Spooky Halloween: the horror movie The Devil Doll (1936)

The movie opens with two Frenchmen in a swamp who've just escaped prison. One is played by Lionel Barrymore, and for readers of these words he is Drew Barrymore's Grandfather? Great-Grandfather? A famous actor of the day, most seen today in It's a Wonderful Life (1947) where he plays Mr. Potter, and if you want to pretend Paul Lavond is Mr. Potter a bit earlier in life, be my guest.

Anyway, Frenchmen escaping swamp prison. Paul spent 17 years in that hell, done in by shitty business partners who framed him. Paul also makes it clear he is fueled by hate. He might literally say that; he spent 17 years in Prison, and he's out for vengeance. His accomplice, Marcel, stayed alive with the hope of continuing some nonspecific work.

Cut to: a swamp

There's a line slipped in that they've given the police the slip 'for weeks' but you could be forgiven for thinking this was the same swamp. It could be the same swamp.

Paul and Marcel get to Marcel's swamp shack, where his lame (in the literal sense) wife (ditto) greets him. Marcel and family have a lot of dogs, and a "inbred peasant halfwit" (his words) servant girl, who is clearly some pretty dancer putting on a she-gor act. Mrs. Marcel explains she kidnapped the girl because "she didn't want a servant with whole wits". Marcel then opens a door and there is a mad scientist lab, right there. And despite the fact he's literally just returned from escaping from Prison he's all "Come on, Marie, we must resume our great work!!" (Mrs. Marcel kinda looks like "what if Marie Curie was in Bride of Frankenstein", so I'll call her Marie.)  

Paul knows nothing about what this great work is. So both men go into the lab and Marcel starts handing Paul small toy dogs. Only Paul comments on how they are curiously warm? See, they are not toys. Marcel is a scientist. And he has developed technology that can shrink people. And dogs. Any sort of animal really, to toy size. He has done this to solve world hunger, because you could raise toy pigs on 1/6th the normal diet, then enbiggen them and eat them. Marcel also proposes just shrinking everyone in the world, so there's 6x the space. Once again, Marcel just got back from escaping prison. The tiny dancers, pigs, etc have a drawback: their brains shrink with the rest of them. But fully grown people can use their thought-rays to not only make them animate, but also control them. Marcel demonstrates with the "toy" dogs. 

Then, without like, some wine and cheese, a cup of tea, anything, he seizes Heidi, the maidservant, to fix her brain and render it perfect while small. It's unclear if that works, but Marcel then dies, of a Heart attack or stroke or similar, understandable considering the pace he's set in this scene. Marie is distraught because who will continue this crazy work now?!? Paul, seeing the setup, says "I WILL - But we have to relocate to Paris for my revenge." Marie agrees. 

SMASH CUT

The Police are looking for Paul Lavond. God knows why. Like they seem to be hip to Lavond's motive, but it seems like his big crime is bank embezzlement? None the less, there are posters of Paul everywhere. The posters and police activity are witnessed by a little old lady...and when I say little, I mean she's hunched over but seems pretty big. This is Lionel Barrymore, Paul Lavond, in drag as a little old lady which he will be for about 80% of the film's runtime. Anyway, Mrs. Lavond is a toymaker, new to Paris, and visits the three bankers he's gonna visit Nemesis on. 

One is named Toto, he has a mustache. Mrs. Barrymore wants a bank loan to expand her business. Toto isn't interested in Toys, but Mrs. Barrymore breaks out a most lifelike Horse,  who she puts on Toto's desk and gets to come to life and prance around. Now if Toto had what we'd call a modern education he'd run from the room screaming, but this is France in some modern but not really modern time, so Toto finds this shit fascinating, and agrees to stop by the toy store.

Later, the large Mrs. Lavond is showing Toto eerie, lifelike toy dogs. So, Toto is then shown a doll's stiletto, which Mrs. Lavond stabs him with. This causes Toto to freeze, like he's been given a dose of fish tranquilizer, and he sort of has been? Apparently Marie has worked up a poison that freezes you but keeps you conscious forever. Toto is then shrank. Revenge 1 complete.

So then Mrs. Barrymore goes to the laundry where his daughter is working. His daughter, Lorraine, HATES Lavond. She was like 4 when he was imprisoned, her and her mom's life really went to shit. First, her mom died, and then, thanks to the Hayes Code, unspecified bad stuff happened, which in context sounds like Lorraine did sex work to keep herself and her grandmother alive. Naturally, Paul uses his Mrs. Lavond disguise to get Mrs. Doubtfire up in this bitch, IE using his little old lady persona to covertly spend time with his daughter, the laundress and former sex worker. Very much like Mrs. Doubtfire, if Mrs. Doubtfire was also riffing on the Count of Monte Cristo and using thought controlled dolls to enact terrible revenge on those that wronged him.

Anyway

Mrs. Doubtfire Lavond visits his mom, (IE Lorraine's grandmother) who his daughter lives with and his Mom knows her son, but is also blind, so she doesn't know Lavond is dressing like a little old lady.  Lorraine comes home, and is glad kindly, large Mrs. Lavond somebody is looking in on her old grandma. Lorraine also has a suitor, a guy who's just bought his second Taxicab. He's handsome and nice so naturally the daughter wants him to forget her, because she's doomed, doomed I tell you! It's a bit strange. 

BACK TO DEVIL DOLLS

Mrs. Lavond then takes a doll (this time, Heidi) to the wife of Evil Frenchman #2. Once again after doing the "they come to life" bit again, she makes a sale. Evil Frenchman #2 is fat and comes in all worried that Toto has vanished. Now the Wife of Evil Frenchman #2 gives this doll to her four year old daughter, and thank fucking god we don't think about that too much. Heidi is shrunk, but still human, and can feel like a human, so this daughter could have inadvertently crippled her or broke her neck or something. 

Nonetheless, that night Old Mrs. Lavond at like three AM arrives outside Evil Frenchman #2's house with a picnic basket. Broadcasting his thought waves (which go through walls, duh) he has Heidi escape the child, go to the Wife's room, and steal her fantastically expensive jewelry, dropping it to Mrs. Lavond outside. Movie fans will find this whole sequence hilarious because to do them they just constructed a lot of really big furniture, and then had the actors clamber about on them. The Jewelry theft ends with Heidi escaping into Mrs. Barrymore's pick-anic basket, a double theft. This was for seed money to continue the shop front. Presumably Heidi has done a lot of theft since being shrank I don't remember if this was combined or this is another theft.

Paul then gets Toto, now shrunk, to break into Evil Frenchman #2's house with a drug stiletto. Toto, controlled by thought waves by Mrs. Lavond,  creeps up on the bed and manages to stab evil Frenchman #2, but not before #2 wakes up, and sees his old friend, Toto, shrank to doll size and coming at him with a knife. Evil Frenchman #2 now is frozen with a look of bewildered terror on his face. Paul makes a comment like "Well, he'll be imprisoned in his own mind, unable to do anything for the rest of his life. I guess that's good enough for my lost 17 years."

The vanishing of Toto and the strange fate of Evil Frenchman #2 convinces the Final Evil Frenchman that Paul is out there, somewhere, and behind these events. Paul sends the final Evil Frenchman a note, that he's gonna kill him at [a given date] at midnight unless he confesses his crime against Paul.

Come the night, Police and hired goons are guarding Final Evil Frenchman in his upscale townhouse. Again, Kindly old Mrs. Lavond and her picnic basket appear outside, and Lavond sends Toto in with the poison stiletto. For about 10 minutes, this movie becomes Tom Thumb, hired assassin. But just as Toto is in a good position to stab, Final Evil Frenchman breaks and confesses all to the police. Paul's name is cleared!

But here is where it gets a bit weird. Marie and Paul have a satisfying moment where they are like "We did it! Let's send our two dolls to the chief of police." You know, Heidi and Toto, who are still alive, and one who is literally an innocent kidnap victim. Also at least once when showing off Heidi, the "doll", Mrs. Lavond points out "her lifelike tears" which must be Heidi weeping as a doll - they move on from that. Then Marie says, "OK, now we continue the work to shrink the world" and Paul is not down, saying "no, that's a dumb idea." Marie takes this poorly, gets a little Murderous, and Paul manipulates her just enough to start a fire in the lab, and then shoves Marie into the fire. The toy shop burns down. Good thing Police Forensics isn't a thing, the bones of all those little dogs, horses, etc would be deeply confusing to a potential ME.

So now, Paul confesses to Handsome Cabbie, and tells him that "Paul freed himself from being falsely accused, but to do that I really did do a bunch more crimes, so now Lorraine will hate me for that. Listen, marry that girl already, here's some money" and a new plan is hatched.

Paul blames the new crimes, strange events etc on the now "dead" Mrs. Lavond, who has vanished but conveniently there's a female corpse in this toy store fire. Then he goes to the Eiffel Tower, with handsome cabbie and meets Lorraine. Lorraine doesn't recognize her dad, but also doesn't hate her dad now that she knows he was innocent (of bank embezzlement, a crime that is pretty pedestrian compared to what Paul was subsequently up to) Paul expresses all those feelings he has for his daughter, saying he's a friend of Paul's. He then leaves, wishing Lorraine a happy life, and here's some money. 

The End

A thing I saw, or am I off my meds? You, the reader, decide

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; Chapter 26

Jason is walking away from Mary-Anne's apartment, high on life and mesclane/an unknown drug's after effects. After living a PKD grade nightmare for most of the book, he's gotten everything back. He hails a johnnycab to go to Heather Hart's apartment. As the fliterbug flies, Jason reflects on Alys's death (I can't get involved, scandal rags would have a field day) the benefits of status (never having to sweat a police checkpoint) and the unimpeachable identity that 30 million viewers every week gives you. They exist, and thus so does Jason. Ratings ero sum, or something, Jason thinks as he falls asleep. The drugs (to say nothing of not sleeping at all over his two day nightmare) have made him sleepy.

Heather Hart's posh apartment complex is suspended by air jets, which rock to create the sensation of an infant falling asleep. Jason finds Hart is out shopping, but her maid, who he knows well lets him in. He's just gonna crash on the couch and listen to music, Jason says, as he squeezes the maid's firm right boob. "You're horny today" the maid says, pleased, before saying Jason is too tall for her. So, Hart has a top flight record player, and obviously a large collection of LPs, as well as some sort of CD-cassette changer, but for records? The maid said Hart would be back around fiveish, and it is around four pm now. Jason places the gift of Mary-Anne's beautiful pot on the center of the coffee table, then loads up the music player.

Jason comes to much later. He'd fallen asleep again. The apartment is dark, empty, and cold; Jason is amazed that he slept through several hours worth of records. His watch says it is 10:30 PM. Where was Heather?

The door flies open, and in walks an ashen-faced Heather, who has a newspaper. It reads:

TV PERSONALITY SOUGHT IN CONNECTION WITH DEATH OF POLICE GENERAL'S SISTER

and some stuff about how Jason Taverner murdered Alys. Heather asks him first if he murdered Alys, and then gets the Alys-themed part of Jason's adventure, including the discovery of Alys's thousand year old skeleton, while Jason wonders, again, if his good life is just some sort of drug-induced fantasy for losers. Heather wants Jason to turn himself in, because the LAPD is honest, so if you are innocent you have nothing to fear. Jason's two day odyssey makes him wise to what bullshit this is.

Hart wants to know if Jason murdered Alys, and then confesses her affair with Alys, which is a complete surprise to Jason. Reading the article, Jason notices that Herb and Felix back-dated Alys's death a few--

Heather tells him to shut up. And then turn to the back page, where Heather Hart is mentioned, and her affair with Alys is mentioned as possibly the trigger to Taverner's vengeful spree. Which is the first Jason knew of the affair, and, in spite of everything else, deeply confusing. Jason asks if the affair happened, and Hart hits Jason in the face, really, really, hard.

"Hit me back" Hart says. Jason is tempted, but doesn't, saying Hart is lucky. "Yeah I guess, if you killed Alys you could kill me too, huh? Might as well. They will gas you anyway." Hart, who you may understand now is incarnadine with rage, doesn't give a shit if Jason murdered Alys or not, because he's for some reason missing the big picture: Hart's career is over. Taverner's career is over. Hart is flipping between physically attacking Jason and dipping into emotional cryo-freeze.

quote:

"Do whatever you want." Her voice had sunk to a blunted whisper. "I don't care. Just go away. I don't want to have anything more to do with you. I wish you were both dead, you and her. That skinny bitch - all she ever meant to me was trouble. Finally I had to throw her bodily out; she clung to me like a leech."

So it turns out Alys was the one with motive, and to go back to chapter one, it is not a coincidence that Hart and Taverner together on NBC was how this book started, as we will see.

Taverner is looking for his shoes. The fact that he literally just learned about Heather's affair with Alys is having zero impact on Hart. "For you", Jason says, tossing Heather the box with the pot inside. Heather lets it drop to the floor. Fortunately Mary-Ann has a tight packing game, and the pot is undamaged. Heather, despite everything, says the pot is beautiful and thanks Jason for it.

Jason says "What can I do but go?" as Hart puts the pot on her mantle shelf.

Hart suggests turning himself in. Jason calls the operator and tells him to call the police general, it is Jason Taverner.

quote:

"You can dial that direct, sir."

"I want you to do it" Jason said.

"But sir---"

"Please" he said.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; Chapters 23-25

Chapter 23

So Jason has his identity and fame back. Mary and Jason arrive at her apartment, and her living room is arresting in its use of color, and has several vases on display. Turns out Mary is pretty darn talented. Jason immediately starts scheming to get Mary on his show, dreaming up musical-pottery related numbers and whatnot, and drops the vase he is holding as he's so besotted with his dreams of the future.

To break the tension there Mary launches into a story about her mother, who was always saying she was at death's door with kidney problems, and when I die it'll be your fault, etc. Once Mary leaves home she forgets about this. A few years later her mom comes to visit, and it's the same complaining sphiel until she says "I have to go grocery shopping". Once there, her mom confesses her kidnies are done and she's getting an artifical replacement but she may die. So Mary goes to the deli counter and asks for a steak and kidney pie.

This doesn't make much impact on Jason, who is first thinking up lies to promote Mary, and then brushing off her concerns about "truth" because he is the arbiter of all truth. He pays for the vase, and Mary gives him another - one of her best pieces. Jason leaves business cards, but Mary isn't really into the idea of fame.  

Chapter 24

We're back at Alys Buckman, dead in a bathroom. The book plays coy, but I suspect it's a fairly mundane dead body and not a 1000 year old skeleton. Felix is there, with the coroner, who tells Felix she died of an overdose.

Felix is obviously grief-stricken, but with a guy who abstracts his emotions like he does, there's a lot of looking away from that grief. His underling, Herb Maime, suggests arresting Taverner. Both men know Taverner had nothing to do with Alys' OD, but it's something. Felix touches his face and is suprised to discover he is weeping. Felix's instinct is to punish someone: Taverner, the people who made the drug, the people currently operating the phone-sex line...

Herb drives Felix back to the police HQ, and then while alone with Felix, broaches a sensitive subject. The sister fucking is a problem, now that Alys is dead. Some of the Grand Marshalls above Felix really hate him, and will leak to the media about the sister fucking, and say that Alys killed herself to attack General Buckman. A salacious story like this would be damaging to Felix. So, Herb suggests a counter move: order the coroner to find Alys' death a murder. Take control of the narrative by suggesting Alys died to spite Felix's kinder, gentler police oppression. Some of Buckman's Marshall enemies behind it, of course. While Felix can see the show trial and execution of some random patsy, Herb urges an upgrade to the actual murderer: somebody a) famous, b) involved in degeneracy, like those marshalls, especially drugs and phone sex, and c) already entwined with the case. So no prizes guessing who this is.

Felix thinks about it, and realizes Herb is right: the way out of this is to make up a bigger scandal than his enemies can insinuate, and well, sister-fucking is some scandal.

 

Chapter 25

(Coming back to this, one thing I noticed about the previous chapter is that Jason Taverener has recovered his celebrity status according to the police. While it is narrated by the grief-stricken and shattered mind of Police General Felix, who accords Jason the status of a six, that slips into Taverener being the perfect celebrity to hang the crime of Alys's "murder" on.)

General Felix and his aide Herb are attending to the dull details of the conspiracy they hatched to frame Jason for the death of Alys. Then a secretary brings the General the Jason Taverner file.

Of course the whole reason the police and General Felix were interested is that there was no Jason Taverner file.

It contains not only files, but mentions Taverner's hit TV show on NBC. Felix and Herb are baffled. Felix puts a call into the local NBC affiliate and gets a VP to confirm that it is a show, it is three years old and has every Tuesday thirty million viewers. Felix hangs up. Herb has never heard of Jason or his TV show. The General hasn't either, and he apparently watches two hours of TV every night, between 8 and 10, IE when the Jason Taverner show is broadcast. It is just inconceivably weird that previously Jason Taverner was expunged from all police records and having to get false papers in Watts, but at the same time was not only famous, but as famous as celebrities get. Taverner's back catalog goes back nineteen years, for fuck's sake. His latest .45, Nowhere Nuthin' Fuck-Up, sold over two million copies. And so on.

Herb is trying to rationalize, and gets about as far as "the computer for reasons unknown was slow in getting back to us." That's logically possible, but the rest of the story sticks out like somebody trying to mash a platypus into a undersized Tupperware container. Fleix's mind does suss a connection - Alys was "fond" of sixes and had an affair with Heather Hart for about six months. Herb takes this bit of info and adds it as motive to the collage of lies they've been gluing together, a motive for the murder. This last detail is not only enough to get Hart and Taverner brought in, it is enough to get Taverner an APB. Ultimately Felix answers the question "why Taverner" with "it has to be somebody." 

Flow My Tears, the Policeman said; Chapter 22

After dropping off the packages, Jason and Mary sit in a nice coffee shop, "a clean and attractive place with young waitresses and a reasonably loose patronage." A jukebox (man, when did those stop being a thing) plays music. Mary asks about those records Jason is carrying, "oh, you made these?" when she reads the name on them. They start talking about music; Mary isn't much of a fan of modern, but likes old stuff, like Buffy St. Marie. Jason agrees with that, but rather understandably is obsessing over what happened back at the mansion. Mary can see something is heavily weighing on him, but Jason doesn't say much. Mary reads the bio on the back of the record, and discovers Jason Taverener is apparently big, with a show on NBC. Jason is amused when Mary asks how it feels not to be recognized. Mary then wonders if the jukebox in the corner would have anything by Jason.

Mary goes and returns, saying "Nowhere Nuthin' Fuck Up, it should play next." Jason rushes the "Babylonian Gothic" structure of the jukebox, and selection B4 (lol) is Jason Taverner's latest song. It plays through the cafe. Mary says Jason is a great singer. Jason is numb and reeling a bit, and he and Mary get into a brief conversation about artists and people's reaction to them. Jason says that reactions are no way to judge your worth, since in people generally you can find the opposite of whatever reaction be it positive and negative, and intellectuals and critics are mostly overthinking bullshitters.

Jason then realizes he needs to make a call. He phones General Buckman, getting through by saying it involves Alys, but gets only as far as Herbert Maime. Maime starts winding an interrogation spiel, so Jason hangs up. Jason is once again feeling Phillip K. Dick post drug paranoia, wondering what the hell happened at the mansion: if it was real, if the mescaline was still working on him. He turns to that drug he was given. What if it wasn't mescaline?

Then two kids come over and say "Hey, you're Jason Taverner, aren't you?" They get an autograph, saying they always watch his show on Tuesday nights. Jason sees his reality leaking back, and is naturally wildly elated. His first thought is that he can call Heather Hart now, and she won't hang up on him. Then the paranoia slaps a wet salmon across his face: what if his identity is the result of Alys' drug? He'd been unknowingly taking this fantastic drug, then somehow missed a dose and woke up in reality. Logic riposte this notion with some counter-battery fire: he woke up in reality with a literal gigantic wad of cash, which makes no sense if he's a permanent druggie from Watts. Similarly it makes his total lack of ID, police or otherwise even more baffling, if that were possible.

Paranoia is a mouth that cannot be stuffed with logic, though - the notion that maybe he is part of a legion of mediocrities who are medicated to believe they are astonishingly successful haunts him. While he's spinning all this, Mary just lets him spin. Once he comes out of it, Mary says he's a brown study, so Jason gets her to play his song three more times. This convinces Jason he exists, goddamnit.

Mary, despite being a modest woman in her twenties who makes pots, is clearly concerned for Jason, as he's been acting objectively nuts. So she agrees to take him back to her apartment, as she has an old stereo record-player there.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; Chapter 21

Jason is coming down and sweating in the police general's sunken living room. He wants to find Alys.

He enters the door Alys went through; it's a long hallway with soft heavy carpet. At the end of the hall is a staircase with a black iron railing. Climbing that, there's another long hallway. The house is silent. He discovers an empty bedroom. Off of that, he spots an antique tub through another door. It is a bathroom.

On the floor is a skeleton.

This skeleton is old, yellowed with age, with any flesh it had returning to dust eons ago. It is, however, dressed in Alys's pre-punk clothing. Jason wonders if this is the mescaline. He touches the clothes, and they feel new.

So that's weird.

Panic hits Jason. Alys is dead somehow. He runs, pausing only to collect the records, putting them in their paper sleeves and jackets in full fight or flight mode. Bursting outside, chest heaving, Jason meets the brown cop. A short conversation happens, which ends with the pol running into the house while shouting "stay there" to Jason. Jason sprints to the quibble, and dumps out Alys' purse/mail carrier. No key. Jason hears a scream from inside the house. Jason starts ransacking the front dash of the quibble for the key. No key.

The cop dashes out of the house, and draws his weapon. Jason runs away as he is shot at. Plunging into the trees at the far side of the lawn, Jason sees the cop turn and sprint back in the house. Jason finds a stone wall, and remembering ALys's comment about the wall having glass shards at the top, runs along it. He soon finds a broken wooden door hanging open in the wall.

Now on the street, Jason spots a woman preoccupied with loading packages into a flipflap. He lopes over to her and tries to spin a lie to get them flying out of here. The woman is a bit "overweight" (though god knows what that means to Jason) with lustrous auburn hair, and is immediately freaked out and suspicious. Somehow, the woman accompanies Jason in the back seat while Jason himself drives. Jason notices that this is an old, economy flipflap. While Jason's mind is still rolling at full speed, the mescaline is mostly gone now, thanks to his Six physiology. Jason and the woman (who's name is Mary Anne Dominic) get to talking, first where the nearest hospital is, and then about General Felix. Jason says that Felix and Alys are twins, which does not make sense. Mary is a potter; all the packages in the flipflap are pots going into the mail for customers.

Jason flies past the hospital, and Mary is terrified again. Somehow Jason starts lecturing her on how you have to face your fear, because fear will keep you from truly being present in the moment, and may make you do worse things than hate or anger. Mary is oddly attentive to these points. Realizing at the same time he's batshit terrifying to Mary, he offers to set down the flipflap, and then, asks if she wants to go to a cafe. He just wants to talk to Mary, as he feels like the tension is winding off of his last tether of sanity as they talk. She agrees, as long as they get her packages to the post office first (afternoon pickup is two PM and I guess it is around noon? Once again, time is vague. Alys picks up Jason at 8 am, flies him to the General's place, and then about four hours passes?) After Jason offers to let her drive, she says Jason should keep flying, as she's kinda nervous right now. To Jason, this feels like a small vote of confidence.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Chapter 20

The mescaline washes over Jason like a wave at the beach. The ceiling became a skybox, colors shift and overlay, Alys' hair writhes like a nest of snakes. Jason feels fear, Alys completely ignores him, talking about Felix and his various goddamn collections. Jason says he can't get away. Alys says it's just the mes, chill.

She then says her collections are in the next room the library, while this is the study. She then gets on how Felix is also a lawyer and capable of doing good things. Apparently, when he was in charge of 1/4th the forced labor camps on terra (back when there were way more 'blacks' in them so they were more death campish) Felix discovers a series of obscure laws that allow him to shut down the camps. Jason sees a hat. Felix also tried to de-escalate things with pols and students when they would come hunting for food as they didn't have any underground. So by studying reports Felix discovered he could ID what campuses were failing, and which were not. The campuses that were failing he'd collaborate with other pols to drive them to destruction through non-violence. The hat is red, Jason says. With the campuses that were succeeding, Felix would arrange for basic supplies; food, water, soap etc, sent to them. For this he was demoted from Police Marshall to General. Despite the hate from other pols and "hard hats" (another sixties political term) Felix remains a general.

Jason says "but what about your incest?" Alys gives up talking until Jason's got his head back. She takes him back to the living room and he manages the difficult operation of lying down. She also mocks him for not being able to hold his mes; she takes five at once.

"But you're vast," jason said. Alys wanders off, down a long, long hallway, to get some thorazine.

Alone, Jason feels alone, and wants to run away from this strange house. Through a hallucinogenic storm, Jason manages to get outside and walk to the quibble. There, he remembers without keys, that quibble not gonna go. Alys's coat and mailbag-sized purse are in the back seat. But so are two Jason Taverner records. He realizes that the proof he is who he is is on these records. He attempts to return to the house. there is a gate. it does not move. there's a button. no. he puts records down and feels for button, he presses it, he picks up the records, the police man is there. Jason asks "is she insane. the brown police says "I'm not in a position to know. front door left open, down to the sunken living room, Alys is she there? careful examination is narrated. ALys is not in this room. Quadphoto is though, behind glass, it slides out with a terrible noise, turn switch to phono, 33 rpm, switch is a knob he twists. Needle touches down, static, hiss, no music.

Still no music, take needle, drops it in the middle, big THUMP. no music?

He takes the other record. It's the same. No music. The records are blank. 

I watch it so you don't have to: the Andromada Strain (1971)

I watched a thing and have thoughts, specifically how knowing the person behind it was a gigantic asshole changes how you view something.

The asshole this time is Michael Crichton, one of the most successful novelists of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. He was also a drawstring shitbag of a person. You can consult his wiki entry for specifics, but he was a person who basically got cancelled before the term existed entirely by his own efforts. My suspicion is that he was ruined by big success early on in life. By the time he finished his undergrad at Harvard he had accomplished his childhood dream: being a successful author. Dude then went to Harvard medical school, but was so successful by that time he did a residency but never practiced.  Maybe because of this, he seems to have decided personal growth was for other people.

The fact that his BA is in "biological anthropology" which was the name "scientific racism" had been living under likely doesn't help, though it does explain why he stormed off the set of the already questionable movie "Rising Sun", and never returned, when he discovered a white character was being played by Wesley Snipes.

Anyway, I recently saw the old SF movie the Andromeda Strain. It is a good movie, one of the VERY few good SF made between 2001 and Star Wars. The movie was adapted from Crichton's first novel, which was a huge success and established him as a bestselling author. It opens with a dead town in California, where a virus collected from space almost instantly strikes the entire town dead, with the only survivors being an infant and an alcoholic hobo. The government does what they do in a lot of MC novels, activate the best and most privlidged elite personnel they can find to Solve The Problem. So I assume they were all first in their class at harvard and yale, and then, I dunno, did post-doctorate work at places so elite I've never heard of them.

Good things first: this movie was directed by Robert Wise, and he knows what he is doing. The art direction, especially, is strong. The facility, 'Wildfire', is this fantasy take on one of those CDC labs that is capable of safely dealing with lethal infectious agents - I think it even has the same level 1 to 5 structure.  The lab features stainless steel everything, and exists as a five level subterranean donut. It also could be 'Chekov's Gun, the building' as pretty much every detail we're told about becomes part of the plot. The labs also feature really clever devices to make visually interesting very boring things (like for example the changing of a particulate filter) and has some early graphics that are computers in operation and *almost* computer graphics. So if you like a retro design, all of that is a joy. I should also say the central plot is in fact, pretty interesting and well done, being the only time I've seen speculative biochemistry as a major factor in a plot. Also I noticed the "PA/computer page sound" [I think] was sampled by one of my favourite musicians, Yoko Kanno, to create a track for a TV show some thirty years later.

https://youtu.be/UJbzrHf4QGg?t=310

https://youtu.be/DPEo_BB2Kok?t=12

Could be a coincidence, considering it is, after all, just two notes on a piano, but they are a really good, distinctive set of notes.

The characters are kind of a letdown, but then again they are four doctors doing intense research, so there's not a lot of leeway there. One of the doctors is AN FEMALE, and is written to be...exactly like a male doctor in their 50s in deportment and intellect. I forget if in the book Crichton just doesn't gender that character - I read the book as a teen and remember being genuinely surprised that the character was a lady - but this is about as close as Crichton gets for gender equity.

Eventually the Crichton surrogate figures things out and saves the day. This is where we get a whiff of the drawstring shitbag. The Crichton surrogate does this by 1) not comforting a crying baby (even when the female nurse really really wants to) and 2) by catching an omission the female doctor accidentally made. In what's a genuinely interesting plot development, the female doctor has been slowly developing epilepsy. I forget if the female doctor was aware of this - it's a subtle plot development in the book because we see the signs from her perspective, which naturally are fairly subtle and confusing. Once it comes out, another doctor speculates if she hid her condition to keep her position of privilege as a fourth level nesting doll. Still, at one point, thanks to the constant flashing lights and intense screens, they discover what neutralizes the mysterious strain, which is looked over because the female doctor is having a minor seizure. So it's partially the female doctor's fault, and it's the author surrogate's job to correct it.

The basic theme is one Crichton would use throughout his career: "science and technology are bad". [His other basic theme is "people's brains are bad because they want amusement" which is expressed mostly in plots about deadly futuristic theme parks, and I'm not kidding about his views on the brain, as you can check his wiki about how he "didn't trust his own brain."] The reason why science and technology is bad is, well, I'm just going to quote a friend here:

"It was always there - one of the core ideas in the Jurassic Park novel is that science is an unearned power because scientists inherit so much of their knowledge and thus don't respect it. With the specific analogy that science is like buying a Saturday Night Special instead of spending a lifetime mastering a martial art."

Very "while you played games, I studied the sword" if you spend too much time on the internet

You can certainly see this in the Andromeda Strain. The Wildfire facility breaks, as it must, as the entire movie is basically a mechanism for an exciting story. Really, the facility is also more than a little absurd. There's a nuclear bomb at the bottom of the facility, and it's clear that the magic computer system they use to do work is also being used to monitor the scientists, with the facility being able to vaporize itself in a sufficiently compromised situation, which has one scientist feverishly cutting AV feeds when the topic gets too dangerous. There's an extended series of scenes in the middle where the scientists go through ever more invasive decontamination, despite the fact that the scientists still must work in clean rooms etc. The baby spends about 90% of the movie wailing in a room with the semiconscious hobo, and both are transported very slowly through the facility on a very slow moving elevator. I'm guessing Crichton didn't pay much attention to what nurses did.

The real "you manics, you blew it all up" energy comes from the revelation that the virus was brought to earth via a space probe that was sampling stuff to create new bioweapons from. (Crichton is a victim of timing here: the movie came out in 1971, and Nixon had by that time terminated America's bioweapon program, for the extremely rational reason that bioweapons were as serious as nuclear weapons, and thus any situation you'd use them you'd be using nuclear weapons, which were frankly better.) Still, the movie ends with....no solutions whatsoever. That's not surprising if you know Crichton. Fear of science never has any resolution, in no small part because Crichton's books are engines of entertainment, amusement park rides, and so the problem being solved would undermine the whole enterprise.

Anyway, the movie is good, especially if you love yourself some 1970s futurism.