Tainted Love.
Source: Wikipedia
I have mixed feelings about a new Creature From The Black Lagoon movie. On the one hand it seems like everything these days is a reboot, remake, or remix. On the other hand there’s a belief that there are a limited number of stories to be told and that everything already is a reboot, remake, or remix, the prime example being Shakespeare’s plays which were based on other sources, and he didn’t even pay royalties. And on the third hand, since we’re talking about monsters and anything’s possible, because I’ve always loved all things aquatic and went through a long phase of wanting to be a marine biologist like Jacques Cousteau, before I realized that job was already taken by this guy named Jacques Cousteau, I grew up fascinated by The Creature, even before I saw the original movies. Because the Saturday matinee on the UHF station mostly stuck to various versions of Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, with occasional appearances by The Wolf Man and a few disappearances of The Invisible Man, I even wrote my own Creature story. It was loosely based on Jaws, although when one of the crew says, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat” they actually go back to land and get a bigger boat, which just gives The Creature more time to wreak havoc, though it’s good because it’s ultimately discovered he’s going after polluters. I was an environmentally conscious kid, and also influenced by Namor Of Atlantis, but that’s another story.
There’s also already been a modern retelling of The Creature From The Black Lagoon: Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape Of Water. Not only did I really enjoy it for its lovely, strange, and dark story but, in spite of only being inspired by, not connected to, the original three films, it seemed to pick up where the original three films left off. Although only very loosely connected the three Creature films still, taken together, tell a story of first love, maturity and marriage, and finally love turned toxic.
The first in the series, the 1954 The Creature From The Black Lagoon, has The Creature as the villain, but there’s also a side story of scientist David Reed and his girlfriend and fellow scientist Kay Lawrence. She’s the one who’s kidnapped by The Creature after he sees her swimming above him. Like a lot of classic monster films there wasn’t any interest in exploring why The Creature would find a human attractive, or even interesting, but what stands out for me is she’s resisted David’s pressure to marry because she wants a career of her own. The Creature is a not-so-subtle metaphor for the pressure put on women to be dragged down.
The sequel, coming out just a year later, was Revenge Of The Creature, with a whole new couple, animal psychologist Clete Ferguson, and his assistant, ichthyology student Helen Dobson. Clete and Helen fall in love and The Creature becomes a surrogate child. Clete is the father figure, disciplining The Creature with a cattle prod while Helen is more nurturing. And because they thought it would be a good idea to keep The Creature in an oceanarium open to the public it escapes and goes on a rampage. Things turn Oedipal—another story thrown into the mix—when The Creature kidnaps Helen and Clete has to come to the rescue.
The last of the original films, The Creature Walks Among Us, gets a lot of hate, and, I admit, deserves it for the ridiculousness of the Creature miraculously developing lungs so it can breathe air, but I like how dark it gets. Also it’s the only one that makes The Creature sympathetic. Finally it’s the humans who are the villains. We get a whole new couple. This time it’s Dr. William Barton—no relation to the real life engineer Otis Barton who designed the first bathysphere—and his trophy wife Marcia. Marcia, Marcia, Marcia is willful, independent, and enjoys shooting at sharks. She attracts The Creature’s attentions when she accompanies the men on a dive. That’s the extent of its interest in her, though. The reduced budget of the third film created a story focusing mainly on the human relationships, and making them more complicated than ever. Barton murders another man who made a pass at Marcia, not caring that she wasn’t interested, then tries to blame The Creature. Somehow aware of the danger it’s in The Creature escapes its cage, kills Barton, and goes to the sea, never to return.
There were plans for at least one more film that would introduce a female Creature, which could have been interesting, but it never made it past the early stages and it would take sixty-one years for The Shape Of Water to make romance central to the story, keeping the third film’s sympathy, and even love for, something not human.
Del Toro’s film seems like a fitting end, and yet relationships are as strange and ever-changing as the sea itself, and if there is a new Creature From The Black Lagoon, I’d like to find out what it says about who, and what, we love, and how love connects us to all life.
There have been more lightning bugs this year than I can remember seeing in a long time. Last night I walked through the yard and lost count of how many there were, each one drawing a distinct J shape in the air as they lit up the darkness. And yet I always feel guilty when I see them because I remember how many I sent to their deaths when I was a kid. Not that I wanted to—there were just some things I didn’t understand, mainly that if you put a bunch of lightning bugs in a jar and leave it next to your bed overnight it doesn’t matter how many holes you punch in the lid. Unless the holes are big enough for them to get out. It’s something I only did a few times but still I think I should have learned the lesson after the first time I woke up to find a jar full of tiny corpses on my bedside table. That also didn’t stop me from performing some pretty disturbing science experiments, like the time I put a lightning bug in the freezer for one minute. When I pulled it out it had stopped moving so I ran outside to the air conditioner and held the lightning bug under the hot blast of air. After a minute or so—I didn’t think to time this part of the experiment—it revived and flew up into the air. So I caught it again and took it back to the freezer for two minutes. Again the air conditioner was able to revive it, although I might have gotten the same result if I’d just left it on the warm ground. At three minutes it took much longer to revive and, sensing I was at a crossroads with one divide leading to a possible career as a serial killer, I let the lightning bug go off into the night, hopefully to find a partner.
April 2023-Staff assembled in the conference room to mark the occasion of the 28th year of Freethinkers Anonymous and to try and answer the question, What are we doing here? There are a lot of excellent blogs out there on a wide variety of topics that, thankfully, are still going while others, sadly, have dropped off. If anything makes Freethinkers Anonymous distinctive it’s longevity. What started as a random assortment of jokes emailed to a distribution list has grown into something resembling an internet landfill. It predated and survived the dot-com boom and, like those early internet companies, has never had a plan, purpose, or profit. On this note everyone cheered and went back to work.
Having read several articles about New Year’s Resolutions over the years I’ve been able to coalesce all that I’ve learned into the following recommendations:
Deleted Scenes From A Christmas Carol, found in the archives at The Charles Dickens Museum, Portsmouth. Scholars presume these sections were removed by Dickens himself to maintain economy of the story. The pages were also only recently transcribed thanks to radiographic analysis. Earlier reading was impossible due to the pages being heavily stained with port wine.
We don’t know how he came to life. Greg said he thought it might be the combination of the charcoal pieces and the sunglasses we stuck on him. There was the pipe too. It was just a stinky old corncob pipe I’d stolen from my brother Mike’s room. He didn’t need it anymore since he got a new glass bong. Anyway that didn’t make sense. Randy said it had to be the hat because when we put that on him that’s when he started talking. It was a round black hat with a flat top. I think I’d seen one like it in old pictures of magicians or something, except this one had some silver stuff around it, like a small belt. That still didn’t make any sense. How could a hat bring a snowman to life? Karen thought it might have been some kind of chemical reaction from the pesticides they use on the vacant lot where we built him, and I agreed with her that had to be what did it. There was just no other explanation. It’s not like he just suddenly jumped to life as soon as we put the stuff on him. No, the first thing he did was sort of lean forward and we thought maybe we’d stacked his body up too high and I thought the hat would fall off but it didn’t. Then he leaned back and then forward again. Then he started talking.