic books gave us. He can be dark and brooding, he can feature in a horror or action or romantic storyline, he can do “the Batusi” and appear in Lego form but always, always be that same character. His rogues gallery of villains are the best rotating cast of n’er do wells in fiction bar none, from The Joker and Penguin and Catwoman to The Riddler, Two-Face, Clayface, Mr. Freeze, R’as Al Guhl, Scarecrow, Mad Hatter, and Bane. The Gotham of Batman, like the Metropolis of Superman, is a fictional city everybody knows about and has probably visited at one time or another. There is quite literally a Batman for every occasion and inclination.

My Lego Batwing, hanging on the Bat-wall

I also remain a Burton fan, though when looking at the overall scope of his work, his most essential years to me remain his early ones, from 1985 and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure through 1994 and his biopic Ed Wood. Many believe he lost his touch after Ed Wood’s box office failure but I feel Burton has always been Burton; it was just in that decade or so stretch comprising Pee-Wee, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Wood found his eccentricities in sync with the movie going public and the cultural shift as GenX took the wheel. It’s no big stretch to see a similarity between Beetlejuice and Scissorhands with David Lynch briefly entering the mainstream with Twin Peaks, and the Alternative Rock generation moving to the forefront. Strange and unusual was “in” for a time and then it wasn’t, and while there is a lot in Burton’s subsequent work to admire, notably Sleepy Hollow, Big Fish, and Sweeney Todd which feel more fully realized than his Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice In Wonderland, and Dumbo. Tim Burton just became what all successful filmmakers do at some point; he became Tim Burton, Incorporated; a filmmaker with a certain style and language and outlook that becomes the selling point over what he’s actually selling.[9]

Lego Batmobile and minifig collection. Thank the pandemic for my Lego obsessions

1989 was the Summer of the Bat. It announced that the 1990s would be a much different decade than the 80s. A decade where the formerly weird suburban kids like Tim Burton would be handed the keys to the kingdom and both shape and be shaped by a cultural shift that would change everything that came before. As for me it was the summer my movie obsession and career path resultant really kicked itself into high gear. The next three years would be some of my most stressful but also my most happy even as my home life would take a turn for the worse. But, like Bruce Wayne, I would find reason to fly.

Just a portion of my 80s movie and TV figure shelf. You have to grow up but you don’t have to grow old.

[1] And occasionally the American one as well; the border was a lot more open back then compared to now.

[2] And if not? It was still two hours in an air-conditioned theater when the temperature outside hit 90 degrees.

[3] Contrast that with 2023, where we seem to ge a “summer” movie every month.

[4] 1981, with Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Road Warrior, and Escape From New York was no slouch either.

[5] None of these were as anticipated by me as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing but owing to its R rating and not making it to theaters in Eastern Ontario I had to wait for it to hit video before watching it multiple times.

[6] Unfortunately, and your mileage with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Dial of Destiny may vary, it was not.

[7] And became a great punchline in Edgar Wright’s 2004 film Shaun of the Dead in the process. The “gag” which I won’t spoil wouldn’t work nearly as well if it had been any album but Prince’s Batman one.

[8] 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a hit but one still in production when Batman was released.

[9] He shares that similarity with Michael Bay of all people, whose more interesting films like Pain and Gain, 13 Hours, and the terrific Ambulance are lost in the shuffle of five (!) Transformers films.

Infinite Content (or: Boredom: A Defense)

Posted on December 14, 2023 by Brad

In January of 2000 I was sitting pretty high. RoboCop Prime Directives was nearing the end of its production cycle and I was living my life as a screenwriter with a bright future. I had money in the bank, I had just upgraded to a very nice apartment in a nice area of Toronto, and my Monday-to-Friday was occupied by writing. My weekends were movies and activities and hanging out with friends, at bars, at pool halls, or coffee shops. I’d even managed to pay back my student loans.

It was a much different life than the one I have today. Today I’m a husband and father; I live on a nice, tree-lined street in a prosperous suburb of one of New England’s larger cities. I still spend my days writing but those days are broken up by school drop-offs and pickups, chores and errands, and general day-to-day life stuff.

The world has changed. My world has changed. But one area where it has not changed, thankfully, is that I still allow myself the simple pleasures of being bored.

It’s why I gave up having a cell phone which makes me a rare beast in today’s connected world. I don’t like carrying any device on me, frankly, be it tablet or smartphone. I find them cumbersome, not for their size, shape, or weight, but for the burdens they carry; the expectation to be “Ponce de Leon, constantly on” (to paraphrase the Beastie Boys); that ever-present need to be online.

The Boys have never steered me wrong for I am a student of their teachings …

When was the last time you were bored? Nothing to do, nothing to say, nothing to keep you occupied other than your own thoughts? When was the last time any of you just sat there with nothing to fill the empty space?

If you have a smartphone on your person, I’m guessing the answer is “never”. Thanks to the smartphone you have the internet and all its distractions. You browse websites, you scroll social media, you shop, you watch videos, you listen to music. You constantly allow something in to alleviate that boredom, am I right?

I have a little thought experiment for you. Picture a drinking glass. This is a metaphoric glass we carry with ourselves at all times that is neither half empty nor half-full. It just is. And there’s always something handy to pour into it; mostly basic day-to-day stuff like waking up, eating breakfast, starting work, all through the day until your head hits the pillow later that evening.

All of the above occupies roughly two-thirds of that glass. The rest is filled by whatever you want; a TV program, a movie, a video game, some reading or listening to music, a walk, dinner with friends, some hobby or regular activity, or just relaxing.

But more frequently, thanks to the ever-present smart-phone and its infinite content, a lot of us – too many if I must be honest – never get around to the other more fulfilling stuff -because the algorithm is constantly encouraging us to hit “refresh” and keep scrolling. We’ll sit there, phone in hand, and tell ourselves “just lemme look this one thing up” and the next thing we know hours have passed. Even when we put the phone down and go back to the movie or TV we were watching we feel it calling to us; not literally, but the chemistry of our brains is telling us it wants another hit of that sweet, sweet dopamine that we’ve become addicted to.

I see this on afternoon pickup, when I trek to my son’s school, passing the middle-schoolers on their way home, nearly all of them walking with heads stooped as they stare at their phones. Same as the high school students who once gathered outside and huddled in groups as they smoked cigarettes; now they congregate and huddle over their phones, trading one addiction for another, and both of them equally damaging for different reasons. But it’s not just “the youts” as Joe Pesci called them in My Cousin Vinny; I see it in the parents waiting outside for their kids, noses buried in their phones. I see it in people much older gathered for dinner at a restaurant, all of them staring at their phones in lieu of conversation. I see it in traffic when the light has changed to green and the driver of the car ahead of me doesn’t move because I can see his or her head in that downward tilt that communicates they’re texting or fiddling with a handheld device.

And while I get that Pandora’s Technology Box is never being closed, I think we as a people and a society are ruining much of what makes life special and unique and interesting; being bored. Allowing our minds to empty of thoughts and just be. That constant access to bright lights and information that never stops filling the void has killed our attention spans in ways we couldn’t have imagined.

We truly have no idea how bad this still new technology is for our brain; it is simply not evolved enough to ingest everything it provides us, but that tech has permeated our society so much that it’s virtually impossible to divorce ourselves for it. I don’t think we should necessarily divorce it completely, but boy oh boy we are living in some wild times; and I’m just talking about the internet, I won’t dilute the point by mentioning all sorts of other major issues we are facing these days.

It’s just as alarming to see how wholeheartedly everyone seems to have embraced this new normal. We’re encouraged to “download the app” to make our experience dining and shopping and living so much “easier”. Restaurants have started to do away with paper menus in favor of a QR code to provide the menu (and allow them to raise the prices on appetizers and entrees during peak dining times without having to print new menus), doctors’ offices want you to download the app that allows you constant access to your medical file (while allowing the same app to harvest your data, from the exercise trackers you use to the number of times you order fast food through another app).

It’s not all bad. Some of my favorite apps come through my local library; Hoopla (the e-book, audio-book, comic book reader app), the Kanopy streaming service, and Libby for e-borrows. I still prefer to do my reading on paper though; with a physical book in hand I’m less prone to pause my reading to see who just emailed. The tablet is powered down and shoved into the desk drawer, not to be unearthed until the following morning. From five in the evening to seven in the morning it stays there; my free time must truly be free for me to actually enjoy it. And if that means being bored, all the better.

I was lucky enough to grow up being bored. When I was bored I hopped on my bike and rode through the neighborhood looking for friends. Better yet was when I’d hear that knock at my door or ring of the doorbell and open the door to see some pals standing there asking if we just wanted to go hang out. When I was older with nothing to do I hopped in my car, threw twenty bucks into the tank, and cruised the streets of my town looking for someone or something to cross my path. Now it’s all done online; the invites, the evites, the rest of it. We are connected 24/7, but that constant connection is what’s driving us further apart.

Getting back to 2000 and the entire point of this essay. It was late in January and I was on a GO bus heading south from Barrie to Toronto after a birthday celebration. As the bus rumbled down Highway 400 we hit a pretty swift blizzard as is common in that part of the province; the “snow belt” they call it, though snow doesn’t fall as heavy or frequent as it did back then. So picture it; me in my seat in the darkened vehicle staring out the window into the night, seeing the snow, feeling the shudder and sway of the bus as it powered through. I had nothing to read, I had no smartphone to distract me because in those days the internet was a place you had to visit through a home computer or internet café. You didn’t carry it with you. It was like TV; another distraction, but one with an “off” switch.

So there I was, staring out the window, and my mind was wandering. The trek reminded me of the trips I used to take on the VIA train between Toronto and Brockville. I started thinking about trains, and suddenly an image popped into my head; two figures atop a train hurtling through a blizzard, fighting for their dear lives. The wind is howling; the snow is blinding. I continued to free-associate and ask questions. Who were they? Why were they fighting?

And my brain provided the answers; one was a big-game hunter in the Alan Quartermain mode. The other … was a vampire. A bloodsucking member of the un-dead. And they were not just fighting atop any old train; they’re fighting atop The Orient Express as it hurtled along ice-covered tracks through the Austrian Alps. The year was 1901, and this Great White Hunter was member of a team of Vampire Killers, dispatched to the wilds of Transylvania to locate a member of their organization who has gone missing ; a man named Abraham Van Helsing, foil of the legendary Count Dracula.

By the time I made it home I had the entire story in my head. I raced to my room, grabbed one of the big yellow legal-size notepads I always used (and still do) when sketching out a new idea, and drafted a three-page outline for a story I would first come to title The Fearless Vampire Slayers, then World War V, before settling on The Gentleman’s Guide to Hunting the Undead. I would spend the remainder of 2000 drafting that outline into a screenplay that while has never been produced was probably responsible for me landing more paying jobs than anything I’ve written before or since. It was one of those great, in some circles legendary, spec screenplays that opened doors and set me before many producers, all of whom requested to meet with me because they read that screenplay and said “this guy has talent”. It was as much a showcase for what I could do as a piece of evidence I still return to now as proof that I’m a good writer. I’m talking tens of thousands of dollars worth of work just because of that screenplay, brainstormed as I sat on a darkened bus, stating out a window into the snow, with nothing other than my thoughts to distract me.

Now picture the same set of circumstances. Bus. Snow. Night. And a smartphone. Had smartphones been around back in those days and were I in possession of one, would I have still cooked up that idea? It’s possible, but I am doubtful. I think The Gentleman’s Guide came about solely because of those circumstances of the bus ride; the time of year, the weather, and the fact my brain was seeking something to fill it and finding nothing but my own imagination to fill it.

Here’s my controversial take; social media, smart phones, and the age of infinite content are bad for us and particularly for creative types; I would go further and say that you can’t truly be a great writer, painter, musician, sculptor, dancer, or actor if you allow these outside influences to dominate your day-to-day. So much of art and creation relies on you being in that physical or metaphoric room with the door closed. It relies on you making your creative decisions in a vacuum of your own understanding, your singular perspectives. When you’re doom-scrolling Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or X or whatever it’s called these days you’re letting other voices in to spoil the soup, so to speak. To create something certifiably you, you need to do it without influence or outside noise.

Let me be clear; I’m not talking about promotion and advertising your wares; that’s all a necessary part of the job assuming you want being an artist to be your job. But on the creative side, infinite content can become the death of that creativity. It’s art by algorithm; those invisible yet present forces that guide you by showing you want you want while also inflaming you by putting the things you dislike front and center to keep you captive to those algorithms. It connects in part to the current controversy over Chat-GPT and AI art; the end-result of a sort of Vampire Capitalism where everything must be monetized as cheaply and quickly as managed; a fatted calf for its exploiters to sink in its fangs and drain it dry.

Artists are needy people. We crave attention, preferably positive, but sometimes negative will do. We want to be acknowledged, we want to perceive ourselves and our voices to be important and respected. We crave that audience. But when the audience begins to guide our decisions as a creator pretty soon we’re creating for them, not for ourselves.

There is a very current analog to this belief of mine that sprung up over the release of Martin Scorsese’s quite masterful three and a half hour epic Killers of the Flower Moon. “Too long, too boring, needed an intermission” people complained. Speaking as someone who was able to sit through Schindler’s List, The Return of the King, Oppenheimer, Magnolia, Avatar: The Way of Water, Seven Samurai, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly without need of a bathroom break or to get up and stretch my legs, these criticisms of Flower Moon smack more of shortened attention spans than anything else. The people who can’t go more than thirty minutes without hitting pause at home to scroll through their phones (or who scroll absentmindedly through the movie) and act offended when you suggest they may have a mild tech addiction.

Yes it’s long but go to the bathroom before and you’ll be fine. Leave the phone in the car though.

Increasingly though I am not the only one who seems to be feeling this wariness. Many people I know in real life and online have begun to step away from this constant connectivity. They’re deactivating accounts, they’re deleting apps, they’re downgrading to more simple flip-phones that offer basic connectivity, texting, and no social media whatsoever. Some people have disappeared from online spaces entirely; people I had pleasant interactions with for many years who are now gone from my life. I don’t know where they are or how they’re doing, but I do wish them well anyway.

“There is a crack in everything; that’s where the light gets in,” Leonard Cohen sings in his song “Anthem”. And so my challenge to anyone reading this as we head into 2024 is the next time you need to go somewhere, either on a walk, a bike ride, or a trip to the grocery store or to go pick your kid up at school, leave the phone at home.

Going to a movie? A museum? A bar? Leave the device off. Engage directly with the world around you and you may be surprised to see people just out and about living their lives, and being much happier than the internet algorithm will try to tell you they actually are. See a remarkable sunset or cherry blossoms falling from a tree, or some remarkable cloud formation? Don’t fumble for your phone to snap a photo of it to share; see it, catalogue it, and file it away in your memories to crop up now and then without aid of a grainy photo that will never, ever be able to capture that moment. Be in that moment because those moments do not last, believe me.

If you’re a creative like me; resolve to create with the door closed, be it physical, metaphorical, or technological. You will find magic where you thought none existed, and you may just create something remarkable that you didn’t realize you were capable of.

Do all of this. Because it would be a tragedy to be at the end of your life looking back and seeing your memories of youth, of health, of love and being loved, all filtered through a smart-phone’s screen. This life only comes around once and to paraphrase Ferris Bueller, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it.

I Think We’re Alone Now

Posted on September 21, 2023 by Brad

The Carolina Circle Shopping Center opened in 1976. Situated in the northeastern section of Greensboro, North Carolina, it survived in one form or another until 2002. For the year and a bit that I lived in Greensboro from 1985 through summer of 1986 it was the mall I most frequented.

It had a bitchin’ arcade called Tilt…

This is the only picture I could find online, but it’s way in the back past the sullen teenage smoker

It had a great first-run movie theater…

It even had an indoor skating rink (the only one to be found in Greensboro at the time).

Later replaced by a Carousel…

It had book stores and record stores and toy stores and others not as appealing to a twelve going-on thirteen year-old. There was a Toys R Us and a K-Mart “out-parcel”, meaning outside the mall structure but close enough to jog across the parking lot to visit. There was even a restaurant and bar called Annabelle’s to draw in the adults. That’s right; adults used to go to the mall to meet up, have dinner and a few drinks, and then go see Schwarzenegger in Commando.

First Schwarzenegger flick I ever saw in a theatre.

It was a shopping mall; this much is clear and this much is true. But it was also a gathering place with a strong sense of community. There were concerts. There were magic shows. Santa’s Village was there for the holidays, Halloween décor ruled the roost in October, the Easter Bunny made his customary appearance as well.

There was shopping, yes, but you could easily spend several hours there without the expectation of shopping for anything other than a slice of pizza, a New York Seltzer, a few rounds of the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom game at the arcade, and a screening of Back to School with Rodney Dangerfield, Keith Gordon, and Robert Downey, Jr.

You could do all of the above on less than $20 dollars, I might add, and still have money left over to drop on a new G.I. Joe figure or two…

The most memorable visits to the Circle would have been that summer of 1986 when my buddy Mark visited from Toronto for two weeks. I’m certain we went several times as he was blown away by how cool the malls in North Carolina were. And while I hated the year I lived in Greensboro I will still admit that in the summer, the off-school weekends, it wasn’t so bad. My mother would drive us over, I’d arrange to call when we were ready for pick-up, and we’d just go off and explore the place. Unaccompanied, unencumbered by deadlines and time limits. When we’d exhausted all the mall had to offer I’d use my last remaining quarter to call home and fifteen minutes later (we lived close by) the family Pontiac 6000 STE would roll into the lot and we’d head home.

It was a ritual Mark and I knew well. Back when I still lived in Toronto it wasn’t uncommon for my mother or Mark’s to drive us and another friend or two over to the Scarborough Town Center or Fairview Mall to do pretty much the same thing. Get food, see a movie, hit the toy and music stores (Scarborough Town Center also had a bitchin’ hobby store – The Hobby Hut – which was always well-stocked and always overpriced) and if there was an arcade, play video games. We’d spend hours there, and the malls encouraged us to. Not by saying “hey, it’s okay to hang out here and have fun without shopping for something” but not not saying it either.

When I moved to Brockville and eventually got my license, my friends and I made Kingston’s Cataraqui Town Center our preferred mall for movie-going and general goofing off. It was a 45 or so minute drive down the highway and whenever a new movie was playing there that wasn’t at our local cinema, we’d convoyed down the 401, grab tickets for the show a couple hours early then just wander the concourse, grab dinner at the food court, and browse the shops before convening at the theatre to see Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, Point Break, or Predator 2.

Ottawa had (and still has) its downtown Rideau Center, and on school trips to the museums, Parliament Hill, or the National Arts Centre, between arrival and whatever we were there for, we’d be allowed a couple of hours of free time at the Rideau to do whatever we wanted.

Then came Toronto and Film School. The Ryerson Campus was and to this day lies just north and east of the Yonge-Dundas intersection; Toronto’s version of Times Square. The Eaton Centre sits at that intersection and in that first year living in Toronto at the Ryerson residence, meant one of Canada’s largest shopping centers was a short walk away. And again, that ritual of browsing the shops, wandering the concourse, grabbing a bit in one of the food courts, then heading to the Eaton Center’s 18 (!) screen multiplex to take in a show, became one of those regular rituals for my film school buddies and I.

The 2000s were not good times to be a mall. Towns and mid-size cities, seeing how the big suburban malls had decimated their downtowns, incentivized retailers with tax breaks to draw people back to the town square, where that social life of a city first began. The death of the mall was hastened with the rise of online shopping; Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, and those big retail supercenters resting near highways replaced the experience of going to the mall. These were not an improvement.

In the Carolina Circle case it was a combination of many factors. The mall began to attract an unsavory element; gangs would brawl in the parking lot and sometimes in the shopping center itself, and the Montgomery Ward store became an infamous hangout, apparently, for gay men hoping to engage in some illicit behavior. Families stopped going as a result, and parents wouldn’t allow their teenage kids to venture there unaccompanied. The movie theater closed, the arcade followed, many of the big retailers left. Bye-bye Waldenbooks and Camelot Music. Bye-bye Montgomery Ward and Toys R’Us, bye-bye Belk and Ivy’s and Dillard’s. The big death knell sounded when Radio Shack – “The Shack” being the one retail outlet that never seemed to die – left; if a mall couldn’t sustain a Radio Shack you knew its days were done.

The Carolina Circle officially died in the early 2000s, closing in 2002 and demolished in 2005. The site is still there though; redeveloped into one of those complexes of box stores like Wal-Mart and Lowe’s

Thinking of the many shopping malls of my youth, the Carolina Circle stands out because it seemed to be a mall built for people to gather as much as it was a place to shop. It had the arcade, the rink, the theater, and the book, record, and toy stores. It had places to draw people in not necessarily to buy things but to just be there. It was a place to go where it was impossible to be bored. There was always something to do.

The Fairview Mall and Scarborough Town Center still stand but they’ve been heavily redesigned as well. Fewer record and book and toy stores. Smaller food courts. Nothing so grand as skating rinks and carousels and arcades. These “New Malls” don’t want people to just hang out; they want them to spend money, see to their business efficiently, and go home. Movie theaters were closed or moved to larger state-of-the-art facilities across expansive parking lots. You didn’t even need to go to the mall if you were going to the movies. As a result you didn’t spend your money in those malls either, hastening the departure of the cool, quirky, funky stores that existed solely to draw you in the first place like The It Store, SpyTech and Razz M’Tazz.

It was a different era, both for the stores and shopping opportunities available, but also for all the stuff we could do. If you had nothing going on, you could go to the mall and usually find something; a new book, a new cassette or CD, grab a burger or slice, and see a movie. When we got older and discovered girls the mall became the place we hung out to watch and be watched in return. Rain or shine the mall offered an escape from home and family, especially when your relationship with both was going through a rough patch. It was a meeting place; even the small Thousands Island Mall in Brockville’s north end was a place you could just wander through and be guaranteed to see someone you knew from school, either working there or like you just wandering.

I couldn’t find a vintage photo of the 1000 Islands Mall but fun fact anyway.

In this 2023 world of ours there’s a great deal of nostalgic longing for the mall experience especially from the generation born after their heyday. At the height of their popularity in the 80s and 90s though many wondered what the appeal of the mall was. Why wander through a sterile shopping environment of chain stores and restaurants? How was a mall better than shopping on your main street, with its shuttered shops, drunks and homeless, and beat cops telling you and your friends to “move along” while stern faced civic leaders and shop-keepers glared down their noses at you? Why?

Because they were fun. George A. Romero’s all-time classic Dawn of the Dead and its thematic derision towards consumer culture gave us the Monroeville Mall post-zombie apocalypse but even then Monroeville looked like a fun place pre-zombie; skating rink, cool elevators, wide expansive spaces big enough for a fleet of motorcycles to drive through. Grocery stores, arcades, fine dining spaces. We could spend the day at Monroeville, Carolina Circle, Cataraqui, and Fairview without buying a thing. We could go grab movie tickets, and have time to kill before showtime, and just wander around. Or after the movie we’d stay, grab dinner at Lime Rickey’s or Shopsy’s and just chillax.

Seen Dawn of the Dead enough times you can probably hear this image.

Today’s malls feel different. There are a couple of big ones not too far from where I live. One is kind of fun; it has a couple toy and collectible stores, it has a Lego store, it has a decent food court and it has a Dave & Buster’s. No bookstore though; which is a big detriment as far as I’m concerned. Yes I judge a mall on the basis of a bookstore being present or not.

Dear shopping malls: you have a bookstore, I WILL spend money there.

The one closer to me is the one I call the rich person mall. It’s one I rarely go to because it’s geared solely to the commerce, not the social. There’s no food court, there’s no theater, no books or toys and games; there’s no gathering place and as a result it’s kind of sterile. I rarely visit it unless there’s a specific reason. Maybe that’s by design; the rich like having their little enclaves the rest of the population steers away from, but you’d think a shopping mall would want people to shop there.

Malls are not what they used to be. They are now purely transactional spaces; places of commerce, full stop. You go, you shop, you get out. No loitering, no goofing off with friends. Where are your parents? Don’t make me call security. You aren’t a person in need of distraction, or entertainment, or even community; you are a carbon-based lifeform whose duty is to consume and if you’re not there to do that then you should be someplace else.

Some say good; that malls were bad and we should feel bad for liking them. Better they die out entirely and encourage people to shop closer to home, on Main Street, supporting those local businesses. But even doing so is a strictly commercial activity. You can’t sit on a bench outside for too long or people will think you’re up to something. There may be open air spaces with chairs and tables. The chairs are chained down; the tables and seating have a thirty minute limit. Spent long enough in one place someone will come up to you to beg for change, ask if you’ve accepted Jesus as your lord and savior, or suggest you move on. There are no more arcades because they always did attract an “unsavory element” and besides you have a phone; go play games on that, preferably at home but if not could you turn the noise down because those bleeps and beeps are bothering me.

Yes, because who wouldn’t prefer a silly little phone game to this?

There’s been a great deal of talk these days about the decline in what has been called the “Third Space”. The social clubs, the bowling alleys, the organizations that people used to go to be with other people, all in decline, and the ones that aren’t charge a premium for use. Malls used to be a Third Space but not anymore. We could spend the day just hanging out, going to the movies, playing video games, seeing friends. But nowadays with more of our socializing done online we’ve been breeding a generation that doesn’t know how to socialize in the real world, and the older generation too has lost that sense of community.

Know what you do see when you go to many malls now? Elderly people. The ones born in the 1930s,1940s, and now early 1950s. The ones who shopped at those malls when they were in their prime; parents with young children in tow. When the malls were a place you could go to meet up with a friend, to shop, have lunch, stroll and browse and just be someplace. As the mall became less central to commerce and the day-to-day the elderly seem to be the ones who still see it as a gathering place, to sit amongst hopefully happy memories and wonder where the time all went. The elderly who still congregate at the mall food court and seating do so because they too have nowhere else to go.

Bridlewood Mall in Scarborough, not far from my old neighborhood there. The top photo is from 1974 showing the cemetery where the mall is now; originally the village of L’Amoreaux. The cemetery is still there in as potent a metaphor for the state of the mall today as you will find anywhere.

Young people are even turning away from getting that rite of passage known as the Driver’s License. Good in a way, but also a little sad; pollution aside a car represented freedom when I was seventeen. It granted me an independence and my parents allowed me that freedom in part because through those earlier years of being dropped off at the mall or the movies, I always made sure to call when done, or just as often be outside the entrance to The Bay or Towers or Zellers at five sharp for pickup or else. Driving to Kingston with friends to see a movie didn’t require me to “check in” by phone; just that I be home no later than 11:30 or else. My parents even let me drive to Toronto to the first Lollapalooza festival in 1991, without my having any idea where I’d be staying that night, or any ballpark of when I’d be back the following day.

Irresponsible? Maybe, but freedoms such as these did prepare me for college life, more so than a lot of high school classes and prep work did. They encouraged me to be responsible, to be safe, to know how to manage my time even when it was the leisurely sort. But who cares about drivers licenses and access to a car now when you can either Uber or Lyft to a friend’s or have mom or dad drive? But what is more heartbreaking is what they’ll tell you when you ask them why. Why not get a license? Why not choose that freedom?

“Where can we go?” they reply. “There’s nothing at the mall for us to do except spend money we don’t have. There’s no clubs, no arcades; no places to hang out. If we do go, security tells us to move along. We’re treated as a nuisance, as a distraction, as possible thieves. We can watch movies online; we can connect with friends by phone or text. We don’t need to leave home to do any of that.”

And what do we adults say?

“Kids today spend all their time on their phones! They don’t go anywhere or do anything! When I was a kid I’d be out until the street lights were on. We’d go to the movies, to the mall, we’d cruise the street, we’d hang out. What’s wrong with kids these days?”

Yes, these are the same adults who’ll see a group of teenagers hanging out in public and presume they’re up to no good. Out come the phones, in come the cops.

The loss of the Third Place has been documented extensively, most notably so for me in Kristen Radtke’s excellent graphic novel Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness. In her book, Radtke identifies loneliness as the challenge of our time because we are social animals; even the introverts. We all seek some form of connection; some one-on-one communication. And year-by-year we lose a bit more of that skill by using it less.

Yes, there is social media. there’s Facebook and Instagram and Twitter (or whatever they’re calling it this week). But I am not being the biggest fan of handing our daily interactions over to tech companies who exploit that loneliness purely so that can make money off of you. Social media is all about a binary yes or no interaction; and one where the negative far outweighs the positive, exposure-wise.

And that negativity permeates the day-to-day. Think of all those distracted drivers sitting at the light before you, head down, scrolling through the phone in their hands as the light turns green and people start getting impatient. Think of the teenagers gathered around the school entrance, huddled with their heads down, hooked on their phones the way their parents were hooked on cigarettes, trading one addiction for another. Think of every short-tempered, rude person you had the misfortune to deal with because thanks to their online push-button world any irritant or delay sparks rage and not patience and understanding.

I’ve long been fond of saying the brain is like any other muscle; if you don’t flex it now and then it will atrophy. That’s why we challenge ourselves with books, with learning, and, yes, in dealing with other people. Loneliness has an effect on our lives and life expectancy. People can die of loneliness. Loneliness takes a lot out of you and it’s dispiriting to find yourself in a world that seems determined to keep us isolated and lonely all so it can sell us things we don’t need but still buy if only to give our brains that little endorphin hit to keep us going.

I also worry about the people who allow themselves to be poisoned by an increasingly negative online discourse that keeps us isolated and angry by design. Therein lies a cautionary tale for us all because every moment we surrender to anger is one we never get to surrender to joy. What I see are people doing way more of the former than they do with the latter. Anger is addictive. Outrage too. And companies are making money off that anger.

The mall isn’t coming back; not the way they existed in the 70s through the 90s. It’s one of those passing eras that we kind of took for granted, like the video store and the arcade. Those places that were here one moment, and gone the next and over before we realized. The death of the Third Place continues to have lasting impact on us because we need physical spaces for commerce-free interactions.

It’s why I’ve long been a supporter of public libraries. To my mind public libraries are the best thing our society, flawed as it is, has given us. A place we can go without requirement of a door fee or expectation we’re going to spend money. A place we can take our children to story-time, where we can borrow armloads of books, where we can attend lectures and performances and seminars. Where we can just … talk to people, but quietly, please; the librarian told us to. Rain or shine, having a library may not be as exciting as the mall once was (and, frankly, might be again as more people realize the necessity of that Third Space), but it is a place where you can go and be seen and maybe feel a little less lonely.

And so let’s all pour one out for the great shopping malls of our youth, and for me in particular that long-gone Carolina Circle Mall, which for a time provided a refuge for a sad, lonely child not getting along very well with Greensboro. At that mall I felt a little happier, a little more comfortable. There were things to do, movies to see, games to play. It only exists now in my memories and the occasional dream where I’m walking the concourse, feeling that chill as the air temperature drop as I near the skating rink and the arcade just beyond it. I can hear the bleep of video games, I can smell buttered popcorn from the movie theater, and I can sometimes taste the Black Cherry New York Seltzer on my tongue.

But it’s a place I can only visit in dreams and that’s sad. We spend so much of our childhoods trying to run away from home and so much of our adult lives trying to run back but like so many things, once a place, a time, or a moment are gone they don’t return quite so easily …

BradAbraham.com

The website of film, television, comic book writer and novelist Brad Abraham

Tag Archives: memoir

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