One Random Saturday Matinee, Complete With Stern Finger-Wagging

Posted on December 15th, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

A True Story from the Author’s past:

Even as a child, I loved going to the movies.

I loved seeing movies. I still do. But seeing them at home, even in this modern era where almost any movie you might want to see is available to you at the touch of a button, is not the same thing as seeing them in a theatre. There is a certain epic quality to seeing a great movie while sitting on a plush seat in an auditorium where you are just one of many laughing or cheering or gasping or weeping, that will never be matched by the home experience, which is so perversely so uninvolving by contrast that people routinely take breaks three or four times in the course of ninety minutes. Movies at theatres swallow you whole. Movies in your living room offer many avenues for escape.

So as a kid I went to the movies a lot, and I got to appreciate the finer or more appalling qualities of various theatres. This one always had the stickiest floors. This one had the best popcorn. This one always had sound bleeding over from the adjacent auditorium. And so on.

The theatre with the biggest fucking attitude problem was the Mamaroneck Playhouse.

You have no idea.

I used to go to that theatre a lot because they ran monster movie double-features as weekend matinees. Bliss!

But its manager must have suffered a terrible case of post-traumatic stress syndrome, because when you got there, there was always a long line of customers leading out the door and onto the sidewalk, due to his policy of not allowing the audience in until he gave them a piece of his mind. These are the rules, he’d tell us. Any horseplay, and you will be ejected. Any smoking, and you will be ejected. Any thrown objects, and you will be ejected. This is a civilized movie theatre, he would say, angrily, and you will act like people, not animals!

He was really, really angry about this.

It must have burned in his breast when he went home at night.

I must have heard this speech half a dozen times, and as a result I would sit on my hands throughout any movie, too terrified to move.

One time the first show on Saturday was switched, without adequate warning in the newspaper, to an Italian-language version of the film. I would later check the newspaper and see that under the ad for the movie I wanted to see, a tiny six-point advisory that the first show that day would be in Italian. I didn’t find out until I walked into the lobby and found a line of forty moviegoers, mostly adults – it being one of the rare films those days that appealed to me as well as adults – listening to the Cinema Nazi grimly going through the same instructions in Italian. The adults looked nonplussed, the kids frightened. I didn’t speak Italian, so I gathered that I would not understand the film, and left.

It was the first time I can recall ever hearing a translation of a speech that I by then knew by heart.

Eventually, that guy stopped hectoring his customers. He may have been fired. He may have received complaints. I don’t know. But the occasional double-features went on.

There was another odd thing about this theatre: when they showed monster movies, they didn’t advertise the names of the movies. They just advertised: MONSTER MOVIE DOUBLE FEATURE, a grab-bag that just as often meant a couple of Godzilla films. They had this additional weird habit of cutting off the opening titles. You wouldn’t get the AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL PRESENTS A FILM BY SAMUEL L. BRONKOWITZ, DOUG McCLURE IN GRONK THE THING FROM BEYOND SHEBOYGAN, in stages, you would get a savage edit omitting the titles and then the first scene of the movie. Then, there would be an equally rough cut after THE END, shutting down any closing titles.

I have absolutely no idea why they did this, unless it was the cheap-movie equivalent of a drug store spinner rack illegally selling comics or paperbacks with the covers ripped off and returned to the publishers for credit.

As a result, there are movies I saw there, in those days, that I never did manage to identify. I know that one of them was DESTROY ALL MONSTERS and that another was WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS, and that still another was THE KILLER SHREWS, but there are others that have remained anonymous to this very day.

And here’s the thing that leads us into the final stretch: as a young boy, I was never scared by horror movies. I found them pleasing to my imagination, and I thrilled to the misadventures of Larry Talbot and the Frankenstein Monster and so on, but they were escapist entertainment to me; the premise that a scary movie could actually penetrate through your defenses and leave you deliciously disturbed afterward, let alone change your fictive landscape, was completely alien to me. It never occurred to me that this could be so. Despite the well-meaning advice to my parents from well-meaning relatives that oy, such nightmares they would give me, horror movies were, to me, harmless movies. Comfort food.

So this is the context for me, age 9 or 10, attending an unspecified MONSTER MOVIE DOUBLE FEATURE, nodding through the manager’s finger-wagging lecture to his patrons, and sitting down for a double feature that I expected to absorb with a kind of Zen calm. The first movie had its titles cut off, and was about a slow-moving walking tree that almost proved too much for a band of stiff actors to deal with; I now believe it to have been FROM HELL IT CAME, though I never saw that movie again and have frankly never wanted to.

(I later filched the name for a somewhat acclaimed short story that served as functional sequel to the movie that followed after the break. I watched that first film with placid, unaffected enjoyment, my pulse rate never changing.)

And I waited for the second movie to start.

And — as was normal in this particular theatre — I had no idea what that second movie would be.

Folks, in my life I have known any number of books, and any number of movies, that changed me forever. With movies seen before I hit 20 the titles include 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY; HALLOWEEN; believe it or not THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE; TWELVE ANGRY MEN; CONRACK; THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER; PATHS OF GLORY, bloody BORN FREE, if you can hack that; MALTESE FALCON; THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE; THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY; LAWRENCE OF ARABIA; CITIZEN KANE; THE GODFATHER; SEVEN SAMURAI. Some good, some great. All pivotal to my imagination.

And beyond their respective quality, they all arrived at a time when I needed them to arrive, and they all colonized my mind. I would never be able to shake them.

And I still see movies that I’ll never be able to shake. That’s how you know you’ve seen a great one. You feel the roots being planted.

I will not claim that the movie that followed was better than any of those mentioned above. I have a reasonable sense of proportion about such things.

I will say that for a sheltered suburban kid who thought Horror was an implicitly comforting genre that could never, ever hit him where he lived, a kid who expected nothing more than a banal balm to finish out an afternoon’s double-feature, a kid who by then already had the vague idea that he wanted to be a writer someday, there was no advance warning that the title about to come up would rock him to his very bone and plant seeds that are still being harvested by his Muse, forty-five years later.

It’s not that this movie was better than all the others. It was that it arrived, and was internalized by him, earlier than all but one or two of the other touchstones: his first clue that horror, and by extension art, not only can be disturbing, but should be. The sons of bitches who ran the theatre didn’t even cut off the opening titles.

The packed audience screamed their asses off.

I was nine or ten years old and only prepared for the likes of FROM HELL IT CAME, when this thing appeared before my eyes, and altered what it touched.

Nine or ten years old, my heart pounding so hard I thought it would leap out of my chest with this apparently crappy little film that I had never heard of.

Nine or ten years old, having my mind absolutely blown by that ending, and realizing, with perfect clarity, that even if you provide a menace, the monster has to be us.

Then growing up to become a writer of among other things, deliberately disturbing stories.

That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is how I first saw NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.

Tags: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Assholes, Bad Movies, Born Free, Citizen Kane, Doug McClure, Frankenstein, From Hell It Came, Godzilla, Halloween, horror, Lawrence of ARabia, Movies, Night Of the Living dead, Seven Samurai, The Godfather, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, The Killer Shrews, The Maltese Falcon, The Poseidon Adventure, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, True Stories, Twelve Angry Men, Westerns, writing | Category Commentary, Horror, Movies, Writing

The Problem With The Eloquence of Heroes

Posted on December 15th, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

Tags: Andrea Cort, Mystery, William Shakespeare, writing | Category Writing

Imagine You’re An Afghan Taxi Driver

Posted on December 10th, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

Originally published on Facebook 10 December 2014, in response to an adamant torture supporter.

It didn’t make a dent.

Just a few short days ago, I wrote as a status update, “As I get older it is getting harder and harder to resist beginning my rejoinders with, ‘This is why you’re an idiot.’”

Johnnie,

I am deeply tempted to begin this reply to you in that manner. However, I am going to give you the long answer. This is an act of perhaps unwarranted respect. But I am assuming that you are not only able to learn but willing to learn. I suspect that I am wasting my breath. But I am showing you this basic courtesy.

Pretend for the sake of argument that you are a young Afghan man. You are in your early twenties. You are not a member of the Taliban. You are just a young man trying to earn a living, stumbling his way through the world the same way the rest of us do. And one of the ways you do this is by driving a taxi.

And one day you pick up three passengers who look like you and every other citizen of your country who you have ever met. You agree to drive them somewhere, in exchange for a fare.

Forces loyal to the local guerilla commander stop the car, arrest you and the other three men, and hand you over to the Americans.

Remember. You have done nothing.

But there has been an attack on the local American base and these three guys you never met before are believed to be in some way connected, and that means you must be connected.

The Americans demand information you don’t have. When you say you know nothing, they drag you off to a dungeon and hang you from an overhead pole. Your toes barely touch the floor. Your wrists are on fire. You still plead your innocence. The Americans start beating your legs with clubs. They break your legs in several places. They in fact pulverize your legs; and it will be discovered in subsequent days that they do so much damage that even if you lived, which you won’t, they would need to be amputated. (Remember, you’re in your early twenties; so much for any dreams you might have of living a full and productive life, providing for a family that now includes a two-year-old daughter, but that doesn’t matter much, as you will not live to ever see the outside of this room.)

At one point you beg for water, because being tortured to death is thirsty work. You are in a chair at this point, and the guy torturing you gives you a plastic water bottle only after punching a hole in the bottom. Its contents spill out onto your lap while you are still fumbling with it. You get only drops. They laugh at you and resume your torment. Ha, ha, ha.

In the four days of nonstop torture you endure, you are dragged around the room by your beard, you are beaten in the knees, you have your head slammed against the wall, you are hung from the ceiling overnight and subjected to sleep deprivation, your feet are crushed, you are told you are lying, and you are beaten more for “refusing” to get to your knees when your legs are so swollen they can no longer bend. You are ultimately left hanging from your pole for so long that when they finally come back to check on you, you are not just dead – having known God alone knows what terror as you hung there in this Kafkaesque nightmare feeling life slip from you. You have actually entered rigor mortis.

All this at the hands of the country that hanged Japanese officers for water-boarding people.

Your name is Dilawar, and this happened to you in 2002.

It doesn’t matter that subsequent investigation documented that you were, in fact, exactly what you always claimed to be, a goddamned taxi driver, or that the soldiers who did this to you receive light punishment – slaps on the wrist.

It doesn’t matter that the three guys you picked up in your role as taxi driver go to Guantanamo (and are eventually released).

You, the innocent one, are still dead.

Now, it is possible that a guy imagining himself an American patriot might snort, “So what? 9/11!” It is possible that that guy is totally unmoved by this injustice, because 9/11; will indeed snort that he’d just as soon torture ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out. It is possible that this guy thinks what happened to you is the sort of thing that he shouldn’t care about.

In this thought experiment, you are still Dilawar, rotting in the ground.

Think of how your family feels.

Think of how your friends feel.

Think of your neighbors feel.

Think of how the many countrymen who merely hear about this on the grapevine feel.

How many of those will say, “We are occupied by madmen. I must kill as many of these pigs as possible?” Or, “I must go to the country that did this, and kill people living there whose only sin is minding their own business?”

Think of how the hatred spreads.

Now let’s consider Iraq, where during Saddam there was a whole culture built around ratting out your innocent friends and neighbors to the secret police, on scurrilous charges, to be imprisoned and tortured and killed, which was simply transferred to new bosses when the Americans took over.

The guy imagining himself an American patriot thinks it just swell that we torture people. He doesn’t care that while an unjust arrest of the sort that happens in wartime can eventually be reversed with an apology, torture can not be taken back, and any number of folks whose biggest sin is simply irritating Ali across the alley are indeed swept up and sent to Abu Ghraib and later to places of extraordinary rendition, where they are dehumanized and terrorized as a matter of policy.

The guy who imagines himself an American patriot snorts. This is really funny stuff. He retorts, “9/11!” He doesn’t care much that when some of those guys are released from Abu Ghraib they have every reason to think of his country as evil incarnate. To him, they are all an indistinguishable brown mass. If they act up, we’ll just torture more or them!

He doesn’t care that torture is a notoriously unreliable way of gathering intelligence and that, at one point during Bush II’s occupation, a prisoner who had no answer to give finally gave up a plot to blow up what he called “the bridge from the Godzilla movie.” Because he did not know the name of the bridge. Because he only knew it from the Matthew Broderick Godzilla film. Because he bought a bootleg at some Baghdad street bazaar.

The guy who imagines himself an American patriot doesn’t care that torture produces false information like this and that our people were well-occupied investigating a nonsensical threat against the Brooklyn Bridge until somebody suddenly had the brainstorm that the guy in custody was talking about Godzilla.

The guy who imagines himself an American patriot doesn’t even care that it’s morally wrong, that it flies in the face of every principle this country has stood for since its founding, the country which proved it was better than Japan and Germany in World War II because, when we took enemy soldiers prisoner, we obeyed the conventions of every civilized country and treated them with minimal care toward their health and well-being.

The guy who imagines himself an American patriot only cares, “9/11! Torture ‘em all!” He doesn’t care that when these crimes were committed against our people, we tried and hanged the criminals responsible. He doesn’t care that we labeled them war crimes then, or that we were right to do so. He would rather be loud than right. His worldview is an action movie. He doesn’t give a damn about anything but kicking ass.

The guy who imagines himself an American patriot only knows good guys and bad guys and is certain that we’re always among the good guys even when we don’t act like it and is equally certain that whoever we have in custody must be a subhuman deserving only of torment whether innocent or not.

The guy who imagines himself an American patriot thinks torture is just fine even when our use of that practice normalizes it worldwide and renders ever more certain the prospect that any American soldier captured by any enemy is brutalized for information he doesn’t have; and he thinks “they will anyway,” when, at the beginning of Bush II’s war, the wounded Private Jessica Lynch was rescued from an Iraqi facility where we found that she was well-treated, and cared for, and given what medical assistance was available. He doesn’t care that the informant who told U.S. forces where Lynch was gave them false information about her being tortured, and that when she was rescued she was ordered, for a time, to not contradict this story. He doesn’t care that she is now quite open about denying all bad treatment. He doesn’t care that this story documents the default position most human beings, even those on opposing sides of a military conflict, will often take if there are rules of war, and that her fate might have been much different if it were known then that the Attorney General, the Vice President, and the President of the United States were creating rationalizations for an environment closer to Dilawar’s than Jessica Lynch’s.

The guy who imagines himself an American patriot thinks he is serving his country well by relieving it of all its moral authority and all its sense of responsibility. He says, “We don’t have to be right. We can kick ass.” Because it’s easier than thinking. (Or, apparently, punctuating.)

The guy who imagines himself an American patriot is content to think, “My country, right or wrong,” without pausing long enough to add the coda, “…but I love this country because we have so often been right, and we owe her enough thought to at least try to be right.”

Finally, the guy who imagines himself an American patriot finds nothing infuriating in the knowledge that by day three of the four-day torture session in 2002, most of the taxi driver’s interrogators had come to the conclusion that, yeah, this guy was probably innocent, and went back in to continue the hellish punishment anyway…because why not; THEY had nothing to lose. Might as well.

And none of this matters to you, because in our thought experiment you are still not that guy.

I am not showing you that much mercy, my patriot friend.

No, you are still Dilawar, hanging from an overhead pipe, trying to breathe despite cracked ribs and a broken nose and the agony of shattered legs, a guy who only wanted to help support his family by driving a taxi. Dilawar, with nothing to say but, “I didn’t do anything!”

As Dilawar, what do you think of the guy who hears about your plight and snorts, “So what?” The guy who loves our country so much he has no problem with our interrogators acting indistinguishably from Nazis?

I know what I think, Johnnie.

It’s not much.

Tags: Dick Cheney, Franz Kafka, George W. Bush, Politics, Race, Republicans | Category Commentary, Politics