The Big Red Room (3 of 4)

Fear is innate. We’re born crying our lungs out and from that point forward it’s all about navigating minefields of potential terrors. Some become better at it than others, and the rest of us pretend.

When I was a little kid I was predictably wide-eyed, it took a while for genuine fear to take shape, to materialize as a recognizable, definable thing in my world. Really, the only thing I was truly afraid of was that my sister might steal from my stash of lemon drops. Again.

Unease, trepidation - these things I understood. The night my family went to see Jaws they dumped me at Grandma’s house beforehand ‘cos they thought I was too young to handle it. I was extremely jealous. I wanted to see it. But they were probably right to do so, since simply looking at the poster for that movie - the shark’s black emotionless eyes, hundreds of sharp teeth headed straight for that lady swimmer - gave me a weird feeling in my stomach. Here’s the thing, though: that was a pretty intriguing feeling.

Once, I woke up in the middle of the night and found my parents awake in the living room, on the couch watching television. They allowed me to watch with them, probably because getting me to go back to sleep was too much of a hassle. What they were watching was an episode of Twilight Zone, “Five Characters in Search of an Exit”. It’s the one where five figures - clown, ballerina, hobo, soldier, and bagpipe player - find themselves in the middle of a blank, colorless nowhere with no memory of who they are or how they got there. After much speculation and hand-wringing about the nature of their existence, they work up a plan to get out. Able to see a rim just above, at the top of the circular white wall surrounding them, they build a human ladder. The soldier is able to reach the edge, and get over, whereupon he plummets to the snow-covered ground below, only to be picked up by a small child several times his size. Turns out the five figures were dolls the whole time, being gathered for charity Christmas gifts.

That episode has a nice, weird atmosphere, perfect for viewing while half-awake. There amid the shadows against the red wall in our living room, the tv screen seemed like a brightly lit portal into some other plane of existence. Those characters each had a kind of primal appeal; clown, soldier, ballerina, each with its own specific mode of dress and behavior, very basic, very vivid. The mood was one of claustrophobia, accentuated by the black and white, so sharp, so stark. I was sucked in.

The ending, with the revelation that the figures were dolls, was both puzzling and unnerving. I had a lot of questions. Do dolls really come to life? Could it be that I am actually a doll? Would I ever get out of this red room? And if I did get out, could I get back in? This is where I keep my lemon drops!

The episode wasn’t particularly scary. A mild disappointment, because for whatever reason, my young mind was very infatuated with the idea of being scared. I would like to claim I had a preternatural understanding that on a psychological level experiencing vicarious fear works as an inoculation against genuine fear, but I suspect I was merely out for cheap thrills.

In classic be-careful-what-you-wish-for fashion, that Twilight Zone episode would come to seem like a warm and fuzzy enterprise compared to another doll-related TV event from 1975. The movie that would irreversibly sully my heretofore pure and unwrinkled childhood consciousness was Trilogy of Terror, a TV movie that starred Karen Black in three separate segments, each written by Richard Matheson, who himself had written several classic episodes of Twilight Zone.

I was one among many thousands of Gen X’ers scarred as a young person specifically by the third segment of Trilogy of Terror, in which Karen Black buys a voodoo doll as a gift for her boyfriend, only to have the thing come to life and terrorize her in her own apartment for half an excruciating hour.

Based on Matheson’s fantasy classic “Prey”, the sequence is a small masterpiece of horror, with a downright brilliant performance from Black as an upwardly mobile suburbanite with troublesome mother issues. She carries the whole segment, vacillating in turns from weary nervousness to full-blown hysteria. The performance is not particularly subtle, but it is believably grueling.

Her performance is more impressive given how easy it might have been to be overshadowed by her little scene-stealing sparring partner. All sharp cheekbones, tiny crazed eyes, unkempt black hair, that damn voodoo doll is scary even when it's inanimate, so imagine the effect when it’s scuttling across the floor, shrieking. Early on Black ponders aloud, “Aren’t you an ugly thing?”. Pretty rude. No wonder it attacks her.

The reign of terror this voodoo doll inflicts on Black amounts to an extended and harrowing cat and mouse game, including plenty of eerie shuffling sounds, broken lamps, kitchen knives, and not a little bloodshed. The editing and sound design are each unusually effective. Once it has sprung to monstrous life the doll is shown only in glimpses, usually in a blur of motion and shadows, so the viewer can never quite get a fix on it. The sound it makes, sort of an obnoxious, hostile gargle, would haunt my dreams from that point forward.

I don’t think I dreamed the night I saw the movie because of course I couldn’t sleep. And that awful, raspy screech kept ringing in my brain. This despite the relatively happy ending of the story, in which (spoiler alert) both Black and the doll come out of the whole ordeal with claim to a kind of victory, the doll having survived Black’s attempt to bake it in the oven by taking possession of her body, and Black in turn now fully prepared to properly face up to her overbearing mother; with a giant knife at the ready and a big, grotesque smile spreading across her face.

I think this movie had such an effect on me because we had a small statue in our red living room that I was pretty wary of even before that voodoo doll raged across my psyche. Afterwards, forget it.

It was an odd statue, a human figure, faceless, limbs posed at awkward angles. My father had a bizarre predilection for that kind of thing. There were always statues of weird heads or misshapen torsos around. But this statue had an aura about it. That thing was not my friend. 

I’d walk by it cautiously, pretty sure it was turning its head to follow my steps. Sometimes I’d see it move. Taking a couple steps forward, jutting its arms out in a weird parody of human movement. I’d be caught there breathless and it would catch my eyes with its no-face and I could feel it giggling. A vacant, barely-there sound, muffled but unmistakably malevolent. I’d try to move and it would mock me. Standing in the doorway, still twisting its arms and legs in a senseless jerking motion. Once I even saw it kneel and curtsy. 

Maybe it was only making an attempt to communicate. To be my friend, in its strange, stop-motion way.  

Nah. I didn’t have time for that shit. Go find friends somewhere else, maybe in whatever creepy statue netherworld you materialized out of. 

I had to find some means of avoidance, some way to blot out this bizarre spectacle that the red room had birthed. I needed a way out. A song or a movie or some drawing or some companionship. Something with noise and smoke.

I needed a parade or an airshow, something with light and color, where the laughter is gentle and open and amiable.

I needed to find something to get me through. 

Don’t we all, at some point?

to be continued

 

The Big Red Room (2 of 4)

The Peanuts gang would prove to be key figures in the hot-wiring of my young imagination. The TV special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown features a sequence in which Snoopy, fantasizing that he is a WWI flying ace, rages through an air battle in his doghouse plane and is eventually forced to crash land. He then journeys back to safety through dangerous terrain, travelling alone under the October night sky through starkly wooded areas, over barren plains, under barbed-wire, through ditches and streams. The tone of this scene is unusually moody, even bleak. It stirred something in me. 

I felt bad for Snoopy, it seemed so lonely and scary out there. I wished I could be there with him, side-by-side, helping to evade enemy capture, finding a safe route back to the pumpkin patch. And so I was. The living room - red carpet and strange shadows in every direction - became that rough terrain. The couches and chairs and tables became the various obstacles and markers along the way. I was there. Layer upon layer of fantasy - me imagining I am friends with an imaginary dog as he imagines he is a downed fighter pilot. 

There was a song that played in my house with some regularity that provided an appropriate soundtrack to that imagined journey. My sister was a fan of British singer/songwriter Al Stewart, and I became fascinated with “Roads To Moscow”, a highlight of his American breakthrough LP Past Present and Future. In stark contrast to that fanciful battle scene from the Peanuts cartoon,  “Roads to Moscow” describes in vivid and poetic detail a very real situation from a very real and terrifying time in history. 

“Roads To Moscow” is a story song, much like a traditional ballad, told in first person from the point of view of a Russian soldier during WWII. The narrator describes the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the push towards the Kremlin and subsequent turning away of the German army back towards Berlin by the Red Army, with assistance from the harsh Russian winter. After years of fighting the narrator finds himself happily returning to his home and family, only to be imprisoned in one of Stalin’s Gulags on suspicion of being a spy. According to Wikipedia the song is based loosely on the experience of the Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who would go on to write One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich about his time in the Russian labor camps.

The song’s dusky mood is established right off with a stately, insistent guitar figure, overlaid with Spanish guitar flourishes that will provide color throughout the remainder of the track. Stewart’s singing voice keeps his British accent intact, and there’s a slight sea shanty feel to the melody that makes the whole thing seem like it might have emerged from the British Isles, despite taking place mostly in Russia. 

Stewart describes the initial phase of the German invasion in terms at once practical and poetic, with the Soviet aircraft rendered useless by bombs and the muffled gunfire an increasingly less distant sound. Particularly evocative is his description of the Red Army soldiers forced to move slowly, quietly, through mist and shadows, trees and fields, crawling on all fours. This is no doubt the bit that connected the song to the scene from the Peanuts cartoon in my brain.    

“Roads To Moscow” contains echoes of Leonard Cohen’s “The Partisan”, another slow, grim song about soldiers working in shadows to conquer a seemingly unconquerable enemy. It has a similar sense of pacing, of suspense and inevitability. But while Cohen’s song has a similarly quiet and haunting feel, much of its power is in its brevity, in the details it leaves out. Stewart’s approach is wider in scope, grand and cinematic. At one point Reich General Heinz Guderian is pictured as a windswept figure atop a ridge surveying the conquered territory below. Later, we get this wonderful description of destroyed German tanks in the bleak Russian winter:  

two broken tigers on fire in the night

flicker their souls to the wind

One might be forgiven for finding the poetry overly rich or the epic scale overdone, especially as the choral voices enter midway through, singing a wordless sequence of three funereal ascending notes, repeated like a Gregorian chant. I half expected to feel that way when I recently re-listened, thinking my admiration for it might be a case of fond memory obscuring schmaltz. I was only mildly surprised to find the song still quite effective, with an emotional pull that’s enhanced rather than diminished by devices like the abundant historical specifics or the dramatic, whirling string arrangement that wraps itself around the final verses. 

The momentum leading up to the denouement is hard to resist. After a combination of winter snows, tactical blunders, and Soviet resolve have driven the Germans back to Berlin, the protagonist finds himself on a train, excitedly heading home. Stewart bunches the words together in an accelerated rush, bass player at the forefront playing a spiraling, insistent pattern above the manic strings. 

Then comes the cruel, fatalistic turn towards which the song has been building. A curious thing  sometimes happens with songs that contain a clearly arranged sequence of events, especially those that do not end well. We tend to end up listening repeatedly, and despite the fact that we know exactly where things are ultimately going, we still hope each time we listen that things might turn out differently. 

One line in “Roads to Moscow” always catches me up short. The narrator is met at the train station and debriefed by officials. They ask about his short time as a prisoner of war, the Germans having captured and interrogated him for a single day before freeing him. This makes him a potential spy in the eyes of Stalin. Here’s how Stewart’s narrator describes the exchange:

"They only held me for a day - a lucky break," I say,

and then they turn and listen closer. 

That last line, with the Soviet officials turning to listen, is painful in its simplicity. Very subtly, it carries an awful and inescapable weight, a fundamental truth about human nature and its boundless capacity for suspicion and fear. We are very weak, in so many ways.

The song ends with the singer staring at the winter sky from within a prison camp, listening to the wind, bereft of hope, no doubt remembering those officers and the expressions on their faces; piercing, expectant, wheels turning. 

Millions were sent to Stalin’s Gulag on the shaky basis of paranoia and pettiness, untold numbers died there. This after the millions upon millions who died fighting in the German/Soviet conflict alone. 

It would take many years for me to catch onto that harsh reality. When I was a child I only heard the sound, the feeling. Any notion of reality, of lives lived and fought for and lost, went completely by the wayside. As I pretended to cross strange and treacherous territory, Snoopy at my side, I only heard the mystery, the dramatic build-up, the lovely melodies. That tumble of words, the shadows and mists, all of it mixing with the deep red in that living room. The way Stewart’s voice takes on that uncanny lilt on the words “You’ll never know, you’ll never know” and the way that repeated phrase would haunt my memory for years afterward, when I couldn’t remember what song they came from and had to search through all the songs on any Al Stewart albums I could find to track it down. 

Al Stewart was describing a scenario that actually existed. If I only heard an imaginary journey, it was still a potent enough concept that I wondered whether I might have to face a real one someday. 

Reality and imagination would subsequently prove to be pretty fierce combatants.

to be continued

The Big Red Room (1 of 4)

All I’ve ever really wanted to do was skirt the boundaries of this reality. I mean, without risking any kind of permanent damage to the brain or body. If possible. 

The living room in our tiny house had red carpet. A dark-ish red, maybe burgundy or maroon. Somehow, when I was a child, the redness of that room covered more space than that occupied by the carpet. It seeped into the air, into the mind, so that it became a state of being, full of trap doors and portals to other states of existence. 

That space, red space, became ground zero of my imaginative world and its many small explosions. 

One of those early explosions was triggered by a set of View-Master reels featuring characters from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. Just in case you’re unaware (hey, don’t wanna assume anything, somebody mentioned Pogs to me the other day and I had no idea what they were talking about) View-Master was a popular kids toy in the seventies (maybe it still is, apparently it’s still being manufactured) that consisted of a small mechanical device, kind of like a set of binoculars, into which a circular reel was inserted, allowing the viewer to see 3-D images of cartoon characters, wildlife and geographical images or still frames from popular tv shows and movies. 

The Peanuts View-Master reels were downright surreal. Rather than direct lifts from the strip, or flat stills from the Peanuts TV cartoons, Charlie Brown and pals were brought to life via three-dimensional action figures, arranged in front of fully-decorated background sets. It looked something like claymation or stop-motion animation, only with no movement. The atmosphere created by these scenarios, if one allowed it to, could arouse a strangely disquieting mood. 

It still can.

Something about the figures - blank-faced, motionless yet on the verge of motion - was eerily off. They suggested department store mannequins that might suddenly, threateningly, spring to life. And the backgrounds, full of shadows and ominously deep colors, as in the pure  red wall of Schroeder’s music room that mirrored the red of my own living room, deepened the sense of being on an alternate plane of existence. Looking at these images was good training ground for a future in serious David Lynch appreciation. 

I wanted to get into that place, hang out with those mystery figures. They seemed like they were probably nice enough. And if things got scary, like maybe if Lucy suddenly decided to hurl that bust of Beethoven directly at me, finding a way out might prove an adventure. Maybe Snoopy could help.

The Peanuts gang would prove to be key figures in the hot-wiring of my young imagination.

to be continued

The Gray Sunday Science Project

Go find some art that you created as a child. If you have to, ask one of your parents to see if they have any of your childhood art laying around. It’ll be fun, I promise.

Here is a painting that I did when I was three years old:

Say what you want about my style, it looks like a little kid painted it, but damn, I think I had a pretty decent sense of color. For a three-year-old, anyway.

Now take the art that you did as a child and try to imagine how you might go about drawing or painting the same image today, applying whatever artistic ability or insight you’ve developed in the intervening years. 

Would you approach it in more or less the same way? Or would you find some element of the original that you like - a group of colors or shapes, maybe an idea or impression - and start from there, adding or subtracting as necessary?

Don’t think about it too hard.

Here is my modern day approach to the painting above:

Odd, that. I mean, really, the first one is full of brightness and the exuberance of childhood. The thing above is old and ragged, potentially evil.

The knee-jerk reaction is to figure that maybe the decades have beaten me down, erasing the bright-eyed optimism of youth and replacing it with bleak cynicism. Where I once saw all smiles I now see a sinister grimace.

But I don’t think that’s true. I still feel generally, if warily, optimistic. If not exuberant. Also I’m pretty sure I was actually trying to give the figure above a grin that conveyed sincerity, and it’s only the limitations of my artistic ability that resulted in something that conveyed malevolence instead.

Still like the colors, though.

I’m not really sure what any of this means, except maybe to note the various ways our brains and bodies and methods of personal expression evolve, or don’t evolve, over long periods of time.

Now save these pictures and draw the same thing again a couple decades from now.