COMICS REVIEW: DAREDEVIL NO. 181 (1982)

“LAST HAND”

A Stan Lee Presentation

Story and Art by Frank Miller

Finished Art and Colors by Klaus Janson

Lettered by Joe Rosen

Edited by Denny O’Neil

Supervised by Jim Shooter

Published by Marvel Comics Group. 

--

“BULLSEYE

VS.

ELEKTRA

ONE WINS.

ONE DIES.”

-cover blurb from Daredevil No. 181

--

Review by William D. Tucker.

Here Be Spoilers . . . 

Daredevil-the Man Without Fear-is the horned and crimson costumed alternate identity of New York City defense attorney Matt Murdock. If you are a regular reader of the comic which bears his superheroic name, then you are aware that Murdock is a man who was once exposed to mysterious radioactive materials which robbed him of conventional sight and imbued him with a power of ‘radar vision,’ which, in some ways, is a superior way of seeing the world. 

Murdock is also a master martial artist, acrobat, and has a highly evolved sense of ethics. Like other comic book superheroes such as Spider-Man or Batman, he will readily engage in bone-crunching hand-to-hand combat to take down the bad guys, but does not seek to kill people outright. Presumably, Daredevil is so skilled at martial arts that he always manages to punch people just hard enough to knock ‘em out, and not to sever their spinal cords or give them permanent brain damage, not to speak of long-term neuro-degenerative diseases which may have their roots in physical brain traumas-just you try to prove that last one in a court of law, buddy. Good thing DD’s normie job is lawyering, right?

So let’s say you just picked up no. 181 of the ongoing saga of the world’s most superheroic lawyer, and you’re scoping the cover and you see Bullseye and Elektra in the foreground with a giant image of Daredevil in the middleground and nothing but yellow in the back. Text on the cover tells us this is a ‘SPECIAL DOUBLE-SIZE ISSUE’ and that in the battle between Bullseye and Elektra only one of them will survive. 

Well, it sure as hell ain’t gonna be Bullseye walking out of here alive. That guy’s an evil-doer. And Elektra, well, she’s a killer, but she’s conflicted about it, and she’s the great love of Murdock’s life. They wouldn’t kill off Elektra. You can’t do a thing like that.  

So, you’re a regular Daredevil fan, and you open up the 181st issue . . . and you see an image of Daredevil’s body torturously twisted, his head caught in some crosshairs, as he is seemingly getting a bullet in the fucking bean, his DIY billy club dropping from nerveless fingers. DD’s body language in this full-page panel reminds me of some of the angsty poses Silver Surfer would strike whenever he would get upset about being trapped on Earth. 

Now, we know that superheroes never really get killed in comics. If they do, they come back, somehow, some way. So, even if you’re relatively inexperienced reading comics, you most likely have absorbed through cultural osmosis the essential truth that comic book heroes never die, and that this image must be part of some kind of bait-and-switch, some gimmick, some storytelling gambit meant to put the con on rubes and children. 

And, indeed, if you read the captions in the top left, you’ll realize that you are seeing the story from the perspective of a bad guy. A bad guy imagining with relish how he’s going to kill the hero. 

Turn the page, and meet our narrator: a solitary blonde prisoner in a spacious cage ruminating on how he was both beaten and saved by Daredevil once upon a time. 

This prisoner could accept that he was defeated by Ol’ Hornhead, but he cannot live down the humiliation of being saved by this same victor. Daredevil and this villain happened to be fighting on some subway tracks, DD knocked bad guy’s lights out, and then cleared him from the tracks just as a train was barreling their way. The bad guy, now the prisoner, cannot accept what he sees as a weakness inside himself for being dependent upon another, especially an enemy, but, perhaps, just anyone and anything in general. He’s a real tough guy this one.

I’m talking about Bullseye, who, prior to his current incarceration, was the number one assassin working for organized crime in New York City. Now, he spends his endless days and nights inside Rikers Island working out and telling himself stories about all the payback he’s going to get out of Daredevil’s ass when he gets the chance. 

Daredevil 181 tells it from the perspective of the villain Bullseye, a costumed psychopath whose hands are lethal weapons, and not like how your strip mall karate instructor tells you that he had to register his hands as lethal weapons in his state of residence-that guy’s full of shit. 

Because that guy? 

He lives in reality. 

And that’s not how reality works, no matter how deep the strip mall sensei’s self-aggrandizing tough guy fantasies penetrate his every living, waking, breathing moments. Because he still lives in reality-the one thing fantasy cannot defeat. And reality crushes our delusions in the end, every last one flattened like so many aluminum soda cans. 

One day we wake up, and we are middle aged, and our knees are shot, we got that fat white gut hanging over our beltlines, and now we gotta hire an assistant half our fucking age who can still do all the katas and could probably also give the high hard one to our wife better than I ever could, that lousy little punk-ass bast-

But Bullseye is one of the numerous fictional constructs populating the Marvel Comics Universe. Bullseye is not bound by our mundane, Big Bang Universe, which gives us brains to imagine gods, immortality, and faster-than-light travel while also simultaneously precluding the actual existence of any deity, anything approaching life everlasting, and most assuredly denies us the realization of a U.S.S. Enterprise-esque FTL-capable vessel.  

Bullseye lives in the Marvel Universe, which has it all: gods, FTL-capable star-spanning intergalactic empires, immortality, psychic powers, Life Model Decoys (Marvel-jargon for clones), and even if you’re an elderly World War II veteran like Nick Fury or Dum-Dum Dugan or a middle-aged cold warrior like Black Widow or Silver Sable you can maintain a catsuit ready combat physique right up ‘til the moments when you enter the gates of Valhalla or the Negative Zone or the Mystic Realms charted by the likes of Dr. Strange when he’s at war with the Dread Dormammu and Dr. Doom as he quests to save his mother’s soul from the devil. 

You can have your choice of heavens or hells or the spaces in-between in the Marvel Comics Universe. 

You can be immortal. 

Or you can die of space cancer like an earlier version of Captain Marvel and stay dead as long as possible because the fanbase is constantly complaining about how there are no consequences in superhero comics and people what die just end up coming back and how that makes Marvel and DC comic books seem like they’re just a bunch of goddamn kiddie books for losers and I think I’ll start reading this harder edged shit from the independent press-like this book Cerebus, which I hear tell is a gritty, philosophically provocative long-form storytelling groundbreaker featuring a talking animal with a sword and shield-oh, wait.

You can be bitten by a radioactive spider and shoot long, ropy white sticky stuff all over New York City and not just because you’re hanging out in the porno theaters in Times Square with your boy Travis Bickle-no sir, it’s because you’re a spider-person, and you’re using your ‘threads’ to swing from building to building and to ‘web-up’ those nasty street criminals and you’re definitely sticking to the walls to ‘climb’ them-just like a spider-and not just because you’re committing obscene acts against inanimate objects for obscure reasons you yourself barely comprehend. Honest . . .

(. . . but did anyone ever do the perv version of Marvel Comics? Where we find out that all the costume heroes and villains are just a bunch of maniacs living out bizarre power fantasies in a world where the average person doesn’t have much of a say in anything? I guess that was a big part of Watchmen, now that I think about it. But Watchmen had its cake and ate it, too: it brought down some cynical realism while also being a totally committed superhero book. Moore and Gibbons wolfed down all the goddamn cake while still keeping the banquet table full of cake, didn’t they?)

Bullseye, as I said, is a deadly villain who uses his hands as weapons. Anything that gets into his hands he can use to lethal effect. He picks up a knife, he can throw it into your brain, your heart,or the dude can get in close and gut you like a fish. If Bullseye gets his murderous mitts on a gat, he can fill you full of lead, and when he’s squeezed off his last shot, he can bludgeon you with the butt or throw it so the barrel pierces your eye socket. 

Bullseye is in superb physical condition, too, which means he can jump and kick and punch and do acrobatics and tumble and bounce back and aikido people’s shit all over the dynamic sphere and  climb all over the place, but not like a perverted spider-person. Bullseye’s not some radioactive freakjob like the Hulk or some goddamn mutie like Wolverine-nowadys, we’d probably call what Bullseye does parkour, or parkour-adjacent. It’s like they do in those Assassin’s Creed games, okay? 

Now, Bullseye is an assassin-for-hire, so he would make for an acceptable player character in a number of best-selling video game franchises. Mostly he used to work for Wilson Fisk, a.k.a the Kingpin. Kingpin is the lord of organized crime in the Marvel version of NYC, and Bullseye was once a top hitter for Fisk. But, as we discover in Daredevil 181 Mr. Death Hands is doing hard penitentiary time after getting knocked out by the Man Without Fear.

Bullseye gets limited time out in the yard for some fresh air, and he’s approached by another kind of Marvel Construct: Frank Castle a.k.a. The Punisher.

You are perhaps familiar with the Punisher. He’s got the black body armor with the white skull on his chest. He’s one of the comic book heroes who has no problem killing people with military grade weapons and tactics. In the 1980s, Punisher came into his own as a heavily armed vigilante mass murderer many found reminiscent of Charles Bronson’s character Paul Kersey in the Death Wish franchise. 

Actually, the Punisher is a more direct rip-off of the men’s adventure novel series protagonist Mack Bolan a.k.a. The Executioner. Both Bolan and Castle were Vietnam Special Forces veterans whose families were destroyed by the mafia. Bolan wore lots of tactical gear and combat webbing and waged a one man war on crime. Castle did the same. Both were depicted as having dark hair and chiseled action hero type faces. Bolan was a character in a long-running series of paperback novels written by a variety of anonymous hacks using the collective pen name ‘Don Pendleton,’ tho’ apparently there actually was a Don Pendleton who wrote the early novels. 

And, yes, they used to publish books that bore the description ‘men’s adventure,’ which basically means ‘here be extreme violence, loving descriptions of guns and explosive devices, and plenty o’ fuckin’. ‘ I read, like, two hundred of these kinds of books in grades 6 to 12. It helped make me the solid citizen that I am today! 

Bullseye tries to mindfuck Punisher by telling him that all the prisoners would love to gang up on a murderous vigilante, but the Punisher isn’t rattled. In fact, the Big P tops Bullseye: he tells him that a new ace assassin has replaced Bullseye in the Kingpin’s organization. The Punisher tells the Man with the Deadly Hands straight up that he hopes he’ll do something stupid with the information and get himself killed. Bullseye takes the bait.

Now, I just told you that the Punisher is a knock-off version of Mack Bolan, but that’s not exactly how Mr. Castle started in the Marvel Universe. Originally, the Punisher was just a costumed gun for hire employed by another costumed miscreant known as the Jackal. The Jackal hired the Punisher to assassinate Spider-Man. Later on, more backstory was written for Punisher, and he eventually evolved from a random bad guy for hire . . . into an Executioner clone. Which amuses me to no end that a character ‘develops’ by becoming increasingly evacuated of any spark of originality. You gotta love comics.

But you may be picking up on something here. Bullseye is basically what the Punisher used to be: a costumed killer for hire. The Punisher, in a sense, isn’t just carrying on his overall vendetta against organized crime by manipulating Bullseye with information. Here, Castle is waging a war against his old hated self. At least that’s how I interpret it. Which is definitely some cold shit to do to a guy. 

A late night talk show host named Tom Snyde wants to interview Bullseye and get a ratings boost by offering the drooling slobs out there in TV Land a glimpse into the criminal psyche. Bullseye doesn’t want anything to do with this silliness at first, but upon reflection he sees a way to use the compromised security of the interview shoot to break out of prison. Which he does, killing numerous guards and hijacking a helicopter which gives him a ride from Rikers Island back to Manhattan. Bullseye hits up a mob of freelance assassins working as independent contractors for the Kingpin and muscles them into giving up the identity of the new ace: Elektra.

Bullseye also uses his new gang of thralls to run street intel ops to triangulate upon his nemesis Daredevil. Bullseye actually does something brilliant: he hits upon the idea that Matt Murdock and Daredevil are the same person. So, you see, Bullseye isn’t completely made of stupid. 

But before taking revenge against Ol’ Hornhead, Bullseye wants his old job back with the Kingpin, which means he has to kill Elektra. Bullseye finds out from the assassination contractors that Elektra has recently been hired to kill Matt Murdock’s assistant, Franklin ‘Foggy’ Nelson. Bullseye tails Nelson, which leads him to Elektra. 

Elektra, meanwhile, is about to kill Nelson, but Nelson recognizes her as his best friend Matt Murdock’s college girlfriend. Elektra, who still has feelings for Murdock, is shook up by this, and let’s Nelson go. And that’s when Bullseye strikes. 

This is the Main Event: Bullseye. Elektra. One lives. One dies. 

And it’s a close battle. You could say that the winner had superior skill. Or maybe it was just a matter of luck. Maybe one combatant’s head wasn’t all in the game while the other’s was-hard to say. 

And, yes, they did the unthinkable. They killed Elektra. 

Later, Elektra came back. But she is, indeed, brutally killed in this very issue. 

Did Elektra die because Bullseye was a superior warrior?

Were they evenly matched in terms of skill, but Elektra’s mind was clouded because of what Nelson said to her moments before?

Were they evenly matched in terms of skill, but Bullseye just got in a lucky shot?

Later, after being defeated yet again by DD, Bullseye tells himself another one of his little stories that basically is just, “Wah, wah, wah-Daredevil just got lucky-pity me, pity me, pity me!” 

And, you know, as much as I think Bullseye is a major piece of shit, he does hit on something interesting about this idea of ‘luck.’

You see, I kinda think that much of what happens in this issue comes down to what you might call luck. 

Sure, there’s superhuman skill. There’s Bullseye’s total lack of conscience. But Bullseye’s impulsive. His whole shtick revolves around being able to use whatever he can find in the moment as a lethal weapon. He is, essentially, an improvisational killer. 

The weapon Bullseye uses to render Elektra defenseless is a playing card-the Ace of Spades, in fact, the Death Card. Bullseye throws it like a blade and cuts Elektra’s throat. Just one of those things Bullseye happens to have on hand. He got some distance on Elektra, and was able to use it. Earlier, he’d used the same card to murder a cabbie and steal a cab. Just making use of what he can carry easily on his person. 

Bullseye then stabs Elektra with one of her own ninja blades, dons a disguise, and then watches as she staggers and crawls to Matt Murdock’s brownstone walk-up. 

Later, Bullseye sneaks into the morgue where-in disguise-he observes Murdock identifying Elektra’s corpse. Bullseye speaks to another morgue employee and Murdock immediately perks up, and Bullseye realizes that his cockamamie theory about Murdoch and DD being one and the same is correct. Bullseye further confirms this by throwing a blade which Murdock effortlessly blocks with his walking stick. 

Bullseye retreats from the morgue and has a sit-down with the Kingpin, and tries to sell Fisk on the notion that Murdoch is Daredevil, but the Kingpin doesn’t trust or respect Bullseye and basically tells him to go out and kill DD and bring back the corpse as proof. That’s what makes the Kingpin the Kingpin. No mercy, no compassion, no second chances, no freebies, no bullshit, just results.

Bullseye goes after Daredevil, and they have a wild melee inside Murdock’s apartment and out the window and across the rooftops and on a train. It is, yet again, a closely fought battle. Both of these enemies have to work in the moment. There’s no set plan. They end up balanced upon power cables high above the city streets. Daredevil balances. Bullseye slips. Daredevil catches Bullseye’s hand. Bullseye says he won’t let DD save him again. Daredevil lets him drop. Daredevil tells Bullseye he won’t kill anyone ever again. Bullseye falls from a great height, shattering his body upon the pavement. 

So, you know . . . Bullseye got some of what he wanted. But not really. 

I think Daredevil grabbed Bullseye’s wrist because he wanted to be able to take responsibility for 86ing Bullseye. This is his decision, not anyone else’s, not fate, not God-this is all on Daredevil/Murdoch. I said a few moments ago, that DD doesn’t set out to intentionally kill most of his enemies, and that is true. Mostly. But sometimes . . . and with some people . . . well, what can you do? 

And, sure, the way the fateful moment is drawn you could interpret it that Bullseye was about to stab Daredevil with one of the blades stolen from Elektra . . . but I think that’s just some Comics Code Authority nonsense right there. 

Bullseye is a major piece of shit, and if I were Daredevil I would’ve dropped him, no sweat. 

That’s how I see it. 

In a universe where he could’ve done anything and been anybody, Bullseye chose the Path of the Asshole. He got what he deserved every step of the way. Even the Kingpin was skeeved out by Bullseye. The Kingpin, fer Chrissakes! The Kingpin’s the biggest, the richest, and the most heartless son of a bitch in NYC. And yet even he was grossed out by Bullseye. 

Oh, yeah, let him drop. 

Then pick him up, lug his ass to the top of the World Trade Center . . . and drop him again.

Repeat as necessary. 

And here’s the kicker: Bullseye is still alive at the end!

The cover blurb did not lie.

Bullseye is stilll alive albeit trapped inside his own paralyzed body. He’s in a hospital bed in a bleakly hilarious full body cast. (Maybe it’s just me, but I pretty much always find the sight of a character in a full body cast to be comical.) 

Bullseye lives . . . inside his brain. Lives off the delusional stories that have sustained him-maybe for his whole life, when you think about it. Hyper-aggressive. Macho. Full of entitlement. Full of bogus victimhood. Full of self-aggrandizing fantasies of power and domination. Utterly incapable of taking responsibility for his actions. Talented, yet jealous, insecure,  and hypercompetitive. No respect for human life. Convinced that he is the One, that he has some kind of special destiny. 

That’s Bullseye.

Fuck that guy.

MOVIE REVIEW: THE THING (1982)

Directed by John Carpenter
Screenplay by Bill Lancaster, adapted from the short story "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell
Cinematography by Dean Cundey
Edited by Todd C. Ramsay
Special Makeup Effects by Rob Bottin (with an assist from Stan Winston)
Special Visual Effects by Albert Whitlock
Music by Ennio Morricone, John Carpenter
Produced by David Foster, Lawrence Turman, Wilbur Stark, Stuart Cohen

Starring
Kurt Russell
A. Wilford Brimley
Keith David
Donald Moffat
Charles Hallahan
Richard Masur
David Clennon
T.K. Carter
Joel Polis
Richard Dysart
Thomas G. Waites
Peter Maloney

...

"When a man bleeds, it's just tissue. But blood from one of you Things won't obey. It's a newly formed individual with a built-in desire to protect its own life. When attacked, your blood will try and survive--and crawl away from a hot needle, say."
--Macready (played by Kurt Russell) in the movie The Thing.

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

150,000 years ago an alien craft crash lands somewhere in Antarctica.

Cut to: 1982. An American research station somewhere in Antarctica. A Norwegian man with an assault rifle chases a dog into the middle of the American facility, firing like mad. He seems to want to kill the dog. One of the Americans is wounded. The gunman rants and raves in a language none of the Americans can understand. In self-defense, the captain of the station fires a .357 round through the mad gunman's eye.

It's determined that the Norwegian came from a nearby research station established by the Kingdom of Norway. Did the Norwegian camp go stark raving mad? Were they cooking some bad drugs over there? Did they go stir crazy or what? Why would anyone want to kill a harmless dog?

Maybe that dog isn't so harmless.

In fact, it harbors a predatory life-form from another world. Something that can take on any shape--once it has consumed it and replicated it via its icky, but sophisticated, biology. This . . . thing has come from distant worlds, and has absorbed all sorts of lifeforms in its journeys, or so it would seem. It has now started to absorb human and canine life forms. It has no interest in communication. Only in absorbing forms, knowledge, and getting the hell out of Antarctica. Maybe it'll imitate a bird, and fly right the Christ outta there.

Soon the Americans are wondering: who's human? Who's the thing? How do you tell a perfect imitation apart from its original?

The answer, it would seem, is in the blood.

Unless, of course, the thing has perfectly imitated human blood. Then what?

What if its goal is to absorb and replicate itself across the whole surface of the earth? How do you contain such an enemy? The thing seems to operate like a bacteria or a virus--some kind of infectious agent for sure. The thing is some kind of plague threatening to wipe out humanity.

Or is it? Maybe when it perfectly imitates you it perfectly re-assembles you, and it only manifests aggression if it feels threatened. Maybe we need to cool down, and not start breaking out all the guns and flamethrowers and so forth.

But what if this thing really is looking to assert total control? We can't just let this thing go. We gotta find out who is human, and who's the thing.

Two enemies, human and the thing, wage a war in Antarctica to see who survives and who dies. Who gets to rule the planet, and who gets reduced to ashes. The only language that both sides seem to understand seems to be a pidgin mixture of aggression, cunning, violence, and manipulation--war, in other words. Prisoners are taken. Harsh interrogations conducted. No one can be trusted. Subtle personal resentments float to the surface: Am I dropping the hammer on this guy because I think he's an alien imitation, or because I think he's kind of an asshole? Remember, these guys have been cooped up in this research station for a long time.

Maybe there is no Thing. Maybe the only contagion brought into the American camp was the virus of fear. Fear takes root, and you see whatever you want to see. Weapons are drawn, fingers pointed, sides chosen. Humans have been doing this to each other since our primal beginnings with no end in sight. Do we really need some ooga-booga make believe alien bullshit to set us against each other to the knife? People abuse and kill each other over invisible things all the time--politics, ideology, nationalism, religion, economics, jealousy, racism, homophobia, misogyny--maybe the Thing is just one more flake-o notion that has entered the heads of human beings in their ongoing quest to find novel reasons to oppress and slaughter each other.

And what if The Thing is real? Well, we can't truly say it's evil if we're objective about it. It just wants to survive. It's a being from another world. Or maybe a colonial aggregation of beings from across the cosmos. Who the fuck knows? In any case, if the Thing is real, I find it impossible to judge its actions in moralistic terms. The Thing wants to survive. So do the humans. They cannot communicate in civil fashion, and so it's gotta be total war. Too bad. A tragedy, really, when you get right down to it. What could have been a stirring saga of First Contact becomes Intergalactic War I, with, I'm sure, many sequels to follow.

But it makes for one hell of a show.

John Carpenter's The Thing . . . After this movie, Carpenter was only competing with himself. Artistically, I mean. Which is all that really interests me, here. Sure, it was a box office disappointment at the time of its release, and Carpenter himself has expressed disappointment that this movie didn't go over as well as he had hoped at the time--but that's all in the past. Without question, The Thing found a long, sinister afterlife on VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, and now, I assume,  Blu-Ray.

And on broadcast television, too, albeit in a heavily censored bullshit version, but many great filmmakers have had to endure the indignity of having their movies chopped, edited, and violated at every level to conform to the bogus morality of regularly scheduled network programming.

 I watched The Thing in a censored version and I could not take my eyes off the screen. I was riveted. I wasn't scared, exactly, I've only ever really been afraid of being abducted by aliens, to be perfectly blunt with you, but I felt like I was watching, I dunno, 12 Angry Men, or Glengarry Glen Ross, or something. It was clearly a science fiction/horror genre picture, but it wasn't schlock. It wasn't played for camp or splatter moments or breast shots. It was about a group of pissed-off humans, all male, trying to root out an insidious alien invader with the power of masquerading as homo sapiens.

 One of these humans(?) has a flamethrower and  several bundles of dynamite and is not taking any shit from anybody. He's forcing the other men, at flamethrower-point, to submit to an improvised medical test that resembles some kind of cult-like, ritual initiation rite. Each man must slice his thumb, let his blood flow into a Petri dish, and then the man with the flame thrower will hold a length of wire in the ignition fire and then, once the wire has been heated up, it will be pressed against the blood samples. If the blood samples just burn and sizzle, it's all good. But if something else happens . . . and what would that something be, exactly? Part of the interest of this scene lies in its deep uncertainty. Just because the guy with all the weapons has dreamed up some test that he thinks is gonna proves who's human and who's the thing doesn't mean the test will actually fucking work. And what if Mr. Blood Inquisitor sees a positive result that's nothing of the kind? Innocent people are gonna burn, for sure . . .

I'm talking about the blood test scene which anyone who has seen The Thing knows about. This was the very first scene I ever saw from The Thing. Or maybe it wasn't quite the very first thing I saw of The Thing. I think, maybe, I had been flipping channels, and noticed this unusual movie about a research team in Antarctica dealing with some kind of alien invasion situation--intense, bearded dudes in winter-wear speaking in low, strident tones about evil doings, Kurt Russell talking into a tape recorder about how no one can trust anyone anymore, Wilford Brimley losing his shit and going all James Cagney on people with a snubnose .38, but I didn't pay too close attention. I skipped around the TV, and, at some point, I came back to the movie at its most intense moment: the blood test scene.

I don't remember what, exactly, compelled me to stop and watch the movie from that point onward. But I think it was the seriousness of the performances. The actors were behaving as though they were actually frightened and angered by their situation. They seemed to have fear, rage, and paranoia playing across their faces at different moments. They didn't act like the kinds of morons you'd expect to populate a typical body count picture. I think it was the seriousness of the actors' performances that drew me in more than anything, but who knows? Whatever it was, I was hooked. I watched the movie 'til its end. And, at that time, the 1990s, I hated watching movies that had been censored for broadcast television. What was the point? If a movie is unacceptable to the networks, then don't show it, I say. TV stations could come up with their own crappy shows to fill timeslots, and probably get more reliable advertiser participation, too.

Think about it. Non-controversial, braindead situation comedies and cop-worship shows are pretty much a sure thing if you want the average television viewer to achieve brand identification with whatever lame product you're pushing. Well, I guess that was true in the 1990s. Now, it would be the increasingly Orwellian depravity of Reality TV, but let's not go there.

The Thing was compelling cinema even in a heavily compromised form. John Carpenter's film was so well-crafted, that it wasn't totally ruined by censorship. Now that is movie-making power right there. But where does the power emanate from? Craftsmanship. Carpenter's deepest game, in my estimation, is his commitment to the basics of storytelling: script, actors' performances, shot composition, soundtrack including both score and sound effects (the "soundscape" if you will), special effects, editing--the whole engine of cinema is geared towards expressing a dramatic situation with utmost clarity. Even the ambiguities and ironies present in Carpenter's movies are expressed with utmost clarity.

Theme is important, too. I think Carpenter's one of the more interesting thematic filmmakers in how he approaches doing horror and science-fiction scenarios. In Assault on Precinct 13 the theme had to do with decent, competent people from both sides of the law caught in the middle of a violent revolutionary struggle between insurgents and an oppressive police state: how do you survive and protect those who depend on you in an impossible situation? Halloween was about how a blind force of destruction manifests in human form in the midst of an anodyne suburban community, and the terror that grows out of normal people's obliviousness to the presence of such an evil force. The Fog was about the sins of the past manifesting to punish future generations. In the Mouth of Madness follows out the idea of what it would be like if the usual laws of mundane reality were displaced by the operating logic of a horror novelist's imagination gone completely berserk. Ghosts of Mars was an interesting blend of Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog: an amorphous spirit of homicide asserts itself as a ghostly insurgency to punish a future human settlement on the red planet. In all of these movies, the horrific idea at the center is illustrated in specific, concretely realized terms. As the viewer, you don't see quite as much as you think you do in terms of mayhem and gore, but the nature of the threat becomes clear, as do the struggles of the humans trying to survive the onslaught. Carpenter's movies apply logic and rationality to irrational, supernatural forces and the results are pleasingly outrageous, but comprehensible.

The Thing takes on the theme of paranoia. Broadly speaking, it uses two contrasting approaches to illustrate this theme: economy and excess. Which is appropriate if you think about it. Paranoia itself is both economical and excessive. Paranoia focuses your mind like a laser even while it takes aim at the entire world which has turned murderously against you. Keep your guns loaded, the eyes in back of your head peeled, and keep a tight routine, because the hit could come from anyone, anywhere, at anytime. Using simple logic, the paranoiac can cook up whole cosmologies that definitively prove the whole world is aligned against him or herself in a grand conspiracy to ruin your day, your era, your lifetime, and maybe even subsequent lifetimes depending on the nature of the Enemy. The paranoiac pursues simple solutions to complex problems.

Remember Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver? Just get some guns, do some push-ups, and shoot some people and everything will be okay in the end. You might even get a date with Cybil Shepherd in the end. And if that doesn't work, well, you can blast the girl away, too, with your .44 Magnum. Hey, your personality may be defective, but your weapons usually work like physics. No big thing. They all had it coming.

The Thing isn't quite the same as Taxi Driver, but it does explore similar terrain of paranoia-induced violence, and the terror that grows out of the failure of communication, civilization, and hope itself.

In terms of technique, The Thing hinges on using economical shot set-ups within a widescreen frame that are filled with agitated human faces in close-up, suspicious humans pointing fingers and making accusations, and then all of this is overtaken by gooey excess when the wriggling alien horror of The Thing makes its presence known. All pretense to civilization goes out the window, and those that are human desperately maneuver to muster a defense against the alien invader. It's a visceral realization of the sci-fi trope of humanity forging a coalition against an extraterrestrial entity for survival purposes that touches on the longstanding tribal tendencies of human beings.

We don't think of ourselves as tribes in the 21st century. We use other titles for our typical groupings: nations, political parties, sexuality, gender, subculture, religion, race, job title, student, townie--all are categories used by the powers that be to divide us into in-groups and out-groups. If you're in the in-group you're supposed to be opposed to the out-group(s). And, of course, the out-group isn't an out-group to those who are in it--they're another in-group from their perspective.

The same could be said for the alien whatsit in The Thing: from its perspective its just trying to survive. The fact that it kills and absorbs people is just tough shit for the humans. Maybe if there was some way for the alien and the humans to communicate they could arrive at some sort of understanding. Instead of unlimited violence climaxing in total destruction, this could've been a story of First Contact and not Apocalypse. A truce could be called with truth and reconciliation between human and extraterrestrial.

(Now think how differently Taxi Driver would've played out if Bickle had gotten some counseling, if he'd had a single friend to confide in (aside from his doofus colleague masterfully played by Peter Boyle), maybe get some anti-depressant meds, get some therapy for his shellshock, find a way to work through his deeply imprinted combat stress--Travis Bickle could've turned his shit around. Sure, he'd maybe have some conservative tendencies, some social awkwardness, but he could've gotten over things. He could've been empowered to move on with his life. And Taxi Driver would've been a terrible film. There's a reason why Taxi Driver is a classic and no one gives a shit about Awakenings.)

Unfortunately, civilized approaches to healing and reconciliation do not make for compelling cinema. Madness, paranoia, conflict, death, and destruction make for powerful storytelling. Nothing is more compelling than watching a situation go from bad to worse and beyond. It's what Poe was getting at when he defined the spirit of perversity in "The Black Cat." We have a will towards escalation, towards conflict which is driven by our desire for total power, total control over all uncertainty in existence. Whatever it is that frightens us--a thief, a murderer, a political ideology, an ethnic group, an animal, a culture, a nation, a language, a religion, a philosophy, an outlook, a disagreement about fashion or policy or economics--our impulse is to shun the thing which upsets us.

 And if we can't avoid it, we denigrate it, try to find like-minded people to join us in condemning the hated thing, and, if things go far enough, we will try to destroy whatever it is we hate and fear. Right and wrong don't have to enter into it. Just think about all the genocides, ethnic cleansing, and no limits civilian slaughtering bombing campaigns, and random assholes with assault rifles and body armor popping off in schools and movie theaters--the spirit of perversity, the will to lash out with violence at whoever and whatever happens to be handy, never mind whether or not such targets have any actual culpability for the perpetrator's troubles--they're convenient, they will therefore become blood sacrifices to the murderer's fear, hatred, and paranoia--whatever dark gods sit inside the star chamber of his twisted heart. Even if the perpetrator has some sense that what they are doing is a doomed course of action, just as the narrators in "The Black Cat" or "The Tell-Tale Heart" have a premonition of their own destruction, they are compelled to walk the path of annihilation and jump into the fire themselves in the end.

Or maybe they lash out, get a little dinged-up, spend some time in the hospital, and then are up and about again as a ticking time-bomb with a brand new timer . . . kind of a spoiler for a movie I shall not mention by name.

The Thing invokes the self-immolating spirit of perverseness, of paranoia, from Poe, but combines it with the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. John Carpenter has stated that Lovecraft is an important influence on his work. Lovecraft's central idea is that human beings are completely at the mercy of cosmic forces beyond their comprehension, much more ancient, powerful, and deadly than any human civilization, even one with fanatic ideology and nuclear weapons (ex. USA, USSR, China, Russia, etc.).

After all, anyone who has read Lovecraft's 1931 masterpiece At the Mountains of Madness knows that the Great Old Ones(a name Lovecraft uses to refer to those terrible, cosmic powers of darkness) had atomic weapons long before homo sapiens wormed its way out of the muck across billions of years of cosmic evolution, and split the atom. At the Mountains of Madness tells the story of a group of human explorers who journey to Antarctica and discover a vast, cyclopean city gone to ruin, within which they uncover a strange hieroglyphic language which reveals the secret origins of humanity and the Great Old Ones.

The Thing echoes some of the ideas from At the Mountains of Madness, even though it is more directly adapted from John W. Campbell's 1938 short story "Who Goes There?" Lovecraft's novella was published in 1931 and Campbell's short story came along in 1938, so I wonder if Campbell had absorbed any Lovecraftian influences . . . I have no idea. But I feel pretty confident in saying that John Carpenter, consciously or not, crafted his movie  in a way which blends Poe, Lovecraft, and Campbell's literary themes and combines them with some of the techniques of his previous movies such as Dark Star, Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, and The Fog.

Earlier in this review I put forward the possibility that maybe the Thing is just in the minds of the humans. Maybe there is no Thing. I don't think this is what Carpenter intends for his movie to be, but it is an intriguing idea to me. As I watched the movie again this past weekend, I couldn't help but wonder if these guys are all losing their minds due to isolation, stress, sexual frustration, loneliness, and simmering resentments over slights both real and perceived. It's an all male group. Some of them seem to be veterans, ex-military people--could combat stress be a factor here? Are these people just more inclined to go looking for an enemy when feeling threatened? Like I said, I think Carpenter means for his movie to be taken on its own terms, but I tend to want to go overboard in interpreting movies I've seen dozens of times, so maybe I'm the one losing perspective here. This is a movie which skews more towards Lovecraftian cosmic horror than Poe-style psychological horror.

The cast is excellent. Kurt Russel is billed as the star, but it's really an ensemble piece. All of the actors take the job seriously, and none of them play for camp or self-parody. Probably the most disturbing performance comes from Wilford Brimley. Watching this guy, with his unflappable outer shell, finally start to lose his shit is a kind of mini-saga of horror and madness all its own buried within the larger movie.

The cinematography, an element of economy, by Dean Cundey is perfect, each frame composed for both clarity of what's going on within a given scene and also to give a sense of growing unease. Watch this movie with the sound off, and just take note of how the color scheme changes and evolves as it goes on, and how one shot is cut with another one. The editing is subtle and unobtrusive even when the Thing makes its wriggling, consuming, chaotic self known within that precise widescreen framing.

Which brings me to the element of excess: the disgusting and horrifying creature effects by Rob Bottin with an assist from Stan Winston. I don't even want to talk about it. You should just see for yourself with no prior knowledge. The Thing bursts out, like some avatar of Lovecraft's Azathoth, the idiot god of chaos and destruction--or maybe not. Maybe I'm just reaching for shit here . . .

Back to economy: Albert Whitlock's outer space visual effects provide a quietly menacing introduction for the idea of alien horror from another world in the title sequence.

Ennio Morricone and John Carpenter both throw down for a sneaky, suspenseful original score that doesn't overstay its welcome. You would think if a director could get Morricone for the soundtrack he would want to squeeze another one of those lush, Sergio Leone scores out of him--and that would be a mistake. The Thing doesn't need leitmotifs and wall-to-wall bombast. It needs a defter touch. Note the mournful, but suspicious, quality of the piece which underscores the investigation of the Norwegian camp. I find it unexpectedly moving. The movie is cruel and relentless, but that bit of music suggests a kind of sadness inherent in the waste left by violent all-out conflict.

Maybe The Thing isn't a horror movie in the usual sense. More and more, I think of it as a kind of tragedy about two sophisticated life forms forced to meet under dire circumstances, and the war that results from an inability to communicate or understand one another. Definitely not another braindead body count picture.

MOVIE REVIEW: KOYAANISQATSI: LIFE OUT OF BALANCE (1982)

Directed and Produced by Godfrey Reggio
Music by Philip Glass
Musical Director/Additional Music Composed by Michael Hoenig
Cinematography by Ron Fricke
Editing by Alton Walpole and Ron Fricke 
Written by Godfrey Reggio, Ron Fricke, Michael Hoenig, Alton Walpole
Associate Producers Francis Ford Coppola, Mel Lawrence, Roger McNew, T. Michael Powers, Lawrence Taub, Alton Walpole

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Koyaanisqatsi is a documentary that offers only beautiful music and stunning imagery to communicate a complex view of nature and technology engaging in a grand and terrifying dialectic. Nature is violently displaced by human machines of war, resource extraction, mass production, and mass housing. One is left with the impression, initially, of the earth being punished, subverted, and subdued. But something more subtle and pervasive is going on here, something like a usurpation of nature, but always keep in mind that humans and their productions evolved out of nature. What we are seeing here is the creation of a new kind of nature, one that is based in technology rather than biology. Or maybe it's a mixture of technology and biology. Maybe technology, in this instance, is just "biology by other means."

 No venerable expert talking heads, no portentous voice overs, no editorial cartoons, and a minimum of on-screen text. Watching this movie, one will not walk away with a sense that one should vote for a particular politician or convert to a specific ideology or religion, although there are passages of it which flirt with being Luddite, which comes, I think, from a profound skepticism of the Utopian dreams and cynical schemes which seem to be so intertwined with high-technological societies. There is also an awareness of the exorbitant cost that high tech First World societies extract from the developing world, where many people live in crushing poverty, and do not necessarily understand what the overall aims and goals of the invasive First World fully entail.  And, perhaps, maybe the First World technocrats don't really understand what drives them on, either. Technological progress has an eerie way of erasing what has gone before, and those of us who have grown up in such societies have no memory of what things were like before the advent of globalization, TV, the internet, etc. Koyaanisqatsi seems to suggest that technology is merging with nature to produce a third thing that is somehow both more and less than either thing alone. More, in that some benefit greatly from the new synthesis; less, in that many will suffer and lose their lives and livelihoods to bring about that new synthesis. The movie offers no easy morals or advice. It is more of a portrait of things as they are, reality itself, in all its cruelty and grandeur. If there is a message here, maybe it's something like, "Brace yourself!" or "Ready or not, here it comes! It's already here!"

Koyaanisqatsi's method is pure montage, perfectly synchronized with Philip Glass's alternately majestic and mechanistic music score. Glass's music provides a kind of "machine soul" to many of the terrifying apparatus on display, and then there are other times when the score seems to be invoking a "soul of desolation" to give voice to the massive waste and folly of humanity's violence towards the environment. This is a spiritual movie, but not a dogmatic one. It is spiritual in that it seeks to create new spirits through music, images, and montage that gives voices to the inanimate things which surround us, and to some extent dictate our lives. Glass and director Godfrey Reggio do not hide their terror and skepticism at the new techno-behemoth stalking the planet, and offer up a kind of requiem in picture and sound for the old world now gone.

There are no leading characters in the usual sense, just stunning footage of natural landscapes in the opening sequences, which eventually gives way to mining operations, engineered floods, dams, and terrifying displays of atom bombs, Soviet tanks, and American fighter craft. These displays of destructive power give way to haunting footage of abandoned apartment buildings, desolate housing projects, shining skyscrapers which look eerily like science fictional mausoleums erected no doubt by the Eloi, and then picks up again with a majestic, and darkly comedic sequence which depicts the integration of frenetic human social and  mass production activity into something like a worldaround computer circuit. I suspect the Wachowskis must've had this movie in mind when they made The Matrix some years later. Humanity is clearly depicted as being at war with nature.

But are we destroying the planet, or are we just making it over in our own image? Koyaanisqatsi itself is a product of high technology, a movie, whose purpose seems to be to give the audience a global perspective in such a way that would've been hard to come by in 1983, the year of its original release. No World Wide Web, no Google Earth, no capacity for billions of people around the globe to produce high volumes of televisual content for their own amusement via YouTube, just a darkened theatre to create just the right kind of worshipful mood to pay homage to the glowing screen. Well, all right, I guess there were books and nature programs on TV back in 1983, but I couldn't help but think that Koyaanisqatsi must've been a qualitatively different viewing experience for its first audiences.

All throughout the movie there are images of humans wandering the streets of large cities, herded along by WALK/DON'T WALK signs, and occasionally stopping to stare into the camera. Everyone looks lost. There's a shot of a man alone in some kind of automated facility, tending machines which don't need tending. I can't quite say why, but I want to say that this man isn't lost. He has found his place. Good for him . . . this is definitely one of those movies that invites you to create your own narratives, intimate and grand, as it carries you along to its stunning finale.

The opening sequence begins with the launch of a magnificent rocket of some kind, taking off, I guess, for outer space. There is a rather cruel payoff to this opening scene, at the very end, which gives the movie an effective shape, lends it a quality of myth, of legend. I'm thinking of Icarus here.

But there is also an inquiry into the nature of physical production, of engineering and construction projects on a vast scale. It must be said that dams, tanks, fighter jets, nuclear bombs, and large scale strip-mining operations involve vast numbers of people, and large quantities of equipment, guided by hard quantitative skills involving advanced mathematics, engineering, physics, management, and a lot of other things above my head. If Koyaanisqatsi has within it deep skepticism at our aborning high-tech civilization, then it is also about a system, a beast, which is both inspiring and terrifying to behold.

MOVIE REVIEW: MAZES AND MONSTERS (1982)

Starring Tom Hanks, 

written by Tom Lazarus from the novel by Rona Jaffe, 

Directed by Steven H. Stern

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Mazes and Monsters is a fantasy role playing game enjoyed mostly by high school and college students. Players take on the roles of barbarian warriors, thieves, powerful wizards, and maybe even pirates. People gather in dorm rooms and living rooms to play, using game maps, handwritten character sheets, and embroidered velvet bags filled with dice. 

But the most important element is the imagination of the players themselves. It's kind of like improvisational theatre, but with less movement. People sit around a table, pushing character markers around maps representing dungeons, castles, mazes, and there are other markers that represent goblins, orks, dragons, monsters, etc. One of the players is assigned the role of "Maze Master." The Maze Master is the referee, and he also conceives of the overall scenario that the other players tune into, and the players do their level best to sort of perform or embody the characters they've created. This performance or embodiment usually consists of the players putting on funny voices, stilted, vaguely Britishy accents, and declaiming spells, oaths, curses, and other brave sounding things. The Maze Master obliges the players by doing the voices and noises of the various monsters and dastardly villains. This usually consists of fakey sounding roars and growls and stilted, vaguely Britishy accents. But sometimes all these conventions about how to play, and what's appropriate, and where performance ends and real life begins--for some people it just ain't enough. Sometimes, the real ketchup's gotta flow. Sometimes, a dudeman has to take matters into his OWN chain-mailed hands. Sometimes, the mazes and the monsters gotta come to life . . . Something like that happens to Tom Hanks's character, Robbie, in this made-for-TV movie derived from a novel of the same title by Rona Jaffe. 

Robbie is a college student with a troubled past, transferring to a new school at the beginning of this sordid saga. At first glance, he seems normal. He seems about like the Tom Hanks characters in movies like Big or Bachelor Party. But something more twisted and complex lurks beneath the surface . . . 

See, long ago, Robbie's brother Hall disappeared under inexplicable circumstances. Robbie's mom is a lush, his father is a pushy asshole, and Robbie just tries to go along to get along. He's seemingly taken on an unreasonable amount of guilt over his brother's disappearance, and his only real outlet to express himself is by playing Mazes and Monsters, and immersing himself in the role of a holy cleric, Pardeux. But, at his first college, Robbie got so wrapped up in his character that his grades suffered, and he was forced to drop out. After an unspecified stretch of time, Robbie has given up the game, gotten some therapy, and is ready to rejoin the academic rat race. Or is he? Once a player, always a player? Robbie falls in with a group of Mazes and Monsters enthusiasts. They want him to play. Robbie resists . . . but not too hard. Soon, the players are upping the ante: instead of just sitting around a table using hand drawn maps and fakey accents to excuse sedentary performances they will take the game live into a possibly dangerous network of tunnels not far off campus. Now, they will wear full, handmade costumes, and they will wield prop weapons cribbed from the theatre department to supplement their fakey, vaguely Britishy accents--evil ensues!! Well, sort of . . . 

Robbie goes into the tunnels and encounters something, a Gorvil, which is a kind of half-dragon, half-man, and Robbie loses his marbles. He kills the beast, but his sanity is mortally wounded in the process. Robbie, from this point onwards, goes from being similar to other Tom Hanks characters in other early Tom Hanks films, to being like a member of a cult . . . a cult of one! He swears off sex, dumps his girlfriend, and begins to draw mysterious maps and diagrams. Robbie, now Pardeux, is tormented by nightmares where a godlike voice commands him to go on a journey, a journey that might lead him to his doom in the dangerous network of tunnels. Robbie's friends are concerned. They set out to solve the mystery of Robbie's transformation . . . . . . 

This movie grew out of the early 1980s hysteria over Dungeons and Dragons, and rumors that players were taking their characters waaaaay too seriously and sacrificing cats and dogs and babies to Satan and voting for Jimmy Carter--all things deeply offensive to the Moral Majority and others who saw D&D as a recruiting packet for the Armies of Lucifer and his Communist allies. The tone of the film is a strange mixture of matter-of-fact and melodramatic. There's even a faint strain of satire. Some of the dialogue of the parental characters in the movie hint at a pervasive mood of stress, of a pervasive fear of change, of how the growing pressure to succeed at all costs in the New Reagan America is driving people to novelty and distraction--is Robbie's saga a parable of all Americans? Is his lost brother Hall symbolic of America's lost innocence? Probably not. Let's just blame it on a game that engages the imagination and encourages collaboration and sharing amongst young Americans--no doubt the precursors to total Communist takeover!! 

Actually, the movie sticks close to the story of Robbie and his trauma. It also makes good use of location shooting. It looks like they actually shot this movie at a real college campus, in actual dorm rooms, restaurants, and some other locations I will not reveal. As ludicrous as the notion is that a pen-and-paper RPG could be a catalyst for insanity is, the movie tells a pretty good story, and Tom Hanks handles the material pretty well. His journey becomes an interesting journey, even a half-clever psychodrama. It's also laugh-out-loud funny. 

Look for an early appearance by Kevin Peter Hall as the monstrous Gorvil. Hall would later go onto fame as the Predator in the first two Predator films.