I don’t think anyone who read Stephen King regularly in the
80s and 90s, when his fame and popularity were arguably at their peak and
nearly everything he published was being adapted to the screen, ever wondered
why no one had made a movie of Gerald’s Game yet. I don’t say that
because I consider the novel “unfilmable,” which is a label that has been
retroactively applied to it now that it’s been filmed, the context being “Oh I
guess it wasn’t unfilmable!” I say
that because I think most people would have agreed that a movie of Gerald’s
Game probably wouldn’t make any money. One of King’s shortest novels,
it’s about a woman named Jesse Burlingame who travels with her husband Gerald
to a remote cabin for a secluded vacation, one of the aims being to put some
spice back into their marriage. Gerald has expressed interest in handcuffing
Jesse; Jesse has agreed with a mixture of openness and reluctance. Once this
game begins, it soon turns too weird for Jesse, who wants to stop, but Gerald
presses on. She kicks him away (in the balls, I think), he has a heart attack,
and dies on the floor at the foot of the bed. Jesse, topless, is still
handcuffed, and they’re not gag cuffs – they’re the real thing.
So there’s the extensive nudity, which most male readers,
such as myself, probably assumed was completely unavoidable but which most
actresses would reasonably balk at, and then there’s the fact that, while
things sure do happen in Gerald’s Game, at least half of it
would have to focus on a single person cuffed to a bed, struggling vainly to
free herself. Entirely filmable, but maybe not a big draw for audiences.
Well, if memory serves, the novel was once in the hands of
George Romero, who obviously never got it off the ground, but someone was
thinking about it anyway, and now here it is, done, by Mike Flanagan. I really
like everything I’ve seen from Flanagan, especially Oculus, and including Hush,
his 2016 thriller that, like Gerald’s Game, premiered on Netflix.
Jesse wears a slip the whole time, so there’s that problem solved.
Starring Carla Gugino as Jesse, Flanagan’s film finds very
basic, very effective solutions to the “problems” inherent in turning this book
into a movie (although let’s be honest: a film less worried about alienating
audiences wouldn’t have needed these solutions). In addition to, you know,
letting the lead actress wear clothes, Flanagan also keeps Bruce Greenwood, who
plays Gerald, in the mix by having him appear to Jesse after her psyche begins
to crack a little. He’s there represent the doubting, frightened side of Jesse
whose inclination is, perhaps, to give up and die. That would certainly be
easier. The Gerald part of her brain wants to encourage this. Flanagan also
allows Gugino to get up and walk around by having her appear to herself, as her
stronger, smarter side, who helps her physical self solve immediate problems, like
where to find water. This is perhaps an obvious way to overcome certain
cinematic obstacles, but they work, and they fit neatly with King’s feminist
themes.
They also keep the film moving, and energized. Gugino and
Greenwood are terrific, and though much of the film takes place in one room,
Flanagan manages to make Jesse’s situation seem harrowing and terribly
uncomfortable without making the film itself seem hemmed in. Gerald’s
Game is given further room to expand by including flashbacks to Jesse’s
childhood, to a day when her family was on vacation, and her father (Henry
Thomas) molested her. This is a horrifying scene (it’s also the kind of thing
that makes me feel bad for the actor playing the molester; this can’t have been
fun for Thomas to play), and is the first strong evidence that Flanagan is
going to adapt Gerald’s Game, goddamnit. This is underlined vigorously in a
scene involving an attempt by Jesse to escape from her handcuffs, using a
method that can only be described as painfully disgusting. I read Gerald’s
Game when it came out in 1992 -- that’s twenty-five years ago -- yet I
remember this scene from the book vividly (as I do the flashback with Jesse and
her father). But reading it’s one thing; you don’t really expect to ever see it. Mike Flanagan’s previous films
haven’t leaned very heavily on gore; even when he employs it, he’s used a light
touch. This scene in Gerald’s Game is one of the
ghastliest things I’ve ever witnessed in a film that didn’t involve actual
animal slaughter.
The ending is a problem. I think it ends the same way the
novel does, though for whatever reason that part of the novel is hazy to me
now. Anyway, I can’t remember how it plays on the page, or what I thought of it
at the time (also I was a teenager, so who gives a fuck what I thought of it).
Tonally, though, it’s off – part of that is Gugino, who has always had a side
to her performances that evokes a form of classic Hollywood acting – she’d have
been at home making movies in the 1950s, and I have a feeling she knows that
very well. But fundamentally, the idea for the ending is a bad one. A little
bit of uncertainty never hurt anyone.
* *
* *
I’ve been wanting to see Tibor Takacs’s I, Madman since I was a
kid and I saw the VHS cover featuring a bizarre black-clad, pale-faced, masked
figure looming over Jenny Wright who was just trying to read a book, for God’s
sake. I was struck by the title (I didn’t yet know that the “I-comma-something”
construction was a cliché), and by Jenny Wright, let’s be honest, but mostly by
the apparent murderer. His particular type of sinister visual design struck a
chord that I can’t break down, but I find it compelling.
In the film, Randall William Cook, the actor in question,
plays two characters, one, Dr. Kessler, only very briefly, in the
story-within-a-story opening. But in that case, the design looks deliberately
Nosferatu-esque (honestly he looks more like Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck in Shadow
of the Vampire). This is fitting, as I, Madman very consciously
wants to play off thrillers of the past; Hitchcock is evoked very blatantly (so
is DePalma, less blatantly, but the acting class that Jenny Wright attends
reminded me of a similar scene in Body Double, and one of her
classmates looks like Ken Lockman in Dressed to Kill), as are
non-cinematic horrors, like the pulp fiction Wright’s Virginia reads. The plot
actually revolves around books: Virginia is an aspiring actress in L.A. who
works in a used book store. She loves a book called Much of Madness, More of Sin by
an old pulp writer named Malcolm Brand. He wrote one other novel called I,
Madman, which comes into Virginia’s possession under mysterious
circumstances. As she reads it, the killer in that novel – who removes parts of
his victim to replace missing parts of his own head and face – apparently
appears in the real world, committing similar crimes. The victims are people
Virginia knows.
And it’s a fun time at the pictures, although I wish the
plot I described above didn’t use as its basic structure that of a police
investigation. Virginia’s boyfriend (Clayton Rohner) is the cop investigating
these crimes, and for some reason Takacs and/or screenwriter David Chaskin
decided that some amount of realism should probably be injected into this
intentionally unrealistic horror film via this route, but all I could think was
that time would be better spent with Virginia investigating this herself. And
it’s not as though this idea actually achieves the apparent goal of grounding a
film that shouldn’t be grounded in the first place (though there is one scene
involving a police sketch artist that seems closer to the reality of that
process that most such scenes); the most relatable thing about I,
Madman is the bit about becoming obsessed by a writer who only wrote
two books, and one of them is easy to find and the other is a giant pain in the
ass.
* *
* *
Yesterday I cracked open my copy of a horror anthology
edited by Ellen Datlow called Nightmare Carnival, because who
wouldn’t want to read stories from a book with that title this month? I only
read one, as it turned out – I skipped directly to “Skullpocket” by Nathan
Ballingrud. Ballingrud is the author of the novella The Visible Filth, which
I haven’t read yet, and the story collection North American Lake Monsters,
which I have, and which made my Best Books list a few years back. “Skullpocket”
is quite different from the stories in that collection, which placed their
horror, supernatural or not, within the recognizable lives of everyday men and
women. By comparison, “Skullpocket” is a phantasmagoria of outsized creatures
and images, and the horror is huge, immersive, and consuming.
The story is about three carnivals, and a man named Jonathan
Wormcake. This man is a ghoul – an actual ghoul – who, when he was a boy, with
other young ghouls on a trip aboveground, infiltrated a human carnival called
the Cold Water Fair. This was in 1914, and something terrible happened there,
something that led Jonathan Wormcake, as an adult, to take control of the town –
unofficially, and benevolently, but unquestionably. All of this is either told
to the reader or hinted at in flashback. The creature telling this story is Brain
in a Jar 17, more familiarly known as Uncle Digby. He’s telling the story of
the 1914 Cold Water Fair to a group of fourteen children who have been invited
and compelled to Wormcake’s home for the Seventieth Annual Skullpocket Fair
(these children were invited not by Wormcake, but by the Maggot). On this
anniversary, the very old Jonathan Wormcake is expected to die, and so he is
being attended to and interviewed by our narrator, a nameless priest in the
Church of the Maggot. The priest found his calling after being one of the
children invited by the Maggot to the First Annual Skullpocket Fair in 1944. It
is this priest’s job to make sure that Jonathan Wormcake dies pure. What that
means is eventually revealed. Also, “skullpocket” is a game that is played by
ghouls, and which is also explained.
All of this, I imagine, makes “Skullpocket” sound almost
like a work of whimsy, a fun-scary story, possibly for children. The veneer is
intentional on Ballingrud’s part, possibly because children, and their
excitement in the face of knowingly artificial horror, is central to what’s
going on here. But “Skullpocket” is horrible, and horribly violent, in a very
adult way. If the story is, in its way, about children, it is also about how
adults look back on childhood, and children. In addition to the 1914 carnival,
we’re also told about what happened at the 1944 Skullpocket Carnival, as a way
of telling the reader what’s about to happen during this seventieth iteration.
It’s beautifully structured, with 1914 and 1944 alternating information, and
existing, in their telling, now, with Uncle Digby and the priest, and Jonathan
Wormcake waiting to die.
The most fascinating thing about “Skullpocket,” though, as
bleak and blood-spattered as it is, is how it is sort of an anti-Thomas Ligotti
story. Ligotti, of course, writes from the point of view that all human life
was a catastrophic mistake. The tragedy of at least two of the characters in “Skullpocket,”
however, isn’t that they were born, but that by the end they know that the
nihilism on which they’ve based their lives is no longer supportable. This is a
hard and terrible world, but it’s only terrible because we know it’s good. This
is the basis of the horror in “Skullpocket.”
No comments:
Post a Comment