Little Miss America

The President of the United States of America is dating a twelve-year-old.

Reluctantly, I reread the article again. My eyes cannot be pried away:

Dolly Carruthers bounces buoyantly upon the saddle of Dandy as he slows to a canter, approaching the presidential stables at Camp David. The President financed the expansion of these stables as a birthday present for Dolly. Dandy was also a gift from the President, their first anniversary.

With Dandy nestled contentedly in his capacious stable space, Dolly adeptly climbs down and ties him in place, her pale green eyes rapt, pink tongue-tip peeking out from between her lips. Rosy-cheeked, hers is a wide-eyed, gamin countenance. In an instant, her shoulders sag.

“I miss him already,” she says. “But it is nice to get some peace and quiet for a change.”

While Dolly relaxes at Camp David, the President is off in Mexico City, renegotiating with President Nieto over Mexico’s one-side backdoor tariff. This weekend has been a much-needed reprieve for Little Dolly, who has been swept up in a media firestorm since she and the President first went public with their relationship. In spite of the initial criticism, Dolly has stayed faithfully at the President’s side, traveling with him to all domestic appearances.

I permit myself a few seconds reprieve from the prose. I look to the picture displayed on the page facing the text, Dolly staring through the camera. Inlaid within is a small picture, the First Family inside the White House, First Lady and First Daughter on the President’s left side, First Nymphet on his right, bulb of her bare shoulder in his tiny palm. The women’s smiles make it seem as if their teeth are trying to climb out of their mouths.

Her long, lovably gangly legs, clad in immaculate white breeches and suede half-chaps, carry her down the paved path to the guesthouse in what seems like only a few steps. In spite of her ranginess, Dolly bears a surprising grace well beyond her years. She removes her riding helmet circumspectly, steadying the short brim between her fingers and tilting her head downward, letting her flaxen hair spill out over her shoulders.

“It’s just all been so stressful,” she says, sinking down onto a bench, settling into a splay more jejune than unladylike. “I want to just hide away sometimes. But it’s like the President always tells me, ‘Dolores, you can’t just fall asleep on us.’”

While the President may refer to her by her full name, her adoring fandom will always know Dolores Carruthers by her sugary sobriquet. America has fallen in love with Little Dolly. Her Twitter account has attracted over ten million followers, and at least one major network has proposed a reality show set in the President’s Manhattan headquarters. Paparazzi were held in thrall by the possibility—proven false though it was—of a baby bump. Playboy has even tendered the idea of a pictorial—non-nude, to be sure. America’s sweetheart is humble about her fame.

“I’m just happy that I can make other people happy.”

Dolly is not without her detractors, though. There are, of course, small sections of the far left that are less than enthused with the President’s relationship, if not with Dolly herself. Radical conspiracy theories abound, including the preposterous imagining that Dolly hails originally from Tijuana, having been kidnapped by Secret Service operatives at the President’s command. While some have demanded an investigation, and even called for charges to be pressed against the President, the White House has larger concerns.

“The President is very invested in this nation’s youth,” one White House publicist has gone on record as saying. “He cares very much about relating to them. And if it helps him do his job more effectively, what’s the harm in love?”

Dolly seems to have won over far more than she has offended. The President’s approval ratings have actually skyrocketed since Dolly entered the public eye, and early polls suggest the Democrats will have their work cut out for them come 2020. Many Americans have softened their position on the once-polarizing President. Dolly, it seems, has won their hearts. She has turned America’s collective frown upside down, offering us all a much-needed break from Kim Jung-un’s bottomless nuclear overtones and Putin’s persistent march through Crimea.

Inset within the text is a photograph of Vladimir Putin shaking hands with the President, the Russian autocrat tilting his thin smile and dozy gaze toward Dolly. It is a fundamentally Russo-American moment. Nabokov must be groping himself in his grave.

And as for Dolly’s opinion on her overnight fame, she remains optimistic.

“He’s done so much for me, I can’t understand why anyone would be so negative. All they have is their simple criticisms. They don’t understand how complicated this world actually is.”

These wise words are no surprise. Dolly is exceedingly mature for her age. Taking this into account, her private tutors have accelerated her studies. So while most American kids are on summer vacation, Dolly is currently working through a tenth grade curriculum. Camp David has given her a rare chance to kick back for a weekend, outside of the limelight.

“It’s all about stress relief,” Dolly offers. “For me and for him.”

And maybe, just maybe, Dolly has relieved some stress for America, too.

I let the magazine fall back down to the kitchen table. I cannot read it again, but I know I will. I roll it into a tube, stuff it into my khakis so no one else in the house can find it. There’s no point in hiding it; the online version went viral overnight. Everyone in the house will read it, I suppose, and I will too. I will read it again, yes, because I was the person who was supposed to have written it.

I got the job at Sampson Magazine eleven years ago, when I was a struggling freelancer with a newborn baby and an almost useless master’s degree in journalism. Desperate for a job, I managed to put together a journalistic essay on sex selection and female infanticide in India based on my graduate fieldwork, and Sampson accepted it. The article received good feedback, and Sampson offered me a full-time position at an unstinting salary. It was my dream job. Sure, the articles were generally apolitical, but the pay was good. For eleven years, it helped support my wife and my daughter, keeping us in a comfortable upper eastside apartment, keeping savings in our bank account.

And then Dolly showed up.

It seemed like everyone loved her except me. The President’s girlfriend is pre-pubescent and yet she becomes America’s sweetheart overnight. Every news channel, every newspaper, every website and every surviving print magazine does an affectionate story about her. And of course Sampson had to as well, securing a rare one-on-one interview with her at Camp David, outside of the President’s paternal gaze. My editor said she wanted the best. She came to me. I said no without even having to think about it. When my editor pressured me, I resigned.

I wanted to write a tell-all. In those frantic, puzzling days that followed, I pitched such a piece to a number of other magazines. They all said no. They wanted Dolly qua Dolly. I considered a blog post in protest. My lawyer advised me against it. The Dolly interview ended up going to an NYU grad, fresh out of journalism school. Her minor, I heard, had been women’s studies.

It gets to the point where you wonder if it’s worth carrying on. You wonder if it’s worth bringing someone into the world now, a confirmed nine billion people and not eight, as the statisticians had for so long insisted on the basis of their projections. Is it moral to reproduce anymore? Is it moral to bring anything into this world? These thoughts have seized me again and again since I left my job.

I start into a slow shuffle up the stairs, my destination the master bedroom. There in the bed I see my daughter. She lies with my wife curled around her, their sleeping breaths synchronized, their exhalations gentle. They are women and the world will eat them. If I try to protect them, I have come to accept, I am not an ally.

We will have to leave Manhattan now. Our savings are not so deep that we can continue to live here without two incomes, especially with my wife soon to be on leave. We will have to look to other places now, less overpriced, the kinds of cities and towns where people consume magazines like Sampson for articles like the one about Dolly, places populated by people who vote Republican with ferocity or Democrat with indifference. But I have to protect my daughter, my wife. Chauvinist though it may sound, that certainty tolls within me.

But I love women. I am not sexist, chauvinist, misogynist. I have marched in women’s rights rallies as a college student. Mere months ago I found myself back in the streets with my wife hefting placards of dissent when the sitting President repealed Roe v. Wade. But now I look at these women in the bed in front of me and I want nothing else but to protect them, forever.

Between them, a swell grows in my wife’s stomach. She went for the sonogram just this morning, but we still have not talked about the result.

I’m afraid to ask, and I suspect she’s afraid to tell.

***

“Little Miss America” appeared in Republican Party Massacre, a privately-circulated samizdat from early 2017 featuring Trump stories. This collection was originally intended to be published, but co-editor Charles Norwood and I got too scared of Trump’s legal team to follow through. Other stories of mine from that samizdat did receive publication in real-life collections, including “The Hills Have Votes” in HellBound Books’ Schlock! Horror! and “Commando-in-Chief” (with Norwood) in Econoclash Review’s Trump Fiction.

Edge of the Axe (1988)

Edge of the Axe is not a very good slasher film. Released in 1988, it came out well after the slasher cycle had ended, and the movie industry had moved toward supernatural franchise slashers as per A Nightmare on Elm Street and the later Friday the 13th and Halloween films. Edge of the Axe is fixated on the early slasher tropes, but this is less a conscious throwback and more a case of being ridiculously late to the party. The film is altogether fairly retardataire, or backward. 

Edge of the Axe was an international production, with scenes shot in Spain and the States. It's actually hard to tell which scenes are in Northern California and which ones are in Madrid, which makes it feel as if the action isn't happening anywhere. The mix of European and American sensibilities is uncanny, and this is especially obvious in the dialogue. A preponderance of lines sound as if they were written by someone learning English, and doing a pretty good job of it—but still learning, nonetheless. Even more damningly on the writing side, the film's ending is somewhat muddled, but I'll say more about that in the post-spoiler addendum.

If Edge of the Axe does anything right, it can be seen in the kill scenes. These don't benefit from their good gore effects (which are poor), but rather from their brutal realism. The eponymous axe hits the victims with blunt force, not making a clean and seamless cut as per the standard slasher flick. It's rather ironic, given the film's incisive title. And on the subject of cuts, the camera does not cut away when the blade makes contact, contra most mainstream slashers. Rather, the viewer is subjected to an unedited sequence of the killer pummeling screaming women with an axe as blood gradually crops up on their clothing. 

With only one exception, the victims are all female, giving the film a decidedly misogynist vibe. This has not aged well, though it does afford Edge of the Axe a full-bodied meanspiritedness, marking it as archetypal exploitation fare. If axe bludgeonings and fairly unapologetic sexism are of interest to you, then check out Edge of the Axe. Otherwise, you're not missing much.

These next two paragraphs contain spoilers, as I'd like to add some further discussion of the ending of Edge of the Axe. 

In the final scene, the at-times sketchy computer-geek male lead bursts into the female love-interest's house (after he's been solidly teased as the killer). He then holds the love-interest captive and insists that it is she who is the killer, explaining that, via a proto-internet "central database," he has found out that she's spent time in a mental hospital on account of having "psycho amnesia." Ergo, she must be the one doing the killings. There is, of course, total disbelief from the love-interest, and she escapes her captor. Police show up as he's chasing after her, and, in unadulterated American form, gun down the nerd without questions asked. Obviously, the police, working on chauvinistic assumptions, presume that being a male pursuer is sufficient evidence to pronounce the lead geek guilty on sight. When the love-interest leaps into the embrace of her police rescuer, we then get a shot of her eyes turning maniacal. The film closes on this shot, making her guilt seem incontrovertible, at least for the viewer. 

But this viewer wasn't so convinced. The male lead still seems like the most plausible culprit, and not just because the rather petite female love-interest didn't match the body-type of the masked killer at all. Rather, time-period and technology factor heavily into my doubts. After all, I/we live in an era where the internet is not some esoteric niche pastime. Moreover, we've all seen how much misinformation is contained in computers. Indeed, entire political movements are based upon bad data. Since the male lead is an early adopter and the only civilian with an online presence in his rural American setting, wouldn't he be the most likely person to have planted the "fake news" in the terminal to convince the female love-interest that she was crazy? In the end, he certainly acted unhinged enough to seem capable of having orchestrated such a scheme. To me, Edge of the Axe contains a reminder that we can and do give computer nerds too much power, when many of them are morally dim basement dwellers who can't handle the fine-grain nuances of social responsibility or human relationships. That we have, since 1988, handed the keys to our society over to a caste of people easily agitated when forced to think outside the boundaries of binary, well, that is the real horror. Unlike the exploitative visuals in Edge of the Axe, this horror will burgeon through many decades to follow.

Why We Were Danforth

Over the course of the spring and summer of 2016, Charles Norwood and I co-wrote and self-published a novella entitled The Feminist Pimp. If nothing else, the story delivers on its title, charting the confused life of and bizarre intrigues surrounding its eponymous protagonist, one Mr. Beauvoir. Many of the scenes wrote themselves, and the book was a pleasure from the planning phase straight through to “publication.”

But there was a complication. If Big Chucky Norwood and Little Johnny Gosham have anything in common, it’s a bit of a Neo-Victorian streak. What that means is that any time one or both of us is having too much fun with something, we assume that surely it must exact some sort of existential price. This might be the reason we initially found each other in the hinterland of unpublished writers looking to collaborate (It might also be what led us to write about an industry where every pleasure has an agreed-upon price). Accordingly, we assumed with certitude that anything as fun as The Feminist Pimp was too good to be true.

More saliently, we were well aware of the volatile nature of the subject matter. There was, after all, in 2016, a gaining social justice movement that seemed to genuinely enjoy being offended. The oxymoron that is our main character—our hero—was a man who profited off women's bodies while at the same time championing women's rights. If The Feminist Pimp got any traction, we knew that it could be a powder keg of offensiveness. Any given underemployed arts baccalaureate with a social justice slant and a blog could have a field day cherry-picking the grittier scenes from The Feminist Pimp and labelling them as “problematic.” Truth be told, Chuck and I knew there were problematic elements—it was precisely these legitimate conflicts within the main character, as well as in his employees and his less-progressive competitors, that we wanted to milk for madcap comedy and social commentary.

But bloggers weren't our worst fear. We were most afraid of our own friends and coworkers, most of whom swing leftward politically (as do Chuck and I, by the way), and have never been afraid to call out a perceived injustice. Chuck and I feared the awkwardness of these potential call-outs, especially since they would probably involve injustices that we ourselves were very aware of. We just wanted to write a silly book predicated on these injustices and maybe make some money at it.

And so, before we ever put pen to paper, we decided upon writing The Feminist Pimp under a pen-name. Not two pen-names, but one for the both of us, which I suppose we assumed made us even less identifiable. The name would have to be androgynous, too, further veiling our identity and making the author's positionality less problematic than that of two white dudes. With these parameters set, we then spat out the most boring, lazy name could think of. And so Pat Danforth was born.

Once we set to work writing the actual manuscript, we made a pleasant discovery. The book wasn't ultimately that offensive. Oh, it had its questionable parts—for instance, Mr. Beauvoir's “I have a dream” speech. But what we found as we moved through the chapters is that the book was undeniably feminist. In fact, the last chapter includes an encouraging and concerted message about feminism with which I don't think any feminist would disagree. If Charles and I had doubted the strength of our feminism at the outset of the project (e.g. insofar as we could exploit such a potentially offensive idea), we didn't by the end. Having completed The Feminist Pimp, we the authors realized that we were feminists.

In July of 2016, The Feminist Pimp appeared exclusively on Amazon Kindle. Norwood and I didn't even have the collective cojones to send it out for legitimate publication. We figured the book's title alone would render it dead-on-arrival for most publishers, given the liberal sensibilities one assumes of small presses. Moreover, Chuck and I were still deluded enough to believe that the idea—the paradox of a feminist pimp—could sell itself. Needless to say, The Feminist Pimp sold very poorly. Nonetheless, its publication marked the beginning of a productive collaborative relationship between Chuck and me, which culminated in a few legitimate publications (see, for instance, "The Centaurist Manifesto.")

In the four years that followed, The Feminist Pimp was never fully out of mind for either of us. Even as Charles and I managed a few more publications to our credit, we still thought about Mr. Beauvoir. We were starting to get our due as writers, but Mr. Beauvoir wasn't getting his.

And as our careers were transforming with the passage of time, so too was the world. By November of 2016, the American people had elected Donald Trump as their president. Here was a man who had bragged on record about groping women without their consent. Here was a man who, as a sitting president, would go on to speak sympathetically about marauding hordes of neo-Nazis and would defend Confederate monuments tooth-and-nail. Here was a man who would teargas protesters to clear the way in front of church so that he could pose there with a Bible. Here is a man letting two pandemics—systemic racism and the coronavirus—go on unchecked. Trump was and is the totemic animal of a white America rediscovering its foundational bigotry. Trump is the apotheosis of a significant section of the American populace—Caucasian and androcentric—that has embraced this bigotry and all its attendant chauvinisms in full.

In short, our current reality looks far more offensive than anything in the fictional world of The Feminist Pimp.

The sorry state of western society has had its upsides, though. Leftists near and far from center, and even some conservatives, have seen that protest against systemic discrimination is not only in order but absolutely necessary. The most salient examples come from the protests prompted by the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement that has subsequently become pervasive in popular culture. Similarly, the Me Too Movement has been making tangible progress in removing privileged predators from seats of power.

And so, the offended-by-everything social justice movement of 2016 has evolved and matured into more constructive forms of social protest. I think most of us would agree that the protests that occurred all across the United States in 2020 have been and are more productive and beneficial than, say, independent acts of bloggers crying foul about fiction writers’ choice of topics (to say nothing of throwaway comedic eBooks).

With that being the case, in this year synonymous with hindsight, Norwood and I took a good, long look at The Feminist Pimp once again. Why not put our names on it? Is it really anything to be overly ashamed of? In a world of pervert presidents propped up by racist voting bases, probably not. And there's also the matter of marketing to consider, too. While Norwood and Gosham aren't bestsellers by any stretch, the handful of “legitimate” publications we have to our credit makes us more of a commodity than dear Pat Danforth, god rest his or her or their soul.

In this spirit of better marketing, I'll go ahead and make the suggestion to you, the person reading this, that you head over to Amazon and check out The Feminist Pimp. By doing so, you can take up these vexing questions of whether or not the book is sexist, and if its authors are indeed feminists or actually the exact opposite. Read to the very end and decide for yourself.

***

The Feminist Pimp eBook is available here for less than a buck!

The House of Daniel

The House of Daniel must be the product of authorial autism, senility or some kind of neurological insult, if not all of the above. In a novel that manages to be both rigidly formulaic and wildly picaresque, bestselling speculative fiction senior statesman Harry Turtledove doesn't just turn his attention to baseball, but rather fixates obsessively upon it. 

The House of Daniel follows a small-town roustabout named Jack "Snake" Spivey as he grabs a spot on a travelling team of bearded ballplayers (based on the real-life "House of David" of yore), all in an effort to evade an unsavory employer. Spivey goes from town to town with the team, seeing large swaths of the American southwest and Pacific coast along the way. In literally every town the House of Daniel plays in, our narrator Spivey (or, better yet, our author Turtledove) provides the same constellation of details about the stop: the layout of the town, the dimensions of the ballpark and its seating capacity, and the uniforms the home team wears. This culminates in about a page or two of description covering the gameplay, which frequently involves the eventual use of a "brushback" pitch and some subsequent hostilities, if not an all-out brawl. After virtually every game, the opposing team's manager either approaches or is approached by the House of Daniel's player-manager and, with Spivey always in earshot, makes a comment to the effect of "you really beat our boys" or "our boys really beat you." 

Dozens of descriptions following this precise template make up the bulk of the book. It's almost as if an aging Turtledove was contractually obligated to provide a novel-length composition, and so he leaned on this formula to pound out the pages. It makes for monumentally uninspired writing and (unintentionally) comically repetitive reading as Turtledove's mind loops back to the same observations and incidents from town to town. Perhaps it is all intended as a commentary on the repetitive life of a Depression-era barnstorming ballplayer. 

But this is not your granddaddy's Depression-era, as it also features, as per standard Turtledove, a robust population of zombies, vampires, and other fantastical creatures, all of which have been more or less integrated into American society. These beings don't have much bearing on the plot, with the exception being a zombie-related incident that happens about 220 pages in and diverts the team bus—really the only juncture in the book that breaks from the template detailed above. Sometimes these creatures enable apparent attempts at comic relief. In the Pacific Northwest, for instance, the main character meets a bigfoot, and rattles off the following observation: "In spite of the long hair all over, that bigfoot was definitely he. His feet weren't the only thing big about him." Beyond coruscating insights of this sort, the monsters serve no purpose; their inclusion may very well have been contractually obligated so as to shoehorn this baseball novel into the genre most accustomed for Turtledove's devotees. 

It strikes this reviewer that the monsters and crypto-hominids might have been able to serve as a point of departure for commenting on racial strife in past and present-day America—including the outright racism of the main character early on in the book—but Turtledove shows no interest in doing this. He just wants to tell you about ballparks and brushbacks with monsters in the backdrop, over and over  and over again. Let's hope that The House of Daniel was compelled by commercial concerns and not cognitive degeneration. In either case, the resultant composition makes for a terrible read.

Super Baseball 2020

Super Baseball 2020 is SNK's futuristic reimagining of baseball. Released in North America in 1993 for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo by way of EA Sports, the game features some crucial rule changes for the “distant” future that the year 2020 represented at the time.

First off, in an effort to curb out-of-control power hitting, the dons of Super Baseball 2020's in-game universe have decreed that the left and right field fences should be colossally high, ensuring that homeruns can only be hit to straightaway center. In a similar effort to facilitate at least some degree of small-ball, foul territory has been limited to the space in front of first base and third base. Balls landing in the foul territory behind third and first as we presently know them are considered fair. The field itself has also been modified. At the warning track, for instance, there are “jump zones,” within which an outfielder can leap with some extra spring in his, her, or their step to take a stab at a fly ball. The field also changes over the course of the game. From the fifth inning onward, the Super Baseball rule book mandates that the field must play host to “crackers”—proximity mines that explode whenever someone ventures into their vicinity. Crackers can seriously debilitate a heedless fielder. Even the players themselves can change within game. Various sorts of plays lead to monetary awards, and in-game earnings can be used to upgrade a player.

Super Baseball 2020 also includes some significant changes around the culture of the game of baseball and, presumably, the society alongside which it has evolved. In consonance with the overarching sci-fi sensibilities, robots are among the players on the field and the umpires calling the plays. Even more fantastically, women appear on these big league rosters; in fact, there are entire teams of females, all of whom are identically blond and buxom and clad in short-shorts to boot. The crowd, meanwhile, appears to be made up of scattered robot parts. On the whole, these changes in rules and culture give Super Baseball 2020 a unique aesthetic, and provide a refreshing alternative to baseball in our current continuity, both past and present.

Indeed, Super Baseball 2020 looks drastically different from baseball in 1993 or in 2020 as it stands. Of course, baseball in present-continuity 2020 looks drastically different from baseball as it did in 1993, or even 2019, for that matter. As Super Baseball predicted, the volume of homeruns has increased dramatically in real-life 2020. With that has come an increase in strike outs. In an era of a deeply polarized politics, and a wholly politicized America often dictated by the whims of its leftist and rightist extremes, isn't it fitting that America's pastime has become about feast or famine, strike out or home run? Baseball has certainly seen rule changes. In an effort to speed up pace-of-play, Major League Baseball has mandated for the 2020 season that any given relief pitcher must face a minimum of three batters. More radically, to expedite extra innings, the tenth inning starts with a designated runner placed on second. And yet the biggest changes in Regular Baseball 2020 have been shaped around culture—not so much that of baseball itself, but rather that of a society racked by a respiratory virus and an unsatisfactory response thereto. With the coronavirus out of control in America, and with a staggering proportion of the American populace unwilling to believe the virus is real, baseball games are played in empty parks. In the absence of fans, enterprising PA guys pipe in 70 different situation-based crowd reactions. To fill the void, some parks have equipped the bleachers with cardboard cut-outs of people, which look a bit like the fans in N64-era baseball games, and are probably preferable to used-up robot parts. All told, actual Baseball in 2020 feels far more dystopian than Super Baseball 2020. At present, watching baseball sometimes feels like watching a video game.

If you're going to play video-game baseball, though, Super Baseball 2020 isn't a bad option. Its visual style and gameplay distinguish it from conventional baseball fare of its era. By comparison, 90s realist simulations like EA’s Tony La Russa Baseball look and feel dated. Super Baseball's futurism affords it some degree of timelessness. However, Super Baseball 2020 is not without its flaws. Chiefly, the game is somewhat buggy. For instance, if a base runner has touched a base, they cannot go back to their original base to avoid a force out (though this anomaly could be explained away as another rule change of the future). More broadly, Super Baseball 2020 suffers from pace-of-play issues of its own. The amount of innings in a game is non-adjustable, and playing a complete game usually takes over 20 minutes. “Futuristic” does not, in this dispensation, mean “streamlined” or “speedy.” And when pitted against other futuristic baseball games, Super Baseball actually pales. Inevitably, Super Baseball prompts comparisons to Base Wars, Konami's 1991 NES release that features all-robot squads playing a fairly conventional version of baseball. There's one important difference, however: force plays in Base Wars occasion one-on-one duels between baseman and baserunner robots. On account of this innovation, as well as overall speedier gameplay, Base Wars is a more enjoyable experience than Super Baseball 2020. 

All that being said, Super Baseball 2020 is still a fine game, and it will endure beyond its eponymous year in the history of both video games and baseball. Truth be told, Major League Baseball in our present continuity could learn a thing or two from Super Baseball. Mandatory green monsters in left and right in every stadium would turn the focus back to something other than homeruns (and the strike-outs that unfettered fence-swinging makes commonplace). The MLB has already started looking into the use of robot umps. It still seems like it will be awhile before baseball culture, or the androcentric American culture that sustains it, will consider the possibility of female players. That said, the San Francisco Giants just recently hired Sacramento State's softball standout Alyssa Nakken as their first-base coach. This is an important first step for women in the MLB. Your correspondent would like to believe we’ll see women on a major-league baseball field before we see proximity mines. Of course, this is America we’re talking about, so you can never count out the tyranny of crackers.

Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom

A Muṭiyēttu performer 

Jeffrey Kripal's 2001 book Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism is both the best and worst kind of academic publication. The book is great because, as usual, Kripal blends a host of sophisticated analytical frameworks ranging from Lacanian psychoanalysis to Robert Forman's insights on pure consciousness events, all for purposes of unpacking the writings and lives of famous mystic-scholars and scholar-mystics ranging from the obvious (Evelyn Underhill) to the oddball (Zoroastrian scholar R.C. Zaehner). The book is somewhat trying, however, because Kripal intersperses the analyses with his own "mystical" experiences, which encompass his personal interfacings with religion, sexuality, and pop culture. Given these not-infrequent autobiographical digressions, the book is likely to turn off traditional scholars, and certainly this is how Roads of Excess has been perceived in the academic community since its release. Nevertheless, these personal reflections provide some of the most lucid, original, and intriguing parts of the book. In one curious insight, Kripal compares the eyes of the Amazing Spiderman to those of the pan-Indian goddess Kālī. This comparison is unprecedented, uncouth, and likely offensive to a substantial proportion of South Asia scholars (it not to Kālī worshippers). But this insight is undeniably edifying, as it raises important questions about archetypes, as well as the parallels between pop culture and folk religion. (Also, Kripal's comparison makes me feel less guilty about my own nagging impression that the burly male actors playing the goddess Bhagavati in performances of muṭiyēttu in Kerala, in their frenzied transvestism, are reminiscent of Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.) It's just unfortunate that more scholars of religion haven't been able to identify these merits in Kripal's work. Many have written off Kripal as a purveyor of navel-gazing drivel. It's too bad, for a host of Kripal's unprecedently honest intuitions and impressions remain as-of-yet unrecognized by his field. As a result, Kripal has drifted more and more toward studies of pop culture studies and, more damningly, the paranormal, even penning some popular non-fiction in the process. (See, for instance, his book with notorious hack-cum-crank Whitley Streiber.) Kripal's career, then, has been marked by the same kind of ambivalence as Roads of Excess itself: as Kripal gets a bigger audience, which is much deserved, he does it as the expense of scholarly rigor and respect. Perhaps Kripal was and is bigger than academia. Regardless of the merits of his newer works, Roads of Excess remains an enduring classic almost twenty years after its publication. Maybe it will take another twenty years for scholars to catch on and catch up. I've heard through the grapevine that Kripal commits himself to write three hours every morning without exception. I would advise him to continue with this regimen, as his own literary excesses might eventually help more mainline scholars of religion to wise up.

On Northern Exposure

This past Saturday, I took a canoe trip along Lake Upsilon in the wilds of northern North Dakota. The sun had just come up over the tiered peaks of the pine, and the greenish-black water glittered under a thinning mist. I had just come around the lake’s western fork, bringing into view some cabins lining the shore. That was when I saw the naked woman.

In truth, she wasn't completely naked. Not yet. She wore a scant bikini, and she was peeling it off in protracted fashion, as if for the benefit of a camera. She posed and pressed and canted against the railing of the cabin’s deck.

I pulled my oar out of the water, and as I drifted ahead, a man came into view in front of her. Perhaps he was a boyfriend or a husband. At the very least, he was an amateur photographer. He was snapping pictures briskly with a camera that looked elaborate. I didn't get the make; in an effort not to stare, I was allowing myself only repeated, rapid-fire glances at the model.

The woman took off the bikini bra, and then she took off the bikini panties. The woman moved through numerous postures, some demure and some vaguely decadent. I could tell she was somewhat comely even without my male gaze at full-bore. Her skin was honey-brown, like a full-bodied lager.

As I coasted past, casting my glances, my first reaction was aghast. I'm not a prude, nor am I offended by nudes, arty or otherwise. But my initial mental spasm to the (somewhat) public nudity was to be taken aback. The impudence! The profligacy! And to be taking photos of the whole affair—the narcissism! The sexism! Shame on him! Where was his feminism? And as for her feminism, what cognitive gymnastics had she done to rationalize this?

Perhaps these priggish knee-jerks occurred because nudity outside the house is such an unfamiliar thing, especially in North Dakota. But my righteousness had fast subsided once I'd glided a quarter-mile down the lake. By then I'd started interrogating my assumptions about these intimate nudes in a new light.

Perhaps this photo session represented new levels of intimacy for this couple. In whatever time they’d spent together, they had evoked a mutual liberation in one another. His photographing her wasn't necessarily exploitative. Rather, it could be an exploration in the expanding landscape of their love. And it didn't even have to be romantic. These nudes could be a new and exciting milestone in a budding artistic collaboration. Conceivably, these photos were the very zenith of a Platonic partnership that spanned creativity and companionship.

Who was I to declare this photo session tawdry? It wasn't necessarily smut they were fashioning. Perhaps it was all private and personal, for the satisfaction, aesthetic and/or sexual, of one or both parties. Perhaps it was even art. Together, photographer and nude were producing something beautiful—a portfolio, perhaps, or even a deliciously risqué installation for the Bismarck art district. Perhaps this photo session would go onto a DeviantArt account, to be seen by anyone anywhere in the world. Even if the partnership, Platonic or otherwise, didn't work out, model and photographer would at least be left with something lovely they'd collaborated to create, surrounded by the verdant forest and the dawn. Her nude body, elegantly posed, would coruscate in harmony with the water, thanks to his eye and her willingness. This photo set could capture the splendor of the lake scenery and the people of the region. It could travel all over the globe. This would champion artistic voices from exotic locales, as places like North Dakota are strange tropics from the perspective of the cosmopolitan world of art.

And even if it was porn, this didn't have to be a problem. It could be refreshing. As I floated down the lake, I reflected on all the years and all the nude photos I’d viewed, from artsy to outright tawdry. Whether art or porn, the scene was almost always situated in New York or LA (not necessarily respectively, and rarely respectfully). If not there, then it was set in Europe or somewhere tropical like Hawaii or Miami or Rio. It was always on a beach or in a fancy home—a mansion or at least an upper middle-class abode. Quality nude photos have always had one not-so-subtle subtext: you have to be upwardly mobile or outright elite to be involved in any worthwhile depiction of nakedness.

Then and there, on that deck behind me, a photographer and his subject were taking back the nude photo. Together, they were reclaiming the aesthetic dignity of points north. Together, they were creating nudes that were visual essays arguing a counterpoint to nude photos taken theretofore: that the untainted, natural beauty of a remote northern state could be a viable backdrop for a human beauty in the nude. The setting didn't have to be a palm-girded manse with a pool overlooking LA or an ocean. It could be a densely-forested lake with water the color of Jägermeister. The model could be a squat, thick-thighed girl.

We need more nudes at northern lakes. We need stripteases in foothills and in badlands. We need erotic thrillers on the pie-bald prairies. We need sex scenes, simulated and non-simulated, in snow. We need girl-on-girl action in unassuming log cabins. We need orgies on weather-beaten decks.

The list is endless. Every permutation and combination of the above should be made to happen if we want art—or at least arty porn—to thrive.

And so, in a matter of minutes, I had gone from abhorring these nude photos to adoring them. I had gone from crying foul to crying for more. I slid my paddle in the water and steered back around. The cabin and the deck approached anew. The photographer was still photographing, the clack of his shutter having worked up to a chittering paroxysm of artistry.

And the girl, she'd struck a pose on all fours and in full mammalian lordosis, prying apart her ass-halves for the camera's Cyclopean eye.

Delirium (1987)

As genres, the slasher and the erotic thriller share plenty in common, including a firm grounding in brutal realism. That is to say, the murders and the gore and the sex and the nudity are presented as-is with little ambiguity. Delirium, a 1987 giallo that incorporates elements of both the slasher and the erotic thriller in depicting a series of centrefold murders, breaks with this trend, presenting some crucial killings in surrealist fashion. In these scenes, Delirium follows the slasher trope of moving into the first-person perspective of the killer, but this point-of-view is, contra that of Halloween or Friday the 13th's antagonists, wracked with bizarre hallucinations. As the killer stalks after victims, the entire screen pulsates red and black; when the victims come into view, their faces are monstrous–by turns Cyclopean and theriomorphic. This imaginative depiction of the killer's psychotic, chimerical delusions marks Delirium as truly inventive across a pair of genres typically resistant to innovation. But this is not the only virtue of Delirium. The film is also a cinematographic marvel from start to finish, with intricate, luminous interiors and vast, palatial exteriors. The affluential aesthetic is realized entirely through visuals. Your reviewer supposes that he is expected to say something to the effect of "but no visual is more aesthetically pleasing than leading lady Serena Grandi," but he will not. Grandi's sex symbol status precedes her, at least in Italy, so it needn't be restated (see picture). Rather, it should be said that Grandi brings an unassuming warmth and earnestness to the protagonist's role, culminating in a human grace that transcends her statuesque physique and tameless, oft-exposed bust. You empathize with her character for the trauma she's experiencing due to the loss of her colleagues and family members, and not just for the backpain she's likely experiencing on account of her Brobdignagian bosom. Despite all it's merits, however, Delirium is not without its flaws: as is typical of an Italian film, it features some improbable plot developments and sketchy redubbing. Perhaps most disappointingly, the aforementioned surrealism is only overt in the first two kills, and tapers off as the film reaches its climax. Nonetheless, Delirium's replacement of realist brutality with vivid glimpses into the schizoid visual field of a psychopathic killer makes the film a refreshing take on the slasher/erotic thriller.

Black Christmas (1974)

This review of Black Christmas (1974) has two theses. The first thesis runs thus: despite the tendency among reviewers to classify Black Christmas as a "forerunner" of the slasher, I would argue that it is a slasher—and a good one at that. The second thesis of this review doubles as a spoiler alert: there are some slashers in which the killer is never revealed, and there are some in which the killer's motivation is never explained; Black Christmas succeeds because it combines both of these elements.

Black Christmas is about a killer-on-the-loose who has narrowed his focus to a sorority house, harassing its denizens via obscene phone calls. We meet among the sorority sisters a pre-Superman Margot Kidder and a pre-SCTV Andrea Martin. Playing the hardboiled detective is John Saxon, whose presence has never been a detriment to a horror movie. The film was made in Canada but is set in the United States, and the ubiquity of American flags among people pronouncing “about” like “a-boot” should annoy viewers on both sides of the border. Indeed, Black Christmas takes patience. The film is not fast-paced and streamlined like later slashers. Yet a body count gradually piles up, slowly but surely, with kills that would not look out of place in slashers of the late 70s and early 80s. Considering the fluidity (and ludicrousness) of genre criteria, it is difficult to speculate on the originary point of any given genre, but there’s a good case for Black Christmas being the singular ur-slasher. (Though Texas Chain Saw Massacre saw a limited release two months before Black Christmas, that film is less a pure slasher than it is a perfect celluloid distillation of America.) Preceding the slasher cycle that commenced in the late 70s, Black Christmas is a film years ahead of its time. That said, Black Christmas is in alignment with horrors present from time immemorial: the fear of a deranged man taking out aggressions on a plurality of people, especially women, with a bladed weapon might just be transhistorical.

The chief merit of Black Christmas is its ending. There are, of course, a number of sub-types of slasher films: In some, the killer is killed (his resurrection in sequels notwithstanding), while in others the killer escapes. In some, we find out why the killer did what he did, and it others, the killer's motivation is never explained. In some slashers, we know the killer from the outset, while in others, in the whodunit fashion, we learn who did it at the end, often via an unmasking. In some, however, the killer is never revealed. Such is the case in Black Christmas. Moreover, in Black Christmas, the killer escapes. We never find of who did it or why (though we suspect, in the late-Freudian mode of the early 70s, that it has something to do with a maternal and/or pubescent sexual trauma). In the end, Black Christmas offers us with nothing in the way of answers. We are left with pure speculation. Through some overdubbed laughter just before the credits, there is a strong suggestion that the killer is still in the attic, possibly metaphorically but more likely literally. This is underscored by the ringing phone to which the credits roll. Either way, the killer and the threat of sexualized violence he personifies will continue to haunt the survivor (played by Olivia Hussey). By not being killed, the killer takes on what novelist Nancy Wayson Dinan has called, in the context of missing persons, a “hyper-appearance.” It's a "conspicuous sort of absence"—the most conspicuous variety, I would suggest. Whether he is in the attic or not, the unrevealed, uncaptured killer in Black Christmas takes on an omnipresence, and so while the immediate terror of the predator has started to subside, a deeper horror has begun to set in, and it will never go away. That killer, and the gendered violence he embodies and iterates, will persist like that ringing phone; frustrated sexuality, as any incel will testify, cannot go unanswered. As Dinan explains, the conspicuous absence of hyper-appearance is “the kind a person can never ignore”—this is just the sort of timeless, violent, sexualized horror that Black Christmas realizes at its finish by not revealing the killer. This killer has disappeared, but he's not gone—in fact, he's now potentially everywhere. There is no closure, only an open wound, and this is the punctum of Black Christmas. The audience members have themselves been effectively slashed. The mysterious, deranged stranger will perpetually fill that gaping rent. Like the survivors in the sorority, he will continually be with us, too. On account of this repulsive timelessness, one of the first slashers ever made happens to be one of the best.

Perhaps this is why Black Christmas has earned not one but two remakes. These later Black Christmases stand as abject failures, though, as they are purely products of their times (2006 and 2019); as such, whatever limited frights they offer are historically bound. The horror of the 1974 original is timeless and expansive, ever-burgeoning, and it does not end at the conclusion of the movie. There is more horror in questions than in answers.

Lake Upsilon Legends

There was a story you used to hear in the Lake Upsilon area in northern North Dakota, right by the borderland with Canada. There was a family man named Crosley, very religious and very well-employed down in Minot. He owned a summer cottage along the shores of Lake Upsilon. His wife and three daughters would go there for the summer months, and he would come up to visit them on weekends. One night two boys snuck away from a camp that used to be in operation across the lake. Crosley's youngest daughter, Suzanne, was a bit of a tart, and she invited them into her room. You could hear the sexy ruckus across the lake. When Crosley got word that his daughter had been carrying on like a harlot, as he called it, he sent her into the woods. He said he wouldn’t take her back until she repented. She never did come home, but she wasn’t the only one. Two weeks later one of the two boys was found near the lake strangled to death. There was talk of closing up the camp early, but the owner wouldn't follow through. They were going to send the other boy back home, but they didn’t do that either. Sure enough, on the last day of camp, they found him dead in his room. Nobody else heard it happen, but he’d been strangled, and not by hands. There were big black bruises around his throat. The next year they opened the camp again like nothing happened. One night at about three in the morning, one of the counselors was awakened by gurgling sounds. He turned on his flashlight in the direction of the screams and saw his bunkmate being choked to death. There, with legs scissored over his throat, was a teenage girl who had once been very pretty but had since gone feral. Caught in the light, she ran from the bunkhouse and disappeared into the woods. The police were called, and they searched around in the woods. They called out for the girl to surrender, and eventually they got a response—crazed giggling. It bubbled up now and then until dawn broke. The police eventually gave up, but that giggling can still be heard in the woods around Lake Upsilon. And people have reported seeing a pretty girl, and later on a beautiful woman, around the shores of Lake Upsilon. She looks younger than her age. Every so often, someone goes missing around those parts. They have bruises on their necks like they’ve been strangled by a strong pair of thighs. Some say Suzy Scissors is still living in the woods, right at the fork in the Y for which Lake Upsilon is named. People liked to tell that one around the campfire at the lake. Who knows if it’s true? Around Lake Upsilon, you might wake up in the night. Maybe it’s the loons, but you could swear you heard a girlish giggle moving across that lake.

Dark Fields (2006)

If you want to read scathing reviews of the film Dark Fields, you’ll find no shortage at IMDb. On that site, the film carries an abysmal 2.4 average rating, as reviewers have not hesitated to dogpile on the 2006 horror flick. While Dark Fields may not be anything close to passable, not even reaching the hallowed so-bad-it’s-good status, it’s still a laudable low-budget horror effort, and a testament to what kind of film can be produced on a four-figure financial plan.

Dark Fields tells an accustomed story: five teens head off to a concert (band and genre are never specified) and get stranded in the country along the way. In Texas Chain Saw Massacre fashion, they encounter a deranged hick (whose motive is only ever hinted at) who then slaughters 60% of the cast. The editor clearly studied under the Ed Wood School of Film-Lengthening, as the viewer is forced to endure long scenes of cars proceeding down roads. With no real twists or turns in the plot, only holes, what we get is an exceedingly slow-paced slasher, making seventy minutes feel like three or four hours. Although the DVD sleeve promises an 80 minute runtime, ten minutes of this are taken up by a blooper reel interspersed within the credits. The real bloopers, however, can be found in the film proper, where boom mikes and camera operators are often quite conspicuous, and where the teens pay in American currency even though they’re clearly in Canada.

But Dark Fields is not totally unwatchable. Unlike the teens in many other slasher films, the members of this youthful assemblage are actually sort of likeable. Their accents are painfully Canadian, a nasally warble thick as maple syrup that turns every “out” into “oot.” Their vocabulary is filled with an aggressively regional patois, most notable in their repeated use of the term “ass-clown” as both noun and verb. Moreover, at least two of the teens are pocked with terrible acne. The verisimilitude is in-your-face, as these are not twenty-something Hollywood actors, but rather actual teens from small-city Canada.

Perhaps the most appealing of the cast members is Jenna Scott, who plays Taylor, the quasi-Final Girl. I don’t mean to lean too heavily on the male gaze in saying so, but she’s undeniably vulpine and, by the end, almost Valkyrie-esque. Moreover, hers is the apotheosis of a midriff. A mild spoiler alert is in order here before I report, with some regret, that there is no nudity in Dark Fields. Nonetheless, Jenna Scott’s midriff is so singularly lovely and so focally visible, it almost should count as honorary nudity. Her perpetually exposed torso may constitute one of the sexiest bare midriffs in filmic history. I defy all the other more vocal critics of Dark Fields to find a comelier lower-torso on a horror-film female lead. On account of that delicious strip of stomach, Dark Fields endures as a minor horror milestone.

By virtue of this agreeable cast, when you do make it to the credits and then sit through the runtime-padding gag reel, you smile and laugh along with players. Here, after all, are some average teens from an average place who managed to make a movie. Now, granted, that movie is far, far below average in quality. But it is still a movie, and no one can take that away from all parties involved. Perhaps it’s my own upbringing in rural North Dakota talking (as close as you can get to Canada without being Canadian, I suppose), but these rosy-cheeked, foggy-breathed teens remind you of people you went to school with—how they acquire their own hyper-localized patois and in-jokes, how they try to do all kinds of things to stave boredom. You feel a certain nostalgia for the teens in Dark Fields, because they could have been your friends. Watch the film five or six times, and, indeed, the cast starts to feel like your friends. Sure, the movie is execrable, but together, this ragtag, rural ensemble was able to see their project through, and on an admirably low budget at that. For this reason, I have no choice but to recommend Dark Fields. It won’t scare you, it won’t impress you, and it won’t entertain you, but nonetheless, you just might feel, even for a few fleeting moments, like you’re back with your high school friends trying to go somewhere. You just might end up smiling.

Reflections on Toilet Paper

In the COVID-19 era, nothing is certain save for the importance of toilet paper. No matter where we reside, we have all heard about the toilet paper shortages in the wake of the global pandemic. Panicked hoarders were quick to strip the shelves of TP. For all that was (and is still) up in the air, one thing became clear: if they were destined to meet god, the consuming masses wanted to do so with clean anuses. Moreover, toilet paper shortages presented some consumers with difficult existential questions.

This was certainly the case in my jurisdiction. Two days ago, I broke my writerly self-isolation (which had already been established in the pre-coronavirus era) and ventured out to the grocery store, where I found the toilet paper shelves bare. I stared into pure, unqualified emptiness between the facial tissue and the paper towel, each of which remained well-stocked.

Gazing into the void, I was reminded of an anecdote a friend of mine had shared on the weekend previous, just as COVID-19 had really dug in its spikes, and society had started to grind to a halt. He lingered for a while in the paper-products aisle of his local grocer, watching as people came face to face with the toilet paper deficit. He observed that the vast majority of these shoppers, tasked with an impromptu choice for anal hygiene alternatives, opted for paper towel. Consequently, the paper towel had depleted relative to the facial tissue, which still brimmed on the shelves.

This evidence is anecdotal, but it allows us to tender a hypothesis a posteriori: the majority prefers paper towel to tissue as an ass-wiping substitute. They would rather have the firmness and absorptive power of paper towel than the gauzy caress of Kleenex and its competitors. Even though the paper towel is potentially abrasive and toilet-clogging, it prevails over the facial tissue, the latter's breezy tactility notwithstanding. Perhaps this is simply because paper towel, like toilet paper, comes on a roll. Or perhaps, in the absence of toilet paper, people's priorities shift. Everyone seeks an immaculate anus, but when the ideal wipe is unavailable, cleanliness of the fingers and hands becomes a crucial tiebreaker. While paper towel may scrape and, moreover, create flushing complications, there is little chance that it will disintegrate mid-wipe. The durability of Kleenex is comparably dubious.

In the COVID-19 era, then, the consuming classes may very well be divided into an ad hoc caste system. At the top will be the champion hoarders with their stockpiles of toilet paper and their impeccable anuses. In the middle will be the not so fleet, whose anuses are wiped raw, but whose hands are clean. At the bottom will be the Kleenex people, for whom there are no guarantees re: the cleanliness of hand or hind—these are the untouchables, though such a designation is moot in a social world mandating that no one can stand within two yards of anyone else.

Faced with the empty toilet paper shelf, and presented with a choice of the alternatives on either side, I decided to defer my choice. Instead, I put my money towards buying more food. I reasoned that, if things got worse (as indeed they have), I'd prefer a surplus of food to that of wiping material. After all, I wanted to guarantee that I would continue to be able to produce poops. For the foreseeable future, I would concentrate on nourishing myself, and worry about wiping on a case-by-case basis.

On a full stomach, I’ve had no shortage of ideas with respect to improvisation. Certainly, being a mostly unsuccessful member of the writing community helps. If this pandemic persists and I can't leave the house, I've got stacks of old rejected manuscripts, not to mention lots of reading material produced by my competitors in the field. COVID-19 just might give me a chance to make it all worth the paper its printed on. From that perspective, my bookshelves are well-stocked with toilet paper alternatives.

The Final Girls (2015)

Imagine if Field of Dreams was about slasher films rather than baseball, and that it explored the relationship between a mother and daughter rather than a father and son, and you'd have The Final Girls. This 2015 horror-comedy tells the story of a college-aged woman, played by Taissa Farmiga, who has tragically lost her mother, played by Malin Akerman. Akerman's character is a struggling actor remembered only for her involvement in a campy 80s slasher, Camp Bloodbath, in which she played the "shy girl" who loses her virginity and then, like clockwork, gets murdered by the masked antagonist. In Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner's character builds a baseball field in a cornfield and, by way of some kind of unspecified magic, he gets to meet long-deceased members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox and, eventually, his estranged father, all of whom step out from the stalks of corn. In The Final Girls, Taissa Farmiga's character and her friends, by way of some kind of unspecified magic, get to step into Camp Bloodbath through a rent in a movie screen. They all become participants in Camp Bloodbath and, as such, Farmiga's character must encounter her deceased mother. All at once, the merger of 80s slasher silliness and overdetermined 2010s meta-horror motif-spotting blend to create a poignant exploration of the relationship between children and prematurely deceased parents. When Farmiga's character watches her mother meet her fate in the film-within-the-film, the scene is wrenchingly bittersweet, a strange synthesis of maternal nostalgia and revulsion. Your reviewer (a man who watches movies like Nightmares in a Damaged Brain and Cannibal Holocaust for relaxation purposes) wept unabashedly, something a film hadn't reduced him to since Field of Dreams. For that reason, and for the beautiful, unspecified magic under which it operates, The Final Girls gets the highest of recommendations.

As is obvious from its title, the film goes all in on the "Final Girl" tautology brought forth by a number of feminist critics of slasher films. This analytical framework, asserted most notably by Carol Clover, suggests that most or all slashers are based on a formula dictating that any character who drinks, does drugs, or, most importantly, has sex, will be killed by the antagonist, and, as a corollary, only the girl who has engaged in none of these acts will survive. I hope I am being redundant when I say that this analytical framework is overdetermined. Moreover, it rarely bears out when watching the actual early-80s slasher cycle films. As Michael Koven has averred in his book Film, Folklore and Urban Legends, Friday the 13th's characters are "neither chaste nor rampantly sexual." Indeed, the only people who die after intimate encounters are the nameless counsellors from the pre-credit sequence, and, later on, Kevin Bacon's character and his female companion. Moreover, Friday the 13th's "Final Girl" Alice participates in a game of strip Monopoly and even takes a toke from a joint while doing so, but nonetheless survives. The "Final Girl," then, is an ideal type, and while the fictional Camp Bloodbath may doggedly follow such a model, it appears in few if any actual slashers. I mention this not as a point of critique against The Final Girls, but rather as a call for reflection and re-evaluation among film scholars and critics. The inclusion of this sex = death axiom is not to the detriment of The Final Girls. Instead, The Final Girls can be read as a send-up of not just 80s slashers, but also of frighteningly predictable scholarly and critical categories for analyzing this subgenre.

Miner's Massacre (2002)

If not a hidden gem, Miner's Massacre (b.k.a. Curse of the Forty-Niner) is at least something of a nugget among low-budget horror films. The film is a supernatural slasher, telling the tale of six avaricious twenty-somethings who unwittingly resurrect the eponymous prospector--the Forty-Niner--who's hellbent on posthumously protecting his accumulated fortune. Perpetually pop-eyed and given to near-constant growling, the Forty-Niner is a bit of a crock in terms of character concepts, but he does wield a pickaxe convincingly. While the script doesn't dig too deeply, the filmmaking is admirably workmanlike. The characters aren't especially likable, with an oddly-cast Final Girl and Guy who are respectively rocking short-cropped and mushroom-cut hairdos and, consequently, are begging for queer readings. The standout cast member is the stalwart redhead Rox Ann, played by softcore standby Elina Madison. She holds the viewer's attention with her down-to-earth good looks and her out-of-this-world backside, the latter of which makes a brief but memorable appearance in the buff during a brisk, efficient sex scene. I mention this not for the sheer sake of male-gazing, but rather to emphasize that Miner's Massacre does not get too distracted with overdetermined slasher tropes such as cheap nudity. Rather, director John Carl Buechler stays on-track with the plot--sending the Forty-Niner back to mineshaft-cum-hellmouth whence he came. In the process, there's even an appearance from Karen Black, which never once hurt a horror flick. All told, Miner's Massacre pans out satisfactorily, at least by the standard of those of us who moil for low-budget, low-quality horror gold. Go Forty-Niner(s)!

The Cropsey Legend in Slasher Films

The Tri-State region has long been familiar with the Cropsey urban legend, especially in New York State. Cropsey is said to be a demented drifter who wields an axe or, alternatively, has a hook for a hand. The story of Cropsey has been told to Boy Scouts and summer-camp attendees around campfires since at least the 1960s, and likely earlier. In the early 1980s, as a spate of slasher films hit theatres, the Cropsey mytheme came to life on the big screen, as well, providing narrative fodder for no less than three contributions to the subgenre.

Folklorists Lee Haring and Mark Breslerman cataloged numerous variations of the “Cropsey Maniac” legend that circulated during the mid-60s and 70s. A representative telling came from a former counselor and camper at Camp Lakota on Masten Lake near Wurtsboro, New York. It goes as follows:

George Cropsey was a judge. He had a wife and two children, all of whom he loved very much. He owned a small summer cottage along the shores of Masten Lake. His wife and children would go there for the summer months, and he would come up to visit them on weekends...One night two campers snuck away from the camp’s scheduled evening activity and went down to the lake to roast some marshmallows. The fire they built went out of control and there was a big fire on the lake. George Cropsey’s family was burnt to death. When Cropsey read the report in the newspaper, it is said he became completely white and disappeared from his home. Two weeks later one of the campers from Lakota was found near the lake chopped to death with an ax. There was talk of closing the camp for the remainder of the summer but they didn’t.

The camp owners insisted upon constant supervision of the campers, there were state troopers posted in the area, and each counselor slept with either a knife, an ax, or a rifle. One night at about three in the morning, one of the counselors was awakened by the screams of one of his campers. He put his flashlight in the direction of the screams and saw his camper bleeding to death, and, standing over him, a man with chalk-white hair, red bloodshot eyes, and swinging a long, bloody ax. When the maniac saw the light, he ran from the bunk, but the counselor chopped at his leg with the hatchet he was armed with. The man got away but left a trail of blood into the woods. The state troopers were called, and followed the trail into the woods. They called to Cropsey to surrender, but all they heard was a crazed laughter. They determined his position, and when he would not give himself up, they built a circle of fire around him. When the fire had subsided, they searched the woods for his remains but could find nothing. The police closed the file on George Cropsey, assuming him to be dead. 

It is said that on the evening of the anniversary of the death of Judge Cropsey’s family, you can see the shadow of a man limping along the shores of Masten Lake (Haring & Breslerman 1977, 15-16).

In some versions, Cropsey screams “I’ll have my revenge” (1977, 19). Cropsey generally works in a socially prominent profession (1977, 15). In the version above and in others, the death that sets the tale in motion is consistently accidental. Some alternative tellings have Cropsey’s offspring drowning: in one case, his only child meets this fate while boating with one of the campers; in another case, his daughter drowns during a cookout (1977, 17).

The makers of the initial Friday the 13th film drew upon the motif of a drowning child and a vengeful parent in formulating the central premise for their 1980 carpetbagger slasher. In this case the parent is a mother, Pamela Voorhees, whose hydrocephalic son, Jason, drowned while counsellors remained oblivious, allegedly caught up in romantic dalliances. The Cropsey legend more obviously informs the 1981 sequel, Friday the 13th Part 2, specifically in conceptualizing Jason. In early stages of the film, a senior counsellor tells the tale of Jason around a campfire:

I don’t want to scare anyone. But I’m gonna give it to you straight about Jason. His body was never recovered from the lake after he drowned. The old-timers in town will tell you he’s still out there, some sort of demented creature, surviving in the wilderness. Full grown by now. Stalking...stealing what he needs, living off wild animals and vegetation. Some folks claim they’ve seen him, right in this area. The girl who survived that night at Camp Blood, that Friday the 13th...she claims she saw him. She disappeared two months later. Vanished. Blood was everywhere. No-one knows what happened to her. Legend has it that Jason saw his mother beheaded that night, and he took his revenge. A revenge he’ll continue to seek if anyone enters his wilderness again. By now, I guess you all know we’re the first to return here. Five years...five long years he’s been dormant. And he’s hungry. Jason’s out there...watching. Always on the prowl for intruders. Waiting to kill. Waiting to devour. Thirsty for young blood (Kurz 1981).

At this point, the story is interrupted when a screaming, emaciated man jumps out of the woods brandishing a spear. The intruder is quickly revealed to be the jokester among the campers wearing a caveman mask. While there are some points of departure from the more standardized narrative, the filmmakers have drawn upon the Cropsey legend in imagining Jason as a denizen of the woods dead-set on revenge for a family member.

The Burning, another 1981 slasher film, draws directly from the Cropsey myth. Indeed, it employs the name of the legendary maniac for its main character, albeit with an alternate spelling of “Cropsy.” Released within a month of Friday the 13th Part 2, the film contains a comparable campfire scene where a senior counsellor relates the Cropsy story:

There was a camp not far from here, just across the lake. It was called Camp Blackfoot. No one goes there anymore. Everything burned down. There’s nothing left, except the ruins. Now this camp had a caretaker, a really evil bastard. And his name was Cropsy. Everyone hated Cropsy. For a start, he was a drunk. Two bottles of whiskey a day, no problem. Like, most of the time he was somewhere out in space, but if he caught you, look out! Because Cropsy could strip the paint off the walls, just by breathing on them. Now this Cropsy was a sadist. I mean, he got real pleasure out of hurting people, scaring them. And he had these garden shears,you know? The kind with long thin blades. And he carried them all the time, wherever he went. And he had this kind of demonic way of looking at you. One time, this Cropsy really went after this kid from Brooklyn. Followed him around night and day. He made this kid’s life a living hell. But this time he chose the wrong guy. Because the kid and some of his buddies had planned a little prank that would scare the living shit out of Cropsy. Only problem was, the gag went wrong. The next thing anyone knows, Cropsy’s trapped alive and burning in his bunk. They try to get him out but the fire’s so fierce they can’t reach him. All they can do is stand outside, and listen to him cry out in agony. They say he smashed his way through the bunkroom door, just a mass of flames. And as he screamed out, burned alive, he cried out, "I will return. I will have my revenge." They never found his body. He survived. He lives on whatever he can catch. Eats them raw. Alive. No longer human. Right now, he’s out there. Watching. Waiting. Don’t look, he’ll see you. Don’t move, he’ll hear you. Don’t breathe...You’re dead! (Weinstein & Lawrence 1981).

The burning incident described in this story has already been depicted in the film’s opening scene, though the revenge-related utterance has been interpolated by the storyteller. Here again, Cropsy has become a savage, at least in the nested narrative; in the main diegetic narrative, the actual Cropsy is a burn victim dead-set on settling the score. After the plot resolves itself and the murderous Cropsy is fully consumed by flame (as per standardized tellings), the film closes by dissolving to another telling around another campfire, with another group of campers and counselors:

They never found his body but they say his spirit lives in the forest. This forest. A maniac, a thing no longer human. They say he lives on whatever he can catch. Eats them raw, alive maybe. And every year he picks on a summer camp and seeks his revenge for the terrible things those kids did to him. Every year he kills. Right now, he’s out there. Watching. Waiting. So don’t look, he’ll see you. Don’t breathe, he’ll hear you. Don’t move, you’re dead! (Weinstein & Lawrence 1981).

The story has evolved, as Cropsy is now fully inhuman, persisting as a vengeful wraith with super-sensory omniscience.

Madman, another slasher film being made concurrently with The Burning at the dawn of the 80s, was also premised on the Cropsey legend. In fact, Madman’s Cropsey-related elements resembled The Burning’s so closely that its production team had to alter numerous elements of the film, which delayed its release until 1982. Nonetheless, the film provides yet another cinematic retelling of a Cropsey variant, opening with yet another campfire scene, and a camp supervisor of advanced age spinning a yarn for the campers and counselors:

My story deals with a man who used to live in that old dilapidated house behind those trees. We’re not supposed to be this close to it because many strange things happen around here. He was a farmer with his family, wife and two children. He was an evil man. Ugly and mean. He’d beat his wife. Brutally punish his children. He’d drink at the tavern and...Fight all the time. He once had a piece of his nose bitten off in a brawl and didn’t feel a thing. It was a night like tonight. Many, many years ago. Wait a minute, now that I think about it, it was the same night as tonight. The woods, quiet and dark. The farmer, for no apparent reason, went stark raving mad. He walked into his bedroom with an axe in his hand and chopped his sleeping wife into little pieces. Then with his bloodlust awakened, he walked down the hall to his son’s room and took an axe to him, but he still wasn’t finished. He walked across the hall to his daughter’s room. And without so much as a word, he chopped her into little pieces too. Then he calmly walked into the tavern, lifted the bloody axe onto the bar, and ordered himself a beer. Well it wasn’t long before the town found out what happened, and when it did, it was all over for the mad farmer, or so they thought. Ten men jumped him and dragged him screaming to the nearest tree, where they quickly looped a thick rope around his neck and hoisted him high into the air. One of them grabbed the bloody axe and swung it at the farmer’s head leaving a deep, bloody gash at the side of his face. They left him there hanging for dead. Next morning, when they went to cut him down, he was gone. It was then they noticed the bodies of his wife and children were missing. And their bodies have never been found. [...] [O]n certain nights, when the moon is full, he’s out there stalking in the woods. Searching for people so he can chop their heads off with an axe. Or hang them from a tree. [...] I have a good reason I haven’t told you his name. A very good reason. You see, it is said also that if you say his name above a whisper in the woods, he will hear you because he can be anywhere anytime. And if he hears you call his name, he’ll come for you. And if he comes for you, he’ll get you. One by one, you’ll start to fall before night’s over. [...] His name is Madman Marz. His name is Marz. Madman Marz. [...] No one is safe in the woods tonight. Anyone alone in the woods. You can’t hear him, you can’t see him. You smell his odor of death, and you turn around, and suddenly this horribly mutilated face stares down at you. It’s the last thing you see before zap! Off goes your head (Giannone 1982).

Again, the Cropsey analogue has inherited a supernatural power. And while he is said to inhabit a house, he maintains a ferality that is even more obvious than Jason’s or Cropsy’s, as he is depicted onscreen as shoeless, with claw-like fingernails and toenails. As he stalks his victims, he makes unmodulated chirrups and groans. His beard and hair are dishevelled and stark white, much like the features ascribed to Cropsey.

Not only did Friday the 13th, The Burning, and Madman appropriate and reiterate the Cropsey legend, but they also crystallized certain elements in the process of spurring on its evolvement. Visually, the Cropsey analogues of Jason, Cropsy, and Madman Marz solidified the demented drifter of the Tri-State area as facially disfigured (hydrocephalic, burnt, and scarred, respectively). Moreover, they are no longer imagined as having been prominent figures in their communities; rather, they are quite the opposite. These on-screen analogues were all established as atavistic, having reverted to a near-troglodytic state. Most notably, perhaps, the films attributed their Cropsey-inspired madmen with supernatural sensory powers or a spiritual ontological status that was theretofore only hinted at in the standardized campfire narrative itself. Haring and Breslerman’s sources did not describe Cropsey as a “ghost” (1977, 20). The ur-Cropsey* of urban legend was motivated primarily by vengeful psychosis, and not the supernatural capacities hinted at by the end of The Burning, from the outset of Madman, and in Friday the 13th Part VI and beyond. All told, all three films re-inscribe the Cropsey narrative via performance around the campfire, blurring the boundaries of legends diegetic and authentic, providing a regionally characteristic frisson, and then projecting it to a transregional audience.

NOTES:

*With the release of the 2009 documentary Cropsey, there has been increased discussion of the “real” Cropsey. This has been fueled by details surrounding convicted kidnapper Andre Rand, who subsisted during a period of homelessness in wooded areas of Staten Island. This has led many online sources to conclude that Rand was the source of the Cropsey legend. This is untenable for any number of reasons, perhaps most notably the fact that tellings of the Cropsey legend predate Rand’s known criminal activity, which began in 1972.