10 Most Disturbing Films #5: The Haunting

Robert Wise’s adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House, remains possibly the best filmed ghost story to this date. It is included here because of Wise’s ability to engage the imaginations of viewers, an art that seems to have been almost forgotten in our tell all/ show all age.


"Hill House", which was Ettington Hall at the time but is now the Ettington Park Hotel.

The premise is an old one: a team of psychic investigators spend the night in a haunted house. But the film (as well as the novel) transcends the stock plot with memorable characters, among which we must include Hill House itself. Filmed in gloriously crepuscular black & white, with some exterior shots completed with infra-red film, The Haunting is claustrophobic, obsessive and gothic without losing is sharp, understated edge. Mousy, awkward protagonist Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris) is seduced by Hill House, its own madness inciting and exacerbating hers. She is drawn into its secret center even as it fills her with dread, just as we are.

It is a tribute to Robert Wise that he was able to use less to make more of an impact. We are frightened by what remains unseen, leaving our imaginations to fill in the blanks. What we hear at times is unsettling and suggestive, more so because it is also muffled and abstract. Humphrey Searle’s score is, by turns, bewitching and chilling, an ideal complement to this shadow-play. Precious few special effects are involved, quite different from the abysmal 1999 remake coughed up by Jan De Bont.

Unlike vintage radio drama, it is hard for film to engage the theater of the mind with the intensity that The Haunting does. It draws us into the shadows where we may hear or feel but seldom see. It invites us to plumb our own darkness and to summon our own ghosts. In doing so, it’s as subtly disturbing as our minds will let it be.

Negativland: It's All in Their Heads

Last Sunday night, I had the rare opportunity to see Negativland in Dallas at the Sons of Herman Hall. I have long enjoyed their provocative releases, lawsuit-related art, and the wit of their sampling compositions.

It was amazing to see their "live radio show" and the cooperative mixing that they do so well. I even put on the blindfold for a while and just listened, though if I hadn't taken if off for the last half of the show, I would have missed some wonderful visual gags. After a while, though, I noticed something missing: laughter.

Granted, there were a few really funny bits scattered throughout the night but ultimately the show, which included a massive amount of spoken samples from religious and secular media, became didactic and even strident. While part of the problem seems to have been that the samples themselves were didactic and strident, the show was reminiscent of those Negativland routines that stop being funny and become bang-on-the-head preachy, a word I use intentionally.

One may forgive the "band" their lapse in thinking that Dallas is still "the tightly clasped buckle on the Bible Belt" rather than the exciting and diverse global city it has become. It was apparent that they considered themselves in enemy territory, albeit with a crowd of friendly fans. While Negativland has often mocked religion to great effect, as with "Christianity is Stupid," the strain of issue polarization seems to have taken its toll. Granted, there were many thought-provoking samples filled with useful advice or ludicrous assertion, but after the 100th repetition of "God is dead," my eyelids started to feel heavy and Sunday night started to feel more like Sunday morning. Specifically, I think that I laughed more when I used to go to church as a kid.

Maybe it's the deadly serious business of thwarting busy-body fundamentalists and violent extremists that sucked the fun out of the room and left Negativland in reactionary black & white mode. The Message, which was pounded into the crowd with tedious regularity, is that religion is "all in your head." That's also the name of the tour, and converts are called "Headites." This would have been mildly amusing had the man one seat away from me not reacted to the show with Holy Roller enthusiasm, nodding and quaking and gesticulating wildy. It was a stark reminder that there is more to this discussion (or presentation) than belief versus atheism. Worse, if the show was any indication, we now have to grapple with the belief atheists have about what believers believe, naturally drawn from the craziest representatives.

Sure, it's all in your head (and mine) but what does that mean, exactly? Presently, science is still addressing fundamentals like the nature of consciousness and the neurophysiology of ostensible mystical experience. Putting it succinctly, we still don't understand our own capacities nor can science adequately address the subjective experiences that are claimed as gnosis, experiences of some Otherness arrived at through various means which cannot be conveyed through speech or text. Pending future findings and methodologies for approaching this dilemma, it's possible to see the emergent New Atheism as a creature that can't seem to shake its own dogmatism, with a sad tendency to ape the very worst aspects of religious fundamentalism. Like Reagan with the "war on drugs," Negativland and the New Atheists have closed the debate for us and wrapped it up with a bow of bombastic mockery.

And so I was shown the error of my own belief that I would be laughing that Sunday night. And the art of Negativland, presented with great skill, ultimately collapsed into polemic rubble of the sort that is now all too familiar to readers of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. With a few exceptions, the foibles of religion are depicted as if all religionists are crazed hillbillies and mouth-frothing lunatics. In the process Negativland seems to be inaugurating the First United Church of Atheism, the Headites. It would apparently be a gag if it didn't seem so very earnest. With plenty of unexamined assumptions and an Us versus Them mentality, Negativland is coming to your area with the New Dogma. It's as subtle as a blow to the head and about as funny.

Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon

(No worries- 10 Most Disturbing Films will resume soon. Also, look forward to future installments of Callithumped, Jugged and Punked)



Against the Day is unlike any other book I have ever read, and one that defies review. Thomas Pynchon’s latest epic tips the scales, packed with 1,086 pages of wonderful characters, marvels, and a tapestry of themes. Ostensibly a novel of revenge, AtD is also (among many other things) an extended rumination on various kinds of light, from the mundane to the esoteric. As the title implies, this is no glorification of spiritual Illuminism so much as a cautionary tale about excesses of light set against the consolations of night.

Taking place in the years prior to World War I, depicted as a sort of historical tipping point here, AtD explores many fascinating themes: Orphism, anarchism, espionage, the elusive nature of freedom, Utopian dreams, Shambala, secret societies, Tarahumara shamanism, peyote visions, doppelgangers, sexual escapades, emergent plutocracy, time travel, the 4th dimension, Icelandic spar, intelligent dogs, Gnostic inversions, Tarot trumps, super-weapons, Lovecraftian monstrosity, Bogomils, hollow Earth theories, Nicolai Tesla, Central Asia, the set of all sets that have themselves as a member, rembetica, fezzes, ukeleles…

The novel begins with the Chicago Exposition of 1893, and some of the best and funniest writing is devoted to this event. Here we first become aware that although this is a book that begins more than a century ago, it sheds a lot of light on our contemporary world and its problems. Much of Against the Day follows the lives of the Traverse family and their acquaintances. Webb Traverse, the patriarch, is an anarchist dynamiter who is done in by hired guns working for the mining company, the owner of which, Scarsdale Vibe, is the novel’s designated vile plutocrat. The task of vengeance falls to Traverse’s three sons, Kit, Reef and Frank. Traverse’s daughter, Lake, marries Deuce Kindred, the man who shot her pa.

This is an incredibly sprawling and tempestuous read. Erudite passages collide with goofy gags, spontaneous musical numbers and puns. Woven throughout the pages is a hilarious parody of juvenile adventure novels and pulps featuring a zeppelin crew of boy adventurers, the Chums of Chance, inspired by the likes of Tom Swift and Doc Savage. Theosophy is also lampooned as T.W.I.T., the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys. Then there are the Visitors, who come from the future or possibly another dimension. “They have been crossing here, crossing over, between the worlds, for generations. Our ancestors knew them. Looking back over a thousand years, here is a time when their trespassings onto our shores at last converge, as in a vanishing-point, with those of the first Norse visitors.”

I will admit to my share of bafflement at much of the math, and confusion generated by a multitude of characters that pop in and out of the narrative like prairie dogs. In the beginning, I leaned heavily on the in-progress Pynchon wiki to help decode obscure historical references, foreign phrases and greater context. But in the last few hundred pages, I surrendered to the flow which carried me hither and yon beyond my wildest expectations.

One of the interesting things about finishing this book is rereading reviews of it. It seems that more than a few reviewers didn’t finish reading it and covered their retreats with bluster. One or two actually admit to skimming. Malcolm Jones of Newsweek arguably takes the best approach and serializes his review in an attempt to keep pace with the novel:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15771953/site/newsweek/

Having lived with this book for three months, I can’t imagine reading it on a deadline. It’s accessible even if one doesn’t run all of the references to ground, but I would recommend savoring it and doing a little bit of reference legwork. If it touches on a subject you happen to relish, you will find plenty of delightful in-jokes and references. But even without a compass, you can appreciate this wild and wide-ranging ride, by turns hilarious and horrifying, intimate and cosmic.

For those interested in Pynchon’s meta-fictional innovations, a running theme of doubling is woven through the book, along with the material symbol of doubling, Icelandic spar, which acts as a sort of mystical lens. Toward the end of the novel, the narrative splits off into an alternate fictional “reality,” one in which we discover the destinies of the major characters as they unfold there. Even in this alternate reality, one character makes an escape into yet another reality, where he is informed that he just returned from Shambala. Fans of the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics will find much to enjoy here.

As long as Against the Day is, I didn’t find myself wanting to skim pages or eager for it to be over. I savored the experience to the very last page, enjoying Pynchon’s ability to conjure so much in this play of light and darkness. Ultimately, the experience of reading becomes lysergic, phantasmagorical and transcendental. The novel, like Biblical Leviathan, swallows you whole and spits you out, exhausted but happy to be alive, on some strange beach.

The Esoteric Rocketman

(I will return to the 10 Most Disturbing Films shortly. In the meantime, I offer this literary intermission)

Many years ago, like an amateur rock-climber who impulsively decides to take on a mountain, I tried to read Thomas Pynchon's masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow (referred to by the 1974 Pulitzer Prize jury as "unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene"). I only made it through about 100 pages, but the challenge whetted my appetite. I enjoy literary puzzles, experiments and challenges, and learning the lessons encrypted in this book became a holy grail for me. I made two more attempts before I finally read the entire novel. I have since read it two more times, the last time with the aid of the invaluable Gravity's Rainbow Companion. Like Huckleberry Finn or Illuminatus!, Gravity's Rainbow is a book that grows with you and rewards your life experience and intellectual expansion. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this novel is the creation of rocket mythology, something Pynchon does with enormous insight inspired, in part, by Jacob Grimm's (of the Brothers Grimm) 4-volume masterpiece, Teutonic Mythology. This is carried out with complexity that falls beyond the scope of this blog, though it is worth mentioning that GR's anti-hero, Tyrone Slothrop (anagram for "sloth or entropy"), while on clandestine assignment in recently liberated France, assumes the identity of Rocketman, complete with a costume of white Zoot suit and conical hat. Among his other heroic duties, he liberates a cache of hash and engages in a pie fight in a hot air balloon. His destiny is bound with the emergent mythology of the rocket and a strange, secret ritual involving rocket 0000 and its payload.

Which brings me to another celebrated rocketman, the scientist/ occultist John Whiteside Parsons featured in "John Carter's" Sex and Rockets (Feral House, 2000). This meticulous study could well stand as a non-fiction sequel to Gravity's Rainbow, concerned as it is with rocket science, alchemy and the crossroads between the two disciplines. While this is plainly a journeyman effort, with uneven though enjoyable writing, the subject is fascinating and the book is exhaustive in telling its tale. The first half of the book concerns itself mainly with John/ Jack Parsons (born under the name Marvel) and his importance to the American rocket program, specifically with reference to the development of solid rocket fuel and JATO (Jet Assisted Take Off) technology that may have helped the allies prevail in WWII. He was also instrumental in the founding of Jet Propulsion Laboratories and a founding partner in Aerojet.

Carter argues convincingly that Parsons is the most important figure in American rocketry, and largely self-taught, at that. Simultaneously, his significance to the occult, specifically the Ordo Templi Orientis that was reconfigured by Aleister Crowley, is denigrated, depicting Parsons as a failed magician whose endeavor to bring about the incarnation of BABALON, the Great Whore of Biblical infamy, also revealed by John Dee in his Enochian workings, was undermined by ego and hubris. That Parsons attempted this with L. Ron Hubbard as his scryer makes the story irresistably juicy, packed with occult melodrama. That Parsons' fame was greater than his accomplishment, at least in the occult realm, is well-argued. However, one is left to wonder at the results of his Great Work. There is speculation that Parsons' BABALON working resulted in the advent of UFOs or the birth of the 1960s counter-culture. That Parsons was apparently swindled by L. Ron Hubbard, identified in Crowley's correspondence as a "confidence trickster," adds elements of sensationalism to the story. Hubbard reportedly took off for Florida with Parsons' girlfriend Betty and a lump sum of his cash, which was to be used to establish a business partnership between the three. Sex & Rockets reprints an explanation from the Church of Scientology alleging that Hubbard was employed to bust up America's hotbed of black magick, bringing Naval Intelligence expertise to the matter. In the end, Parsons is largely undone and in debt. Disillusioned with the OTO as the chariot of Thelema (Crowley's Hermetic philosophy summarized, "Do what Thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the Law, Love under Will") he quit the order, while remaining a student of the more secretive A.:A.:. Ultimately, he illegitimately took credit for the grade of Magister Templi. Having lived an incredibly full life, Parsons was killed by a mysterious explosion in 1952, followed by his mother's suicide by sleeping pill overdose mere hours later. Later, rather unsavory details are alleged concerning an incestuous relationship that existed between Parsons, his mother and her dog.

Much of the fun of this book is reading about the many notable figures who passed in and out of Parsons' life and his rooming house for eccentrics and free love, that also accommodated the Agape Lodge of the OTO for a time. Actor John Carradine is said to have read poetry at the opening of this Lodge, something missing in the details of the recently reviewed Hollywood's Hellfire Club (also Feral House). L. Ron Hubbard's pre-Scientology role is provocative and mysterious. A Who's Who of American rocket scientists is featured. The politics, trickery and melodrama of the Agape Lodge is diverting. And the book does a wonderful job of following Parsons' partner, "elemental" Marjorie Cameron, through a burgeoning counterculture, featuring cameos from Kenneth Anger to Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell.

In the end, the reader is left with several questions and the sense that the story has many holes left to be filled. The connection between Parsons' innovations in rocketry and his occult/ alchemical enthusiasms remains largely unexplored, though hinted at here and there. His legacy seems to be primarily literary and should remain safe with the publication of the concisely stated essay "Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword," which considers Crowley's magickal philosophy of Thelema as the vehicle for radical anarcho-libertarianism. His enceavors to bring about the incarnation of BABALON are discounted by Crowley, though, and Carter concludes that magically, Parsons was an egotistical failure who offers an object lesson for aspiring occultists. At the same time, though, he is credited with working harder than most at his occult work.

This is a fascinating study, amply documented (sometimes distractingly so), that carries a strange cargo of hard science and deep esotericism, much as Gravity's Rainbow does in its fictional framework. In the end, the failures of Parsons are as interesting as his successes. And his legacy seems to be a missing chapter of the rocket mythology painstakingingly created/ depicted by Pynchon. In closing, Carter offers a fitting epigraph from a science fiction story to the effect that Parsons was instrumental in bringing about the end of the world but the beginning of the galaxy. For me, the story is one best closed with the lyrics of the '70s band Jigsaw:

You, You've Blown It All Sky High
Our Love Had Wings To Fly
We Could Have Touched The Sky
You've Blown It All Sky High

Up Round I've Flown
Then Down Down Like a Stone