Food scientists have developed an edible metallic spray paint. Im guessing these were the same food scientists who, about fifteen years ago, came out with a warning right before Thanksgiving that cranberries can give you cancer, but then had to admit that the risk was so small youd have to eat thirteen pounds of cranberries a day for a decade to be at risk, and even then youd be more likely to die from malnutrition having eaten nothing but cranberries for that long. As a side note this means cranberries have joined eggs in the group of foods that were good for you then bad for you then good for you again, although cranberries have the advantage of being low in cholesterol.
Anyway, Im assuming food scientists developed edible metallic spray paint so when you come up with a really good idea and your friend says, That sounds like a slice of fried gold you can both then have a slice of fried gold and see if it compares. And the spray paint doesnt just come in gold. It also comes in metallic blue and metallic red, because if theres one thing more appetizing than metal its colors that dont occur naturally. And it also comes in silver, which doesnt seem like such a big deal. People were using edible silver balls to decorate cakes and other pastries back when egg yolks were still good for you. I remember a dumb joke about those another kid told me back when I was eight years old, which went something like this: a woman was decorating a cake but she didnt have any of the edible silver balls so she used BBs instead. If you can understand why someone would do this you also understand why someone, probably the same woman, would also name her dog Freeshow, but thats another story.
Anyway, the next day the womans husband came in and said, Honey, I just farted and I shot the mailman. At the time this joke cracked me up, although I think it was mainly because the word fart will make any eight-year old laugh. Also my mother used those edible silver balls when it got close to Christmas and she did a monumental amount of baking. I realize now that one of the best things about the holidays wasnt getting and opening presents, which mostly lasted just a few hours, or even being out of school for two weeks, but all the amazing things my mother made: candied pecans, fudge, date spirals, kolacky, which is a kind of Czech pastry, and pretzels and peanuts dipped in white chocolate. She made chocolate rum balls, which my grandfather loved, partly, I think, because they annoyed my teetotaler grandmother. Hed always say, Its okay, the alcohol gets baked out of them and then hed wink at my mother because he knew she added the rum after they were done baking. And she made mountains of sugar cookies. Compared to most of the other treats she made the sugar cookies were pretty plebeian, but she gussied them up with food coloring, and she had a device that looked like a caulking gun that spat out cookies in different shapes, so instead of just plain cookies she made green Christmas trees, red holly berries, and blue stars decorated with silver balls. When I was really young Id get my mother a box of food coloring every year for Christmas. It wasnt because I was cheap. Im sure if Id thought of it my father would have been happy to help me get her a bottle of perfume or maybe a new car, since Id wrecked the backseat of her Pontiac by covering it with spider webs I made out of some chewing gum Id found on the street. Food coloring was just something I associated with my mother, even though it never occurred to me that, as a gift, it was kind of like giving someone a Christmas tree ornament for Christmas: its a gift thatll get put away somewhere for at least the next eleven months. And one year my mother did run out of food coloring in the middle of her holiday baking, so she opened her Christmas present early, which made me feel proud. Id saved her a five minute trip to the grocery store. As far as I know she never ran out of the edible silver balls and substituted BBs. At least I dont remember the mailman ever being shot.
The comedian Sacha Baron Cohen made fun of Kazakhstan. In his novel The Corrections author Jonathan Franzen made Lithuania out to be a chaotic place run by gangsters who didn’t put horse’s heads in beds–they ate the horses. And Dave Barry used to make jokes about North Dakota. And all three were invited to visit the places they’d misrepresented. In Dave Barry’s case they even named a sewage processing plant after him, which, for a writer, is actually pretty appropriate. I think all sewage processing plants should be named after writers since writers take in a lot of crap and try to process it into something worthwhile. I’m sure there are other cases of well-known people misrepresenting places and being invited to visit, but those three are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head. The fact that they were invited to visit these places and, I suspect, were shown a pretty good time if they chose to take up the offer–has always intrigued me. Basically it seems like a great way to get a free plane ticket and a good meal, although it only seems to work if you’re famous enough that you could probably afford both your own plane ticket and the dinner tab. And while I have no illusions about my own lack of fame I’ve wondered if I could gain enough notoriety by making up a bunch of outrageous stories about a small place most people don’t consider a tourist destination anyway–Tuvalu, for instance–that I could get myself invited there. Except there are a couple of problems. For one thing there are only about ten thousand people living in Tuvalu, mostly chervil farmers, and I don’t think anything I said could make them really want to fly me out there. And since misrepresenting a place isn’t really that funny to start with there would be a lot of people who wouldn’t get that I was joking, and even most of the ones who did wouldn’t find it funny, and, once you got down to it, the one person who did find it funny would probably admit that the only part of it he really found funny was how much it annoyed his mother-in-law. Chances are that if I ever do visit Tuvalu–or any other place, for that matter–I’ll do it as just another tourist.
But if by some bizarre chance I did become well-known enough there that some people would actually consider my visit an event I’d still rather it be a visit where people are happy to see me. You may have heard of a pop singer named Madonna. She was my generation’s Lady Gaga. Anyway, she was in the movie A League Of Their Own which was partly filmed in Evansville, Indiana. I wasn’t there at the time but I heard that Madonna, before she’d even gotten there, called Evansville the most boring place on Earth. Since I went to college in Evansville it didn’t seem all that boring to me, but boredom is in the brain of the beholder. And although I was never able to independently verify this I heard that on the day Madonna arrived a banner was hung over main street that said, "Evansville hates Madonna." If it was true it did nothing to change Madonna’s opinion and just made Evansville look bad, especially if they couldn’t come up with something zingier than that "No, the most boring place on Earth is any movie theater showing Dick Tracy", but that’s another story. I
‘d rather go somewhere and be welcomed, or at least try to enjoy myself as much as I can, which is why I usually travel with an open mind. Several years ago my wife and I went to Cleveland. She was going for a dog show. I was going because, hey, Cleveland! Before we left people who heard where we were going almost always asked me the same question: "Why would you want to go to Cleveland?" Sometimes for emphasis there was a "the hell" thrown in there. And I always had the same response: "Why wouldn’t I want to go to Cleveland?" I had a great time there. When I came back I told one guy–who at one point in his life had lived in Cleveland, and who asked me why the hell I wanted to go there–how much fun I’d had going to the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame and the Cleveland Museum of Art, and he scratched his head and said, "Wow, I never thought about doing stuff like that." My father told me he never wanted to go to Cleveland because he once got stuck there in an airport during a snowstorm. Of course you’re going to be bored in an airport, but there was a snowstorm outside, which is why I still don’t understand why he didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to put up signs in front of the entrance gates that said "Welcome to Seattle" or go make snowmen out on the runways. And this was the Seventies, so he could have passed off the snowmen as an art installation, calling it something subtle and profound, like WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!
Anyway, the year before that my wife and I went to the French Lick Resort for a dog show. When we got back and I told a friend what a blast I’d had in French Lick–it really was a fun trip, by the way–he said, "You must have a high tolerance for boredom." No, I’d just had a lot of fun staying in a place that had also hosted Franklin Roosevelt, Al Capone, was the home of Larry Bird, and had a train museum. I admit that if you’d asked me before those trips to make a list of the places I’d most like to visit I probably wouldn’t have thought of either Cleveland or French Lick, but then if you asked me to make a list of the places I’d most like to visit it would probably just be easier if I took a map of the Earth and said, "Somewhere here." In fact I think I’m going to start doing research for a book called The Most Boring Place On Earth, which will both be an effort to knock Evansville off the top of the list and also to see if I can find a place that is genuinely and truly boring. Maybe I could make up a list of potential candidates and have people fly me out there and try and show me the most boring time possible. Although, you know, that actually might turn out to be pretty interesting. Especially if they pay for dinner.
Earlier this week I had a doctor’s appointment. It was nothing serious-just a regular checkup. In fact I’m pretty sure this was the first checkup I’ve had this millennium. That’s how frequently I go to the doctor. I know that an ounce of prevention is worth a silk purse made from a pig in a poke, but I believe an apple a day allows me to have my cake and eat it too. Basically I’m always afraid that my doctor’s going to tell me I’ve got six months left to live. And I’m even more afraid that when I say, "I’d like a second opinion" he’ll refer me to a specialist instead of saying what any doctor with years of training and experience should say in that situation, which is, "Okay, you could stand to lose a couple of pounds too."
Maybe I would go see my doctor more frequently if his office were easier to find. The hospital his office is in isn’t that hard to find. It’s a building that covers approximately fifty seven square acres and has more wings than a flock of birds or a corner bar in Buffalo. And that’s the problem: like almost all hospitals it’s a huge building, and for some reason the same architects behind old English hotels-the ones that have half floors and mysterious staircases that lead nowhere-also design hospitals. Maybe it’s because, like old English hotels, hospitals aren’t built all at once. They’ve been added onto gradually throughout the years and sometimes halfway through a renovation they’ll run out of money so they’ll build a wall where there was supposed to be a chiropody ward. This is why sometimes when you’re walking down a hallway in a hospital following signs that point you in the direction of, say, the doctors’ offices, you’ll go around a corner and find yourself in the back of the gift shop. It’s a useful way to keep the gift shop in business but it’s not very helpful when you have an appointment. When I was trying to find my way to my doctor’s office to keep my appointment I was at first thrilled to find a map right next to the elevators. And it had YOU ARE HERE clearly labeled on it, even though I already knew I was right next to the elevators. What baffled me-and this is absolutely true-is that nothing else on the map was labeled. All the map could tell me was that I was on one floor of a building with a lot of rooms. A map of North America with YOU ARE HERE printed underneath it would have been just as useful. About the only reassuring thing is that there were windows next to the elevators so I could look out and see trees and, on the other side of the trees, more windows.
This is one thing that differentiates hospitals from old English hotels: as far as I know no English hotel has trees growing right in the middle of it, but for some reason any hospital built in the last thirty years has to have a central open space with at least two trees struggling to get enough light to survive. At least the map reassured me I was in the right building, but what was really disconcerting was that when I asked someone who worked in the hospital where my doctor’s office was-this is also absolutely true-she had no idea. There are a lot of TV shows about doctors, and there are a lot of things about them that are completely unrealistic. For instance I think it’s incredibly unlikely that a group of doctors, nurses, or internists will manage every week to encounter medical conditions or emergencies that most doctors will never see in their lifetimes. It’s unlikely that doctors will ever have to deal with a three-hundred car pileup in which one of the crash victims has bubonic plague. On the other hand it could happen. And it’s unrealistic that every person who works in a hospital is not only habitually single but has sex with every other person who works in the hospital on a regular basis. It’s unlikely that a doctor is going to perform a splenectomy while simultaneously having sex with three interns, a nurse, and a janitor. But it could happen. But the next time I’m watching a drama about doctors and people rush through the hospital without ever having to stop and ask for directions or take at least two different elevators and a flight of stairs to get somewhere I’ll know that’s fiction. Because maybe doctors really do lead the incredibly exciting lives we’re led to believe. After all my doctor told me I was very healthy and that I’d probably be the most boring patient he’d have all day. And he meant that as a compliment. In the medical profession boring is good. I hope for my doctor’s sake that he has days where the biggest challenge he faces is finding his office.
There’s an old joke about an airplane spiraling to the ground right after the meals have been served. A passenger says, "If the crash doesn’t kill us this food will." While my recent experience leads me to believe that airline food hasn’t improved since Henny Youngman was a young man finding new and exotic cuisines does seem to be the whole reason for some people to travel. There are at least twenty different TV shows devoted to people who go off the beaten path in search of unusual local foods. I realize I’m slightly behind the curve on this and that many of these shows have been on so long the hosts are either running out of unusual places to go or they’re going in for coronary bypass surgery, which gives them an opportunity to say, "If the operation doesn’t kill me the hospital food will."
I wonder if these TV shows have created a whole travel culture of people who go to exotic places just for the food. Heck, I don’t have my own TV show and yet I am one of those people who likes to sample the local cuisine of wherever I am, whether it’s Suriname or Cincinnati. I’ve been known to drive friends and family nuts by insisting that, since we can eat at one of those chain places anywhere, we should try Rex’s Refried Reptile Ranch, with the hand-painted sign on the side of the road, and if we get intestinal parasites, hey, it’s all part of the adventure. Also, just for the heck of it, let’s pick up that hitchhiker with the hook and the eye patch who’s holding a sign that says, "Anywhere". In spite of this I understand why most people choose the same standard fast food chains when travelling. The benefit of fast food chains is they offer the same food at usually the same prices that can always be counted on to taste like mildly seasoned wet dog hair. Places off the beaten path are a risk, and sometimes you have to go way, way, way, way, way off the beaten path to get to them anyway, and when you’re headed to a specific destination it’s not always appealing or practical to want to make a side trip that may or may not lead you through an area where the only thing the radio will pick up is Dueling Banjos.
And not all fast food is bad, although I doubt any of us would consider it haute cuisine. Well, most of us did when we were kids. I remember being a kid and telling the woman at the register at McDonald’s to send my compliments to the chef. But kids don’t know any better. Heck, kids think Chef Boyardee is the pinnacle of epicureanism. Here’s a fun fact: Chef Boyardee’s real name was Ettore Boiardi. He used the phonetic spelling because he was concerned Americans who couldn’t find Italy on a map of southern central Europe would mispronounce his name Qadaffi, but that’s another story. I don’t mean to sound like a snob because there are times when I eat fast food–times even when I know of places off the beaten path that I like and where I won’t get intestinal parasites–because it’s the only thing I happen to be craving. I’ll do this in spite of having worked at a fast food restaurant one summer. Well, technically it wasn’t a fast food place, because it did have printed menus and people went in and sat down and their food was brought to their table by a waiter or waitress. But working behind the scenes I discovered everything that was served was either frozen or powdered. Including the lettuce that went out to the salad bar. When they learned where I worked people would ask me, "How do they make that wonderful gravy?" And I would say, "Well, they take the fifty-five pound bag of powdered gravy mix and dump it in the sink…" The desire to go off the beaten path is also, at heart, a desire to try something new and different, and you can do that even with fast food. For one thing they’re constantly changing their menus, or offering five different items for under $5, or ten items for under $10, and eventually I’m sure they’ll take pride in offering at least a hundred different items for under $100. As a slogan it beats "If nothing else kills you eating here will!"
Sometimes in science fiction or horror films, or in science fiction horror films, a character will be confronted, either through technological or supernatural means, with their worst fear. It’s an idea that goes back as far as Orwell’s 1984, although his hero, Winston Smith, gets a real cage full of rats strapped to his face, rather than being subjected to an induced hallucination or virtual reality simulation. The fears are almost always pretty standard: various creepy crawlies, being burned alive, or Mickey Rooney in a dress. And it’s almost always suggested that this is the person’s worst nightmare. Everything else they could presumably deal with, even things that make them really uncomfortable, but this one thing, we’re led to believe, is the one fear the person can’t handle. If it’s true, if most people really only have just one thing that scares them that much, then I think they’re pretty lucky. If I were in a situation like that I think the supernatural force would tear itself apart or the virtual reality machine would short out trying to narrow the results down to just one thing.
I’m not saying I live in a state of constant paralyzing fear, but there’s a lot out there to be afraid of. Type the word "fear" into Google and the number of results will give you a rough idea of how many things I’m afraid of. Yes, it’s true that there are some things I’m more afraid of than others. Even though ferrets creep me out I think if given a choice I’d rather pet a ferret, or even have a cage full of them strapped to my face, than be dangled out the window of the seventy-third floor of a skyscraper. Drowning scares me when I think about what it would be like, but I know it’s also not likely to happen to me. Once I rode a roller coaster and was in a state of constant paralyzing fear until the ride ended. The solution is simple: don’t ever ride roller coasters ever again. And I can walk right by a roller coaster without it bothering me the way, say, walking by the ferret cage at the pet store does. And context has a great effect on fear. In a dark room in the middle of the night a strange shape over in the corner can be absolutely terrifying until I turn on the lights and see it’s just the pants I left draped over a chair. Getting in my car to go to work is pretty dull. Getting in my car in the dark and remembering all those urban legends about someone hiding under the car with a knife and slashing the Achilles tendon of the driver or of a crazy person hiding in the back seat can be unsettling, but, as much as I’d like to use them as an excuse to take a day off from work, I’m not going to, especially when the "crazy person" turns out to be a pair of pants I left draped over the back seat.
Taking a shower isn’t scary. Taking a shower in the Bates Motel can downright unnerving. And I remember lots of stories I heard on camping trips that, around the campfire or in the darkness of the tent, were terrifying but which, by the light of day, seemed laughable. There were tales of the pig man, a guy who’d worked in a slaughterhouse and started drinking pigs’ blood until it turned him into a wild creature who roams the woods. There were tales of the man with a hook for a hand, of faceless people, of headless people, of whole campsites wiped out by Mickey Rooney in a dress. The story I remember most vividly, though, is one I heard on an overnight camping trip in a cave. I love caves. They are testaments to the staggering power of time. Deep underground, in vast spaces carved by water patiently working away at rock stalactites and stalagmites can grow to dizzying heights, and yet they’re so fragile their growth can be ended by a single touch of a human hand. Deep in caves there are crystalline walls of gypsum that have lasted so long in unchanging conditions that the heat of your body will cause them to shift and crack, and there are enormous crystal beams that surpass the length of a city block. Caves are also dark, which is what makes them an ideal place for scary stories. On this one camping trip, when my Scout troop had pulled out our sleeping bags and bedded down on the cave floor, one of the rangers who’d led us through the maze of tunnels told us about a man who’d gotten lost in the cave. The man, a ranger himself, had made the mistake every spelunker dreads and is supposed to be on constant guard against: he took a wrong turn. Trying to retrace his steps just led him deeper into the cave, to places where no search party could ever find him. His flashlight was dead in a matter of hours. In desperation he ate fungus from the cave walls and drank the blood of bats. He survived months, then years, becoming a creature of the cave. Once he came into a regularly toured area of the cave lit with electric lights and saw his reflection in a pool. He was naked, hairless, and his skin was now translucent, all his organs exposed. He found his way to a group of sleeping campers, and touched one of them on the neck, where the blood beats the strongest, and was about to bite when the boy awoke and scared him away.
A story like that should have kept me up half the night, but, for one thing, I was surrounded by fellow campers. If anyone was going to be bitten by a skinny vampiric cave man it was probably going to be Ritchie, who nobody liked and who was sleeping off by himself over at the far end of the room. For another I’d already had a private, quiet experience of terror that far surpassed any story. In caves there is a darkness deeper than anything we can experience on the surface world, and in every cave tour I’ve ever been on there’s always a moment when the guide insists on turning out all lights to experience the darkness. I’ve never been a fan of the dark. I slept with the lights on until I was…okay, sometimes when I’m alone I still sleep with the lights on. But for some reason on this particular caving trip my fear of the dark, just for a moment, went beyond just fear. All the lights went out and I felt I was falling upward. I felt there was nothing around me. It was, I thought, what death must be like. Philosophers can debate whether the world is real or merely our perception, but we are, each of us, a living consciousness. As contradictory as it may seem I had a sense of what the universe will be when the last light goes out and all is void. It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced, although, now, being unable to describe it, it doesn’t seem scary at all.
There’s a movement afoot in Britain to do away with expiration dates on food. On the surface this seems like it might be a boneheaded idea, but scratch just below the surface and it seems fairly reasonable. A lot of perfectly edible food gets thrown out because it’s past its expiration date. Yes, we should all be a little concerned about not rushing toward our own expiration date, but the chances of most foods turning lethal because they’re one day past the recommended date is pretty slim. I’ve had skim milk that was still perfectly drinkable three days after its expiration date, although I’ve also had whole milk that smelled like a bad case of athlete’s foot two days before its expiration date, although that might have had something to do with the fact that I pulled it out of the refrigerator in the morning and forgot to put it back until I got home from work. Then there’s 2% milk, which I prefer to stay away from, because no one’s ever been able to tell me what the other 98% is. Keep scratching at the plan to do away with expiration dates, though, and it goes back to seeming like a boneheaded idea.
Well, to be fair, it seems reasonable in some cases but not so reasonable in others. With something like bread, for instance, I think we can pretty well judge for ourselves whether it’s edible even without a date. If it’s still soft and still smells and looks like bread it’s probably still safe to eat. If you can hammer nails with it or if it’s got those white and pale blue blotches on it it’s time for it to go to the compost heap, or possibly the backyard of that creepy neighbor who never mows. The same is true of fruits and vegetables. I know some older people who won’t buy green bananas because they’re not sure they’ll be around to enjoy them by the time they’re ripe. Personally I think that’s being way too focused on your expiration date. There are better reasons than that to not buy green bananas. I won’t buy them because I don’t have the patience to wait for them to ripen, and unripe bananas taste, to me, like a lime crossed with asparagus. Not that I have anything against either limes or asparagus, but they’re two flavors that generally should be kept apart. My mother used to occasionally experiment with recipes, producing something unusual like bouillabaisse gumbo, which would taste terrible. When I turned my nose up at it she’d say, "You like everything that’s in this!" And I’d say, "Yeah, I also like oysters and butterscotch, but I don’t put them together," but that’s another story.
Lettuce is another good example. As long as it’s still crisp and green it doesn’t matter if it’s past its expiration date, although, in general, you shouldn’t be keeping fruits and vegetables around that long anyway. If they’re going bad before you eat them that’s poor planning on your part and it has nothing to do with whatever date the manufacturer stamped on them. If you’ve watched late night television you may have seen these magic keep-your-vegetables-fresh bags, which basically look like green-tinted plastic bags, and they’ll supposedly keep your lettuce fresh and crisp for six years even if you take it out of the refrigerator in the morning and forget to put it back until a decade later. I’m a little disturbed by those bags because the only thing I know that will also keep vegetables fresh for that long is landfills. You may have heard that, thanks to the compact, no-oxygen climate created deep in landfills scientists have been able to dig down into them and pull out fresh heads of lettuce that have been there since Eisenhower was president. I sometimes wonder if future archaeologists will find these and think, "What’s the purpose of this? Were these people collecting lettuce?" But expiration dates on other things do serve a purpose. Take eggs, for instance. Without expiration dates you might not know an egg has gone bad until you’ve cracked it open, and then it’s too late and your whole house smells like a landfill. And let’s not forget canned goods. A while back my wife and I cleaned out the pantry and I found a can of squid. I’m not sure why I bought a can of squid, although I’m sure I had a good reason at the time. Actually since the expiration date was from sometime when Eisenhower was president I think it may have been purchased by the house’s previous owners, or possibly even left there by one of the construction workers who built the house. And I’m grateful for that expiration date because otherwise I might have been tempted to open it, and I’m betting the smell of a rotten egg is pleasant compared to the smell of bad squid. Expiration dates also help grocery stores keep track of what they need to throw out, or at least they do if the grocery store employees are paying attention.
I remember going grocery shopping with my mother once. She picked up a container of sour cream that was over a week past its expiration date. She mentioned this to the kid who was stocking the shelves, and he said he’d go get the manager. The manager then came out and started telling my mother that expiration dates were arbitrary and meaningless and that the sour cream was probably just fine, and that she needed to find something better to do than waste his time. On the surface and at every other level this was an incredibly boneheaded thing to say, not to mention rude, uncalled for, and inappropriate. And my mother proceeded to explain that to him in words that even he could understand and at a volume that guaranteed it was heard by everyone in the store. The sour cream, meanwhile, had mutated into a whole new life form and crawled away. I understand it’s still living in Waukegan where it works in a bank, and has a pretty nice lettuce collection.
Originally Invasion of the Body Snatchers was supposed to end with Dr. Miles Benell, played by Kevin McCarthy in the middle of the freeway screaming, “You’re next! You’re next!”, but the studio executives worried that this ending was too depressing and would turn audiences off. Normally when the stuffed shirts want to monkey around with a story to make it, in their opinion, more commercially viable they ruin it. You may know that executives wanted to give Terry Gilliam’s Brazil a radically different ending, which would have wrecked it, and I’ve heard that one executive thought they should cut “that rainbow song” from The Wizard of Oz. Maybe that wouldn’t have hurt the film, but it’s hard to imagine it with the first song being “Ding, Dong, The Wicked Witch Is Dead” instead of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”.
In the case of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, though, the normally brainless brass got it right. The opening and closing with Dr. Miles Bennell in a hospital insisting that he’s not crazy nicely frames the story, and makes it even more effective. With Bennell’s narration the only thing we have to go on it would have been easy to dismiss his story as a hallucination, or all just a dream. And what was supposed to be an optimistic ending–hey, there really are giant pods from space being trucked all over the country!–ended up being darker and more disturbing than a man in the middle of the freeway screaming his head off.
There’s been a lot of debate about what Invasion Of The Body Snatchers “means”, and I’ve heard contradictory statements about it being intended as a criticism of both communism and the anti-communist hysteria of the period, and either one or both is possible. Both Kruschev and McCarthy used fear of the other to distract people from the real problems facing the world, and to gain and hold on to power. But the beauty of the story is it’s not an allegory for anything specific, and is open to broad interpretation. Invasion of the Body Snatchers could easily be a metaphor for any major change that happens quickly and seems to rob a person or a group of people or a place of what makes them unique and special.
To me it’s about urban sprawl. It’s about what I saw happen to the neighborhood where I grew up, where tree-covered hills were shaved down to bare dirt so rows of cookie-cutter condos could march across them. There had been woods there, thick and green in the summer and where, in the winter, when the trees were all bare I could see one little shack leaning sideways at the top of a hill. I never knew if someone lived in that shack, far from the roads, or if they ever came out to look in the direction of my house at the same time I was looking at theirs. All that was cut down to be replaced, seemingly overnight, by a building boom that produced uniform real estate that sat empty for months–or in some cases years. And I’ve seen it happen again and again, recently not far from where I live now. There used to be a wooded area I would drive by on a regular basis. Since it was private property I never saw anything past the old rock wall, held together by gravity, that separated it from the street. It was an old farm that had gone back to the wild, and was probably like most wild areas you find in middle Tennessee: a few oaks, maybe a tulip poplar or two. There may have been some exposed areas where rocks that hadn’t been touched by the ocean in millions of years bloomed sea foam lichens, where moss and passion vine and star flowers grew. And lots of cedar trees. Even from the road I could see the cedars. According to the Cherokee legend of the beginning of the world all the plants and animals were tested by having to stay awake for seven days and seven nights. The cedars, and all evergreens, were the only trees who were able to stay awake for the whole period, and their reward is that they keep their leaves through the winter. Also lost, or displaced by the construction, were the animals: squirrels, field mice, lizards, snakes, raccoons, hawks, possums, buzzards, foxes, and even coyotes and deer. An amazing variety can thrive in a small area, and now that it’s gone the coyotes are sniffing around our backyards and trash cans and deer come into yards and run across busy streets. And there are also the owls, who, like the evergreens in the Cherokee legend, stayed awake for seven days and nights and feed on those who sleep. Some nights I hear the owls speak to each other behind our house, or, one night, in the tree right outside the front window. The places the owls have to hunt are becoming smaller and smaller, as is their number. In spite of the similarities between the wild areas each of these places is unique in a way that’s undone when megastores and strip malls move in. And while unused real estate can be restored or renovated it’s harder to make a place go back to its former wild state. Nature can be persistent, but we can also do irreparable damage to the environment, and extinction is forever. The Cherokees didn’t live in this area but only used it for hunting. Most of them were willing to give some of the land to European settlers in a pre-Revolutionary War treaty, but according to some sources a Cherokee leader named Dragging Canoe called this “dark and bloody ground”. He didn’t want to give this land up to the Europeans. Perhaps he saw them as aliens–emotionless aliens from another place who would displace or destroy what he knew and valued, even though Cherokee legends say nothing about chainsaws, bulldozers, or parking lots.
When the owner of the small piece of farmland gone to seed died the residents of the community had little warning about what was coming. Big decisions about our neighborhood were made by outsiders while we slept. It had been a buffer between the neighborhood and the highway, but now if you drive through there you can see the endless string of cars and trucks even over the giant chain stores that went up where there used to be trees. The farmland used to soak up the rainwater that now has to be collected in deep concrete trenches that run like scars alongside the road. And it hasn’t stopped there. The success of strip malls and shopping centers breeds more until opposite sides of the street start to mirror each other. I’ve actually heard it argued that it’s not fair to make people drive as little as two miles, favoring the proliferation of superstores. Even though plans to develop even more of the old farmland that’s further down the road have been beaten back I fear it’s only a matter of time. Already there are “For Sale” signs in the yards of homes in the neighborhood that include the ominous words “Commercial potential.” I’m not opposed to progress, but all too often I think what’s called “progress” is really shortsighted greed, which is the engine that drives the cycles of boom and bust that in the long term benefit only a few and harm many.
Toward the end of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers Miles Benell and a woman he’s fallen in love with, Becky Driscoll, are chased by a mob of former neighbors, now pod people. In other monster films the monster is the minority, an evil other that people must work collectively to overcome. In Invasion Of The Body Snatchers the mob is the monster. Miles and Becky escape by hiding in a cave, but are drawn out by beautiful music. Becky says, “Miles, I’ve never heard anything so beautiful. It means we’re not the only ones left who know what love is.” In fact the music comes from a radio in a truck parked outside a greenhouse where the pods are being mass-produced. As an announcer comes on the truck driver simply switches off the radio, leaving an eerie, heavy silence. Love and beauty, like everything else, have become commodities: transportable and disposable. And they have to be imported from somewhere else.
The film ends by returning to Miles Benell in police custody. Another police officer comes in and announces that a truck full of giant pods has turned over on the highway. Suddenly the ravings of an insane man are confirmed, and one of the doctors who was measuring Benell for a straitjacket picks up a phone and starts asking to speak to the governor, the National Guard, and Washington. Benell leans back against the wall. His fear has turned to exhaustion. This ending was meant to reassure us that everything would turn out all right, but I think we, like Benell, are overwhelmed by a quiet sense of futility. Epidemics are difficult to stop once they’ve started, and in this epidemic the fatality is the ability to feel. Since feelings can be mimicked distinguishing the pod people from the real people is almost impossible. Jack Finney’s original novel The Body Snatchers opens with the warning that the story “will not be neatly tied up at the end, everything satisfactorily resolved.” It could be that while we slept the seeds of our destruction have been sewn.
It is, of course, my favorite movie, and it doesn’t always make me so gloomy. Some late nights when I’m home alone I pull my copy of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers off the shelf and lose myself in the story, in the wonderfully sweeping music, in the creepy greenhouse scene where the pods pop open and froth, in the moment of pure horror when Miles realizes he’s lost Becky, along with everyone else, to the pods. Then, once the credits roll, I turn over and go into deep, dreamless sleep.
This week’s Freethinkers Anonymous is also available as a video essay:
Folklore has always fascinated me. I love old tales, but I’m especially interested in stories of creatures that inhabit the shadowy realm between our world and the next. Their origins are as mysterious as the creatures themselves, but I sometimes speculate as to where stories of certain creatures came from. Take banshees, for instance. It’s not much of a leap to imagine people huddling down on a bitterly cold winter night and thinking the howling wind was a living thing, and on such a night if someone died in the dark hours between twilight and daybreak it wouldn’t be hard to blame the wind. How the banshee became a beautiful woman is a bit more of a mystery, although perhaps the explanation lies a bit closer to home.
Ray Bradbury has a story called "The Banshee" about a young scriptwriter who’s teased and tormented by an older film director at the director’s Irish country home, where they both have an encounter with a banshee. The director’s name in the story is John, and the story was based on Bradbury’s real experience with working with John Huston, who subjected Bradbury to everything from jokes to emotional abuse while Bradbury was working on the screenplay for Moby Dick. One night at Huston’s house Bradbury turned the tables on Huston, telling the director there was a girl out in the woods and that she wanted to take Huston away. The director, jokester that he was, turned out to be pretty superstitious and was unnerved. So Bradbury got revenge twice: first in real life and a second time in fiction. Mean-spirited as it is I do understand the kind of satisfaction Bradbury must have felt. Although I was never able to exact such direct revenge I did have a similar feeling once, following an encounter with something similar to a banshee. My family regularly went down to Florida where we’d stay in a house my grandfather had left my parents. On one occasion one of my uncles and one of my cousins joined us. This cousin and I were avid science fiction fans and for reasons I don’t exactly remember he and I were both reading the same book at the same time. Well, not exactly. I’d read it while he was doing something else and he’d read it when I was doing something else. Except he was a faster reader than I was, and he was always giving away major plot points.
My cousin was one of those people who was book-smart but completely clueless about everything else, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but his obliviousness made him kind of a jerk. "Oh man," he’d say, "you won’t believe what happens on page two-sixteen." At one point I finally snapped, "Yeah? Is it anything like the shut-your-big-yap that happened on page one thirty-two?" And because he was oblivious he said, "I don’t remember that. So, what happens is…" And then he raised his voice and followed me around the house to make sure I could still hear him even though I had my fingers in my ears, was going "la-la-la-la", and walking away from him. That wouldn’t have been so bad, though, if I hadn’t had to worry about finding my place in the book every time I got the chance to pick it up again. Even though my cousin was well past the parts I hadn’t read yet for reason I never understood he always took out my bookmarks and threw them away while he was reading the book. I explained to him what the purpose of a bookmark was and he’d said, "Oh yeah," and then kept throwing mine away. In frustration I did something I’d normally never do to any book-I dog-eared the pages where I’d stopped reading. My cousin, sharing my respect for books, would unfold the page corners. How he found them I don’t know, but he still left me to try and figure out where I’d left off when I finally got the book away from him. Anyway, this was an older house with plumbing that hadn’t been updated since the Victorian era. Most bathtubs that have a shower have a lever that you turn or a knob that you pull to make the shower come on, and in most of them all you have to do is turn off the water to make the knob or lever go back to its original position so the next person to turn on the water doesn’t get their head soaked by the shower.
The bathtub in this house, though, had a sticky lever or knob so it was very important to remember to turn it back off after you were done with your shower. Except I kept forgetting to do this, and it didn’t seem to be a big deal because nobody complained. Then, the last day, while we were packing up and getting ready to go, my mother announced that she was going to clean the bathtub. She went in the bathroom and turned on the water, and a strange, wailing cry went up, a plaintive yet angry sound that seemed to circle the house and must have reverberated up and down the street, striking fear into the hearts of Florida’s retirees. My mother stormed out of the bathroom, water dripping from her hair. For some reason the rest of us were all gathered in the living room, so we witnessed a strange and extraordinary thing. My mother stood in the middle of the living room and her whole body glowed with energy. She lifted three feet off the floor, and darkness radiated from her as her whole body turned crimson while her eyes burned white with rage and her hair stood out in every direction, forming a dark halo around her head. When she spoke it was with a deep, guttural voice that caused the floor to vibrate. "Who left the shower on in the bathroom?" she asked. We were all too terrified to speak. Then she raised her arm and pointed with a long, sharp talon and said, "IT WAS YOU!" And I would have died on the spot if she hadn’t instead pointed at my cousin, who, that morning, took a shower after I did. My cousin collapsed in a heap on the floor, and then spent the next half hour scrubbing the bathtub himself while I finished packing and finally finished the book. The next summer we visited my uncle at his house, and my cousin was still kind of a jerk, so I dog-eared pages in all of his books.
Bonus: If you enjoyed this tale of terror I hope you’ll also enjoy this tale from the original American master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe:
We’re always told you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but the fact is if you’re not familiar with an author or a particular book a cover can still draw your attention and make you pick up a book you might have passed by otherwise. Still a cover by itself isn’t going to make you buy a book or check it out from the library. That’s why they have those blurbs on the backs, the sort from various critics you’ve never heard of or magazines or newspapers you never read, that say things like, "Once the check the author sent me cleared I found this book to be the greatest work of literature since Hamlet." Or praise from the author’s friends, even though you know they’re probably all really thinking, "Finally he’ll shut up about no one wanting to publish his book."
But it’s rarely the one-sentence recommendation from a complete stranger that makes us want to open the book–or, for that matter, buy a copy of a movie. If anything nudges us from curiosity to being willing to get out our wallets it’s the plot summary on the back cover of the book, or whatever case or box the movie is in. This isn’t like buying a cookie where flashy packaging and the promise of chocolatey or caramelly or coconutty or tripey goodness is enough to win us over. A book or movie is a larger financial investment, and an intellectual investment of at least a couple of hours. I had an uncle once tell me that people who work nine to five jobs are chickens while people like writers are pigs. I’m sure he was speaking as someone who’d met plenty of professional writers, but he was actually making a subtler metaphor. People who work day jobs, he believed, were like chickens: they lay their eggs and move on with their lives. How salaried employees fit in here is a mystery, but it’s something to think about the next time you bring home a bucket of fried chicken for dinner.
Anyway, writers or other professionals are according to him, like pigs: they offer their whole lives up to their career. Because, you know, ambitious piglets often stop suckling long enough to say, "You know what I want to be when I grow up? Prosciutto." I don’t know whether he was trying to make a point about writers and other artists being supposedly more dedicated than people who pursue more traditional, and sometimes more stable, careers, or whether he was trying to dissuade me from ambitions of being a writer. Either way I don’t think it was as simple as he was trying to make it out to be. There are some very dedicated people who work day jobs, and I suspect there are some people who write for a living who work an eight to five shift five days a week and dream of working in accounts receivable in an office or of being a fast food restaurant manager. Okay, maybe not, but I don’t think the people who write the blurbs for the backs of books are doing what they’ve always wanted to do. And then there are the people who write those film plot summaries for newspapers, magazines, or, for that matter, the backs of the cases the films are packaged in. I’ve always wondered who writes those.
A summer of working for a temp agency opened my eyes to the not very profound fact that many things we take for granted–from display stands in grocery stores to perfume samples in magazines–are made and placed there by someone. There are a lot of jobs that simply go unnoticed. But I bet the people who write film plot summaries think they’ve got a pretty sweet gig. Maybe I’m naïve but I think that has one of the greatest jobs in the world. Watching all those films would be a definite plus. Yes, that would mean sitting through some really awful movies, but a day of watching bad movies beats a bad day at work. Then, as an added bonus, there’s the special challenge of having to sum up the film itself in sometimes fewer than a hundred words. And I can just imagine the training they go through, learning to make even the most awful films sound entertaining and how to avoid phrases like "terminally putrid" and "I can’t believe I watched the entire thing." And there’s the challenge: they have to be concise and to the point, but also make people want to purchase, or at least go see, a movie. I once read a short blurb for a movie in a newspaper that said it was the story of how a woman surprises a man by moving in with him after only one date, "with wacky results." That last phrase has stuck with me because I’m pretty sure among the writers "with wacky results" translates as "they couldn’t pay me enough money to watch this entire film."
What really made me think about this was the back of a two-movie DVD I picked up because it was only a dollar. Actually it was originally a dollar, but it was in a half-off bin. You can’t even get a really good cookie for fifty cents, and besides, each movie would only be an intellectual investment of a little over seventy minutes. The summary for the first movie on the DVD, Revolt Of The Zombies (a 1936 zombie film) was very straightforward and professional-sounding, the sort of summary you’d read in your guide or in a newspaper. The other film was called Vengence [sic] Of The Zombies. Its summary was more like a book report written at the last minute by a third-grader on the bus. Okay, I take that back, because it’s unfair to third-graders. Here it is in its entirety, and I swear I’m quoting this exactly:
"These two grave robbers are robbing a tomb when they get trapped inside. Then this voodoo guy shows up and brings the body to life and it kills them. The dead body’s cousin (I think) goes to this seance, then goes to a cursed house to visit this guru."
It’s neither concise nor to the point, but it fulfills the purpose of making me want to buy the movie, even without knowing anything else about it. Even if it had been as much as a dollar I’m sure I still would have wanted to buy it, if only to see what this voodoo guy looked like, especially since his appearance clearly had wacky results.
There are a few books I love so much I have to go back and reread them every few years. One of those is E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. I remember the first summer I read Charlotte’s Web. In those days there was only a handful of television stations and one of them was required to show the Hannah Barbera cartoon adaptation, which, amazingly, is pretty faithful to the original, during every major holiday, so I’d seen it at least two dozen times. I still liked the book better. I picked up the book the same summer I found a huge garden spider–Argiope aurantia if you want to get scientific about it–under the deck. That whole summer I’d catch small bugs and throw them into the spider’s web and watch with fascination and a little horror as she’d grab these gifts and wrap them in silk, to be eaten later.
Fortunately I wasn’t a budding serial killer. I’m just a guy who really loves spiders. I get that a lot of people don’t like spiders and I’m not going to try changing people’s minds, but I challenge anyone to read Charlotte’s Web and not come away with at least some appreciation of spiders, and even if you still don’t like them I can’t imagine how you could not fall in love with Charlotte. Wilbur, of course, gave me a greater appreciation of pigs, or, to be more specific, a greater appreciation of bacon, pork chops, and sausage, because he’s so annoying. It’s even worse in the cartoon, where Wilbur makes Spongebob Squarepants look stoic, but even reading the book there were times when I thought, "If that damn pig starts crying again I hope they take him to the slaughterhouse before the fair." Charlotte, on the other hand, was what many spiders, particularly the web builders, are: a nurturing mother. It may seem a little strange that a spider would ultimately be Wilbur’s savior, especially since a spider, of all creatures, should understand that certain animals will end up on the farm’s dinner table, although maybe Charlotte saved Wilbur as a way of improving the spider world’s karma. Or maybe it’s just because, as I said, she’s a nurturing mother. Spiders spend the entire summer building webs and catching insects in preparation for the next generation. They devote their whole lives and give everything they have to children they will never know.
Charlotte is, in a way, mirrored by Wilbur’s initial savior, the girl Fern Arable. By the book’s end, though, Fern is on the cusp of becoming a young woman, and this is where they diverge. Charlotte will spin her webs, lay her eggs, and, when summer ends, she will die. Even though in winter Fern reminisces about a moment at the state fair she shared with a boy at the top of the Ferris wheel–which looks like a giant web–her future isn’t as clearly defined. She may or may not marry, she may leave the farm, and she could go on to any career–although veterinarian seems most likely. Charlotte, by the way, is mostly referred to as a barn spider, but White knew his spiders, and, if you want to get scientific about it, she’s an Aranea cavatica, which I think is a lovely name for such a lovely animal. This is another area where the cartoon version falls short: in reality these spiders are quite striking, colored black and orange with speckles of white or yellow, but in the cartoon Charlotte’s a dull, uniform gray. With only two eyes. Okay, I understand giving her six or eight eyes would have been too creepy. Anyway, every year in my yard or somewhere around my house, especially toward the end of summer or in early fall when they’ve gotten big and are ready to lay their eggs, I find at least one Aranea cavatica. One year there was one on the old television antenna up on the roof, and I wondered if she picked up signals and, if so, how often she wished I’d change the channel. I like to think of them as Charlotte’s great-great-great-great and so on grandchildren, which they may very well be. As much as I love seeing them I always feel a little sad about it. Or maybe more than a little sad, especially when I find them after they’ve built and filled their egg sacs, and are too tired to feed themselves. I have to admit I can’t be too hard on Wilbur for crying in the face of his own imminent demise because there were very few times when I was a kid that I didn’t bawl my eyes out over the death of Charlotte, whether in the cartoon or the book. It’s all part of nature’s cycle, but that doesn’t make it any easier to accept that where there’s life there must also be death. As sad as it makes the book though I think any child would feel cheated if Charlotte had lived happily ever after. Even though Wilbur lives to a ripe old age even he doesn’t live forever.
Charlotte used the gifts she had to make the world a better place. Her reward was that she is loved, and unlike so many spiders she doesn’t die alone. And Wilbur does what he can to ensure her legacy. It seems strange for death to be such a major theme of a children’s book, and to be dealt with so bluntly, and, in fact, there were plenty of critics who didn’t like White’s book because of that. In a letter E.B. White said to a friend, "I am working on a new book about a boa constrictor and a litter of hyenas. The boa constrictor swallows the babies one by one, and the mother hyena dies laughing." Needless to say he never actually wrote that book but, you know, if he had I think I’d go back and reread it every few years, and every time I’m sure I’d laugh until I cried.
