In this column, we look at two pop-cultural interpretations of ubiquitous Weird legends as portrayed by two narrative television programs… like how Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Rupert Giles and Inspector Gadget’s Penny would both be nothing without magic books. But with monsters. Enjoy.

Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Episode 1×13, “Tale of the Pinball Wizard”

And

Batman: the Animated Series, Episode 1×45, “What is Reality?”

Every major technological trend or development is always addressed by pop culture with a movie or show that illustrates the breakthrough’s potential for wild mass homicide. What if a VHS tape… were haunted? What if your cell phone… were haunted? What if the Internet… were haunted? The stereotype is that all of these sorts of properties emerge from Japan – after all, my above examples come from The Ring, One Missed Call and Pulse, all American re-makes of popular Japanese horror films. But one really only need to look back as far as the early ‘90s to find a time when North America was just as obsessed with fashioning some sort of fiber optic bogeyman (e.g., films like The Net and Lawnmower Man) with which to sop up all the technophobic cold sweat breaking out over things like the Internet and the promise of virtual reality. The root of this fear stems from people’s inability to comprehend exactly how invisible information is stored, transmitted and received, and their dread that individuals who do understand, or ghosts, who are also invisible and are, therefore, somehow viewed as computer compatible, can take advantage of that mystery to exploit society’s reliance on technology.

Batman: The Animated Series and Are You Afraid of the Dark? both crafted technology-centered episodes, specifically predicated upon the largely parental fear of addictive escapism in the form of video games. The episodes were released only one year apart (Tale of the Pinball Wizard in 1991 and What is Reality? in 1992), and each seeks to address the ubiquitous modern concern that people are using electronic entertainments to escape their actual lives by entering false realities that they either command or are able to conquer. One of these episodes comes down firmly on the side of irrational parents, engaging in lengthy finger wagging session that lays out the addictive nature of gaming and the ultimate physical price that comes with it. The other episode is, thankfully, a staunch defender of kids, recognizing that, while it’s true that people can’t occupy a world that they control, and shouldn’t try to, they can still embrace the fact that, ultimately, they have complete control over themselves.

In “The Tale of the Pinball Wizard,” adolescent pinball obsessive Ross Campbell, while trying to talk his way into a job at the local arcade, volunteers to watch the place while the creepy proprietor eats lunch. The proprietor agrees, with the condition that Ross doesn’t touch the awesome-but-broken pinball machine that’s stored in the back room. Ross agrees, but of course plays the game, which turns the mall into a living version of the game story, a medieval quest, which Ross must finish to escape. Upon completing the quest, however, Ross discovers that he’s not in the mall after all, but actually trapped inside the machine. The proprietor laughs at him through the glass.

In “What is Reality?,” Edward Nigma, in a plot to erase all records of himself and transform his Riddler alter-ego into a wholly digital miscreant, hacks into the stock market to lure Commissioner Gordon into virtual reality. Nigma then proceeds to hold Gordon’s mind hostage in the program, both to keep the police busy while he destroys the hard copies of his identity records and to lure Batman into the same virtual prison where Gordon is being held. Once Batman enters the program, Nigma presents him with a number of virtual riddles, including a giant chess game. Batman generates an army of Batmen to destroy the program after realizing that, even in the simulation, he still controls his own mind. Later, they discover that The Riddler has lost his mind after losing himself in his own virtual universe.

Are You Afraid of the Dark? is very clearly attempting to deliver a stereotypical polemic about the dangers of excessive video gaming. What’s interesting about the episode is that, in typical ‘80s drug PSA fashion, Ross is never actually given the opportunity to apply the lesson in his life, as his pathological playing immediately has ridiculous, irreversible consequences. Rather than, say, Ross falling asleep and dreaming that he’s in the universe of his pinball game and then slowly coming to realize that the game is only fun in the context of real life, and that the moment the game becomes a lifestyle it’s no longer a game, then waking up and opting go play Frisbee or smell a flower, the show completes its totally valid, if condescending and out-and-touch, lesson using a fairy tale scare tactic: “You want to live a life of pinball? Well, now you will… because you’re shrunk down and actually physically trapped inside the machine!”

In Batman: The Animated Series, although Nigma essentially suffers the same fate as Ross when he completely loses his mind to the virtual world, he doesn’t die… or get physically transplanted into the computer and have to run around getting electrocuted by micro-chips or something. In fact, the entire episode is more balanced, doling out a comprehensive admonishment while still showing faith in people to engage responsibly with escapism. The Riddler’s creation of his own virtual world and attempt to exact omnipotent control over it is foiled by Batman’s freedom of will, which also saves Batman from extended imprisonment in the digital realm. This is wonderful because it not only demonstrates that the only absolute control a person has is over their own actions, but also shows the implications of that reality in practice. The Riddler’s downfall comes in attempting total sway over the manufactured universe around him. Meanwhile, Batman only defeats Nigma upon the realization that even if, in virtual reality, Nigma is able to determine the conditions of the surroundings, Batman still has agency to control his own butt-kicking actions, which throws the Riddler off, causing him to lose what little control he actually has.

(Unfortunately, the portrayal of the VR realm is so ridiculously devoid of any technical realism, trying to coax a definitive technology-specific message out of the episode is nearly impossible, although bughouse insane computer world probably resonated with kids a bit better than pinball land.)

Applause to Batman: The Animated Series for offering a broad life lesson that both addresses parents’ fears, while also reminding kids that their brains are powerful, their wills are strong, video games can still be fun and even if they did control Mario World, Mega Man could still bust in and start killing Yoshis. Boo to Are You Afraid of the Dark? for saying that video games are bad and that if you get addicted to playing Mario, a live piranha plant will actually set you on fire.

In this column, we look at two pop-cultural interpretations of ubiquitous Weird legends as portrayed by two narrative television programs… like how The Closer’s Brenda Johnson and The Muppet Show’s Janice both stockpile excess grrl power in their lips. But with monsters. Enjoy.

This week:
I am the werewolf

Tales from the Crypt, Episode 4×13, “Werewolf Concerto”

And

Futurama, Episode 2×18, “The Honking”

Whether they’re eviscerating innocents or surfing atop speeding vans, werewolves play an integral role in the over-active dream life of the human world; they are an indelible personification of the perpetual internal pugilism between ego and id that holds civilization in tenuous balance between perfection and collapse. Humanity, as contemporary society understands it, is a volatile potion derived from a combination of the instinctual primacy of natural functions and hierarchies, and the imposed order of an invented ethical and social structure. Over the centuries, tales of lycanthropy have been used to represent the eternal ego/id conflict in a variety of venues, including mental illness and human sexuality. After all, unlike vampires, demons or yetis, werewolves are full-time humans who only moonlight as monsters, going feral when the extant animal mechanisms inside them are activated, forcing them to tear through the binding fabric of civilized clothing and run howling out into the world with all the anger and force of a captured animal finally loosed from its cage.

Tales from the Crypt and Futurama both take incisive looks at very different aspects of the curse of the werewolf. Both delight in some of the legend’s traditional trappings – the stark pain of transfiguration, the who-dunnit paranoia of knowing someone in the room is harboring a beast within – while exploring different, but in no way mutually exclusive, facets of the larger ramifications of lycanthropy in the modern age. One episode travels down the well-worn path of the werewolf as male sexuality gone awry, before taking a sharp turn that provides an answer to the reckless pubescent violence of repressed masculinity. The other seeks to acknowledge the co-dependence that the wolf exhibits towards the very system that it longs to devour.

In “Werewolf Concerto,” the owner of a werewolf-stalked luxury resort promises vacationers that an anonymous guest is a veteran werewolf hunter who has agreed to kill the creature. One swaggering, rugged guest in particular, a Mr. Lokai (played by a bestubbled Timothy Dalton), who’s first seen wooing a particularly attractive female into bed, seems extremely driven to uncover the identity of the werewolf, conducting subtle interviews and spying on his fellow vacationers. In the end, it turns out that Lokai is the monster, and his actions were meant to out the hunter, who he could then kill. Unfortunately for Lokai, the aforementioned particularly attractive female is the hunter, and also a vampire who travels the world, killing and feeding on werewolves so as not to have to feed on the innocent. Dalton gets vamp ganked.

In “The Honking,” Bender gets run over by a mysterious 20th century car while visiting the creepy robot town of Thermostadt. Upon returning to New New York, Bender discovers he’s acquired a virus that, each night at exactly 12 AM, turns him into a murderous werecar. Bender discovers that to break the curse, he must discover the original bearer of the virus, and destroy it. After following a trail of increasingly strange were-vehicles, the Planet Express crew locates its quarry in the form of an experimental 2019 Chrysler called Project Satan, which was constructed using parts from all of history’s most evil cars. They proceed to demolish Project Satan, thus breaking the curse.

If these episodes work in tandem to do one thing, it’s to show how broad a swath of the cultural landscape werewolves occupy. Both employ similar genre tropes and ideas, but end up using them to shape and resolve completely separate arguments. Fortunately, “Werewolf Concerto” supplies enough of a version of the contemporary werewolf legend to provide a foundation for the fascinating ramifications of “The Honking”’s tale of manufactured lycanthropy and how it relates to the human nightmare of werewolfism.

Up until the latter years of the 20th century, proper werewolves (meaning those whose transfiguration is involuntary) have always been portrayed as male, the curse of lycanthropy often representing the deep-set violent carnality of masculine sexuality, and the danger of allowing it to be repressed by the societal ethos of sexual virtue and monogamy (again, id vs. ego). Even the transformation itself, what with the sudden sprouting of body hair and fevered grunting and panting, presents a sort of hyper pubescence, belying a powerful, but dark, sexual awakening. The torment of the classic werewolf is his knowledge, during waking hours and long sleepless nights beneath the waxing gibbous moon, that this fierce libidinous animalism is a part of him, ever present, living deep inside and waiting to be unleashed.

Tales from the Crypt flips this paradigm by showing a modern werewolf who has embraced these dark urges, the spontaneous, normative sex that he engages in while in human form acting as a welcome prelude to the ruthless acts of murderous penetration he later performs with his claws. While, initially, the end reveal that the woman who defeats him is actually a vampire seems over the top, really, it’s engaging perfectly with the inherent sexism of the classic werewolf mythos (the denial that women also possess deep-set, primal sexual urges) by embracing the calculatingly ruthless sexuality of vampirism and applying it as almost the female answer to lycanthropy, the fangs offering a physical mechanism for the woman’s penetration of the man. Whether the idea that men’s repressed sexuality is one that’s loud, unfocused and wild and women’s is cold, savvy and manipulative is more sexist toward males or females, I’ll leave up to you to decide. The point is that “Werewolf Concerto” crafts a modern response to one of the oldest interpretations of this lupine threat using an equally classic competing monstrosity.
If Tales from the Crypt is asking, “How might a contemporary werewolf habitually embrace the repressive mores of society,” then is Futurama asking, “How is it that the repressive mores of society habitually create werewolves?” Using the creation of robots with A.I. (and, therefore, free will) to parallel the advent of evolved man, the episode demonstrates that, even if the binary of good and evil is accepted as the pre-existing state of the universe, lycanthropy depends on a structured society in order to exist.

At the time that Project Satan is created, the only robots it can infect with the virus are machines that pre-date A.I. – machines that, once attacked, exist in a static state of evil (“evil” here always referring to the subjective mass perception of evil as that which encourages the deterioration of the prevailing ideology); up to this point, then, the threat is still merely the general existence and corruptive nature of evil. Once A.I. permits robots free will, they become responsible for their own decisions. The curse of that original malignance, the curse of the werecar (the pre-android machine to the werewolf’s pre-human animal), now becomes a threat because it represents an internal prehistoric enemy, crafted before the advent of free will, and therefore immune to the absolute individual control that agency ought to allow. This is the root of lycanthropy’s ability to instill terror – it presents an argument for an absence of free will that is in no way based on things like karma or determinism, but rather on the stifling dogma of nature.

To humanize it, the biological imperatives of humanity (eating, sleeping, etc.) eliminate the possibility of complete free will. By building these necessary processes into the structure of society and constructing choices around them (what to eat, when to sleep, etc.), a functional illusion of freedom is created; however, this same structure requires that limitations be placed on other instincts, and it’s these primal, selfish, but natural, instincts, and the threat they pose to the stability of current societal architecture, that the werewolf embodies.
Just as Tales From the Crypt assures the viewer that the werewolf is still actively hunting, even in a more permissive, modern society, Futurama asserts that even the loosest artificial structure can’t shake the fear of inevitable natural chaos, thereby, answering the Cryptkeeper with a resounding, “no, d’uh.”

In this column, we look at two pop-cultural interpretations of ubiquitous Weird legends as portrayed by two narrative television programs… like how Bones’ Angela and Six Feet Under’s Olivier both use art to explore distant, uncharted regions of the human capacity for being annoying. But with monsters. Enjoy.

This week:
Jack

Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Episode 1×01, “The Ripper”

And

Star Trek, Episode 02×14, “A Wolf in the Fold”

For two and half months in the latter half of 1888, Jack the Ripper prowled the brothels and boarding houses of London’s seedy Whitechapel district, killing and mutilating at least five prostitutes with brutal aplomb. The Ripper was never captured and, over the course of the last century, the list of possible suspects has grown to contain the names of over 100 people, ranging from abortionists to cobblers to known confidence men.

While it’s increasingly likely that detectives and pathologists will never uncover the true identity of one of the world’s most notorious serial killers, Hollywood has continually stepped in to offer fantastical solutions.

If there’s one service that pop culture dutifully provides, it’s the declawing of society’s fiercest bogeymen by strapping them down into three-act structures and onychectomizing them with sharp dialogue and steady-handed denouements.

These episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Star Trek are quintessential examples of popular storytelling providing the solace of a solution where real life finds none and, in doing so, offering the viewer a false sense of comfort and security. The anonymity of Jack the Ripper is why he has endured as an elusive, frustrating and terrifying cultural enigma; he is an abstract, at once man, monster and ghost – a human driven to inhuman deeds, who then disappeared into the ether of nightmares before his true face was revealed. Fortunately, the first step storytelling takes to allay our deepest terrors is the provision of a monstrous physical form that can then be attacked and conquered by the brave and the savvy and the attractive. It’s in this aspect – personification – where these shows choose radically divergent paths, while still managing to arrive at a similar and wholly unsatisfying brand of succor.

In the pilot of Kolchak: Night Stalker, “The Ripper,” the titular stalker, a wise-cracking newspaper reporter, is investigating the knife murders of three women in the Chicago area. After watching police do battle with the suspect, who eludes the fuzz by performing an array of seemingly superhuman feats, Kolchak begins researching the history of various slashers throughout history, including Jack the Ripper, only to discover that dozens upon dozens of seemingly unrelated, geographically scattered attacks are the work of a single supernatural immortal who limits his regional murders to five victims, and whose only weakness is electricity. Kolchak proceeds to electrocute and destroy the Ripper, but the body burns up and no one believes him. Subsequently, Kolchak cracks wise.

In the second season Star Trek episode “A Wolf in the Fold,” Scotty is accused of murdering two women after two separate incidents in which he’s found alone with stabbed bodies and in possession of a bloodied knife and a nagging case of amnesia. After a thorough lie detector test is administered on the Enterprise, everyone is convinced of his innocence. After doing some research, the crew discovers that the murders were actually performed by a formless and seemingly immortal being that feeds on fear. This being, which can take an invisible physical shape, and also possess other creatures and objects, was responsible not only for the murders attributed to Jack the Ripper, but also to a string of other violent killings across time and space. After the creature possesses the ship’s computer and a couple other folks, Kirk and Bones trap it in a corpse and use the transporter to disperse its atoms throughout deep space.

Clearly, each episode approaches the personification of the Ripper in a wholly different way – Kolchak by endowing him with the dark cloak and haughty cane (plus a bizarro beard) that people have always envisioned, but then hanging those accoutrements upon a supernatural creature, and Star Trek by refusing to give him a definitive physical shape, choosing instead to preserve his facelessness, and the terror thereof, while still providing a narrative resolution to an enduring historical mystery. Given the radically dichotomous portrayals of the killer in either show, it might seem a given that both episodes are also exploring different corners of the Ripper’s mythology and cultural currency – of the lessons society can extract from his violence and the truths these lessons reveal about the dark, primal shadow that haunts human nature. Instead, Kolchak and Star Trek bluster and scapegoat until mankind is not just an unfortunate victim, but also an heroic savior.

While both shows manufacture monsters to pawn the Ripper murders off on, it’s Kolchak that fully and completely passes the buck. The creature, referred to simply as the Ripper, has lived among humans for decades, moving from place to place and killing women for no apparent reason. It presents the most basic narrative blueprint of a stock monster, who is then defeated in a ridiculously clichéd manner – the exploitation of an arbitrary, accidentally discovered Achilles heel. Meanwhile, the greater message, that the savagery and violence of Jack the Ripper’s crimes exceeded man’s natural capacity for evil, ergo, those crimes must have been perpetrated by some extra-natural being, attempts to erase the rightful respect and fear of the human capacity for brutality that the Ripper should instill in everyone.

Star Trek doesn’t do much better. In typical glass-is-three-quarters-full Roddenberry fashion, “A Wolf in the Fold” not only attempts to explain away a specific set of 19th century hooker murders, but also some percentage of evil itself. Star Trek, as a flagship of late-‘60s American culture, was always enthusiastic to portray a future in which humanity has systematically conquered many of the prejudices and injustices of past societies. By creating a being that lacks visible physical form, and which can also possess people and machinery, this episode takes the larger theme of man’s ability to better itself as a species to an entirely new level; it posits that, for centuries, humans have been attacked and possessed by an innately sinister invisible creature. Following the episode’s implications out to their logical ends, one can only conclude that any number of malevolent, allegedly human deeds could have actually been the work of some amorphous, fear-hungry anathema. This regressive attribution of historic human barbarism to nefarious invisible monsters that can act independently through human hands is merely a contemporary secularization of the type of “the devil made me do it,” humans-as-Satan’s-pawns beliefs espoused by less-enlightened ancient cultures.

Jack the Ripper was scary precisely because he was human. That a regular person could be capable of such extensive, unhesitant violence is much more frightening than the idea that a monster might exist, or that some powerful, external evil could force a human hand. Pop culture creates monsters out of human fear to give people something tangible to fight. To wrap our insecurities, our irrational terrors and momentary peccadilloes, into grotesque, drooling masses of scales and teeth, and then snap their sinewy necks, is a form of desperate empowerment. To escape the dark side of human nature by attributing it to some other-worldly creature that cackles and howls and possesses starship computers is sheer denial. And as witty and exciting as Kolchak or Star Trek might make it, I’m not buying it.

photo credit: slimmer_jimmer

In this column, we look at two pop-cultural interpretations of ubiquitous Weird legends as portrayed by two narrative television programs… like how Battlestar Galactica’s Colonel Tigh and Pushing Daisies’ Aunt Lily both use an eye patch to eliminate the burden of depth perception from their delirium tremens. But with monsters. Enjoy.

This week:
“Don’t be silly, Toto. Scarecrows don’t talk.”

Friday the 13th: The Series, Episode 1×11, “Scarecrow”

And

Supernatural, Episode 1×11, “Scarecrow”

On the most basic level, the scarecrow is a symbol of protection – an untiring sentry standing watch over a working family’s livelihood. The idea of creating something in the image of man, of manipulating raw Earth or plant matter into human form, of shaping around that form a mission or purpose to be carried out in the creator’s stead, is the stuff of golems (And if pop culture has taught us anything about golems, it’s that the only thing worse than a wild golem loosed recklessly by a careless hand is a controlled golem conducted maliciously by a steely one).

The transition of the scarecrow from the symbol of protection that it represented to our European ancestors to the glowering potential death omen it has since become has everything to do with the cultural shifts that occur when a communally centered agricultural ideology is overpowered by a system of industrial capitalism, and the fear that fading agricultural segments of that industrialized society will employ drastic measures to force an unpredictable, uncontrollable entity (the Earth) to function with the same consistency as wholly programmed and regulated entity (a machine). Drastic measures like, say, golems…

In “Scarecrow,” a sinister innkeeper is using an enchanted scarecrow that offers a prosperous harvest from all its owner’s landholdings in exchange for three human sacrifices, selected by the owner using photographs pinned to the scarecrow’s lapel. The innkeeper’s scheme is to buy up local farms, offering the sellers a continued cut of the profits from her perpetually plentiful harvests, and then use those who refuse to sell their land as sacrifices. The farmers still ultimately gross more than they would have owning their land and braving yearly blights, frosts and aphid infestations, and the disappearances are chalked up to failed, debt-drowned farmers skipping out on bill collectors. Thankfully, Micki and Ryan get wind of the haunted scarecrow and arrive in town to put it out to pasture.

In…ahem… “Scarecrow,” Sam and Dean trace a rash of annual road-tripper disappearances to a small farming town with an overly friendly welcoming committee and a sinister-looking scarecrow. It turns out that the scarecrow is the avatar of an ancient pagan deity that the town turned to years earlier in the wake of crop troubles. In exchange for two sacrifices a year (one male, one female), the creature ensures the entire town a lush, bountiful crop. As it is pagan, the deity’s power rests in a sacred tree, which the Winchester’s destroy. End of scarecrow.

While both of these first season, 11th episodes entitled “Scarecrow” accomplish their goal by painting suitably terrifying portraits of farming gone mystically awry, it’s Friday the 13th that seems to construct a more, for lack of a better word, “realistic” narrative. Supernatural really just espouses a deep-set xenophobia via blatant stereotyping. And I’m referring to the agrarian cult thing here… not all of the homophobic, yo’ mamma-caliber gay jokes that Dean makes. Like all golem stories, while the golem reflects the tale’s mileu, it’s the human puppeteer(s) that give the most insight into the true message of the story.

(Though the references to paganism and ancient magic would seem to suggest at least some sense of overriding socio-religious fear [such as in Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man], these episodes are simply employing them as a part-and-parcel shorthand to give viewers some immediate (if stereotypical) insight into the baddies’ motivations without having to, say, invent an entirely unique nature-based theology.)

Supernatural shows that, with crops failing, a small farming community will band together and do whatever it takes for their town to survive in the harsh conditions created by the requirements of the free market. The problem with this is that it suggests a clichéd and artificial communalism that simply doesn’t exist (in practice, at least) when a free market exchange is the dominant trait of an economy. These farmers aren’t living on a self-sufficient compound where all the crops are used to feed the members of the community; they’re selling the majority of what they grow and then using the money to purchase things like equipment, insurance and pre-packaged foodstuffs. Even the most magnanimous farmer in town is still, by virtue of the most basic architecture of capitalism, in competition with every other local farmer. The idea of the town banding together to commit murders in the name of an equally shared prosperity simply represents an unrealistic combined fear of socialism and supposedly shifty country folk who rely on consulting natural, and more importantly, unquantifiable, indices in making their business decisions.

Admittedly, Friday the 13th still perpetrates general country bumpkin stereotyping, portraying all the farmers as competitive, but friendly and not at all actively competitive, but, admittedly, the show does need to quickly establish a segment of the economy that’s the perfect target for a free market suckerpunch in order for the episode to play out. The story it tells, with the single greedy woman manipulating a homicidal scarecrow, shows the viewer that if someone is going to employ ancient pagan magic (the aforementioned drastic measures) for economic gain, they’re going to do it within the parameters of the prevailing economic ideology, namely capitalism. The town as a communal entity is only a participant to the extent that farmers have sold their land to a single real estate maven who’s able to artificially increase the annual output of the land using morally questionable (scarecrow murders) means in order to benefit all parties involved, while her personal profits skyrocket and those unwilling to participate are eliminated. In a way, the entire episode draws a basic (if heavy-handedly pessimistic) picture of applied capitalism.

Supernatural proposes that a desperate community forced to compete beyond their abilities will use untoward methods to create a new, competing system. Friday the 13th underlines the real fear – that, in any system, desperate or greedy individuals will go outside the artificial moral boundaries of that system, while still adhering to its essential economic tenets, in order to financially succeed above the level permitted by the constructed ethical ceiling that others obey, thereby, exploiting the systems’ true participants.

Every free market walks a perilous line between competitive and unfairly competitive. Supernatural denies that something can be both competitive and fair. Friday the 13th forces us over the line and onto the dark side.

Matt Finley is the Weird Things Culture Researcher and is currently based in Cleveland. His blog can be found here and you can follow him on Twitter at @Finfizzler.

In this column, we look at two pop-cultural interpretations of ubiquitous Weird legends as portrayed by two narrative television programs… like how Sam Malone on Cheers and Al Swearengen on Deadwood both manipulated the politics of an entire town from behind the counter of a bar. But with monsters. Enjoy.

This week:
“Bigfoot is blurry.”

South Park, Episode 1×03, “Volcano”

The Six Million Dollar Man, Episodes 3×16 and 3×17, “The Secret of Bigfoot”

Bigfoot has always occupied a unique place in the pantheon of American cryptids. And I use “American” very deliberately here to suggest that, while sasquatches and yetis and abominable snowmen are found (and feared) the world over, Bigfoot is a specifically American cultural institution. Even the name “Bigfoot,” a simple, almost cute, descriptive moniker, suggests what ultimately seems to be the larger mystery that Americans wrestle with when they ponder the elusive, hirsute giant. It isn’t “Is he fact or fiction?,” but rather “Is he friend or foe?”

Both South Park and The Six Million Dollar man mused upon this question. One employed the query in revealing larger truths about pop culture’s grip on folklore. The other simply provided an answer… a weird, ridiculous answer.

In the first-season episode “Volcano,” Stan’s uncle takes the boys on a hunting trip while, simultaneously, the titular volcano threatens to destroy South Park. Cartman is mocked for telling the legend of Scuzzlebutt, a terrifying basket-weaving creature with a celery arm and a Patrick Duffy leg, and Stan’s masculinity is questioned when he refuses to kill any animals. In the end, the volcano erupts, and, though the town manages to save itself, Stan, Kyle and Cartman are rescued by the real Scuzzlebutt, who weaves a basket to carry them safely over the lava. Upon reaching safety, Stan immediately attempts to prove his manliness by shooting Scuzzlebutt in the head, which only ends up making everyone mad.

Meanwhile, back in the ‘70s, in the epic two-part episode “The Secret of Bigfoot,” Steve Austin links the disappearance of two scientists to Bigfoot. After tracking the creature down and trying to communicate with him, only to be violently rebuffed, The Six Million Dollar Man fights the creature, which takes flight after Austin tears off its arm. Austin then pursues the monster to a cave, where Bigfoot is revealed to be an intelligent android built by aliens to guard their mountain base.

Though created more than two decades apart, both of these storylines engage with the uniquely American consideration (maybe even hope) that Bigfoot is a benign, gentle creature, perhaps more human than animal. Scuzzlebutt (an obvious Bigfoot analog) is revealed to be a magnanimous craftsman who puts himself in danger to save the children. During Steve Austin’s initial encounter with the beast, Austin tries repeatedly to talk not just at the creature, but with it. How can we use these distinctly American narratives to uncover how Bigfoot has been sculpted into a national icon?

The Six Million Dollar Man two-part episode is interesting as an artifact from the beginning of America’s pop cultural fixation on Bigfoot. From the discovery of a giant footprint to the first sighting of the creature ambling through the woods (a clear homage to the infamous Patterson-Gimlin footage), the show’s portrayal of Bigfoot (up until the sensationalist, ratings-hungry robot reveal) hinges on his starkly uneven elusiveness-to-size ratio and the taxonomical theory that he is a missing evolutionary link between primates and man. While it seems obvious to regard the latter point, evolutionary kinship, as the root of the country’s fixation, it’s important to consider that Bigfoot-like creatures are a globally reported phenomenon, but few others are afforded the same national affection (or adorable nickname) as Bigfoot. Even the alien robot version of Bigfoot was portrayed as a misunderstood, intelligent alien robot. While it’s true that his bipedal posture and supposedly humanoid face lend Bigfoot a bit more hugability than, say, the horse-headed, bat-winged Jersey Devil, there’s a huge leap being made from possible threat to anonymous creature to probable friend.

So, what’s aiding Americans’ minds in making this jump? Well, on television, the Jersey Devil is going to be an anonymous puppet or special effect. Bigfoot, on the other hand, because of this supposed evolutionary kinship, can be played by a human. Everyone who watched The Six Million Dollar Man, for example, saw the creature as portrayed by a Muhammad Ali, and that image was branded into the cultural consciousness. To oversimplify: America sees Muhammad Ali as Bigfoot, America loves Muhammad Ali, ergo, etc. And that’s just one portrayal on one show. Bigfoot was a fixture of narrative TV in the ‘70s; the more people see a monster personified, the less they see the monster.

Here’s where South Park comes into it – while Scuzzlebutt’s Patrick Duffy leg seems like a silly pop cultural non sequitur, it manages to perfectly articulate this precise point: folklore is no less susceptible to pop culture than music or film. In his story, Cartman characterizes the creature as a bloodthirsty beast that kills people in order to “add pieces to its deformed body.” This quote almost reads like hyperbolized meta-commentary on pop culture itself, and the way it’s constantly assembling and re-assembling its own amorphous form and the form of all of it components, Bigfoot included.

The underlying non-threatening folksiness hinted at by Scuzzlebutt’s celery arm and penchant for basket weaving reveal another constructed trait that Americans have projected onto Bigfoot; If it’s assumed that Bigfoot is, in fact, more human than primate, his humanity is an older version, untouched by technology and the social complexities of the modern world. Given America’s obsession with idealizing an unobtainable past, it makes sense that people would find something attractive and mysterious about this kind of basic humanity, and the way Bigfoot supposedly carries it around inside of him, like he’s the last fluent speaker of some ancient, forgotten language.

The real Bigfoot remains a mystery. In the meantime, the country has stitched together the Bigfoot it loves. It has a Muhammad Ali leg, an idealized past arm and a wealth of the other disparate pieces of our national identity that have been offered up and subsumed in the name of creating a truly American monster.

Matt Finley is a regular Weird Things researcher currently based in Cleveland. His blog can be found here and you can follow him on Twitter at @Finfizzler.

In this column, we look at two pop-cultural interpretations of ubiquitous Weird legends as portrayed by two narrative television programs… like how Walter on Fringe and the eponymous Gilmore girls repeatedly explored binge eating as a salve for intellectual fatigue. But with monsters. Enjoy.

This week:

“I heard a Frankenstein lives there!”

The X-Files Episode 5×06 – “The Post-Modern Prometheus”

Written by show creator Chris Carter

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Episode 2×02 – “Some Assembly Required”

Written by Ty King

The classic story of Frankenstein has been reinterpreted through the catch phrase-addled, boob-frenzied lens of pop culture over and over and over again. Just when you thought the premise was dead, some mad scientist of a producer resurrects it against the will of God and allows the resulting hideous perversion to rampage through prime time all over again. Two of the most lauded modern genre shows, X-Files and Buffy The Vampire Slayer each took a stab at the story, but only one truly broke new ground on the legend.

Chris Carter, who created The X-Files and generally stuck to writing the complex-to-the-point-of-impenetrability mythology episodes, tried his hand at several monster-of-the-week stories. While his early one-offs, such as “Jersey Devil,” in which the titular devil is revealed to be a feral child, and “Space,” in which a ghost from space that’s somehow the infamous Mars face possesses an astronaut (how could anyone think this show is nerdy?) are arguably series’ nadirs, his fifth season episode “The Post-Modern Prometheus” was a daring, captivating bit of television that managed to be equal parts James Whale and Thomas Pynchon.

While the title of the episode is a play on The Modern Prometheus, which is the subtitle of Mary Shelley’s classic novel, the episode itself is an over-the-top homage to the Universal Frankenstein franchise, complete with a deep-contrast black and white look, repeated cartoonish jags of lighting in the sky and a climactic scene featuring torch- and pitchfork-wielding villagers.

To briefly recap: Mulder and Scully go to a strange mid-western town to investigate the mysterious pregnancy of a woman who contacted Mulder and told him she was raped by a monster (the woman got Mulder’s name when he was mentioned by a guest on The Jerry Springer Show who said Mulder helped her when she was impregnated by a werewolf). The agents confirm the existence of the monster, trace his origins back to a local mad scientist and discover the mysterious pregnancies were actually the work of the scientist’s father, a local farmer, who, feeling bad for his son’s creation, was using animal DNA to impregnate local women in the hopes of creating a mate for the reconstructed offspring. The creature, having found solace in the film Mask, is nurturing a Cher obsession, which is built up throughout the episode via a Cher-heavy soundtrack.

The episode not only riffs on the classic Frankenstein story, but also on the pervasive, near-instinctual presence of that story, and other stories like it, in our culture. By employing cliché visual tropes and throwing in a succession of references to an array of then-current pop cultural hallmarks, Carter demonstrates how these classic horror stories are built into a cultural dichotomy wherein people immediately identify the story and it’s most classic tellings as iconic fiction while still unknowingly incorporating the underlying primal horrors represented by these fictions into the everyday narratives of their lives. People use these stories to put a face to their fears, but even in a post-modern society, where everyone is aware that these legends are created to externalize innate distresses of the human condition, the stories and the terror behind them persist.

Carter also wrote the episode entitled “The Host,” in which he posits that a man/fluke worm hybrid would, like, totally bite the sh-t out of you.

Meanwhile, in the Whedonverse, Chris, a high schooler driven mad with grief resurrects his dead athlete brother Daryl and then goes about harvesting female body parts in order to construct an ad hoc cadaverous hottie for his newly undead brother to put the staggering, unsettling moves on. Then Buffy stops him before Daryl’s post-mortem paramour receives her final component: Cordelia’s head (this “Charisma Carpenter gives good head” joke is in parentheses because I’m leaving it up to you, the reader, to decided whether or not I, in fact, went there.)

As Buffy episodes go, “Some Assembly Required” is far from revelatory. However, it’s worth discussing because this episode represents the first of several stories throughout the series about the construction of the perfect girl as a means to stave off existential loneliness (At least in Spike’s case… Warren’s just a misogynistic douche).

This is where “Some Assembly Required” and “The Post-Modern Prometheus” dovetail so beautifully. Although both seem to be dealing with the traditional Frankenstein (or, if you prefer, Prometheus) legend, that story ends with a simple admonishment to respect powers that are beyond human reason and control. While both of these episodes flirt with this theme through the sheer existence of the creatures as a direct result of human meddling, the primary focus of the stories is on the inherent responsibility of the creator to the creation, even after every other natural law is broken. It’s the story of Universal’s original Frankenstein sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, which suggested that the need for love is an inextricable component of life itself, so that to artificially imbue something with life is also to imbue it with a desperate loneliness. The larger point is that, by the 1930s, when The Bride of Frankenstein was made, science and culture had both advanced to the point where fewer and fewer powers were beyond human control. The lesson of the original Frankenstein was moot. The narrative had to be revised to accept that humans will always attempt control, but teach that, in succeeding, vastly daunting liabilities are created.

Granted, for all the claims that this updated Frankenstein mythos answered to a completely different set of ethical concerns, it is true that the upshot of every bride of Frankenstein story is still a massive cosmic “told you so!” about how “none of this would have happened if you hadn’t insisted on building that damn monster in the first place!” But, I mean, it was a pretty stupid thing to build.

Lastly, while The X-Files helped put the ongoing existence of monster lore into a contemporary cultural context, it’s the Buffy episode that actually modernizes the Frankenstein story in direct response to the oft-overlooked fact that as technology develops, so do our motives and yens. Frankenstein classically portrayed a mad scientist embarking on a strange and seemingly impossible journey just so that he could prove that the journey could be completed. Carter’s script, because X-Files hinges on the revelation of the unexplainable taking material form and invading our reality, regards Shelley’s Frankenstein in the same way we do – as a fiction – and, therefore, allows the episode’s mad scientist to be the first person to successfully harness the power of life and death. Ergo, his motive of “to prove I can” is still viable. In a reality where people have already completed many seemingly impossible journies (a reality maybe not so dissimilar from 21st century America), no one is making the journey simply to prove that it’s possible. In “Some Assembly Required,” Chris knows that he can resurrect Daryl, and does so because he misses him and feels lonely. It’s only after resolving his own loneliness that Chris realizes he’s now responsible for Daryl’s loneliness as well. Chris’ mistake isn’t borne out of arrogance like Victor Frankenstein’s was; Chris’ mistake is borne out of mourning, love and a horrifically relatable nostalgic greed.

The Frankenstein story used to read as a cautionary tale to the learned and a tale of sensationalist horror to the commoner. In a modern world, where the commoner has increasing access to the resources of the learned, and the learned throw caution to the wind, that story is changing. And Chris Carter’s writing it. And eventually he’s going to put a Mars face ghost into it.

In conclusion, I guess pretty soon we’re all going to be resurrecting the dead and then having to resurrect more of the dead for the original resurrected dead to make out with. I blame computers.

Matt Finley is a writer currently based in Cleveland. His blog can be found here and you can follow him on Twitter at @Finfizzler.