Tag: Jed Mayer

In May of 1979, six-year-old Etan Patz went missing.  Soon after his disappearance, images of his
face began to appear on lamp posts, store windows, newspapers, and
television.  Later, his face became the first to appear on a milk carton, spearheading
a campaign by the National Child Safety Council which was to expand through the
following decade until leading psychologists discovered that the images were
causing children grave emotional distress. 
Anyone growing up at that time knows that there was something uniquely
haunting about those milk-carton photos: poorly reproduced images of smiling
faces that resembled a mockery of their likely fate, they stared at you from the
other side of your cereal bowl, as you began each day with an oblique warning
about the dangers lurking just outside the door. 

The 70s was a scary time for anyone—nuclear disasters,
political revolutions, oil conflicts—but it seemed a particularly disturbing
one for kids.  Besides being inundated
with images of violence and death—from Vietnam to Son of Sam to
Jonestown—children seemed particularly threatened.  The year that began with the highly publicized
disappearance of Etan Patz ended with the deaths of eleven concertgoers at a
Who concert in Cincinnati, crushed by a stampede of fans when the general
admission gate opened.  I remember it as
a time when subcultures began to separate teens from one another, creating
gulfs wider than those of race or class. 
I remember 1979 as the first year I was scared to leave the house.

By the 1980s the films of John Hughes, Amy Heckerling, and
Cameron Crowe would transform teen angst into popular entertainment.  As entertaining as these films were, they
didn’t come close to capturing the violence and anxiety of being a teen in
those years.  Although its gritty urban
setting was a far cry from the tree-lined, Midwestern suburban streets where I
grew up, Walter Hill’s The Warriors was
the first film I remember seeing that captured the sense of division among
young people at that time.  Although the
film became notorious for allegedly sparking acts of gang violence following
its 1979 debut, its narrative is positioned squarely from the
victims’ point of view. 

When the gangs of the five boroughs hold a summit in a
vaguely post-apocalyptic New York, their plan of uniting their forces against
The Man turns suddenly into a witch hunt in which the Coney Island gang called The
Warriors is singled out and pursued across the city.  Despite its sensationalistic, comic-book
trappings, what struck me most about the film was the way it captured the everyday,
matter-of-fact experience of scapegoating and persecution that are so much a
part of youth culture.  I believe it was
around this time that our junior high English teacher made us read William
Golding’s Lord of the Flies, but as
powerful as that book is, it somehow misses the banality of evil in children,
its atavistic narrative of tribal regression masking the effortlessness with
which young people can mark each other out for victimization.  I would argue that The Warriors became an instant cult classic not only for its
depiction of young people engaging in casual violence, but more for its
capturing of the experience of being at the wrong end of teens’ destructive
tendencies.

Closer to home (or my home, rather) in terms of setting and sensibility, Jonathan Kaplan’s Over the Edge sets its tale of teen
persecution and rebellion in a suburban community where the planners have ignored
the interests of their children, with disastrous results.  Set in the imaginary planned community of New
Granada, Colorado, no film more accurately captures the experience of growing
up bored in the 1970s.  The identical,
faux-rustic, board-sided ranch homes and artificial lakes looked exactly like
those of Croixwood, the planned community going up a few miles from our high
school, where my classmates and I would later skip classes, spending the
afternoons watching TV and getting high in a series of interchangeable sunken
living rooms. 

Over the Edge is
marvelously matter-of-fact in its depiction of teen drug use, sex, and
violence, especially refreshing during an era laden with “topical” made-for-TV movies and
after-school specials depicting kids jumping out of windows on angel dust or
clawing their faces off on bad acid trips. 
The kids in Over the Edge were
so familiar that it might have been cast from my high school.  Their soundtrack was our soundtrack: Cheap
Trick, the Cars, and Van Halen, rather than the canned nonsense typically
inserted into teen films; their parties were our parties, with joints being
passed and beer drunk by kids standing around and talking, not all that
differently from at our parents’ parties; their violence was our violence, with
a pair of kids jumping another kid on his way home at night and pummeling him, with
no further consequences, no counseling sessions, no anti-bullying campaigns;
their motto was our motto, which was any kid who tells on another kid’s a dead kid.

And that’s where fear enters into the life of a teen:
friends can become persecutors with little warning, and violence has to be
endured in silence.  In my high school,
where virtually everyone was white and comfortably middle class, there were few
markers of difference.  Once punk and new
wave broke, which for me happened with the release of The Clash’s London Calling in 1979, music and fashion
became a new way of defining ourselves, but also of marking us out.  My friends and I were routinely pushed
around—tripped in the hallways, lunch trays flipped, gym shorts pulled down—but
it rarely escalated to anything major. 
That is, until one night when my friend and I went to a party dressed in
our version of punk fashion, which for me meant ripped jeans, a Stranglers
t-shirt, and a loud tie worn around my bare neck.  Pretty tame, and pretty silly, but for the
Skynyrd and Zeppelin crowd at Stillwater High School, it was an outrageous act
of provocation.  On our way home my
friend Stu and I were jumped by half a dozen drunken music critics and pummeled
until we could no longer stand.  I am
simultaneously proud and ashamed of the fact that we never told who did it.

When Carl, the protagonist of Over the Edge, undergoes a similar experience, he makes light of
the incident, telling his mother to simply “dump a bottle of peroxide on my
head.”  Despite its unflinching realism,
the film is largely reticent about the inner lives of its characters, and we
get little sense of what they are actually thinking and feeling as the story
spirals towards its riotous conclusion, when the kids lock their parents in the
high school auditorium during a town meeting while they vandalize and set fire
to their cars.  The closest we get to
knowing what Carl is feeling after he gets beaten up is when he puts on his
headphones and cranks Cheap Trick’s anthemic “Surrender.” 

That brief moment of interiority, with a teenager lying on
his bed and brooding, is essentially the point of departure for the strangest
teen film of that era, Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm.  It’s protagonist, Mike, is shown in several
scenes lying in a state between sleeping and waking.  These scenes typically end with the walls of
his bedroom suddenly transformed into a graveyard scene, where corpses erupt on
either side of him and try to pull him underground.  While The
Warriors and Over the Edge show
us the public side of teen life, Phantasm
depicts its dark unconscious.  The
streets where Mike spends his days and nights are strangely deserted,
fortune-tellers give him cryptic advice and offer strange tests of endurance,
and his parents are conveniently dead, replaced by the ominous patriarchal
figure of The Tall Man, who stalks the palatial funeral parlor overlooking the
town.

Phantasm’s
fragmented, dream-like narrative centers around a sinister plot that reads like
a bizarre metaphor for growing up.  Mike
and his brother Jody, along with a delightfully eccentric ice cream man named
Reggie, uncover a ghastly slave trade in which dead bodies are shrunk and sent
to another planet to become zombie laborers. 
While the teens seem to defeat the forces of evil, the plot’s
circularity and fragmentation leave this in doubt.  Like my own experience of being a teen, fears
can become realities, just as certainties can become illusions. 
The only thing I knew for sure was that those kids on the milk carton
were missing, and wherever they were, they certainly weren’t smiling.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

During the first week of December, 1978, the covers of Time and Newsweek featured horrific images that would haunt me over the ensuing
year.  Both magazines bore the headline
“Cult of Death” superimposed over masses of dead, decaying bodies, victims of
the catastrophe at Jonestown, Guyana. 
Under the direction of their leader, Jim Jones, 909 members of the cult
organization calling itself the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project were
persuaded to commit “revolutionary suicide” by ritually drinking a sweetly-flavored
poisonous mixture in a senseless act of coerced self-destruction that spawned
the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid.”  At
the age of thirteen, I couldn’t really fathom this event, nor did I know where
Guyana was, but I was deeply impacted by those horrific magazine covers.  I would only begin to make some kind of sense
of these events by watching the horror movies that were released during what Newsweek would call “Hollywood’s Scary
Summer.”

By that summer I had already become a fairly seasoned
watcher of horror films.  More than mere
thrills and escapism, however, horror movies had come to serve as a reflection
of the toxic environments around me.  My
understanding of the world was shaped by violent and disturbing images, not
only in theaters but also on television and in magazines, thanks to the news
media’s increasing tendency to capitalize on the graphic shock value of current
events.  I suppose that after televising
Viet Nam, nothing was taboo, and there was certainly a political significance to
a nation’s being asked by its reporters and photographers to bear witness to
what its military was being ordered to do overseas.  But there’s no denying that
images of massed dead bodies displayed on the family coffee table could have a
dramatic, even traumatic, effect, especially on children and adolescents.  

The poster advertising John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy featured a grotesque image of a
monstrous fetal creature wrapped in its placenta, an image I responded to like
all such images in the media environment of the 70s: with equal
parts fascination and horror.  After seeing
the film, however, I discovered that horror could help me to make social and
political, as well as emotional and imaginative, sense of the era’s disturbing
events.  Several months earlier, on March
28, 1979, the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania experienced the
worst meltdown in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry, releasing
radioactive material into the environment and alerting America to the
catastrophic risks courted by the industry. 
Less than two weeks before Prophecy
hit theaters, on June 3 the exploratory oil well Ixtoc 1 blew and began
spilling vast quantities of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, in a summer-long
disaster that would later be disturbingly reenacted in 2010, stage-directed by
British Petroleum.

With Prophecy,
Frankenheimer wanted to create an environmentally-conscious horror film that
would raise the ethical stakes of popcorn fare. 
While it can hardly be said that he succeeded in this goal—the director
has blamed his own alcoholism at the time, as well as production issues, for the
film’s relative failure—it did succeed in presenting images and settings that
managed to distill, at least for one young filmgoer, the toxic environments of
the 1970s. 

Dr. Robert Verne (Robert Foxworth) and his wife Maggie
(Talia Shire) leave their urban life for the Maine woods, in order to carry out
an investigation for the Environmental Protection Agency.  A native tribe has accused a local logging
mill of dumping pollutants into the Androscoggin River, pollutants that are
poisoning their land and people.  Verne
and Maggie find themselves trapped between the interests of Native Americans
and those of loggers, but gradually become advocates for the local tribe and
its environment once they begin to see the monstrous mutations spawned by the
mercury that the mill has been releasing into the environment.  Trouts the size of sharks, giant demented
raccoons, and tadpoles the size of overweight bullfrogs are just a few of the
initial signs that something weird is going on. 
Like the three-eyed fish that jumps from the river beneath Burns’
nuclear plant in The Simpsons
opening, these creatures are more a part of radiation lore than of mercury
poisoning. 

And it’s precisely the indeterminate, hybrid nature of the
creatures that stalk, wiggle, and hop through horror movies that allows them
such a broad range of reference.  Those
who don’t get horror movies would cite the implausibility of such monsters as
undermining the film’s environmental message. 
But the indeterminacy of this kind of horror imagery
actually multiplies meanings rather than negating them.  It matters that the creature of Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein is created
from the dead as well as the living, from humans as well as animals.  In his hybridity, the creature embodies a
plethora of anxieties induced by the rise of scientific culture in the early
nineteenth century, when the novel was first published, including concerns over
the use of human corpses in anatomical research, the use of live animals in
laboratory experiments, and the use of animal-incubated antitoxins in
vaccines.  While it would be rather a
stretch to compare Mary Shelley’s classic novel with John Frankenheimer’s
not-so-classic film, the latter does partake of this rich tradition of the
monstrous that is horror’s enduring legacy.

As a thirteen-year-old, I was captivated by these creatures,
and horrified by the most dramatic of the film’s monsters, a giant mutant she-bear
that the natives regard as an avatar of their totemic nature spirit,
Katahdin.  But I was even more affected
by Katahdin’s grotesque cub, which Maggie tries to rescue, in a harrowing
sequence that remains one of the film’s most effective moments.  Early in the film we learn that Maggie is
pregnant, a fact that she keeps secret from her husband until she discovers
that the fish they been eating from the river have been poisoned by the same
substances that have produced Katahdin and its brood.  She knows her own child will suffer the same fate,
and consequently regards the mutant cub they find with a displaced motherly
affection.  As she swims through the
river, carrying it in one of her arms, the cub grows terrified as it hears its
biological mother howling in the narrowing distance of pursuit, and begins
biting and tearing at Maggie’s throat. 
She drowns the cub, as she will presumably abort the mutant fetus growing
inside her.

This scene stayed with me for several months after seeing
the film, for reasons I couldn’t quite place, until one weekend, bored during a
visit to my grandmother’s, I pulled out a collection of award-winning
photographs from Life magazine that
had I had often perused before.  There I
came upon an image that had long horrified and moved me, and the connection
between it and the scene from Frankenheimer’s movie instantly clicked.  The image was taken by W. Eugene Smith as
part of an expose on the mercury poisoning caused by the Chisso corporation in
Minamata, Japan.  It showed a mother
tenderly bathing her adult child; the young man’s limbs are bent and twisted at
unnatural angles and his face is distorted in an agonized grimace, the result
of mercury exposure.  In this grotesque
pieta, the mother supports him gently in the tub, and gazes upon him with a
look of steadfast love.  The image was
taken in December, 1971, a fitting emblem for the decade to follow.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

As tag lines go, George Romero’s seminal zombie epic sports
a pretty good one: “When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the
earth.”  As a thirteen year old, I had
repeatedly stared at the lurid poster bearing these ominous words in the front
windows of the Maplewood Mall multiplex in the weeks before the film was
released in the summer of 1979.  But like
most tag-lines, these were grossly misrepresentative of the film they
advertised.  The notion of an overfull
Hell spewing forth its denizens is too mythic, too Dantesque, by comparison with
the abjectly modern and mundane world the film depicts.  A more fitting tag-line might have been taken
from a speech given by President Jimmy Carter later that same summer: “Often
you see paralysis and stagnation and drift. 
What can we do?”

Addressing what he described as a “crisis of confidence” in
America, Carter’s July 15, 1979 address has been called “the malaise speech”
for its focus on the country’s financial woes and lack of direction.  Though neither provide answers to the
dilemmas America experienced at the end of the 1970s, both Carter’s speech and
Romero’s film offer disturbing visions of a world succumbing to “paralysis and
stagnation and drift,” visions that clarified and vitally shaped my own
perception of the world, then and now.

Now that we are inundated with zombies, in the movies and on television, it’s hard to remember
how off-the-wall Romero’s film seemed at the time.  There was something both funny and disturbing
about seeing monsters that looked more or less like ordinary people, though well
past their “sell by” date.  Massed
together in vast hordes, these creatures, stupid and slow-moving on their own,
collectively assumed the contours of a nightmare, one that hadn’t been realized on such an
expansive cinematic canvas before. 

Yet despite of all its originality and strangeness, Dawn of the Dead made sense to me,
largely due to the fact that much of its action takes place in an enclosed
shopping mall.  As a Minnesotan, I grew
up in the land of malls.  The Mall of
America may be the most massive example of my home-state’s mall obsession, but
Southdale was the first mall of America, opened in 1956.  Many others followed, including the Maplewood
Mall, where my family and friends experienced their own version of the uniquely
American malaise evoked by Carter, and where I later saw Romero’s film.

“Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but
by what one owns,” said Carter. “But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things
does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material
goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”  For all his failings, it’s hard to imagine a
President since Carter having the guts to offer such an honest criticism of our
country, verging on sacrilege against major tenets of the American commercial
gospel.  This description of vacuous
consumption is an apt description of zombie appetites—joyless and never
satisfied—as well as of the situation in which the four human protagonists find
themselves in Romero’s film. 

Holed up in the Monroeville Mall of Pennsylvania, an odd
collection of refugees from the zombie apocalypse gradually form a community
based on escapism and greed.  Sadly, escapism
and greed are also at the core of the uninspired “solution” offered by Carter
to our national dilemma.  Reducing the “growing
doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose
for our nation” to our dependence on foreign oil, Carter advocated using more
coal, building a pipeline, and conserving what we’ve got until something better
comes along.  At least Romero had the
insight to foresee what the end result of this shortsighted thinking would be,
as the horizon of possibilities gradually closes in on the film’s protagonists.

It’s easy to forget about the larger world when you’re in a
mall, which offers a virtual environment catering to seemingly every consumer demographic.  The Maplewood Mall had two bookstores, three
record stores, two hobby and gaming stores, eight cinema screens, and two video
arcades: these so fitted my limited needs and consumer choices as a thirteen
year old that I could hardly imagine what more the world could offer me.  It took me some time to realize that my
consumer desires were not being catered to so much as created by the Mall
itself.  As with the protagonists of Dawn of the Dead, what began for me and
my family as an escape turned into a lifestyle. 
The walkways were lined with trees and shrubs to create an illusory
natural environment, and the utopian vistas of its vast central court, crossed by gently
rising and falling escalators, resembled the sets of seventies sci-fi films like Logan’s Run, Futureworld and Rollerball.  In my eagerness to live in a virtual reality,
whether through video-games, films, or malls, I somehow missed
the point that these visions were meant to be dystopian. 

Watching the film now gives me a strange frisson. 
Those muted earth tones, those defunct store-fronts with their period fonts,
those broad lapels and flared pants worn by the mannequins: they resemble the
lost iconography and ambient set-pieces of my youth, brought uncannily to
life.  The film’s soundtrack consists
largely of commercial background music of the period, what came to be called
“library music”—LPs that could serve as a ready source of musical interludes
to be played in the background of low-budget films, commercials, or educational
videos.  The genre has become a popular
one for collectors, largely because these virtually anonymous musical pieces
provided the sonic backdrop of our collective past.  An unofficial soundtrack release collects
many of these from Romero’s film, and for anyone who grew up in the 70s,
listening to it is the aural equivalent of watching a super-8 movie of an
average, anonymous day out of the past.

Dawn of the Dead is
less a horror film to me than it is a distorted snapshot of my youth, one into
which I still sometimes escape.  As the characters
frolic through the Monroeville mall, indulging their consumer whims while
zombies menace them from behind glass doors, I find the premise disturbingly
seductive even as I recognize its abject futility.  It’s a fantasy I could never really experience,
since even if there was some version of a zombie apocalypse, I wouldn’t want to
be holed up in some mall of the twenty-first century: I only want to be alive
in the mall of the 1970s.  The final
irony is that my own response to the New American Malaise has been to retreat
into nostalgia, but what I discover in watching films from the 1970s is an
America hardly dissimilar from the one from which I’d hoped to escape.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.