{"id":3066,"date":"2012-05-31T08:42:25","date_gmt":"2012-05-31T14:42:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=3066"},"modified":"2012-05-31T08:42:25","modified_gmt":"2012-05-31T14:42:25","slug":"b-memories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=3066","title":{"rendered":"B Memories"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I saw something of my own childhood, albeit at a decade\u2019s remove, in Colson Whitehead\u2019s memoir of growing up in the seventies with low-budget, low-esteem science-fiction movies. He writes, \u201cIf I was lucky, I\u2019d come home from elementary school to find WABC\u2019s \u2018The 4:30 Movie\u2019 in the middle of Monster Week,\u201d and that was my experience, too. Among my very earliest cinematic memories, from the mid-sixties, are movies revealed on that broadcast, though the films he cites, \u201cFrogs\u201d and \u201cThe Power,\u201d from 1972 and 1968, respectively, came too late for me. Even the very title \u201cMonster Week\u201d was, as I recall, a latter-day product of a more self-consciously joshing way with the medium. I remember a solemn on-screen science-fiction rubric, and the difference of a decade, of a mood, and of the relevant films was crucial: science fiction connects to science, and the B-movies that were broadcast, and that obsessed me between the ages of about five and eight, came from the fifties and early sixties and were tethered to the promise and the peril of new technologies.
\nAs a kid in the age of Sputnik, those technologies were my underlying obsession, as they were the nation\u2019s. From the atomic bomb (which, as I had learned, ended the war and thus possibly saved my father\u2019s life, as he was about to be redeployed to the Pacific theatre) to the polio vaccine to the race to the moon (on which a family friend, an engineer, was working) to a panoply of pleasures and comforts (such as television and air-conditioning), science enjoyed a gleaming reputation in our home, and I enjoyed science in school and, of course, expected to become a scientist, whatever that meant. But thanks to the Museum of Natural History, dinosaurs crept into the equation\u2014paleontology became, for me, a primordial ontology, and the very notion of the inaccessible past fused with a vision of a quasi-utopian future (that may be why the dinosaur scene in \u201cThe Tree of Life\u201d struck me as perfect: I assume that, in his childhood, Terrence Malick had read the same pop-science books, with the same illustrations, that I had read) to forge the connection between investigation and imagination, or, more bluntly, between fact and fiction.
\nWhat they showed those afternoons on Channel 7\u2014thin yet hectic fantasies, such as \u201cEarth vs. the Spider,\u201d \u201cEarth vs. the Flying Saucers,\u201d \u201cBeginning of the End,\u201d and \u201cThe Brain That Wouldn\u2019t Die\u201d\u2014fed a fascination with science while also catering to a child\u2019s apocalyptic imagination as well as addressing a child\u2019s fears. There was nothing ironic or self-mocking about these movies; they had some of the grandiose adult earnestness of science, but they replaced its careful, incremental, workaday progress with visions emerging from its most spectacular achievements. In the same way that imagining diseases (and, in imagination, immediately unleashing their deadly force upon an unsuspecting world) was, for a child, more enticing than pondering cures for real ones, watching the furious force of monsters from deep within or from distant galaxies was a way of confronting the most monstrous possibilities that loomed just outside one\u2019s own secure life, or, for that matter, those monstrous feelings that a child feels, moment to moment, in the face of every constraint, whether practical or moral.
\nMy very favorite of them was a diptych: \u201cThe Amazing Colossal Man\u201d and its sequel, \u201cWar of the Colossal Beast.\u201d Glenn Manning (played by Glen Langan), a soldier in a trench at the perimeter of the site of an impending atom-bomb test becomes a hero when, during the countdown to the blast, a pilot crashes a small plane nearby. Dashing out of his trench to try to save the pilot, Glenn is gravely burned in a shower of nuclear debris, but, somehow, survives. Not only does his skin suddenly heal, but he begins to grow, and keeps growing, turning into an angry freak, demented (the \u201cscience\u201d being that his brain doesn\u2019t keep up with the rest of his growth) and dangerous. In the sequel, he survives a calamitous fall at the Hoover Dam after a military assault, and comes back more monstrous and madder than ever (\u201cGlenn! Put the bus down!\u201d).
\nEvery child is a giant at the center of his own world, and the image of the outsized self in action\u2014an embarrassment as well as a danger, a bigger center of attention than one ever wanted to be and a bigger pain than one ever intended to be\u2014had a strangely cathartic impact, even as it captured the hysterical incongruities in alluring images of flamboyant imagination. The director Bert I. Gordon (who seems to have been my primordial auteur) didn\u2019t do much in the way of character development or psychological subtlety, but he sure knew how to make a visual metaphor\u2014to convey extravagant emotions, indeed, the mental overdrive of youth itself, in simple images. Monster movies are movies of self-transformation; even a child knows that makeup goes into the creation of the roles\u2014and also knows that, as Socrates said, from the imitation one draws off some of the being. From my afternoon Bs, I picked up\u2014and have never shaken\u2014the idea of movies as something other than a representation of characters or a study of behavior. They mattered to me (as they still do) as reimaginations of the self, detached collections of visual extravagances that capture something of existence as a whole, as works of amazing and colossal ambition and scope.
\nThis primal pleasure in the potent image also conditioned me to a cinematic hedonism that, to this day, is the motivating force in watching and discussing movies. Pleasure in the images (and, in another post, I\u2019ll try to discuss the nature of this pleasure) is the first and the main reason to watch movies. It\u2019s the gateway to empathy with a director\u2019s point of view, and it fuels the deployment of analytical tools; in the absence of such pleasure, I hope that the word \u201cinteresting\u201d is heard as a tacit term of contempt.
\nI sat down to write this post with an invigorating enjoyment in reimagining some of the formative outer and inner experiences of early childhood and avowing, to myself and to others, an unshaken fidelity to them. Yet midway through, ruefulness took over as the retracing of some decisive early steps\u2014ones taken with an exuberant blindness to their import\u2014turned into a sidelong glance at a whole landscape full of roads not taken and of missteps along the way. If my hive of Bs taught me anything, it\u2019s that every possibility is also a limitation, every dream a potential nightmare, every invention a labyrinthine trap, and there\u2019s no going back. One heads further into the vortex, accompanied by ever wilder images in an ever more fervent confrontation with\u2014and acceptance of\u2014the definitively unrepresentable void.<\/p>\n

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