The Maelstrom at the End of Summer

A Program Essay for Maverick City Cinema’s Late Summer Soirée

Late summer is the season in which everything still insists upon being alive.

The trees are full. The insects conduct their little electric orchestras after dark. The pavement holds the afternoon long after the sun has gone down. Windows remain open. Shirts remain unnecessary. There is still daylight enough to pretend.

But underneath it, something has begun to move.

Not autumn yet. Nothing so obvious. No leaves turning ceremonially red, no pumpkins, no clean theatrical change of scenery. Only the first suspicion that summer has reached its outer limit. Darkness arrives a little earlier. The night air occasionally contains one impossible cool current. A garden that looked immortal in July begins producing things faster, almost desperately. August has the peculiar grandeur of an empire that has not yet received the telegram.

Tonight’s program begins there.

Not with a film, but with a voice.

Before the projector is started, before Bela Lugosi enters his laboratory, before Bart Simpson raises the dead and before the Amberson mansion begins to recede into history, Buzz Drainpipe will read Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström.”

There will be coffee.

There will be donuts.

This is important.

Maverick City Cinema has no interest in separating the sublime from the ordinary. Terror may arrive while someone is trying to locate the powdered sugar. Revelation has always had to compete with the sound of somebody opening a paper napkin. The universe may tear open above us, but somebody still has to make the coffee.

Poe understood this relationship unusually well.

His maelstrom is enormous, but his story is precise. The terror lies not merely in the violence of nature but in the terrible privilege of seeing it clearly. A man is pulled toward annihilation and, in the midst of panic, begins to observe. Objects behave differently according to their shapes. Patterns reveal themselves. The mechanism becomes briefly legible.

He cannot stop the whirlpool.

He can only learn how to move within it.

This is the first proposition of the evening:

To understand the force destroying you is not necessarily to defeat it.

Sometimes understanding is simply the difference between being swallowed and being returned, changed, to shore.

From Poe’s ocean we move immediately into another laboratory of catastrophe: Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster.

There is a temptation, with Wood, to laugh before the movie has even begun. His reputation arrives early and takes its seat before us. The wobbly sets, the recycled footage, the dubious octopus, the scientific machinery assembled from whatever electricity happened to be lying around. The films have spent decades carrying the burden of being described as failures.

But failure is an oddly insufficient word for Ed Wood.

Failure generally implies surrender to reality.

Wood’s cinema refuses reality outright.

If he needs a storm, there will be a storm.

If he needs an atomic superman, Bela Lugosi will explain one into existence.

If he needs a gigantic octopus, then by God there is an octopus, and the audience may take up any complaints with the management.

The astonishing thing about Bride of the Monster is not that it fails to resemble a polished studio horror movie. The astonishing thing is that it exists with such complete belief in itself despite possessing so little of what cinema supposedly requires.

Money says no.

Materials say no.

Common sense says no.

Ed Wood says, Action.

This makes Bride of the Monster unexpectedly compatible with Poe.

Poe’s sailor survives by recognizing the rules of the impossible situation.

Wood survives by declining to recognize the rules at all.

Both confront systems larger than themselves. Poe studies the machinery. Wood ignores the machinery and builds another machine out of cardboard.

Between them lies almost the entire spectrum of artistic survival.

Then the lights come up.

Coffee may be refreshed.

Donuts may have entered their second, more philosophical phase.

And the television takes over.

“Treehouse of Horror II.”

“Treehouse of Horror III.”

These episodes occupy the exact center of the evening because The Simpsons belongs to that marvelous historical moment when the debris of twentieth-century culture was still lying everywhere within reach.

Horror movies. Anthology television. Poe. Serling. Shelley. King Kong. Twilight Zone premises. Killer dolls. Zombies. Mad scientists. Cursed objects. Stories once whispered in candlelight, then projected in theaters, then broadcast into living rooms, are thrown into a yellow suburban blender and returned as jokes.

Nothing is sacred.

Which is different from saying nothing matters.

Parody is often treated as destruction, but great parody is closer to preservation by digestion. It proves that an object has entered the bloodstream deeply enough to be rearranged without losing recognition.

A child can encounter King Kong through Bart Simpson.

A joke about reanimation still carries Frankenstein’s electric charge.

A cursed monkey’s paw can migrate through literature, cinema, television and schoolyard quotation without completely surrendering its ancient warning:

You may get what you asked for.

History rarely destroys culture cleanly.

Mostly it chops culture into pieces and feeds those pieces forward.

The dead return wearing different costumes.

This is the second proposition of the evening:

Nothing disappears if someone keeps finding a use for the ghost.

And then, after Poe’s terror, Wood’s conviction and Springfield’s carnival of recycled nightmares, we arrive at the final film.

Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons.

And here the joke stops.

Not completely, because Welles himself understood comedy too deeply ever to make a world entirely without it. But the evening’s machinery suddenly reveals what it has been building toward.

The real monster.

Not electricity.

Not an octopus.

Not the undead.

Not a cursed object.

Time.

The Ambersons possess nearly everything human beings invent to protect themselves from change.

Money.

Property.

Family name.

Architecture.

Custom.

Social position.

Memory.

They have a magnificent house in a magnificent world and every reason to believe magnificence is a permanent condition.

Then an automobile comes down the street.

The automobile is not evil.

That is what makes it terrible.

Progress does not need hatred.

History does not require malice.

A new machine arrives because people find it useful, and somewhere else a world begins ending.

The tragedy of The Magnificent Ambersons is not that civilization has become worse in any simple sense. The tragedy is that change distributes its benefits and wounds without consulting the people who have mistaken their surroundings for eternity.

Streets widen.

Houses vanish.

Fortunes collapse.

Names lose meaning.

Cities breathe smoke.

Children become adults.

Adults become photographs.

The people standing at the center of one age become curiosities in the next.

And no speech, however eloquent, stops the process.

The irony is almost unbearably complete because The Magnificent Ambersons itself became a victim of the mechanism it depicts.

The film that survives is famously not quite the film Welles intended.

It was cut.

Altered.

Reshaped.

Partially lost.

Somewhere behind the movie we can watch exists another movie that history consumed.

That absent film has become one of cinema’s great ghosts.

Perhaps this is why the surviving Ambersons can feel so strangely haunted even in scenes containing no supernatural element. The movie already knows something has been taken from it.

We are watching loss describe loss.

A broken object tells us that objects break.

And now Poe returns.

The maelstrom.

The great machinery turning beneath appearances.

A man looks into the abyss and notices patterns.

Ed Wood responds by building a laboratory.

The Simpsons responds by making jokes.

The Ambersons respond by insisting the world remain what it was.

Only one of these strategies reliably fails.

Refusal.

Late summer knows this.

Late summer does not resist autumn.

It merely burns extravagantly until autumn arrives.

Perhaps that is why this particular collection of works belongs together despite appearing, at first glance, to have been assembled by drawing titles from several unrelated hats.

Poe.

Wood.

Groening.

Welles.

The ocean, the swamp laboratory, Springfield, the Amberson mansion.

Yet every piece concerns people staring at forces they cannot completely control.

Nature.

Science.

Culture.

Modernity.

Time.

Every piece asks, in its own vocabulary:

What do we do when the world begins moving faster than our ability to explain it?

Poe says observe.

Wood says create anyway.

The Simpsons says laugh and reuse the parts.

Welles says remember.

Maverick City Cinema proposes one additional answer:

Gather.

Sit together in a room.

Drink coffee.

Eat a donut.

Listen to someone read a nineteenth-century story aloud.

Watch an inexpensive monster movie created through stubbornness and wire.

Watch television cannibalize a century of nightmares.

Then finish with one of American cinema’s great elegies for a world disappearing beneath its own future.

Outside, August will still be August.

The night may still be warm.

Cars will pass.

Phones will glow.

Buildings will stand where other buildings stood.

Somebody will go home through a neighborhood that has changed without asking permission.

And somewhere in the dark, invisible but already turning, the great wheel will continue.

The maelstrom does not stop.

The projector does.

For a little while, that will have to be enough.