Happy Late Night, my Darling,
I hope your day was good, and perhaps you are still on your road trip. My day was a Typical Thursday (hair salon, etc), so I didn't go on a hike, but I did watch a really weird movie tonight called "Shock Corridor", which was directed by a guy named Samuel Fuller, who was known for making what I will call Hard Boiled Movies. Movies with in-your-face themes, in the 50s and 60s mostly. I don't know that he was a great director, but he is somewhat famous, and this movie tonight was........hmmm.....I guess Off The Wall would be the correct term. It was made in 1963, and I remember - from being a little kid at that time, and through the mid-60s - that themes involving "Insane Asylums" were provocative subject matter, because what went on inside those places were Things Nobody Ever Talked About.
So that was a phrase you heard a lot in the early '60s : "Insane Asylum". To a little kid, it was a scary phrase.
This movie, on the other hand, would almost come off as campy if it wasn't so serious and if the acting wasn't as good as it is. The film is about a newspaper reporter who pretends to be nuts (in love with his sister), in order to get himself committed so that he can solve a murder that has taken place in the asylum. But the film was made at the height of what I will call Playhouse 90 melodrama, and method acting, and so it's all very over-the-top - ultra dramatic and hyperactive. But the director Fuller does explore themes that still resonate today, such as sexual abuse and racism. One character in the nuthouse is a communist sympathiser, still a salient topic as well. That role is played by a guy named James Best, a Southern actor who was really good at character parts.
Anyway, the movie is not great, I don't think, but it is definitely notable because you won't see too many movies like it. "Off The Wall" is the accurate description rather than "weird".......
Yeah, Insane Asylums were big deals back then. Shock Treatment was a big deal, too, and it was a horrible thing to do to people.
Lobotomies were still performed in the 60s, and maybe even later. There is no lobotomy in the movie, but now I'm on a roll, thinking about all this stuff, lol.
Here's a term for ya : "Trepanning". That's another word that used to scare the heck out of me when I was little. Trepanning, if you didn't already know, was a procedure done in ancient times in which a circular piece of the skull was cut out, either by drill or saw (depending on the size of the hole), and this was done to Let Evil Spirits Out Of A Person Who Was Nuts, so it was a form of lobotomy without actually cutting out the brain. But anyway, I mention it because we used to have National Geographics at home, when I was little, with pictures of trepanned skulls found at archaeological sites.
The stuff that scared me as a kid made big impressions on me, and so I never forgot those things, haha. And many of them had to do with Issues Of The Brain - mental issues or holes drilled or whatever.
And in those days, they made a lot of Sci-Fi films having to do with Brains, like "They Saved Hitler's Brain", "Donovan's Brain", "Fiend Without A Face", and - most terrifying of all : "The Brain That Wouldn't Die".
I saw 'em all, multiple times. For some reason, I like stuff that scares me, as long as it's in a movie, or a book. Cause then I can safely deal with it.
But one time, when I was in fourth grade, we had a Show-And-Tell. Did you guys still have those in the 90s? Show-And-Tell was when you brought to class something different or unusual from home, and then showed it to the class and talked about it. Well, on this occasion a kid named Andrew Rodney brought in a large white metal pot, shaped like an apothacary jar. This was in 1969, so I was nine years old. Andrew's Dad was a doctor - a Brain Surgeon! - and the teacher explained that Andrew had brought A Real Human Brain to Show-And-Tell. Yep, and it was in the white metal pot, and it was floating in formaldehyde. And after Andrew talked about it a bit, and what his Dad did as a doctor, the brain was passed around in the jar for all us kids to look at.
It was grey and rubbery looking. Wrinkly. But what I recall the most is the formaldehyde smell. It made me not want to eat my baloney sandwich that day.
I have never forgotten Andrew Rodney and his Show-And-Tell Brain. It grossed me out, but in a quiet, nervous way.
I think Brains should Remain In Skulls, without Holes Drilled In Them, or Shock Treatments performed.....
Except perhaps in movies.
That's all I know for tonight, Sweet Baby!
See you in the morn. I Love You. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
(Brain extrapolation inspired by tonight's film......)
No comments:
Post a Comment