Misery Loves the Company of Dreams

Somewhere in Danse Macabre, Stephen King tells the following story about a recurring nightmare of his:

"I'm writing a novel in an old house where a homicidal madwoman is reputed to be on the prowl. A door on the far side communicates with the attic, and I know -- I know -- she's in there, and that sooner or later the sound of my typewriter will cause her to come after me....At any rate, she finally comes through the door like a horrid jack in the box, all gray hair and crazed eyes, and weilding a meat-axe."

These words were published in 1981, but King dates the dream as originating from a date roughly ten years earlier -- more than a decade and a half before the publication of Misery in 1987. And while it might be an oversimplification to say that the novel draws its plot from this nightmare, it certainly seems to find at least part of its inspiration therein. So if I may, I'd like to depart from the standard formula of simply reviewing the novel in question to addressing the issue behind the novel -- the nightmare that I believe drove it.

Everyone has conscious and unconscious fears. Misery is, in my estimation, a sort of tour-de-force of both as they exist, or existed, within Stephen King when he wrote the book. All the themes -- destructive compulsion, slavery to deadline, adoration turned to hatred, wretched helplessness, the perversion of the nurturing relationship, the degradation of torture -- are primal and visceral in nature. They strike not at the complex areas of the human mind but the simplest. Anne Wilkes attacks Paul Sheldon psychologically as well as physically, but the overall atmosphere of the book is of a child's nightmare made into flesh. That is to say, primitive. Sheldon, weeping with terror and pain but also with powerlessness, is a frightful figure, an animal tormented into making particular sounds for the pleasure of its master. Clearly this image resonates with King; it is his idea of hell, perhaps, made all the more frightening by the knowledge that he has many "Number One Fans" in real life, any number of which would be only too happy to give him a hobbling. It is in the end a courageous book, because King is not merely trying to scare us -- he is clearly trying to scare himself -- and probably succeeding.

I dream quite a bit, and my dreams, in addition to being quite vivid and colorful, often follow something akin to a plot or storyline. This is quite the double-edged sword, because when I have a nightmare it is a real sonofabitch. In 1993 or so, I had a particular nightmare that I have never forgotten. Everything was blackness, absolute blackness, but I knew that I was someplace icy cold and remote -- Alaska, perhaps, and in the dead of winter. I must have been in some kind of vehicle, because at some point I switched on a spotlight which made a perfect circle of light in the ink-black night. In the light were several burned-out, abandoned police cars sunk to midwheel in thick, densely packed snow. On the snow were the largest, most vicious-looking wolves you can imagine, feeding hungrily on a human corpse. Their eyes blazed yellowly like lamps, their gray coats long and winter-thick, and their jaws were smeared and slathered with blood. They looked fearlessly into the light -- at me -- with their gory fangs gleaming. Looking at them I knew, with that peculair certainty common to dreams, that civilization had been destroyed or destroyed itself, and I was looking at the successors of mankind. When I awoke, it was not with the usual gasp and pounding pulse that a nightmare brings, but a kind of dread, a feeling that I had been given a glimpse into the ultimate fate of my species.

I've yet to write anything about this dream, but sometimes I think about the interesting one-two punch that it dealt me. On the one fist was the primal fear of being hunted and eaten -- probably while still alive -- by a merciless predatory beast. (At night, no less; and in the snow -- one of the least hospitable elements for human beings.) On the other fist was the presence of the police cars. One doesn't need to be a genius to see the symbolism there -- the complete collapse of human authority and power. I don't like to read too much into dreams, but I think there was a strong psychological element to this nightmare, something which spoke directly to my own fears -- however subconscious they might be. Maybe I won't produce a Misery from it, but perhaps it will yield at least a nasty little short story.

My point here -- yes, I have a point -- is that horror is a nebulous term, laying somewhere (if I may paraphrase King) between terror and the gross-out. It involves a certain level of fear but also a certain level of repulsion, and it is an intensely personal feeling, never exactly the same for two people. Yet because all humans are related, our fears are related too -- and our nightmares. King's nightmare resonated with him to the point where he felt compelled -- or inspired -- to spin it into a novel. He not only confronted but exploited his fear, and in the "Number One Fan", the axe-wielding Anne Wilkes, created an iconic horror villain. The ability of a writer -- not merely a horror-writer but any sort of writer, for we are writers before and after we are stuck with the genre label -- to do this is, to attack head-on the thing head-on that they most dread, is, I believe, an ill-discussed and ill-examined facet of our craft. Indeed, it belongs perhaps not to the craft side of writing but to the artistic side, because it involves moral courage. Anyone can write a "shocking" book by smashing someone else's religious or moral or sexual or psychological taboos; not many have the stones to attack their own. But King did. And that's why the axe of Anne Wilkes cuts so deep.


 

Lecter vs. Lecter: or, Why I Didn't Care For "The Silence of the Lambs"

Let me begin by uttering four words we've all heard a million times before:

"The book was better."

It's become something of a cliche, hasn't it? Sort of the antidote to "I'll wait 'til the movie comes out." You, the gentle reader, buy a novel, and within a matter of days it becomes your favorite, or at least takes a place among the pantheon of your favorites. You read and re-read it until you know it by heart. Then, one day, usually years later, you see that "they" are making it into a movie. Half of you trembles with anticipation. The other, wiser half, trembles with fear, because you are wondering, if only to yourself:

How bad do you think they'll fuck this up?

Red Dragon was the seminal novel of my formative years. When the sequel, The Silence of the Lambs came out, it disappointed me on only one level: there was no Will Graham. Other than that I thought it a masterpiece, quite on the level with the former book, and arguably better as a pure thriller. Several million other people agreed with me, and so the movie became an inevitability. But this presented me with a problem. Hollywood generally Fs up its interpretations of novels. Not always, of course, but enough so that anyone emotionally invested in one of those novels goes into a flood sweat thinking about what "they" will do to it. And when I saw the movie version of Lambs, I realized that while "they" had not exactly F'd up, they had made some mistakes which Michael Mann, who had handled the movie version of Dragon, had not made. (Mann, for the record, made different mistakes.) I won't go into all of what I think those mistakes are, but I will tackle the two I consider the most egregious.

In Manhunter (a.k.a. Red Dragon), Mann made the choice to cast the veteran Scottish character actor Brian Cox, who is best known to Americans for his work in Braveheart, Rob Roy, and the Bourne films, as Hannibal Lecter. In Lambs, Johnathen Demme chose the better-known Welsh thespian Anthony Hopkins. Both men are superb at their craft, but it was not the actors themselves so much as the interpretations they put on the roles -- most likely in consultation with the directors -- which go to the heart of Hollywood's problem, and mine.

Cox handled the role of Lecter like a straight-pipe exhaust. That is to say, his take on the doctor was very close to the way "Hannibal the Cannibal" is portrayed in the book. In conversation with Will Graham, he betrays no obvious, outward sign of insanity or villainy. If this version of Lecter lived or worked next door to you, it's doubtful you would have thought him odd. Stiff, perhaps; pretentious, certainly; intellectually vain and perhaps unlikeable. But not threatening. He is courteous, if cool, and even when he tries to loosen the screws in Graham's head, he has a certain clinical detachment. Once in a while his sense of humor, dark and subtle, glimmers in our vision; and every now and again, such as when he remarks about how Officer Stewart left the police department with emotional problems "after seeing my basement", the sadism that drives him; but for the most part he remains enigmatic, the unknowable, self-contained Other, unconflicted, bored by his captivity but completely at ease with his own nature, precisely as Harris wrote him in Red Dragon. 

Hopkins' take on Lecter was quite different. From the very first moment we make eye contact with him in his cell in Lambs, it's obvious that there is something deeply wrong with this man. His vocal intonations, facial expressions, unblinking stare, chilling smile and hideous parody of intimacy -- the way he insists on using first names ("Clairisssse"), for example -- all fairly jangle with creep and menace. It's a brilliant and effective portrayal of controlled insanity, far more frightening than Cox's portrayal, but it lacks his subtlety and the subtlety Harris worked so hard to engender in the character. If this Hannibal lived next door to you, and were arrested for murder and cannibalism, how surprised would you be? If you were Will Graham, would it take your empathic gifts and forensic brilliance to capture a man who practically walks around with a sandwich board that reads, I AM A SERIAL KILLER.

One could argue, of course, that Hopkins had no choice but to take the interpretation in a different direction than Cox, against whom he was certainly competing in his own mind. Also, that Hopkins (and Demme) wanted the audience to be scared shitless of Dr. Lecter from the git-go and didn't have any interest in subtley. But for me, the blatancy of it undermined the film. Lecter is too obvious a boogeyman.

Another problem I had with Lambs was the virtual elimination of Jack Crawford from the storyline. His teacher/father/mentor relationship with Clarice Starling is one of the critical story devices in the novel; it serves as a counterweight to the evil influence of Lecter, who also acts, albeit in a different way, as Starling's teacher, father-figure and mentor. Indeed, the whole book is something of a proxy-struggle conducted between Crawford and Lecter, with Clarice acting as intermediary and, in a strange way, pupil, of both men. In Lambs, Crawford is reduced to a mere facilitator of plot; he puts Clarice on the case, and thereafrer largely fades from sight. As a screenwriter of sorts, I can understand the decision to do this from a technical standpoint, but it was a convenience and not a necessity. Cleverer writing, or more economical writing, could have salvaged some of Crawford's moments. No one would argue that Manhunter lacks plot intricacies or larger-than-life characters, but Crawford manages to impose himself in that story despite the presence of Graham, Lounds, Dolarhyde and Lecter. In Lambs, considering the short shrift given to Mr. Gumb in favor of Clarice, Chilton and Lecter, I think Crawford could have been mined more effectively.

Don't misunderstand me. I don't hate Lambs. I don't even dislike it. Hopkins is, to use a phrase from my childhood, one creepy-ass mo-fo. If I may continue my vulgarisms, I don't think Demme fucked up the film at all. But I do think he chose the path of least resistance. Hollywood has a history of shallow interpretations of complex works; part of this is the inevitable result of transferrng an inherently complex medium (the novel) to an inherently simple one (the screen). But Manhunter, whatever its other flaws, does not lack for depth. Lambs may be a more satisfying film, but it doesn't go nearly as deep.

The Red Dragon Is A Lifelong Stand

One day I last year I was toiling on some minor assignment for the show CSI: New York -- researching burns, or somesuch --when I realized something quite odd. The only reason this show existed, the only reason I was getting paid to look at pictures of disgusting third-degree burns and print out the results on ridiculously expensive photography paper, was due to a book I'd first read in high school called Red Dragon. Turning my attention away from the picture of a human arm covered in hideous yellow pustules, I drew something in the margin of my notebook that looked like this:

Red Dragon (1981) - Manhunter (1986) - The Silence of the Lambs (1988) - Profiler (1996) - CSI (2000)  - CSI: NY (2004) = my paycheck (2010).

Call it "six degrees of separation", but when Thomas Harris released Red Dragon in 1981, he was doing a whole helluva lot more than putting out one of the outstanding novels of all time. He was, from a creative standpoint, tossing a lighted torch into a gunpowder magazine roughly the size of New England. The explosion set off by the release of Red Dragon, or perhaps I should say the series of explosions which followed, is still going on today, like an endless chain of firecrackers. When I get invited to go see Gary Sinese's band play on the CBS lot, and briefly feel important as a result (don't worry, it fades quickly), it's a direct, if unimportant, result of that original bang.

You see, while there had been novels about serial killers before -- Lawrence Sanders The First Deadly Sin comes to mind -- and while the idea of solving crimes via forensic investigation alone was hardly new (Quincy did it all through my childhood), it wasn't until Harris introduced us to Will Graham, Jack Crawford, Alan Blood, Bryan Zeller, and the rest of the bloodhound gang over there at the FBI's Behavioral Science division that the genre of "forensic crimefighters" (and its favorite subgenre, "forensic crimefighters vs. brilliant serial killers") was truly created.

Switch on your television. What do you see? CSI, CSI: New York, CSI: Miami, NCIS, Profiler, Criminal Minds, Crossing Jordan, Bones, Cold Case, and various others, all over the guide. Go to Borders (if it hasn't closed yet) and look at the shelves: they're crammed with books like The Sculptor and Along Came a Spider and Sleepyhead and Compulsion. Serial killers are everywhere; and hot on their trails are forensic investigators, following hair and fiber and blood evidence like breadcrumb-trails, or trying to get inside their heads using sophisticated psychological techniques. It is no less popular in “reality” format; shows like Forensic Files, The New Detectives, Cold Case Files, Extreme Evidence and Medical Detectives examine the work of real-life psychiatrists, psychologists, ballistics experts, crime-scene investigators and forensic technicians as they used their highly specialized skills to hunt down fugitive criminals, break cold cases, and most famously, trap serial murderers before they kill again. So prevalent are books and TV shows and movies in this theme it’s hard to imagine a time when none of this existed, or that, in absolute terms, it’s actually a recent phenomenon, and that Thomas Harris is largely responsible for it.

Which belatedly brings me to the book, and why it's so damned good. I suppose I could examine the obvious reasons -- Harris' meticulous research on every aspect of forensics, psychology, law-enforcement produre, etc., his brilliant use of the Iceberg Theory as a stylistic tool, the terrifying vividness of the two villians, Dolarhyde and Lecter, his relentless pacing, or his unusual prose style, which might be described as Hemingway on intellectual steroids -- but I'd rather concentrate on the aspect I find most interesting; the protagonist, Will Graham.

I use the word specifically. Wounded and world-weary, plagued by doubts and terrors, walking a tightrope between the supersanity of a scientist and the madness of a murderer, Graham is far from the Hollywood archtype of a hero. When Crawford tries to mollify Molly by telling her "it's his bad luck to be the best", he isn't referring to Graham's skills as a forensic investigator. Graham is very good in that regard, but as we discover, there are others just as good. What Crawford wants from him is the intangible "gift" that Graham possesses, the ability to assume the viewpoint of anyone he encounters. What heroic qualities Graham possesses reside largely in his willingness, however grudging it may be, to put on his badge one last time to hunt the Dragon, knowing as he does the psychological torment the hunt is going to inflict upon him.

Graham is extraordinary as a detective in part because of its inability to separate himself from his cases. This may be commonplace now, but it has not always been so. Novels, TV shows and movies have traditionally assumed that a detective with an extraordinary ability, such as Sherlock Holmes, will naturally embrace that ability. They rarely if ever explore the idea that gifts such as Graham's can be a curse as well as a blessing. Dr. Bloom scolds Jack Crawford with the words, "You wouldn't like it either if you had it (the ability of pure empathy and projection), Jack." He also reminds Crawford that Graham is a man flooded and inundated by fear -- hardly a typical characteristic in a hero. Graham uses a form of self-hypnosis to distance himself from the horrors he has to crawl through, literally on hands and knees; it takes the shape of pretending that the manhunt is an exercise in pure forensics, a kind of logic problem that he, Graham, is particularly good at. When Graham can achieve this distance, he's happy -- or at least content. But the harder he works a case, the less possible this distance becomes. The sense of simpatico he achieves with the murderer "spreads in his head like a spill." Over the course of the novel we come to realize that Graham is in a certain sense insane, and within his head lurks the same madness he hunts in others. He differs from his quarry mainly in his unwillingness to let the madness dictate his actions, but even this requires a certain amount of denial. When he reunites with Lecter in the mental hospital, the doctor quips, "Do you know how you caught me, Will? Because we're just alike. If you want the old scent back, smell yourself."

Great detectives are often seen as men apart. They view the unraveling of a mystery as a purely intellectual exercise. Sherlock Holmes occasionally took to task his friend and chronicler, Watson, for the sensational way in which Watson recorded Holmes' exploits. In "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" he says: "You have erred perhaps in attempting to put color and life into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing..Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales." Edward X. Delaney, who caught two serial killers over the four Deadly Sin novels, actually remarks in the last of these novels how interesting the counterpoint is between the frenzied, hot-blooded passion of the killer and the cool, unemotional, methodical actions of the detective who hunts that killer. Both men view their detective work as a professional exercise. Graham, with his blessing-curse of "pure empathy and projection", cannot. How he would love to possess the icy detachment of Sherlock Holmes, who actually lamented the death of his opposite number, Professor Moriarty, because of the challenge he presented! Alas, for Graham, the Hobbs, Lecters and Dolarhydes of the world are not the opposing queens on a chessboard, to be forced bloodlessly into concession. They are monsters, and sometimes monsters bite.