King's Highway pt. 23.5: Cell (Revisited)

"Can you hear me now?" 

- Verizon Guy

"'I'll a-babbalah your a-kazzalah, you fuck!'"

- Clay Riddell

Here are some supplemental remarks to my original King's Highway entry for Cell, written four years ago and towards the beginning of my blogging career. (Well, "career.") I hadn't quite gotten the hang of it yet, as that post attests to, so it seemed a good candidate for this here King's Highway Bridges and Infrastructure Renewal Summer Project.

Here's what I wrote for my brief description of Cell from my recently-revamped King's Rankings:  

"If you are at all literate in what King does, you must recognize that this one is the Matisse painting of King's catalog - everything's bold colors and stripped down to its essential lines. Plus, as we go further and further into the internet age, the idea of society descending into weaponized chaos - equalized at last in pure hivemind-y hatred of "the other" - as triggered by some ghost in the machine seems less and less sci-fi and more just like everyday life in 2016."

And after an additional re-read, I stand by both points. Particularly that last one. Couple of bullet-points along those lines:

- Early on, when the first pulse is sent out over everyone's phones, a girl Clay calls "Pixie Dark" receives only a half-dose. As a result, she staggers around, screaming "WHO AM I?" before self-inflicting serious harm to her own face. I hesitate to deconstruct this further as it just seems as perfect a metaphor all on its own. Pixie Dark is half of the online community, on any trending topic, on any given day. It also made me think of the practice of "tagging." Without the external validation of one's identity by others, Pixie Dark loses her sense of self.

- The gibberish of the phoners reminded me of the "I CAN HAZ CHEEZEBURGER"-speak. Remember when everyone went out of their minds a few years back with adorkably-misspelled gibberish on funny cat photos? Is there any real difference? 

- Says The Head at one point: "By using cell phones, which have become the dominant form of communication in our daily lives, you simultaneously turn the populace into your own conscript army - an army that's literally afraid of nothing because it's insane - and you break down the infrastructure." The online mob and the media-academe that feeds it have broken down the infrastructure of network programming, elections, and journalism. 

There's even more, but I don't want to get carried away. I think it's remarkable that the behavior of the phoners and some of the situations that develop in Cell have parallels to everyday online behavior in 2016, and I think it's even worth exploring on a deeper level. But I lack either the sociological or psychological know-how to be the Neil Armstrong of the bunch. I hope someone smarter than myself delves into it. That said, I don't think King sat down to "predict the future" or anything - let's call that a happy (or rather a decidedly unhappy) accident.

"That country (the old U.S.A.) was now out of service, off the hook, so sorry, please try your call again later."

The breakdown of society that follows the first pulse is seemingly as all-pervasive as Captain Trips in The Stand. And similar to that work, the survivors begin to receive visions in dreams as to where they should go: Kashwakamak, as it turns out, a fictional resort town in Maine's lake country first seen in Gerald's Game. 

There the Stand parallels break down. Clay and his newfound companions (first Tom McCourt and teenager Alice Maxwell; then Jordan, the surviving pupil of the Gaiten Academy, a prep school where they perpetrate their first act of vengeance against the phoners; and finally Denise, Ray, and Dan, fellow "flock-killers") are ostracized by both the phoners (led by "Raggedy Man," aka the President of Harvard) and the non-phoner survivors, whom the phoners telepathically turn against them. (When a pair of redneck survivors don't get the message, they are dealt with brutally as a warning to all.) 

Clay is motivated by trying to find his son on the off-chance that he can save him. Things come to a head up in Kashwakamak, and everyone parts ways. Does Clay find his son? Is his son beyond saving? What happens to the world? In the words of a popular Time-Life commercial from yesteryear, read the book. 

As always with King, there are several sentences that struck my fancy. Such as "Clay Riddell believed he might be witnessing the first reluctant scurry he had ever seen in his life," in reference to the hotel clerk who reluctantly assists them in the immediate aftermath of the pulse. Or "survival is like love; both are blind."

The only thing working against the novel - and "against" is relative, of course; I actually think they're rather endearing qualities - is its dated-ness. Something tied so specifically to a technology breakthrough that's already undergone so much evolution always runs that risk, of course. (Not for the first time in King's bibliography. Witness the great lengths The Running Man - a novel set in the future - goes to with analog recording equipment.) But I had to chuckle at a couple of Clay's observations:

- While watching someone talk on the phone while at the counter of the ice cream van, he thinks: "He was watching an act which would once have been considered almost insufferably rude - yes, even while engaging in a small bit of commerce with a total stranger - becoming a part of accepted everyday behavior." I can relate to this 100%. I made the same observation to all my cellphone-using friends in the first few years they appeared. I recall vividly the first time someone interrupted our conversation to answer their cell and how rude I thought it was. 

But: I think this vestige of manners from a bygone era might puzzle modern readers. The practice has become too ubiquitous. 

- Also, the idea of Clay being a "cellphone hold-out" is more and more anachronistic with each passing year. I'm still a smart-phone / tablet holdout (more out of habit at this point vs. any sensible objection) and would totally be a cellphone hold-out if such a thing were possible. But I'm feeling the squeeze. Verizon keeps discontinuing their non-smart-phone choices for mobile phones, and even the land-lines you can get now are part of cable bundles, etc. 

Does it matter for the year in which the story is set? Not at all. It's a nice snapshot of the early years of the 21st century. Speaking of: 

- Clay refers to 2004 as "the year the Red Sox won the World Series." Not so fast! Which World Series? The window of time where said year would be nailed down as 2004 was brief, as unfathomable as that sentence would seem to any pre-2004 Red Sox fan.

- Also, Clay remembered thinking "too good to be true" about recordable CDs. Me, too! But hell, a future edition of Cell will probably have to include a footnote explaining what the hell a CD even is.

"Three days ago we not only ruled the earth, we had survivor's guilt about all the other species we'd wiped out on our climb to the nirvana of round-the-clock cable news and microwave popcorn. Now we're the Flashlight People."

Finally, Charles Ardai (the headmaster of Gaiten Academy and a name-check of the founder and editor of Hard Case Crime) has this Glen-Bateman-esque summation of events re: the phoners:

"If all conscious thought, all memory, all ratiocinative ability, were to be stripped from a human mind in a moment, what would remain would be pure and terrible. (...) Although neither the Freudians nor the Jungians come right out and say it, they strongly suggest that we may have a core, a single basic carrier wave, or a single line of written code which cannot be stripped. (...) At bottom you see we are not homo sapiens at all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule this planet not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. And that is what the Pulse exposed five days ago."

Not sure if The Head's use of "motherfucker" is entirely in keeping with his other dialogue, but otherwise I tend to agree. I don't even consider it pessimistic. Like Freud, I find it a fundamentally optimistic pursuit in mapping out the ways in which the human default is irrational and violent, as it presupposes we can figure it out and change it.

Save to System. 

Underrated book and a gem of late-innings King.

~ 

Out of the Past (1947)

Tonight's selection:

(1947)

"All women are wonders because they reduce all men to the obvious. 

And so do martinis."

Jeff Bailey is just your everyday gas station owner. 

He keeps mum about his past, both with his girlfriend Ann (whose parents strongly disapprove of him) and with his deaf-mute assistant "The Kid." One day, though, a former business associate drives through town and recognizes Bailey as he's working the pumps.

Joe persuades Bailey to come up to Lake Tahoe and see their old mutual boss, Whit Sterling, for whom Joe still works.

Bailey decides to take Ann with him, and on the way, he opens up about his past life. Years ago, Sterling hired Bailey, who was then private detective "Jeff Markham", to track down and return his estranged wife, Kathy. Kathy shot him twice and left him for dead and ran off with $40k. Sterling doesn't care about the money; he just wants Kathy back. 

"I don't understand."
"When you see her, you'll understand."

Bailey/ Markham agrees, but he tells his partner Fisher (Steve Brodie) he's doing this one alone. Fisher doesn't care, so long as they split what Sterling's paying. Bailey locates Kathy in Acapulco and - wonders never cease - immediately falls in love with her. 

He double-crosses Sterling and runs off with Kathy to San Francisco.

Everything's cozy and great until they're spotted by Bailey's old partner, Fisher, who follows them into the mountains and confronts them. He wants his cut of the old deal. Kathy shoots him dead and flees. Despondent, Bailey takes up his new life as a gas station man of mystery. 

After Bailey finishes his story, Ann promises to wait for him while he goes to Tahoe. Sterling welcomes him into his home and assures him that the past is the past. 

Bailey is skeptical.

The big surprise comes when grapefruit is served and in walks Kathy. She's told Sterling everything. Sterling uses this leverage to have Bailey do a little favor for him: go to San Francisco and see about getting his hands on some tax documents that implicate Sterling with defrauding Uncle Sam out of $1m of undeclared income. The papers are in the possession of a lawyer, Mr. Eels. Feeling he has no choice, Bailey agrees.

He's put in touch with Eels' secretary, the extravagantly named Meta Carson.

After talking with the soft-spoken Eels, however, in a wonderfully awkward scene, Bailey begins to suspect that Sterling has set him up for a frame: he intends to have the lawyer killed and pin it on Bailey. Bailey warns Eels, but he's unable to prevent his murder. 

Although he is unable to prevent Eels's murder, He discovers Kathy was in on the frame, having signed an affidavit naming Bailey as Fisher's murderer back at the mountain lodge.

Now the target of a police manhunt, Bailey has to play everyone against one another for a chance to get back to Ann and clear his name. But - as foretold by the doomed tone of voice of Bailey's voiceover narration throughout the film - it's not meant to be. Kathy kills Sterling, and Bailey agrees to flee to Mexico with her. He deliberately drives into a police stake-out and the bullets fly. 

Out of the Past is one of the more popular film noirs. It's easy to see why. The performances are great, the scenery's great, all the film noir boxes anyone could want to look for are checked, and   it's a very accessible picture. It's easy to follow even when it takes its twists and turns.

Part of its appeal is undoubtedly the cinematography of Nicholas Musuraca. As always, museum-painting perfect, particularly when paired with director Jacques Tourneur. 

THE CAST

I always feel a little odd trying to come up with things to say about guys like Robert Mitchum. What more is there to say? He's Robert Mitchum. Here's a brief tutorial, specific to Out of the Past. On a side note, I think only Sam Rothstein from Casino or Rick Blaine from Casablanca smokes more cigarettes than Bailey does in this film. Some kind of cinematic record. 

I'm not quite as enamored with Ms. Greer as everyone on-screen, but she's certainly a bad-ass femme fatale. I don't think I've seen her in much else, actually. Of her classic stuff, I mean - I remember her from Twin Peaks and other TV of that era. She's great here, to be sure. 

The once and future "Queen of Technicolor."

I checked out Kirk Douglas' autobiography from the library a few years back. It was overall enjoyable, but what I remember most was one anecdote he told about how he set out to seduce thirty women in thirty days. He failed, and it sent him spiraling into depression. "I had failed as a Man." Ever since I project this on his every performance and chuckle to myself. But I'll be damned if doing so here doesn't cut to the quick of Sterling's character and role in the psychodrama. Which conforms to a theory I have on all great actors: they circle the same thing in their psyche from performance-to-performance.

Special shout-out to Paul Valentine. All too often the enforcer-guy in these things tends to the over-the-top (perfumed bullets, theatrical routines, mother fixations, etc.) But Stephanos is actually somewhat sympathetic. It'd actually be interesting to tell this story from his point of view, and I wonder if someone has done this, actually, disguised as another film. This nose smells a mystery!

Jacques Tourneur, one of the jewels of the RKO crown, especially when paired with Musuraca, was given considerable resources to make Out of the Past, and he wielded them perfectly. Ed Dmytryk was originally slated to direct, but a scheduling conflict made that impossible. Tourneur got the job on his recommendation. 

"What was left of the day went away like the pack of cigarettes you smoked."

~