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| Jay North, everybody |
The
highlight of the July 2019 issue of the Los
Angeles Review of Los Angeles (LAROLA,
to its familiars) is Will Bernardara Jr.'s "Jay North as He
Stands in Relation to Rage and the Tragedy Margin." This short
fiction provides a snippet from the life of Jay North, the actor who
played Dennis the Menace, as a grown man in 1980s Burbank. In
Bernadara Jr.'s imagining, North has been reduced to a shut-in's
life, and spends his days watching slasher films on VHS and eating
constant junk food (e.g. Dingdongs and Tostitos). Bernardara Jr.'s
fiction aptly captures the emptiness of child stardom post-childhood and,
more generally, that of the 1980s in the United States. The prose is
evocative from start to finish, though Bernardara Jr. occasionally goes
heavy-handed when representing Jay North's addled thoughts, leaning
heavily on all-caps descriptions and
psychotic-for-the-sake-of-psychotic visions. Sentences such as
"BABYLON BABIES [...] BURN YOUR FACES OFF WITH A BLOWTORCH"
abound. While more than a little bit silly, these images have a
somewhat jarring effect, which ultimately serve the atmosphere of the
piece, and so I make mention of these authorial decisions not as a
measure of critique. Towards a more pointed critique, I would bring
up the notion of the slasher film as the go-to, presumptive "totally
nihilistic" genre of cinema. Indeed, as Bernardara Jr. writes, "now
those relatively tame pictures don’t satisfy him [Jay North] the
way the slasher movies do. He needs the grungy viscerals, the
spurting blood, the savagery of ‘80s basement-horror to feed
whatever elemental thing rages inside him." Slasher films aren't
necessarily the optimal shorthand for nihilistic violence. By contrast, many
80s slashers rely on the quick, stylized, and almost bloodless kill,
where murder is a hit-and-run affair. Indeed, the movies
Bernardara Jr. puts in North's regular rotation include The
Prowler,
Visiting
Hours,
and Sweet
Sixteen,
all of which follow from this formula. All are competent slashers
(or, in the case of Visiting
Hours,
the psychological-profile sort of pseudo-slasher), but none are
particularly mean-spirited. By contrast, I personally would have had
North watching exploitation films: Cannibal
Holocaust,
Nightmares
in a Damaged Brain,
and perhaps even Salome.
In these films, torture, death, and brutality do not pass by the
viewer's eyes hastily. The murder scenes are almost meditative, and
this, I would imagine, would even better suit the subjectivity of a
former child star. True-to-form early-80s slashers films just don't
deliver the unexpurgated savagery that these pure exploitation films
do. The violent exploitation flick, then, is a better signifier for
filmic nihilism than the slasher. The only classically exploitative
slasher Bernardara Jr. includes in Jay North's lineup is Pieces
(though we might consider The
Mutilator among
these as well). With all that being said, I would concede that
exploitation films are more 42nd Street New York than Burbank,
California, and so Bernardara Jr. is all-in-all justified in his choice
of the slasher. Certainly, my quibble stems from a minor peccadillo
at best—Bernardara's fiction delivers solidly, and his vision of Jay North's life is a
recommended read from an author to look out for in the future.