Luke Skywalker Can't Read (7 page)

If you're wondering why monsters like Dracula have such power over us in general, it's right here in this movie. Both Mina and Lucy were into Dracula arguably before he started using mind-powers, and even if they weren't, we—the audience—totally were. Dracula is either the bad boy we want to become or the taboo bad boy we might want to date. Bela Lugosi embodied the best taboo aspects of vampires, which started with Lord Ruthven and, of course, Carmilla. If the vampire is “the biter,” then post-Carmilla, and the cinematic 1931
Dracula
, “the bitee” becomes complicit in the whole thing. We're literally rooting for Dracula to win. These jokers he's hanging out with aren't ready for his sense of style or his crazy ideas about relationships. Lugosi's Dracula is the sexy monster, the thing we wish we could either possess or become, if regular boring life weren't standing in the way.

Another iconic vampire—Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) from the long-running soap opera
Dark Shadows
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—is similarly loved by audiences (and other characters) without having to rely on vampire mind-control powers. In 2013, I was lucky enough to talk to Joseph Caldwell,
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one of the original writers
of
Dark Shadows
. He told me that contextualizing Barnabas as a sympathetic vampire was essential to prevent the character from just being seen as a “serial killer.” Caldwell explained that a vampire's urge to kill is a “compulsion” and likened it (as Landis did) to a sexual act. “It's a metaphor for compulsive sex!” Caldwell declared, and he was probably right. The ratings for
Dark Shadows
reportedly went up to twenty million viewers after the introduction of Barnabas Collins.
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And the reason why all those people rooted for Barnabas to “win” had nothing to do with him having powers over people or possessing them, but instead, because Caldwell and other writers played the character straight. If the audience didn't buy Barnabas Collins as a real person, they wouldn't care. Which is the same reason why Dracula beat out Varney, both on the page and, of course, as Lugosi. In fact, the
Dark Shadows
writers' room was so in love with the 1931
Dracula
that Caldwell claims the writers often intentionally mangled the warm Italian salutation “Tante Bella Cose”
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to become “Tante Bela Lugosi!”

Other non-vampire monster movies often take their cues from
Dracula
, specifically 1933's
King Kong
. We're told by that movie's metafictional filmmaker Carl Denham that we're watching a “Beauty and the Beast” story, but that's too simple. Faye Wray's Ann Darrow in
King Kong
has way less agency
than Miss Mina in
Dracula
. The real reason Denham calls the King Kong story “Beauty and the Beast” is because he's a flim-flam man, trying to sell everyone on the idea that Ann Darrow might have learned to love Kong. And unlike Dracula, she doesn't really. And could you blame her? What could they have in common?

The more a monster looks like a grotesque inhuman creature, the more the metaphor becomes uninteresting. In 1954's
Creature from the Black Lagoon
, there are
two
men—not counting the titular creature—who are vying for the affections of the leading lady, Kay. One is the supposed nice guy, David, and the other, Mark, is a big-time asshole. In these kinds of movies, we can often tell which guy is a huge jerk because he'll be the one more willing to use violence against whoever the monster in the movie happens to be. Because we're already kind of rooting for the monster in these situations (you get 'em, Dracula/King Kong/Creature!), siding against the monstrous human male who is foaming at the mouth for bloodshed becomes easy.

Even the original
Godzilla
(
Gojira
in Japan) wasn't immune to this formula. Never, never forget: a major plot point in the classic first ever
Godzilla
is the fact that young, handsome boat captain Hideto Ogata and his girlfriend, Emiko, jointly decide to put their engagement announcement on hold because, duh, Godzilla is attacking! If monsters existed in real life, psychologists would probably see a pattern in people trying to weasel out of committed relationships because they're afraid of “Dracula” or “King Kong” or “Godzilla.” Which is just a metaphor for a commitment-phobic person. In the newest 2014 incarnation of
Godzilla
, the screenwriters are either completely aware of
this monster-as-home-wrecker theme, or are totally unaware. Either way, the effect is the same. The new Godzilla doesn't threaten the romances of any of the movie's human characters, really, but instead, we're told he's only put on this Earth to stop OTHER monsters from having sex. Godzilla in the twenty-first century is a thing that monster-blocks his fellow monsters.

If your relationship can survive monsters, I suppose it's a strong one, and that, maybe more than anything, is why we love monsters so much. We go on dates to scary movies or to haunted houses to grab on to each other and test the ability that we can get through something as frightening as a vampire or huge ape. Dating someone who doesn't like scary movies or haunted houses is fine, but you should still probably watch one with someone you love anyway, just to make sure you can both survive it. Part of why jerky guys like John in
Dracula
are so lame is their total disbelief in the existence of this far-out stuff in the first place. The idea there could even be a vampire, another way of living your life, another place to buy your pants, is just totally out of the possibilities of this character's mental and emotional universe. Which is why, while watching the movie (or reading the book), we hate those characters, and we want them to get what is coming to them.

One of the smartest monster movies of all time, and one of the few classics that doesn't pit boring nice guys against sexy, exciting monsters is the excellent 1941 flick
The Wolf-Man
. Instead of monster versus boring guy, both things are made into the same character. Lon Chaney Jr. plays Larry Talbot, a dough-faced, totally likable, not conventionally handsome guy-
next-door. Early on in the movie, Talbot is bitten by a gypsy named Bela, who—you're never going to believe it—is played by BELA LUGOSI. That's right, Dracula himself passes the monster fangs to the new monster in this movie. This is kind of like when Richard Roundtree shows up in the 2002 remake of
Shaft
to give Samuel L. Jackson's new Shaft advice about being Shaft.

In terms of its relationship to source material, 1941's
The Wolf-Man
doesn't have quite the same literary lineage as 1931's
Dracula.
Though there was Alexandre Dumas's 1857 story “The Wolf Leader,” and an earlier 1831 story “The Man-Wolf,” by Leitch Ritchie, neither is a canonical work that really defines how werewolves behave in future pop-werewolf narratives. In fact, there's really one true Victorian novel about werewolves, released one year before
Dracula
, 1896's
The Were-Wolf
, written by suffrage legend Clemence Annie Houseman. Like “Carmilla,”
The Were-Wolf
can be seen as an early feminist work, featuring female werewolves devouring men who mean to destroy them. Unlike “Carmilla,” it was, thankfully, written by a woman, and influenced horror writers like H. P. Lovecraft probably more than the novel
Dracula
.

The year 1933 saw the publication of the Guy Endore novel
A Werewolf of Paris
, and though it was a
New York Times
number one best seller that year, it was not at all associated with the first two black-and-white Universal Pictures werewolf movies. Prior to 1941's
The Wolf-Man
, Universal had put out a movie called
Werewolf of London
, which you'd think would be
A Werewolf of Paris
, only in London, but it's not. Instead,
Werewolf of
London
is more like a remake of
The Strange Case of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, a Robert Louis Stevenson novel you might have heard of, which, if you squint, is a quasi-werewolf story, too. The notion of a split personality, of being one thing one moment and being something else in another, is, at least in most versions, part of what werewolf stories are all about. With its mad scientist and potions,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
is bona fide science fiction; what if chemistry and
not magic
could turn a person into a monster? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle plays with the exact same idea in the 1922 Sherlock Holmes story “The Creeping Man,”
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in which an old geezer named Professor Presbury injects himself with monkey testosterone in order to become younger, but accidentally just starts acting like a monkey.

For me, a weekend, full-moon monster is markedly different than an I'm-a-monster-all-the-time thing like Dracula. The biggest difference between Dr. Jekyll and the Wolf-Man is that the Wolf-Man—as represented by Lon Chaney Jr.'s Larry Talbot—didn't ask to be bitten. Instead, this sort of monster is a regular person who
becomes
a monster; and through biting, the conversion from a regular person to a monster is shared by both vampire fiction and werewolf fiction. The difference with the latter is that werewolves seem to contain the monsters inside of them, which, instead of having a deranged outside reason for your relationship not working out, actually turns that monster–home-wrecker thing back on you. See, it's not the monster's fault you can't commit to a date; it's yours.

Larry Talbot wants to have a nice relationship with Gwen in
The Wolf-Man
, but unlike King Kong snatching Ann Darrow away from Jack, or Dracula brainwashing Miss Mina to screw over John, Larry has only himself to blame when his particular relationship doesn't work out. If we have sympathy for Larry as he's beaten to death by his dad in the final scene of
The Wolf-Man
, it makes sense, but what we're rooting for in this movie is a little more confusing than with
Dracula
. The Wolf-Man isn't cool, nor is he suave. In human form, Larry mumbles and embarrasses himself while flirting with Gwen. And as the Wolf-Man, he's not hypnotizing anyone with his ghoulish charm; he's just a fucking really scary wolf. And unlike Bela Lugosi, his pants are baggy and lame.

Lugosi gave us cool monsters in the '30s when he told us to listen to “the children of the night” and took them away in the '40s when he bit poor Larry Talbot. He changed the way we think about monsters, twice, in the blink of a cultural eye. First, he made monsters dashing, and something we wanted to root for and, perhaps, go to bed with. And then, when passing monsters to a new generation, he turned them into our worst fears: outrageously hairy people who can't control themselves, who can't commit to a relationship, and who also have no sense of style whatsoever. You know, real
monsters.

M
y mother didn't really believe me, but this was the album I wanted.

“You understand what the word ‘symphony' means, right?”

I said that I did, even though I didn't. Being into science fiction when you're eleven often means you assume new words are actually just sci-fi things. I'm confident that watching Star Trek and reading science fiction and fantasy novels improved my vocabulary, but I'm not totally confident that the line between vocabulary words for real things and for fake ones was ever made all that clear. Rudimentarily, a lot of kids learn the word “dragon” or “unicorn” or “dinosaur” around the same time as “horse,” “dog,” and “barn,” but understanding the difference between words for make-believe and words for real things is tough when make-believe is such a big part of the inner workings of your child brain.

If you've ever read a really good alternate-universe novel like China Mieville's
The City and the City
or anything by Paul
Park or the challenging dystopian jam
A Clockwork Orange
, then you know how this goes. You have to put in placeholder “blanks” for words you don't really get. I think because of the hardwiring of sci-fi to myself as a child, I still deal with unknown words and concepts in the same way one might read
A Clockwork Orange
, minus the glossary.

“Symphony,” my mother said, seeing through my lie, “means there aren't any words, and this tape is just going to be lots of instruments playing the music from the movies.” She made it sound like I wanted to buy one of those tapes that just had whale sounds on it. She didn't get it. But I was relieved and bobbed my head up and down excitedly. By questioning the whole “symphony” thing, she'd had me worried for a second; maybe this excellent cassette tape I'd spotted in Sam Goody wasn't what I wanted at all. But it was. This was the soundtrack to a better, more adventurous world. Yes. This is what I wanted.

The tape was
Star Trek: The Astral Symphony
, a 1991 release that was a “greatest hits” collection featuring selections from the scores to the first five Star Trek films. As a preteen, the musicians I first memorized were not members of New Kids on the Block or the guys in Blur (that would come later) but instead the composers who worked on the Star Trek films. Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, and Leonard Rosenman were actually the only three composers on this particular compilation, since the composer Cliff Eidelman was too new. He'd just done the music for the sixth Star Trek film, and I was going to have to buy that one as a separate tape when I saved up enough money, which, almost six months later, I did. In contrast to the previous, sunnier Star Trek movie scores, Eidelman's score for
The Undiscovered Country
is super-dark, so much so I actually believed wholeheartedly it must have been the same guy who did the music for the 1989
Batman
film. I was wrong about this, of course, since that score was composed by Danny Elfman, who has gone on to do lots of movies you probably like, while Eidelman's resume mostly consists of that one Star Trek movie and
Free Willy 3: The Rescue.
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If sci-fi television can prevent a child from enjoying kitchen-sink dramas, and sci-fi novels can make it hard for that same kid to start really digging literary realism, then imagine the amount of cultural malnourishment a kid can get from having
Star Trek: The Astral Symphony
as his first album. Once I had that tape in my Walkman, I never, ever, ever had to leave a certain kind of adventure. The only thing better than watching Star Trek was listening to it.

Like any greatest-hits album,
Star Trek: The Astral Symphony
wasn't actually for the true fan. As a grown-up, I'm a Beatles nut and absolutely detest the idea of the “Red” and “Blue” greatest-hits albums, since they mess up the risky progression of the Beatles' albums by only giving you the safe, popular stuff. Similarly, barely a year into playing my Star Trek album to the point of actually harming the tape itself, it dawned on me that it was a weird sampling of what this kind of music was actually all about, and I started doing some reading and buying more cassette tapes. The opening fanfare from
Star Trek V
, called “Life Is
a Dream,” I learned, was actually the same opening theme Jerry Goldsmith composed for
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
. This duh-dunt-dah-dunt-dah theme was later reworked as the opening for
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, and other than maybe the Alexander Courage ah-awww-ah-ah-ah-at-aww theme from the classic TV series, this is still the piece of music most associated with all of Star Trek. I'd also argue that
other
than the main theme to
Star Wars
, Jerry Goldsmith's “Life Is a Dream” is the
second
most recognizable sci-fi/fantasy theme song of all time.
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Sometime after 1992, I scored another greatest-hits album—this one all John Williams—containing selections not only from
Star Wars
but also from
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and, excellently,
E.T.
In talking about big sci-fi fantasy scores, it's impossible to not try and figure out the whole John Williams dominance. As an adult, I worry there's an easy and often-trod cynical and acerbic route on this: John Williams music is used by Lucas and Spielberg
instead
of real writing and character development, and when you take it away, some of the more famous movie moments he's scored start to fall flat. As a sci-fi blogger I've seen this a million times: somebody posts a video of the last scene of
E.T.
or the last scene of
Star Wars
without the John Williams music and it's always presented like this big “gotcha” moment when you realize the music was just manipulating you into liking something that was stupid. But as a little kid, it's simply not true. The music isn't instead of the plot, or some kind of cheap trick. No. It's more like an
ingredient, a spice, that certainly works on its own. There are elements of Star Wars that would be silly if isolated without the context, like watching Mark Hamill get hit with random pieces of Styrofoam by stagehands. But the score isn't like that; it might be part of the postproduction process, but it's also able to exist in its own dimension, removed from the visual narrative.

The Star Wars music sort of speaks for itself, but the most stirring of the John Williams themes for little me was
E.T.
I've got a massive soft spot for this particular movie, since my parents took me to see it at a drive-in when I was all of one year old and still in a car seat. I'm not saying I actually remember that particular screening, but I don't think it's a coincidence that I've devoted much of my professional career to science fiction stuff after the first movie I ever really “saw” was about a little kid hanging out with a friendly space alien. My mother also frequently claims that she wanted to name me Elliott after the character in the film, which is obviously one of those sweet mom lies that make no sense, since the movie obviously came out after I was born. Still, if you see a thirtysomething dude cruising around Brooklyn in a red Elliott hoodie humming to himself, there is a real chance it's me.
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What makes the
E.T.
music so great for a little kid is this naw-naa-nana-nanu-na-nooow sweeping, stringy fanfare that plays when the kids are riding on their bicycles and E.T. conjures up his handy bike-flying spell. My strongest, best childhood memories of listening to symphonic scores either while doing something shitty like mowing the lawn or, heroically, while
riding a bicycle. When this song hit, I always, always, without fail imagined my bicycle flying. I could have been Elliott, but
E.T.
includes all the other kids, too. My other tapes,
Star Trek: The Astral Symphony
or
Great Sci-Fi TV Hits: Featuring Buck Rogers
, may have allowed me to picture my bike as shuttlecraft, or Earth Defense starfighter, but with the
E.T.
theme, the bicycle was just the bicycle. Williams's
E.T.
score is by no means his best, and I'd even go so far as to say it's his most generic, which is also why it's great. If you remember the themes from less-than-stellar '80s sci-fi movies, like
The Last Starfighter
(composed by Craig Safan) or
Masters of the Universe
(composed by Bill Conti), you'll notice they almost go out of their way to sound exactly like
E.T.
Plus, Williams seems to have almost ripped off himself when he did the score for the first Harry Potter film. Yes, “Hedwig's Theme” and “Harry's Wondrous World” are a little more haunting than
E.T.
's cues “Chase/Escape,” but if I'd never actually seen Harry Potter and only heard the score, I'd assume it was another movie about Elliott.
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Kurt Vonnegut's fictional science fiction writer Kilgore Trout has a lot of funny and tragic traits, but the most telling of them
all is in
Breakfast of Champions
when Vonnegut mentions, “Like most science-fiction writers, Kilgore Trout knew nothing about science.” While this is super-insulting to a lot of persons both living and dead, I think it explains the relationship a genre film-score enthusiast has with classical music: we don't know anything about classical music, like at all. I thought I was totally alone on this fact until years later, with several sci-fi fantasy albums under my belt, I met someone who knew more about these movie scores than I did. And it was all because I'd decided to write a play.

I was sort of in college, and sort of involved in some theatre shenanigans at Arizona State University. Now, there's no reason to believe I would have actually been involved with this stuff if it hadn't been for my best friend, a guy who was, and is, a real playwright by the name of George. He had dared me to come up with an idea for a play to write with him, and knowing how much I talked about science fiction all the time, he prompted me to write a play that would be “like a sci-fi porno.” I said okay, but he added a stipulation: “The constant sex has to come from a legitimate science fiction reason. You have to earn it.” I was about twenty years old and accepted the challenge on the spot. I told him I'd have a treatment for an idea that would feature a “realistic reason for constant fucking in a science fiction narrative” by the morning. Obviously, my first thought was to cleverly disguise the plot of
Barbarella
, but I quickly realized that other than the effect Barbarella's promiscuousness had had on me (and the culture at large), it wasn't exactly rationalized all that well in the plot itself. Instead, I came up
with Buck Falcon, better known to his friends as the interdimensional playboy Time Fucker.

George loved the idea and we wrote the “script” for the ten-minute play—
The Time Fucker Chronicles
—a few days later, probably while drinking a lot of Boone's Farm or box wine, or whatever you drink when you're really young and extremely proud of yourself for no reason. The “brilliant” science fiction conceit I'd give as to why Time Fucker needed to fuck so much—and across multiple time periods—was because he learns from a soothsayer that his family tree is actually the result of lots of time travel and sleeping around, but that if he doesn't end up becoming his own ancestor, he'll cease to exist. The soothsayer who tells him this is brutally murdered (naturally) right before he can tell Time Fucker the exact time period he needs to travel to in order to fulfill the paradox. So, like a horny Sam from
Quantum Leap
, Time Fucker has to travel through time and sleep with
anybody
. The play is both wonderful and wonderfully terrible and even though I later realized I'd unconsciously stolen most of the Time Fucker plot structure from a Robert A. Heinlein story, “All You Zombies—,” I still occasionally worry that it might be the most original idea I've ever had.