The Apotheosis of the Psychotronic: A Start in the Crypt and the Night of the Comet (1984)

Well, one must start somewhere.  Sitting so often and so long in lonely, dust-clogged crypts, it is a surprisingly simple feat to go a month without moving at all.  But once you realize this -- cough some of the dust out of your lungs and look around you -- "I'll be damned," you intone to the oppressive dampness.

And then you sit down to write.  And your hand breaks off.  Arhh, hands!  O tempora, o mores, you cry.  And then you get to the point.  The real down and dirty point of it all.  Don't you?

It's time to start something meaningful.  Time to explore scripture.  Time to become a lowly commentator.  We shall scribble in the margins, dustily, shan't we?  If god is "one eternal round" -- an endless spiral of form -- a great and terrible and beautiful all...

Well, part of this project will be to trace a fascination.  Says great and beautiful Howard Lovecraft:

Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man's relation to the cosmos—to the unknown—which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background. Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty.  (Lovecraft)

This might contain, someways, the hint, glint, glimmer of fascination I find in "psychotronic" films --  the grindhouse, exploitation, horror, the b-movie.  What better collapses the dreamily wistful paradox of art and time?  An example:

Night of the Comet (1984).  A cheap, silly horror-comedy, or, a revelation of terrible beauty?  I see, at it's heart, a set of paradoxes that make it both.

At the basest level, it is gleeful 80s trash fun.  But probing deeper, we realize it is a particular fun -- a deep and powerful nostalgia -- that exists only in its celluloid moment.  We can never access it, except as outsiders, as viewers.  This is like all art, of course.  But, it is so particularly striking in this movie, because it is so deliberately a product of its time.

It is not a timeless piece of literature, betrayed only occasionally by an outmoded turn of phrase.  Here there is teased out hair, garish neon,  garish color, Cyndi Lauper covers.  A specific moment in time.  It, furthermore, captures the youth of its acting participants.  And teases them out of time.  Freezes them in an endless moment.

No one can return to this moment.  No one can ever truly inhabit it.  This is enough to make one deeply sad.  But the paradox deepens.  The film is about an apocalypse.  And this is where the truly psychotronic enters the picture.  It is a movie, which captures endless youth, cyclically (as we may watch and rewatch) -- it captures a pleasurable, painful nostalgia.  But this endless youth is juxtaposed against the end of all things.

This combining reaches its height in the infamous shopping sequence:



The astute viewer will pierce this cheesecloth veil.  Here is the horrible vitality of youth against the red death of the world.  Right at the height of ridiculousness, in the movie's most exuberantly youthful, vital, living moment -- the idea of ending strikes home.  These are kids doing kid things -- but there, bubbling in from the edges, is the realization -- and we're all going to die eventually.

But the combination makes it beautiful.  In a month's worth of movie-watching, one or more a day, nothing struck me with more profound joy and pain than this moment.  It is the entire triumph of cinema, of art -- next to all of its limitations.  Because this realization about our eventual death, our decaying youth sits next to a piece of frozen time, of youthful beauty.  It is the pain and beauty of time, potential, hope, and death.  It is the Keatsian dialectic belted out in Cyndi Lauper tones-- an indescribable feud...

My spirit is too weak—mortality

   Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,

   And each imagined pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship tells me I must die

Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.

   Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep,

   That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,

Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.

Such dim-conceived glories of the brain

   Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;

So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

   That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude

Wasting of old Time—with a billowy main—

   A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.

Except our Elgin Marbles here aren't the products of former god-like craftsmanship.  Frankly, that would be something many moderns could sit next to comfortably.  But, next to sheer fun.  The pain dial is amplified.  It speaks our language.  It raids our cultural memory.

Worse still, the two currents in Night of the Comet: (1) the impossibility of returning to our nostalgic homes and (2) the revelation of our eventual deaths in the youthful moments of our greatest vitality.  These things underscore each other.  We realize that our relation to death parallels our relationship to the art.  We can never fully get inside the art or the artist.  Nor can it become us.  We love only from afar, because its physical reality is separate from us.

We have nothing, as Thoreau says of literature, "not only...read but actually breathed from all human lips" -- the language of film contains fully formed figures outside of us, built from the very stuff of our lives.  When we read, we can speak the words -- they inhabit us as we inhabit them in the speaking.  But film is an alien mirror.  It is a medium of unrequited love.  And realizing death in Night of the Comet makes us realize the limits of its art.

Bloom has said the only real function of art is to help us face death.  Unless we believe in the projects of mysticism (so many of our great Americans) -- this is where art leaves us.  We cannot escape ourselves.  On the cusp of unity with all things -- on the cusp of unity with art -- with the artist, we look briefly into the terrible other side: where that one eternal round is unending series of self-reflection, not solipsism -- not that that universe is us, merely that it never reveals itself; it only shows us to ourselves, in an endless reminder that the human (no matter how capacious the spirit) can never truly escape its mortal bounds.  After a long trip into the void, we might just find ourselves waiting for us.

But I resist this.  We revise as we go.  The answer of Ishmael is the real answer.  We have authorship.  We have one eternal round in which we are no longer just appreciators, but authors ourselves; we birth new forms.  We infuse new things with our pained love, in dialogue.  We have our love and our wonder.  Lovecraft again and always:

Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty.

"To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite" -- this is the very stuff of cinematic art.  And in particular, it is the domain of the psychotronic, its fundamental task always to mix the mundane, film-able world with those things from outside.  The trash film, especially, is the site of filmic divinity.  It is the high and the low.  It is the key to the gate.

The zombie is the specter of the universe's hidden spirit.  The rotting castle is a living dream.  The lesbian vampire is the pure lurid dilated phantom of culture.  Each a thousand gateways more.

Kurosawa will always be to me, film scripture in its purest form.  But this project will be the reading of a thousand little books.  For pieces, for fragments, for shoring up ruins -- but for more, endlessly, God, for more -- for gateways to the cosmic.  For dreaming.  For love and ecstatic dreaming.  The potion antidote -- not merely escape, but catalyst for mystical dilation, leading us out beyond ourselves:

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.  (Lovecraft)

Borges speaks about art, at the end of his life.  And in some ways we can feel ourselves on the other side of his words:

A poet never rests.  He's always working, even when he dreams.  Besides, the life of a writer is a lonely one.  You think you are alone, and as the years go by, if the stars are on your side, you may discover that you are the center of a vast circle of invisible friends, whom you will never get to know but who love you.  And that is an immense reward.

Watching films, we are the lovers.  Lonely and pained by the most bizarre strain of solitude, because we will never truly know the makers of our dreams.  But thankful, deeply...

That dreams live.  And this scribbling is the smallest part of my love.  A record of all the things that last in my memory.  And I feel myself transforming.



A society of invisible friends...