This evening for “music night” at The Wild Reed I honor singer, songwriter and actress Julee Cruise, who died this past Thursday, June 9. Since 2018, she’s been living with systemic lupus, which caused her considerable pain and affected her ability to walk and stand.
On Thursday, her husband, Edward Grinnan, wrote on Facebook: “She left this realm on her own terms. No regrets. She is at peace . . . I played her [B-52’s song] ‘Roam’ during her transition. Now she will roam forever. Rest in peace, my love.”
Julee, who released four albums beginning with 1989’s Floating into the Night, is best known for her collaborations with composer Angelo Badalamenti and film director David Lynch in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Her signature song is the haunting 1989 single “Falling”; an instrumental version of which was used as the theme song for the television series Twin Peaks in which Julee appeared in a recurring role as a roadhouse singer. She reprised the role in the 1992 movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (which also featured her music), and in the 2017 revival series Twin Peaks: The Return. She was also featured in Lynch and Badalamenti’s avant-garde 1990 theater production Industrial Symphony No. 1.
In 2010, Pitchfork Media ranked Julee’s “Falling” at No. 146 on its “Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s.” NME listed the song at No. 38 in their ranking of “100 Best Songs of the 1990s” in 2012. Music & Media magazine stated that “anyone who is familiar with the Twin Peaks series is sure to have shivers listening to the theme tune. An ambient and dreamy song; although atmospheric, it is at the same time very down-to-earth, and threatening in its cold-blooded beauty.”
Nick Robinson from Music Weekcommented, “Every now and again a truly beautiful single comes along transfixing everyone that hears it.” He added, "The sparse haunting instrumentation combines with Cruise's dreamy vocals to produce a stunning piece of music.”
According to composer Angelo Badalamenti the characteristic sound of the song was made playing a tuned down electric guitar. “In the ruckus of beers flying through the air at The Roadhouse, we have Julee singing a beautiful, slow-tempo song, and it’s so outrageous,” said Badalamenti in 2016. “You would never have that kind of song in a place like that. . . . The songs with Julee serve a two-fold purpose: They contrast the visuals and they set the tone for the show.”
A music video was produced (below) featuring Julee performing the song through soft curtains and dramatic red lighting. It fades to various scenes from the Twin Peaks television series.
I’ve only sparodically watched the long awaited third season of director David Lynch's landmark series Twin Peaks. What I’ve seen is both mesmerizing and disturbing, much like the original TV series.
Recently I came across a fascinating piece about season three by Crit Hulk. Following are excerpts.
Because at the end of [Twin Peaks], when a million choices could have been made, [director David] Lynch had to go back to her. Just like he had to go back to her years ago with Fire Walk With Me. In a way, Twin Peaks has never been about anything BUT Laura Palmer.
To many, she started as a narrative’s “murdered body.” A version of a trope we’ve seen in a thousand shows and a thousand movies. But to Lynch, she was never just a simple motive. She wasn’t a dead girl’s picture on a wall. She wasn’t a fridge to be stuffed, just so that some dude could feel all aggrieved and seek revenge. What set Twin Peaks apart was how much this small town cared about the girl’s death, and more, how they cared about her life and the way she affected everyone around her. The narrative of the show itself was not a whodunit, but a Rebecca-like investigation of who she really was in the first place. The whodunit was more about what lies at the dark heart of the American town and the American family, unveiling the echoes of abuse across the spectrum, along with the many contorted faces we force young women to wear just to keep up the facade. Twin Peaks is a story about what shouldn’t have been done, but what was done a thousand times. A girl who experienced so many tragedies before the inevitable one that took her life. It’s a set of tragedies that continues in many forms, even 25 years later.
As the new season tells us, “Laura is the one.” But righting this wrong isn’t as simple as catching a killer, nor somehow finding a way to return a single girl from the dead. I go back to the episode eight “origin” scene where we learn that Laura’s light was put into the world as a response to evil [represented most powerfully in the third season of Twin Peaks by the entity known as Judy or Jowday].
But what we’ve seen is not exactly fighting evil, is it? In fact, she ends up being a victim to evil. Was this show saying that women were put on Earth to be victims of men? Is she more akin to the female Jesus, dying for our sins? What does it mean? What is her light? Well, I think episode eight is telling us to see these forces as part of a larger system. If the story of Twin Peaks is about the story of abuse itself, then stopping abuse would require understanding all of the cycles that go on without end. It would mean disappearing into the history of time and violence and echoes of generations. It would mean facing the entirety of the truth.
. . . There’s always a question driving us, but it is also what traps us. We always want to fast-forward through the anguish to the alleviation. Here and now, it is more pronounced than ever precisely because I do not know if we will get another season of Twin Peaks. No one does. Even David Lynch doesn’t know. And so, we sit like a ball on the curved track of infinity, forced to wait in our point in time. It does not feel so great.
This is the forever state of Twin Peaks. Whether it’s waiting a week or 25 years, the cycles of plots and cliffhangers and expectations meet at the nexus of ad infinitum, the same way forever, over and over again. It’s frustrating because we may never get “out” of it through resolution or definitive ending. But like life itself, there is only that which may come to be, and that which is cut down before its time. We are the trapped magicians, longing to see between two worlds, to see through time and what the future of a show may bring. We are the ones who risk being burned by the fire itself.
But what is the fire metaphor anyway? It is the chant used to walk between worlds. It is what we say when we let the demons try to get inside us and “cross through” with the difficulty of that which may burn us. It is that which may devour us whole. That’s why we need to hone the demons of time. We need the fire to effectively “walk with us.” Which essentially means we need to open our hearts and make it through such barriers undamaged. This is so completely necessary because you cannot break cycles without facing them. Without knowing how they permeate yourself. Without really finding a capacity for change in yourself, which is the hardest thing in in the universe. As Gordon Cole once called it in different terms, it is “fixing your heart.” And so, we must be like Laura and embody the hope of eradicating the impossible. Of somehow burgeoning through the annals of time itself, having taken in so much fire and surviving it. Because when we’re trapped in the recesses of such despair, the way out is always through.
The groundbreaking TV show Twin Peaks which, among other things, writes Matt Zoller Seitz, was an unrelenting and mystifying meditation on grief and trauma, returns after 26 years.
The revered TV show Twin Peaksreturns tonight on the Showtime channel . . . 26 years after it last aired.
The series that begins this evening is considered the show's third, and takes place 25 years after the events of season two. In the last episode of that season, the murdered Laura Palmer tells FBI special agent Dale Cooper in the otherworldly Red Room of the Black Lodge that "I'll see you again in 25 years." . . . And so here we are.
(NOTE: For a 5-minute video recap of the Twin Peaks story so far, click here.)
As with the two original seasons, season three, also being called Twin Peaks: The Return, is created by Mark Frost and David Lynch. It's a "limited series event," consisting of 18 episodes. Two episodes have been selected to be screened at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.
Above: The three different covers for the March 31, 2017 issue of Entertainment Weekly, featuring some of the returning Twin Peaks cast members. From left: Wendy Robie as Nadine Hurley, Everett McGill as Ed Hurley, James Marshall as James Hurley, Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer, David Lynch as Gordon Cole, Kyle MacLachlan as Dale Cooper, Sherilyn Fenn as Audrey Horn, Mädchen Amick as Shelly Johnson, Dana Ashbrook as Bobby Briggs, and Peggy Lipton as Norma Jennings.
I was sorry to hear that one of my favorite characters in the show, Catherine Martell* (played by Piper Laurie [right]), won't be present in season three.
Talking to Entertainment Weekly earlier this month, Laurie said: "I did send a note to David [Lynch] that I would be delighted to return, but I think most of the material that I was in on the original didn’t really involve the darker aspects of the show, and I can guess maybe that’s where David and Mark Frost are going, but I really don’t know. My character was more on the silly, comic, fun side."
I don't get Showtime, so unfortunately I won't be tuning in tonight to watch the return of Twin Peaks. I'm definitely curious about it, though. For one thing, I have absolutely no idea what the plotline will entail. In fact, apart from those involved in the show's making, no one does – and the official trailers that have been released reveal very little (see, for instance, here and here). I must admit I have concerns about how good it will be. I mean, the original series ended so dismally (as is discussed here). And then there are the thorny but crucial questions that Melanie McFarland raises in her May 20 Salonpiece: "Can a classic succeed at being happening again? . . . Twenty-seven years after a series has broken ground, how can new storylines match the quality of all the shows it spawned?" I suppose I'll just have to wait for the new series to come out on DVD to find out.
In the meantime, Matt Zoller Seitz has a timely and insightful piece at Vulture in which he deftly examines why Twin Peaks is "not the series we’ve convinced ourselves it was."
One aspect of the show that Zoller Seitz explores and which especially interests me (given my current training in chaplaincy) is to do with how the original Twin Peaks was "a meditation on grief and trauma."
Following is that part of Zoller Seitz's article which explores this idea.
Twin Peaks was a meditation on grief and trauma that expressed itself in unrelenting, deliberately unreal, often mystifying ways. People tend to forget this when they talk and write about and remember Twin Peaks. That show did not go down easy. It was charming and weird, but it was also creepy and upsetting and sometimes genuinely horrifying. It gave you a spoonful of sugar, then it punched you in the gut. The gut punches had to do with the psychological effect of loss on individuals and their community.
Twin Peaks is often described as a mystery or a soap opera, and it was definitely both of those things. But it was also the story of a small town reeling in shock after a random act of violence, acting out in strange and terrifying ways, and purposefully and accidentally disclosing not just their naughty secrets (an element common to the soaps that Lynch and Frost emulated, as well as films like In the Heat of the Night and Anatomy of a Murder), but the persistent sadness, desperation, and dread that lurks under the surface of mundane reality. The deeper FBI agent Dale Cooper and his fellow investigators dug into the soil beneath those magnificent Douglas firs, the more ugliness they unearthed. There was incest, sexual exploitation, drug abuse, drug trafficking, domestic violence, smuggling, murder, and corporate crime happening in those cottages and hotel rooms and in the gloom of the woods.
But more impressive – perhaps more daring, considering Americans’ limited tolerance for sincerity – was the show’s willingness to plumb the emotional depths of its characters with the white-hot intensity of a 1950s melodrama or a 1970s Italian horror film, without distancing devices, and often without facetiousness or irony.
The latter was eerie and moving to behold and, for 1990 network TV, unexpected. But it was also upsetting and depressing and occasionally confounding for mass audiences, which is one reason why the show’s ratings, which were immense for the premiere, kept falling by the week, until it became clear a few episodes into season two that ABC was likely to cancel it. Twin Peaks wore the comedy mask and the tragedy mask with equal confidence, and sometimes it put them both away and put on a mask that had live worms in it and might have been made of human flesh.
The audience didn’t just reject the series over the long haul because viewers wanted closure on the question of who killed Laura Palmer, and Lynch and Frost seemed to be in no hurry to provide it. It was also a reaction to the series itself – all of its elements, but perhaps especially the intensity of its darkness. Twin Peaks was not just physically brutal (Leland Palmer’s murder of his Laura-look-alike niece, Maddie [left], is still hard to watch nearly three decades after its airing). It was also emotionally wrenching, in a way that was uncharacteristic of TV in the early ’90s. Supporting characters were forever weeping, sometimes wailing in grief as they remembered Laura. It was an open wound of a show, right up through the end.
The characters’ pain was hilarious if you were a callow teenager or college student who didn’t understand loss and the many, equally valid methods by which art can examine it. You have to permit yourself a certain vulnerability when watching Lynch, otherwise the simplicity of the characters’ needs and fears and the nakedness of their desperation will seem hilarious. Viewers over the legal drinking age had to decide to be okay with a certain level of emotional exposure while watching the original Peaks.
Twin Peaks was playful about everything except pain. It took pain so seriously that over time, an increasing proportion of its initially big viewership did not know how to process it, except to squirm, snicker performatively, or stop watching. Everybody who watches the new Peaks has to recognize this and not be surprised or upset by it. It’s going to be part of the package, because it’s an area of life that is of deep interest to Lynch, the director of such light and peppy movies as Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, and Inland Empire.
A 30-something friend of mine quit watching it after a few episodes because his mother had recently died of cancer; Twin Peaks made him feel as if he was reentering a space he never wanted to be in again.
* Following is how the character of Catherine Martell is described in Twin Peaks FAQ by David Bushman and Arthur Smith.
Catherine Martell is the sister of Packard mill owner Andrew Packard, and she runs the business after his apparent death, though the ownership passes to his "widow" Josie – and that arrangement is not a happy one for anyone involved. A fiercely proud, shrewd, forceful, and bitterly thwarted personality, Catherine vents her frustrations on her husband, Pete, a gentle former lumberjack and angling enthusiast bewildered by his wife's hostility.
Catherine is conducting an affair with Benjamin Horne and conspiring with him to defraud Josie out of the mill and surrounding land, not suspecting his intention to double-cross and do away with her, taking all the spoils for himself. Academy award winner Piper Laurie gives an effortless authoritative performance – Catherine is a formidable presence, and while she's no Girl Scout, there is also an affecting vulnerability (as seen in her poignant appreciation of the remnants of affection that remain between her and Pete, and in her jealous paranoia regarding Ben's affections) that makes her something more than a stock antagonist.
Catherine has no connection to Laura Palmer or the supernatural phenomena haunting Twin Peaks, serving instead as a linchpin in the show's soapier plot mechanics, and she is one of the series' more conventional characters – she is absent any bizarre tics or wardrobe eccentricities and feels like she could comfortably exist in a typical "straight" TV drama. That is, until she, after her apparent death (if you're gonna kill a Packard, make sure you see the body before you assume the job is done), disguises herself as a Japanese businessman [Mr Tojamura] to take her revenge on Horne. That was pretty weird.
From all accounts, the recent conclusion ofLostwas a total fizzer. Turns out the “survivors” on the island were actually dead and in some kind of purgatory. The most amazing aspect of this “twist” was that it required six seasons to reveal. Give me the 1972 TV movieHaunts of the Very Richanytime. It shares the same twist, is much more compelling, and a heck of a lot shorter.
As Lost approached its finale, I read various online commentaries rhapsodizing about its “religious themes.” Yet it seems to me that it simply hobbled together elements and insights from a range of faith traditions and spiritual paths in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to convey “deeper meaning” to the people and situations it depicted.
Yes, I admit the premise of the show was initially intriguing, but from the few snippets I watched and from what I read, it seemed clear that the show’s makers were dragging proceedings out and, worst of all, giving the distinct impression that they were making things up as they went along.
Of course, it’s not the first time that we’ve seen an initially promising TV show fizzle out. Unfortunately, the same fate befell my favorite show of the 1990s,Twin Peaks.
Following is how David Hofstede describes the “long decline” of Twin Peaks in his humorously entertaining book,What Were They Thinking: The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History. (Oh, and I think it’s safe to say that if there’s a second edition of Hofstede’s book any time soon, the finale of Lost will feature.)
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The Unraveling of Twin Peaks
By David Hofstede
Let’s give credit where it’s due: before a television series can fall as far as Twin Peaks, it must first rise to heights of achievement beyond the imagining of most network dramas. Twin Peaks attained that level from the opening moments of its two-hour pilot, with the discovery of a corpse wrapped in plastic. “The best two hours of film you’ll find anywhere these days,” observed Rolling Stone.
The deceased was high school studentLaura Palmer(Sheryl Lee), an angel on the surface but a devil down deep; just the sort of character beloved by series creator David Lynch. The oddball director of Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart instilled his trademark brand of highly-stylized weirdness into Twin Peaks, which merits comparison to his motion pictures in its scope, depth, and conception. It was a calculated risk whether Lynch’s unique vision would translate well to television, dependable purveyor of the safe and bland, but the payoff was immediate. “In one night,” raved Time magazine, “the show had hip America hooked.
Sent to investigate Laura’s murder is FBI special agentDale Cooper(Kyle MacLachlan), the first of a seemingly inexhaustible supply of remarkable original characters introduced by Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost. Cooper, the brilliant eccentric devotee of cherry pie and damn fine cups of coffee, is aided in his investigation by earnest small town sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean) and the hilariously acerbic forensics expert Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer).
We met a selection of potential suspects – Laura’s ferel boyfriend Bobby Briggs, sensitive biker James Hurley, creepy shrink Dr. Jacoby, and wife-beating trucker Leo Johnson. But as the story unfolded to the strains of Angelo Badalamenti’s hauntingmusic, raw emotion mixed with grotesque horror and dry humor, and viewers suspected that this was a series that felt no obligation to follow the boundaries of what was acceptable. Once that safety net was removed, the experience was both frightening and exhilarating.
Seven episodes followed the two-hour pilot, each one quite extraordinary. Viewers became caught up in the machinations of Josie Packard(Joan Chen) andCatherine Martell(Piper Laurie) at the Twin Peaks sawmill, and in saucyAudrey Horn’s undercover mission at the brothel One-Eyed Jacks. But the fate of Laura Palmer was never far from our minds, and the identity of the killer was TV’s most burning question since “Who Shot J.R.?”
The first season ended with Cooper being shot by an unknown assailant, the sawmill burning down with Catherine Martell inside, and Ben Horn unwittingly about to sleep with his own daughter, but Laura’s murder remain unsolved. Fans expected an answer before the summer hiatus, and felt cheated that they’d have to wait three months before the story resumed. “Will viewers have grown weary of the show’s cliffhanging teases”? asked Time magazine.
The fall season premiere was appointment TV, but something was amiss. The opening scene had a senile room service waiter finding the seriously wounded Cooper bleeding all over the hardwood floor, and not noticing his condition. Cooper then had a vision of a giant who speaks in riddles (“The owls are not what they seem.”) Later, Cooper shared his vision with the sheriff, and hoped to find the answers he seeks in its message.
Supernatural elements were always a part of the mix. Cooper’s reliance on dreams was established early on, but as just another quirk in his personality, not his primary method of crime solving. But suddenly the entire tone of the series had changed, as Twin Peaks progressed from slightly surreal to flat-out stupid.
Ridiculous new characters turned up – foppish menswear clerk Dick Tremayne, a cross-dressing DEA agent played in drag by David Duchovny, and Lynch himself as Cooper’s hard-of-hearing boss. And still the murderer was not revealed.
It was not until episode 14, aired six months after Laura’s body was discovered, that we learned she was killed by herfather, while he was possessed by a malevolent entity namedKiller BOB[right]. By then, much of the audience had become frustrated, and moved on to other pleasures. The moment had passed.
In a TV Guide interview, Killer BOB portrayer Frank Silva revealed that he was originally hired as the show’s propmaster, and that his character was added as a whim after Lynch spotted him on the set. “The interview confirms what this column has suspected all along,” the piece concluded; “the great minds behind Twin Peaks are just making it up as they go.”
Such articles prompted Frost to respond that the series was never supposed to be about Laura Palmer, and that the media fixated on that story while ignoring their overall “vision.” A ridiculous argument. You introduce a murder victim in the first scene, you follow that up with a detective, suspects, clues, and an investigation, but it’s not a murder mystery?
That’s not to say there weren’t some moments worth remembering during the show’s long decline; Joan Chen revealed new facets of the enigmatic Josie Packard, the suave Jean Reault (Michael Paris) was a memorable villain, and there’s a fun reunion between Mod Squad costars Peggy Lipton, who played waitress Norma Jennings [left], and guest star Clarence Williams III.
But the last few episodes are almost unbearable to watch, with their messages from outer space, and the spectacle of Josie’s spirit being trapped in the wooden knob of a nightstand drawer. Twin Peaks was finally put out of its misery after 29 shows.
Whether it was their inexperience with the dramatic television format or a certain arrogance in expecting viewers to follow them anywhere for as long as they wished, David Lynch and Mark Frost captured the nation’s attention and squandered the opportunity. “Lynch and Frost were like weekend fishermen, who when they tossed their lines in the water, hooked Jaws,” observed Brandon Tartikoff in his book The Last Great Ride. “But they couldn’t hold on to that big fish.”
Without doubt, one of the highlights of Twin Peaks was its music by composerAngelo Badalamenti. The opening credits sequence offers a good example of this particularly haunting element of Twin Peaks.
For more of Twin Peaks at The Wild Reed, see the previous post: London Calling
London calling to the faraway towns Now war is declared – and battle come down. London calling to the underworld, Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls.
. . . The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in. Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin. Engines stop running, but I have no fear, Cause London is burning and I,
I live by the river.
One of the scariest things I can remember watching on TV as a child was an episode of the British sci-fi seriesDoctor Whofeaturing an alien menace capable of creating and controlling plastic objects.
This alien entity’s plan for world domination included all sorts of things made of plastic, from daffodils that squirted a deadly spray, to “Autons” – sinister-looking shop window mannequins (with concealed weapons within their hands) which, when activated at the climax of the story, broke through shop windows to bring chaos and death to the streets of London.
Yeah, I know, it all looks a bit hokey now. And rest assured, the good Doctor saves the day. Still, the Autons, according toWikipedia, “remain one of the more memorable monsters associated with Doctor Who, [and] the image of store mannequins coming to life [and] shooting people down in the street, is one of the series’ iconic moments.”
Interestingly, “[such scenes] caused public controversy about whether [Doctor Who] was too frightening for children. The story also featured in a discussion in the House of Lords, where Baroness Bacon expressed worries about it being too frightening even for older children.”
I’m sure this all seems like a storm in a teacup, especially considering what children can now observe on TV in relation to violence. Not surprisingly, the 2005 return of the Autons in the very first episode of the“new” Doctor Who, involving even more graphic destruction and carnage, didn’t cause the least bit of a stir.
I think the reason why this particular Doctor Who story made such an impression on me as a child was that it used everyday objects as embodiments of violence, fear, and evil. I could dismiss other Doctor Who monsters –Daleks,Sea Devils,Ice Warriors,Cybermen, etc. – as they were so, well, fanciful. But shop window dummies? Why, we even had those inGunnedah!
Master filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch are renowned for their ability in using ordinary everyday objects and occurrences to mask and convey forces of chaos and evil. In Hitchcock’s classic The Birds – another film I remember well from my childhood – the attacking birds, notes one critic, “represent the eruption of chaos, of unpredictability . . . [of] everything we don’t understand and can’t control.”
And then there’s David Lynch, whose films would have to contain some of the most potent examples of the weird yet compelling blending of the ordinary and the surreal ever committed to celluloid, as the following clip from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, hauntingly demonstrates. (And, yes, that’s David Bowie playing “the long lostPhillip Jeffries,” and Lynch himself playing “Gordon.”)
Again, what makes Lynch’s visions of otherworldly entities and places all the more strange and unnerving is their inclusion of and merging with everyday objects. As film critic Greg Olson has noted about this aspect of Lynch’s Twin Peaks saga: “Roaring TV-set snow and eerily twittering telephone wires are a kind of inter-dimensional conduit. . . . In a place you can’t locate with an earthly compass, thered dwarfthrives on creamed corn and [the evil entity]Bobsports a leather ‘Levis’ patch on his jeans.”
London, however, is a place one can locate with “an earthly compass,” and the featuring of its various landmarks in stories and films of alien invasions and apocalyptic showdowns has a long tradition.
Doctor Who, of course, has maintained this tradition –ensuring that the British capital has been the focal point of one extraterrestrial incursion after another.
Yet it wasn’t just Doctor Who that alerted me to this tradition. In 1978, Jeff Wayne’smusical interpretationof H.G. Well’s classic novel, The War of the Worlds, was a huge hit in Australia. Wayne’s securing of Richard Burton as the narrator-protagonist added considerable gravitas to a “concept album” which could easily have come across as “a load of old bollocks,” as they say in Britain.
At one point in the story, the Martians, with heat-rays blasting, advance upon London in their tripodal war machines. Amidst the ensuing chaos, swelling strings and Justin Hayward’s re-worked “Forever Autumn” flood the soundtrack. Yet even more compelling is the hero’s attempts to locate his beloved and escape the panic and disarray of the capital. It’s truly epic. Burton’s rich plumy voice, of course, helps tremendously, as does the inclusion of snippets of H. G. Wells’ stirring text (and all set to a disco beat!):
As I hastened through Covent Garden, Blackfriars, and Billingsgate, more and more people joined the painful exodus: sad, weary women, their children stumbling and streaked with tears, their men bitter and angry; the rich rubbing shoulders with beggers and outcasts. Dogs snarled and whined, the horses bits were covered in foam, and here and there were wounded soldiers – as helpless as the rest.
We saw tripods wading up the Thames, cutting through bridges as though they were paper – Waterloo Bridge, Westminster Bridge. One appeared above Big Ben – “Ullah!”
Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together. This was no disciplined march, it was a stampede without order and without a goal. Six million people, unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilization; of the massacre of mankind.
London’s seemingly perennial role in such classic tales of alien invasion, gothic horror, and apocalyptic doom was the focus of a recent article by Mark Kermode in The Observer. The recently released film, 28 Weeks Later, the sequel to Danny Boyle’s hit about zombies roaming the empty streets of London, is the starting point for Kermode’s reflection.
“There is something particularly resonant about such nightmarish phantasms when placed within uncomfortably familiar British sites,” he muses. “[It’s] a juxtaposition which has long been exploited by purveyors of the uncanny.”
Yes, just ask the producers of Doctor Who.
Following are excerpts from Kermode’s article.
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A Capital Place for Panic Attacks By Mark Kermode The Observer May 6, 2007
In the 19th century, Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker established Britain as the natural home of Gothic horror – with Frankenstein being first published (anonymously) in London in 1818, and Dracula later bringing its eponymous vampire across the waters from Transylvania to darkest Whitby.
When HG Wells wrote his classic tale of extraterrestrial invasion The War of the Worlds, he instinctively understood the eerie appeal of having monsters from another planet land on the outskirts of somewhere as ordinary as Woking. Tom Cruise might have battled valiantly against giant tripods reaping post-9/11 chaos in New York in Steven Spielberg’s recent blockbuster adaptation, but Wells’s late Victorian novel places its first otherworldly appearance squarely in the soils of Horsell Common, a location renowned for its quaint English beauty. Somehow, these outlandish ideas seemed more credible – and disturbing – when played out against the down-to-earth backdrop of Britain.
As a fan of scary movies, I’ve long been aware of the appeal of horror on the home front. One of the creepiest experiences of my childhood was watching a TV rerun of Wolf Rilla’s black-and-white chiller Village of the Damned, a typically domestic tale of alien terror based on John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos. Wyndham had first established himself as a master of strange English science fiction with The Day of the Triffids, famously filmed by Steve Sekely in and around a number of memorable London locations including Charing Cross and Marylebone stations, Piccadilly Circus, and Westminster Bridge.
According to Boyle, it was the opening sequence of The Day of the Triffids, in which a man wakes up in hospital to discover that a meteor shower has blinded his fellow countrymen, which first inspired Alex Garland to write 28 Days Later.
Village of the Damned is altogether less cosmopolitan, centering on a sleepy English village whose womenfolk are discreetly visited by procreating aliens and subsequently give birth to a brood of blond-haired neo-Nazis from space. In Rilla’s film, the children are handsome telepaths who can cause people to kill themselves simply by giving them the evil eye, hence the haunting tagline: “Beware the stare that will paralyse the will of the world!”
This all was worrying enough, but, as a child, the real terror for me came from the fact that the children’s stamping ground was Letchmore Heath, a rather twee little enclave which happened to be up the road from my school. This meant that I was being educated next door to the children of the damned. No wonder I turned out the way I did.
And then there was Quatermass and the Pit, the film which convinced me that taking a trip on the underground would lead you into the very bowels of hell. Originally broadcast as a six-part BBC serial in the late Fifties, Quatermass and the Pit was remade by Hammer [Studios] in 1967 with a ripping screenplay by original writer Nigel Kneale. The plot concerns a string of ominous discoveries (skulls, skeletons, spaceships) during unspecified “Central Line extension work” at “Hobbs End” station.
As demonic artifacts are uncovered, a riot of violent madness erupts, climaxing in an apparition of Old Nick himself over the London skyline. The ingenious twist is that this “devil” is actually a Martian, an intrusive extraterrestrial ancestor from whom mankind has inherited its innate propensity for violence. (“We are the Martians!” concludes our hero.)
According to Kneale, the inspiration for the story came from watching news footage of the Notting Hill race riots in the late Fifties. But it is the sense of the underground as some kind of portal to the underworld which haunts my memories of this creepy classic.
Since then, umpteen movies, including 28 Weeks Later, have capitalised upon the unsettling potential of the tube, a brooding labyrinth which has come to embody the morbid subtextual groanings of horror's repressed psyche. . .
[It’s at Tottenham Court Road station in John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London] that an unsuspecting passenger is stalked and ravaged by the eponymous beastie, providing one of the most memorable sequences in a film which trades heavily on the frighteningly funny disjunct between quaint English locations (Yorkshire pubs; West End porno cinemas; Tower Bridge; even London Zoo) and lycanthropic fantasy.
It’s significant that the long-awaited sequel An American Werewolf in Paris proved to be a total flop, mainly, I think, because once you cross the English channel, who cares whether there's a monster on the prowl? Over in Europe, anything goes; it’s only here in uptight Britain that the magic formula of horror and humbug really makes sense. . .
In recent years, there has been an encouraging resurgence of dark-hearted, British-set fantasies which have acted as a cadaverous counterbalance to the endless diet of comfortably middle-class Hugh Grant staples. An adaptation of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s terrifically seditious graphic novel V for Vendetta ran into unexpected controversy when its explosive, tube-bound finale chimed too closely with the real-life horrors of the 7 July bombings. The film’s release was postponed (officially for “other reasons”), but scenes of the Houses of Parliament being triumphantly detonated from below by a heroic latterday Guy Fawkes remained intact, alongside images of anarchists merrily swarming across Trafalgar Square.
One of the most impressive films of last year was Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, a gripping, dystopian nightmare adapted from a novel by PD James (via the legacy of Nigel Kneale) which posits a desolate vision of a near-future world in which human reproduction has become a dying art.
Beautifully filmed in battle-scarred, colour-drained hues by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, Cuaron's apocalyptic vision of this grey and unpleasant land charts a grim map of Britain which includes haunting footage of the once-magnificent Battersea Power Station, and climaxes in a Hadean vision of Bexhill-on-Sea which most closely resembles war-torn Bosnia.
Danny Boyle agrees that Children of Men exists within the same tradition as 28 Weeks Later, and points out that both films are significantly directed and photographed by non-British film-makers who are able to observe the strangeness of this land and its culture with the intelligent empathy of an outsider’s eye.
“In the end,” says Boyle, “I think the key thing about Britain is that it’s built on this deep, dark ocean of history. There are grassy, picturesque areas of London which you still can’t put train tunnels through because they’re actually covering plague pits. You just don’t get that in America – that dark abyss of the past. And it makes Britain, as a location, very fertile ground for horror.”
(Hmm, not sure about this last bit. America lacking in a “dark abyss of the past”? I think if Boyle took the time to acquaint himself with the genocide of the Native Americans and the carnage of the Civil War, he might think otherwise.)
To read Mark Kermode’s “A Capital Place for Panic Attacks” in its entirety, clickhere.
London calling, yes, I was there, too. An’ you know what they said? Well, some of it was true! London calling at the top of the dial. And after all this, won’t you give me a smile? London Calling.
I established The Wild Reed in 2006 as a sign of solidarity with all who are dedicated to living lives of integrity – though, in particular, with gay people seeking to be true to both the gift of their sexuality and their Catholic faith. The Wild Reed's original by-line read, “Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.” As you can see, it reads differently now. This is because my journey has, in many ways, taken me beyond, or perhaps better still, deeper into the realities that the words “progressive,” “gay,” and “Catholic” seek to describe.
Even though reeds can symbolize frailty, they may also represent the strength found in flexibility. Popular wisdom says that the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm. Tall green reeds are associated with water, fertility, abundance, wealth, and rebirth. The sound of a reed pipe is often considered the voice of a soul pining for God or a lost love.
On September 24, 2012,Michael BaylyofCatholics for Marriage Equality MNwas interviewed by Suzanne Linton of Our World Today about same-sex relationships and why Catholics can vote 'no' on the proposed Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment.
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