The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972)

Texarkana filmmaker Charles Pierce's first project was a low-budget "documentary" about the Fouke Monster, a Bigfoot-esque creature roaming the bottomlands and swamps of the Texas/Arkansas border. The film collects various accounts of encounters with the creature, local legends and campfire tales tied together by a folksy narrator recounting how the creature scared him as a child and wondering if the thing is still lurking in the woods. Local citizens and landowners spin yarns of spotting the monster while on squirrel hunts and driving at night on lonely roads; at one point, a hunt is organized but once the dogs catch a whiff of the hideous thing, they go no farther. The centerpieces of the film are two disturbing scenes involving late-night attacks, one on a trailer where three teenage girls have a slumber party, the other on an isolated farmhouse rented by two young couples; the latter attack is a recreation of a newspaper account, but both occurrences too closely resemble archetypal "damsel in distress" horror-movie scenarios to carry much credibility. Hoax or not? One old salty codger, living for decades in a shack deep in the swamp, claims he's never seen any such creature. What is beyond dispute: despite the extraordinarily low budget (the movie was filmed on a borrowed 16mm camera, and it shows), or perhaps because of it, Boggy Creek is very effective at delivering some low-grade thrills. Pierce -- savvy to catch the Bigfoot craze in full swing, not long after the release of the infamous Patterson Film -- lovingly showcased the eerie shadows and sounds of the remote swamps in such a way that, sure, a shaggy 8-foot-tall monster seems plausible. And the fleeting glimpses of the creature, never fully revealed and often only heard, are just right. A huge hit at the drive-in theaters of the era, this was an undeniable influence on later films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999).

Reefer Madness (1936)

Filmed as Tell Your Children by a church coalition -- intended as an educational treatise on the dangers of drug use, concerned/easily frightened parents the target audience -- the footage was re-edited by savvy investors and the retitled Reefer Madness became an underground classic on college campuses and the midnight movie circuit during the 1970s. A bizarre pastiche of blatant misinformation, clunky scripting, and campy overacting; no plot, just thinly connected vignettes detailing the criminal hi-jinks "marihuana" inspires among fiendish "hop-heads," including but not limited to: unmarried cohabitation, misadventure by automobile, rape, suicide, murder, and (shudder) jitterbugging. Scandal! At least the drug dealers, in their snappy suits and fedoras, look respectable. Why, you'd never know the evil at your doorstep, dressed up all fancy, just like the Devil himself is apt to be.... The 'Rifftrax' edition from Legend Films includes commentary from Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009)

In a distant quadrant of space, an ongoing war between humans and Cylons --sentient, human-like cybernetic creatures -- enters its endgame following a sneak nuclear attack on human outposts (the Twelve Colonies of Kobol and primary planet Caprica), which are thoroughly destroyed. A handful of survivors escape by taking to whatever ships are nearby. This cobbled fleet falls under the stewardship of the only remaining warship, the Battlestar Galactica, and its beleaguered commander, Admiral Adama. Newly-elected President Laura Roslin, battling cancer and susceptible to drug-induced visions, instructs the skeptical Adama to chart a course for the legendary lost Thirteenth Colony (Planet Earth, duh) guided only by religious artifacts and vague prophesy derived from ancient polytheistic scriptures. Adama is grumpy about it, but follows orders, understanding that people need a more constructive, positive goal than merely maintaining their desperate flight from the relentless Cylons. They need to find a new home.

The mortal plight of these 50,000-odd remaining human beings is counterbalanced by the schemes and needs of the Cylons. They are a race eons old; twelve clone "models" of Cylon are known to exist, but only seven have been identified. The "Final Five" models have critical internal, subconscious knowledge of their racial genesis, but are scattered among the remaining human population, their memories erased and masked by new identities. To fulfill their destiny and forward their monotheistic system of religion/prophesy, the Cylons want to reunite with the Final Five, find their own way to Earth, and establish a permanent home world. But the "Significant Seven" are themselves divided about how to proceed: do they simply destroy the remaining humans (so the Final Five will then "download" into new clone bodies on their Resurrection Hub)? Or do they use, even team with, the humans to collectively find Earth and, eventually, peace? Even their primary pawn, human scientist Gaius Baltar, can't keep their machinations in order -- not that he tries much, being so sidetracked by his lust for Cylon Model #6 he can no longer tell reality from dream. A condition that may very well define the end (or is it the beginning?) of the Human Race....

War and Peace set in outer space; a serious SF drama about war, politics, culture, race, and the miraculous, unknowable nature of God. Showrunners David Eick and Ronald Moore remain philosophically pliable throughout, challenging viewers to pick a side, then painting the Cylons the same shade of Human as all the other human characters. Much that the 1970s-era show took for granted, this version cultivates and explores, building a world that supports two conflicting religions, neither of which can survive direct confrontation. This became problematic when it came to scripting an ending for the series, but the great strength of the overall Galactica narrative is in the questions it raises, less so the answers provided. Joss Whedon: "It's so passionate, textured, complex, subversive, and challenging that it dwarfs everything on TV."

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Detective Sam Spade is hired by va-voom redhead Brigid O'Shaughnessy to find her sister ... only she doesn't have a sister, and people connected to the case keep winding up dead: a cargo ship's captain, a guy named Thursby, even Spade's business partner Archer. What's an amoral PI to do? Get to the bottom of it, of course, and in this case what everybody's chasing is a jewel-encrusted statuette of a black bird, paid in retribution by the Knights Templar to the King of Spain. Hooey, maybe -- but the bodies keep stacking up, so keeps Spade shifting allegiances in order to remain one step ahead of the law. John Huston's enduring take on Dashiell Hammett's quintessential grifter tale is still a hoot after eight decades. Humphrey Bogart is to Sam Spade what Boris Karloff is to Frankenstein's Monster. Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet turn in equally iconic performances as villains each looking to catch the mysterious Falcon for themselves. The penultimate scene, as the principals conspire to get their story straight for the authorities (and to hell with whatever really happened) is the greatest send-up of cozy butler-did-it mysteries ever concocted -- takes place in a parlor, even. Play it again, Sam.

Slither (2006)

Small-town lawman Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion, having a blast) is charged with protecting the province of Wheelsy just as a meteor lands and a space bug with a mission -- a reproductive mission -- hatches. Freakin' alien terrorist cells, I tell you what. The critter isn't choosy for a mate, picking the first target of opportunity, happens to be town boss Grant Grant, out in the woods with his mistress Brenda since his wife back home (the lovely Starla, who also happens to be Pardy's old unrequited love) won't give him any, boo hoo. Take a pinch of Alien (1979), a dash of Die Monster Die (1965), garnish liberally with some From Beyond (1986), next thing you know Grant has mutated into a giant space slug and taken up stealing raw meat so he can feed Brenda, whom he's tucked away in an abandoned barn while she... gestates. Not to give it away, an unholy rain of brain-eating space slugs ensues. Something for everyone. Lovecraftian homage to creature features of yore; James Gunn's witty script and direction target the funny bone as much as the gross-out gizzard. This is how a dud becomes an underground cult classic.

Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control (1997)

Errol Morris documentary focuses on four oddballs: a sculptor of topiary hedges, a lion tamer, an engineer who builds insect-like robots, and the world's foremost expert on the mole rat. Morris crosscuts footage of his subjects weighing in on what their obsessions mean to them with bizarre stock footage from old newsreels, educational films, and cartoons, then layers dialogue from one subject over visual footage of another -- disorienting techniques that deliver unusual punctuation, and uncover common ground between these disparate men and their works. What first seems a kooky conceit gone wrong slowly gels into a deeper meditation about how our passions shape our lives. Sublime, weird, hilarious, moving.

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Reliably inaccurate psychic Criswell clears his throat and warns audiences of "grave robbers from outer space" (the film's working title) as this Z-grade masterpiece from Ed Wood kicks off. Airline pilots report flying aluminum foil pie-tins wobbling through the California skies. Innocent gravediggers are brutally attacked by thin-waisted creature-feature movie host Vampira. At some point, police inspector Tor Johnson becomes a zombie (plot twist: no one can tell the difference). Bela Legosi dies in real life, does not become a zombie, is replaced by the director's chiropractor (plot twist: everyone can tell the difference). Cops scratch their foreheads with their revolvers and stumble over cardboard tombstones while muttering dialogue so inept, it doubles back to a Zen-like grace: "It's tough to find something when you don't know what you're looking for." Fey aliens wrestle with cheap prop curtains and cross their arms in salute just before their own zombies choke them to death. Smart viewers seek solace in illicit medication. A classic of its kind, as the kids say.

The House that Dripped Blood (1971)

Robert Bloch-scripted anthology film from the always excellent Amicus Productions centers around a sinister rental property and the misfortunes of those who reside there. In "Method for Murder," a thriller writer (Denholm Elliott) is literally pestered by his latest creation, a dastardly strangler named Dominic. He is believed only by Stephen King, who cribs the idea for his novel The Dark Half. Meanwhile, Peter Cushing obsesses over a "Waxworks" museum where one of the displays resembles a former paramour. That Salome was a real head case, turns out. In "Sweets to the Sweet," Christopher Lee plays a frosty widow/father who disallows his daughter any toys or even friendship with other children; her new tutor takes umbrage but soon learns about the voodoo she do. Finally, a prissy horror film actor (Jon Pertwee) searches a curio shop for suitable vampire attire for his next picture. But "The Cape" he purchases is a little too realistic, as his co-star already knows, beautiful bloodsucker that she is. Fun atmosphere, brisk storytelling, numerous genre in-jokes, including several swipes taken at contemporary critics who complained about Hammer's typical gore and violence; at one point while wandering the wax museum, Cushing strolls dismissively past a figure of his co-star Lee as Dracula. But it's Pertwee who gets the best stuff, at one point mulling a mantle portrait of himself in his Doctor Who garb. The framing device -- a Scotland Yard officer investigating the disappearance of Pertwee's character -- has a weak payoff, but the individual stories are what counts.

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

The first of Hammer's Frankenstein series (and the only to feature Christopher Lee as the semi-titular Monster, though Peter Cushing would recur as Victor Frankenstein) also marks the start of the studio's long run of horror classics, establishing production aesthetics that continue to influence filmmakers. Dodging Universal at every turn (lawsuits awaited if the new film in any way resembled their iconic versions), Sangster's screenplay cribbed much from Mary Shelley's novel which had been discarded by James Whale, focusing on Frankenstein's immoral studies, propensity to murder, and descent into Mad Science rather than on the monster he creates, a mere symptom of his true ills. Terence Fisher's film is a feast for the eyes, summoning a deeply Gothic atmosphere straight away. Phil Leakey's creature make-up veered considerably from Jack Pierce's famous Karloff applications; the Creature suffers a more stitched-up, gruesome visage. Tame by latter-day standards, this tale of dark deeds and harsh consequences was initially panned for violence and gore by critics missing the film's subtle nuances: Was the Monster a figment of murderous Frankenstein's imagination? Or is his former accomplice Paul Krempe simply getting the last laugh as the Baron is led to the scaffold, the place where he acquired so many of the parts that went into his work? A cornerstone of modern horror.

Evilspeak (1981)

Coopersmith (a suitably miserable-looking Clint Howard) is admitted to a private military academy as a kind of charity case following the deaths of his parents. This being the kind of military academy where the hoary personnel in charge slyly approve of cadets torturing the underachievers, Coopersmith has a rough time of it. For punishment duty (though his crimes, beyond clumsiness, and lateness to class attributable to his classmates stealing his alarm clock, are never disclosed) he is sent to the basement of the abbey to "clean up." The school custodian, an old drunkard named Sarge who happens to live in said basement, doesn't much like this, but what the hell, it leaves him more time for whiskey. Besides, Coopersmith is mostly out of sight, especially after discovering a sub-basement filled with books of black magic. He steals a Tandy TRS-80 from the computer lab, lugs it down to his newfound lair, finds an electrical outlet in a cave otherwise illuminated only by the light of black candles, and starts coding passages from those dusty old pentagram-decorated books into the mainframe. The computer answers! The earliest version of the Internet was a gateway to a Hellmouth, who knew? Some brand of Satan worship ensues, wax dummies spurt red syrup, and at some point a nude woman in a bathtub gets eaten by possessed pigs, I kid you not. A lot of bad data went into the screenplay; garbage in, garbage out.

The Road (2006)

There is a distinct branch of Science Fiction, what we might call the Office of Dystopia, which quietly began operations during the Industrial Revolution, late in the 19th Century. Earlier, in accordance with prevailing philosophies, speculative fiction tended towards more rose-tinted outlooks; people believed history was progressing and improving, the trend was upwards, Heavenwards, and the fortunes of Mankind were leading to if not Earthly Paradise then certainly to some graceful, affluent state. Many metaphorical tales for the Age of Exploration do in fact revolve around quests for "lost" civilizations, heretofore undiscovered countries inside the planet's crust or hidden at the poles, or accessible dream worlds -- all of which represent the kinds of beatific society assumed to be the ultimate fate of Earth's citizenry. Two definitive, if late, expressions of this school of thought appeared in 1933: James Hilton's Lost Horizon, a travel brochure for the Utopian hideaway of Shangri-La, and H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come, a prophetic dispatch from a future society dedicated to the global promotion of science and the arts. (Neither of these novels is entirely Utopian in scope, each hinting at impending world war, and can thus be said to provide bridge material for the harder, more pragmatic brand of SF just around the corner....)

As the world entered first the Machine Age and ultimately the Atomic Age, the "scientific romances" popularized by Wells and Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs turned quaint, even gauche. Speculative fiction began directly siphoning the promises of applied sciences and engineering -- disciplines increasingly applied to military weapons development, bottom line being the cost of human lives during wartime -- and was thus forced to view Utopian dreamscapes through a harsher, more cautionary lens. (The more recent "steampunk" offshoot of SF retrofits 21st Century sensibilities into Victorian settings and tech, resulting in yarns dyed deeply with irony. See: Pynchon's Against the Day (2006) which by no accident contains, among many such plot threads, a futile search for Shambhala during the run-up to World War I, as though uncovering such an idyllic place might somehow save the world from impending doom.)

Propulsion being a by-product of detonation, rocket technologies did not generate only stories of travel through outer space; as the Cold War dawned across the 1950s and the geopolitical landscape divided into East and West, nuclear apocalypse mushroomed into a daily threat, an invisible cloud looming over the planet, likely to burst at any moment. Writers best equipped to scry the future saw grim patterns in the crystallizing mist; proposing improved futures fell to nostalgia for a better world that should-have-been but never came within reach -- the perpetual folly known as The Good Ol' Days. Tapping into underlying fears of the future, the sub-genre of post-apocalyptic SF was easily geared up and sent shambling over the literary landscape.

Whether dealt with via metaphor or more directly, post-apocalyptic narratives break down the business of survival in an environment rapidly coming to pieces, or already in pieces. The means of destruction may differ -- plague, unnatural depletion of resources, nuclear annihilation, brain-munching zombies -- but the response is every time identical: just like the song says, Hit the Road, Jack. It's never safe where you are, but there's a Promised Land just over the next hill, and you may as well die trying to reach it. (Notable exception, in which a cadre of characters dig in and band together: Frank Conroy's Alas Babylon (1959). Following a one-day nuclear war, citizens of a south Florida community coalesce so firmly that when the military finally arrives, offering to move them elsewhere, they refuse to go, steadfastly believing they can best rebuild where they already are. The novel is a dramatic study in the civil defense mindset of the Eisenhower Era, but is otherwise a statistical anomaly within the sub-genre.)

George Romero's zombie films trace their pathos to the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend (1954) in which prototypical last-man-on-earth Robert Neville is besieged by bloodthirsty creatures (humans transformed by a mutant virus) who swarm his suburban castle after sundown; like any good mid-century American citizen with a backyard bomb shelter and an instructional brochure on nuclear fallout, Neville pragmatically hunkers down to wait out the insane disaster. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) takes doomsday prepping to the next level, with a band of characters holing up in a shopping mall they convert into a fortified private compound, shutting out the undead hordes. While Romero satirizes consumer habits, the real truth unveiled is how quickly and terribly society deteriorates when under siege, and how safe places become hideous traps. To survive, keep moving -- the moving target is hardest to hit.

More than simply fleeing danger, Apocalyptic Wanderlust is fueled by the basic desire for human connection, for families and clans. Dystopian novels often feature characters beginning their journeys alone, then in slowly aggregating communities as the plots progress. In Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957), Australian survivors of a nuclear war await the arrival of drifting radioactive clouds. When a Morse Code distress signal from North America is picked up, the military dispatches a submarine to investigate; this quest for fellow survivors becomes a major plotline but the novel remains chiefly concerned with how people address their fates, how much quality and grace they carry into their final acts.

Two novels by Stephen King follow a more typical "travel narrative" pattern: The Stand (1978) and Cell (2006). In both books, overnight catastrophe wipes out the majority of the human race, leaving those unharmed by either flu-like plague or brain-frying microwave pulse to suffer dreams and visions which compel them to a common destination (in The Stand, it's Colorado; in Cell, central Maine). Staying alive is not a solitary endeavor, but a common one -- it's going to take a village to reconstruct civilization, after all. Anyone who has endured the calamitous, ongoing aftereffects of severe weather (hurricane, earthquake, tornado, take your pick) understands how important, how inherently logical, neighborly relations are. Permanently wrecked infrastructures of course means the disappearance of law enforcement, the rise of self-deputized vigilantes, not to mention armed highwaymen with a severe case of the Self Interest. Within this void, citizens necessarily become clan members -- continually protective, defensive, wary.

So, as characters strike out for the Unlikely Promised Land, they must also watch their backs. This is the underlying scenario of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), a novel that differs from the usual post-apocalyptic template in one important way: in most cases, whatever disrupted society remains part of the ongoing story, like the tribal struggles over gasoline in George Miller's film The Road Warrior (1981), or how in John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids (1951) deadly bio-engineered plants have usurped mankind's primary position on the food chain, with plot revolving around efforts to keep the creatures at bay while also seeking permanent sanctuary from them. But in The Road, the only real goal in sight for the unnamed father and his son, heading inexorably south to the coast during relentless nuclear winter, is daily survival. Killers and cannibals roam unchecked through the poisoned landscape, as if the ashen wastelands were not obstacle enough, but man and boy persist because that is all there is to do -- cling to each other and continue.

Like Rod Serling's classic Twilight Zone episode "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" (itself an allegory of the Cold War-related Red Scare), the story is concerned only with what the characters do with the incomplete hands dealt to them -- whether they will act rationally or succumb to hysteria. In many ways, The Road echoes On the Beach, illustrating how disaster and death are not just inevitable, but ever-present -- we shouldn't need a global disaster to remind us how to live and love and take each day to our bosoms like rare treasure.

At the end of McCarthys' novel, there is no ultimate Better Place, only more of the same. While on one hand this contradicts the logic of setting out in the first place, it also underscores the intrinsic importance of believing in a Better Place. That a phoenix might arise from the ashes of the old world, and be waiting at the end of a hard journey, is reason enough. Even when faced with overwhelming odds, hope dies hard -- and that's exactly as it should be. More than youthful vanity or misplaced survival tactics, the drive to outlive an apocalypse -- atomic, viral, or zombified -- is what makes us fully human.

True Grit (1968)

It's a surreal joke, with a winding punchline worthy of Mark Twain: When is the South not the South? When it's the Old Southwest! This shifting literary borderland -- populated by mustache-twirling villains, inept but determined (and uncannily lucky) lawmen, saloon brawlers boasting how they could whup Sampson himself, misunderstood hookers with perfectly calibrated hearts of gold, not to mention Johnson Jones Hooper's infamous Captain Simon Suggs and Twain's own celebrated jumping frogs -- is nowhere funnier than where mapped by Charles Portis in his novel True Grit.

Portis hails from Arkansas, a state many would consider decidedly Southern, and his novel makes affectionate, specific use of the setting: main character Mattie Ross takes bold pride in repeatedly reminding others how things are accomplished in her native Yell County, just for starters. Still, several initial reviews of the book took care to point out the "Western" aspects, with Michael Cleary defining Portis as "one of the most inventively comic writers of western fiction" in Twentieth-Century Western Writers.

Location-challenged reviewers aside, the story is relatively high concept, and certainly familiar to readers of pulp westerns: the aforementioned Maddie seeks justice for the murder of her father by one of his hired farmhands, Tom Chaney, who has taken up with a band of outlaws led by the nefarious Lucky Ned Pepper. To apprehend (or kill, whichever) the dastardly Chaney, Mattie treks to Fort Smith for the purpose of hiring a lawman with "true grit," and finds near-enough in the figure of Federal Marshal Rooster Cogburn. Also on Chaney's trail is a Texas Ranger, name of La Boeuf; eventually -- and despite their differing motivations, which range from sheer revenge to simple cash reward -- these three ride out together in search of their quarry.

Though the novel could easily carry different genre labels (satire/humor, coming-of-age) at this later date it's no feat to look back and ascertain how True Grit came to be shelved as a Western rather than, say, a Southern (a decent tag which would fit many books, and that some have tried to make stick, though the adhesive apparently still needs work). The initial marketing of the book is not terribly at fault: the first edition jacket design features a simple illustration of a stern-looking young woman holding in one hand the reins of a horse and in the other the barrel of a rifle. While this iconography telegraphs "Western" for sure, it also merely reflects the essential elements of and suggests a time-frame for the tale resting between those covers. True Grit is Mattie's story, in both plot and tone (she's the first-person narrator, recounting her adventure some sixty years after the fact).

But almost unarguably the main reason: scarcely a year following publication, out from the Hollywood hills loped a popular film starring beloved "cowboy actor" John Wayne as Cogburn, a role which finally earned him an Academy Award. But John Wayne alone did not brand True Grit as a Western; the 1969 film takes many liberties with the novel, beginning, importantly, with the setting: the scrubby, mountainous landscape of Ouray County, Colorado, stands in for the Ozarks, and thus does the movie unavoidably "look" like a traditional Horse Opera. (Additionally, the screen version moves Cogburn to front and center, correspondingly muting Mattie's acerbic attitude and commentary -- an undeniable charm of the novel.) Interestingly, Vincent Canby, in his mainly positive review of the film for the July 4, 1969 edition of the New York Times, had this to say: "I couldn't quite understand what all the fuss was about when the Charles Portis novel hit the best-selling lists last year. The book was strictly freeze-dried nostalgia, which imitated the flavor of nineteenth-century American writing without ever making you believe it was as good as the real thing (Mark Twain, Bret Harte)."

Though contemporary full reviews of the novel are now scarce, Canby's comments seem to be at odds with those short blurbs and slug lines which do remain accessible, either printed on the front endpapers of the paperback editions or elsewhere. In the New York Times Book Review, Richard Rhodes called the book a "skillfully constructed ... comic tour de force," echoing the sentiments publisher Overlook reprints on their current edition, which also features an afterward by another Southern novelist, Donna Tartt -- who proclaims the book a "masterpiece" even as she notes how well it captures "the Wild West of the 1870s."

It is as though the film, despite its bold differences from the source material, has supplanted within what Carl Jung would pinpoint as our Collective Cultural Consciousness the true character of the novel. In that sense, at least, Mr. Canby has had his way -- despite the fact that Portis' novel sold millions of copies well into the 1970s and for a short while was taught in schools, when most people think of True Grit they are thinking of the film and not the novel, thus bringing to mind stereotypical Western iconography. Meaning: horses, shootouts, lawlessness, and of course John Wayne. (Doesn't help that the latest [2004] edition of the True Grit paperback features silhouetted saguaro cacti -- which grow only in the Sonoran Desert. Does everybody around here need a map?) Of course, American pop culture sensibilities are finer attuned to cinema than to the written word, at present. It could even be argued that many people, in remembering moments from their favorite books, are actually remembering details from the better (or at least most persistently referenced and shown) movies made from them. Motion pictures like To Kill a Mockingbird, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Maltese Falcon, and The Lord of the Rings have all come to be considered as powerful complements, if not outright equals, to their literary sources. (There are even cases -- Love Story, Jaws, even Dracula comes to mind -- where the film treatment might be preferred over the books.)

Assisting this perception, True Grit, despite its initial popularity, remained out-of-print for nearly twenty years. In an essay for Salon, Allen Barra writes: "True Grit's going in and out of print over the last four decades probably has more to do with a reluctance to take the western seriously as literature." Which is a fair point. By the mid-1970s, the Western had fallen out of favor; the dime novels and pulps and Saturday serials which had popularized the genre were long gone, Westerns rarely produced in Hollywood anymore, even the long-running TV series Gunsmoke reached the end of its run. And, in favor or not, "Western" is an easier tag to apply than "Southern." Particularly when only remaindered and hand-me-down copies of the novel were available, and the film version had free reign to establish itself in the cultural memory.

Not to put too much blame on the author, but another factor in this slightly askew labeling might well be the sparse, pigeon-hole proof output of Portis himself. His career as a novelist spans from the 1966 publication of Norwood to the 1991 appearance of Gringos; counting also the 2012 essay collection Escape Velocity, Portis has produced only six slender tomes over a five decade period. With topics ranging from ridiculous secret societies to bus-driving cuckolds to UFO hunters lost in Mexico, his novels have only one thing in common: a distinct comic sensibility. Given a one-line description of each, one might reasonably assume all five are the products of different individuals -- particularly since we readers are accustomed to authors tackling recurrent story structures, subjects, themes.

Which brings us back to Mr. Cleary's assertion that Portis is "one of the most inventively comic writers of western fiction." In the final accounting, given his disparate if slight oeuvre, Portis can no more be counted among the writers of "western fiction" than can be Mark Twain, whom Mr. Canby thinks Portis is clumsily aping. At least Donna Tartt doesn't entirely miss the mark -- the final pages of True Grit do specifically satirize "Wild West" exaggerations, as Rooster is remembered as having become an actor in a travelling circus, cashing in on his rough-n-tumble lawman-of-the-frontier persona. He rode with Quantrill! the handbills for the Cole Younger/Frank James show say, He rode for Parker! -- a brief but snarky reference to the showmanship and commercialized myth-making which still colors popular American perceptions, far contrary to reality, of what the West was like in the last couple decades of the 19th Century. Looks like we all need maps, if not well-researched guidebooks.

Perhaps the grand irony here is, Portis was trying to disassemble the Western, not contribute to the canon. Though it would seem he's been largely misunderstood, given the prevailing comic sensibility of the novel, Portis probably still would argue his joke landed correctly -- squarely on the heads of his audience. Having scribed Mattie's own inflexible worldviews, Portis shows he understands both the folly and the comfort of unchanging perception. And if anyone appreciates the humor of a grapefruit being labeled as an orange, it would surely be Charles Portis.   

Inherent Vice (2009)

In all the commotion typically attending the appearance of a new title by Thomas Pynchon -- considered by many to be the poster boy for Postmodern Literature -- it is often forgotten that he began his career as a bestselling popular novelist. Mass market paperbacks of his first two books, V. and The Crying of Lot 49, had sold a combined three million copies prior to the 1973 publication of Gravity's Rainbow -- a novel for which, shortly after launch, Viking boasted orders of over seven hundred copies per hour. But during the seventeen-year silence leading into Vineland, Pynchon got racked into the category of "literary" (not to mention "difficult") rather than "popular" and while his next three novels made a great deal of additional noise over the publishing landscape, such prior sales numbers proved elusive.

The savvy Pynchon is apparently unwilling to fade into "literary cult author" status -- how else to explain this curious cross-breeding of a Maltese Falcon with a Pink Panther at a time when crime fiction is at a hip zenith? Inherent Vice is exactly what the dust jacket makes it looks like -- streamlined noir, gilded at the edges with a mellow, psychedelic glow. It is 1970 in the LA surf community of Gordita Beach. The Lakers are in the playoffs. The Manson Family is going to trial. And gumshoe (or, as he refers to himself, "gumsandal") Larry "Doc" Sportello is one evening visited by his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fey, transmitting bad vibes about her current dalliance, billionaire real estate developer Mickey Wolfmann -- who soon disappears, possibly murdered, leaving Sportello as the chief suspect, at least in the eyes of Sportello's perpetual shadow, LAPD detective Bigfoot Bjornsen.

Sportello (think Phillip Marlowe by way of the Firesign Theatre's Nick Danger) spends the rest of the novel trying to clear his name, or to at least keep from being ensnared by Bigfoot. Or something to that effect. Other ingredients include but are not necessarily limited to: a federally-thwarted plan to build domed houses for the poor and homeless; smugglers from Vietnam trafficking in counterfeit bills printed with Nixon's face; a multitude of wigged-out hippies and surfers, some capable of astral travel; an early version of the Internet which interests Doc only so much as it might help him score weed; a set of peculiar neckties, hand-painted with likenesses of nude women (one of whom is Shasta Fey); a cabal of sex-crazed dentists; and a mysterious schooner called the Golden Fang, whose shadowy operators just might be tied to everyone and everything involved.

Like fellow literary lion Cormac McCarthy, who some years back and with great commercial success began shedding a dense, idiomatic, description-centered prose style for leaner, plot-oriented narration, Pynchon here nixes his notoriously recursive and tangential approach(es) to storytelling. The omniscient intrusions and historical flashbacks which extend, deepen, and often contort his previous works are no longer in evidence -- vanished, apparently, into the ever-present smog surrounding Gordita, Pynchon's stand-in location for the Manhattan Beach of his own younger days (where he reportedly wrote a great deal of Gravity's Rainbow). One can almost imagine the author blissfully banging away at his typewriter, serving only the basic needs of his tale, freewheeling as it is -- Vice is nothing short of a classic potboiler (emphasis being on the pot.) It is also a bittersweet portrait of the American culture teetering between the joys of Sgt. Pepper and the grisly angst of Dark Side of the Moon -- and as some have pointed out, the particolored details are likely the closest the World of Letters will get to autobiographical reveals from the famously reclusive Mr. Pynchon.

For all its narrative brevity, speed, and hilarity -- and this might well be Pynchon's funniest book, which is no small statement -- there is a devious undertow at work. Pynchon sends up his own obsessions, elements from previous novels, and the expectations of a devoted readership, but retains his signature moral outrage against imbalances of power. Gravity's Rainbow underlines the weird moralities and opportunities "civilized" countries abuse during wartime -- whatever atrocities can be gotten away with under cover of larger violence; Inherent Vice takes the scarier tack of what can happen in the Homeland when citizens remain willfully unaware of what is happening under the auspices of keeping their streets safe: neighborhood watches suddenly comprised of neo-Nazi wannabe badasses, sub-contracted private firms looking to get into the paramilitary business, all sanctioned by local law enforcement by way of federal monies. It's not hard to imagine how Pynchon feels about Halliburton or the agents of Blackwater.

Against the backdrop of Fear as powered by the atrocities of the Manson Family, fear against the hippies and their Freak Power movement destroying society, Bigfoot constantly attempts to recruit Doc as an informer to aid in various shake-down schemes -- a path Doc dreads Coy Harlingen, the subject of one of his missing persons cases, has already stumbled down. Harlingen was a semi-famous session musician and saxophonist for a surf-rock band called the Boards (now apparently taken over by zombies). Coy's wife, the aptly named Hope, does not believe her husband overdosed on heroin, the official story, but that his death was faked and he is now a federal operative. Whatever the circumstances which led to Coy being taken from her, she doesn't care; she just wants her family back together. As things will turn, repairing this damage will become Doc's primary concern. When, that is, he's sober and straight enough to focus on the mosaic of clues.

Inherent Vice (a term from maritime law, applied to annul potential shipping damages -- i.e. eggs break in transit, reason being: they're eggs) is saturated with images of "the axes of space, now taken away into commotion and ruin." While this initially seems like yet another route into entropy (one of Pynchon's favorite concerns, going back to his eponymously-titled 1958 short story), in Vice that idea is taken a quantum step further. Natives of the coast wander their old neighborhoods, confused by the sudden construction craters where their houses used to be. But the old order isn't being supplanted by the expected chaos: coming to replace the old standalone businesses owned by locals are clean corporate franchises, lined up in strip malls. Pynchon pinpoints a moment in our culture when the detritus inevitably left behind by commercial efforts of change and progress started being packaged and sold: the experience of nostalgia as commodity. Doc, driving past a supermarket-sized record store, takes note of the customers visible just inside the sweeping glass front, each secluded in a soundproof booth; music -- the community glue of that era and an important motif in this novel -- is suddenly an individual rather than a collective experience. The Powers That Be have already begun to divide and conquer, using the easy wedges of simple market forces, supply and demand -- no greater conspiracy seeking control and subservience of a citizenship, such as those that have previously dominated Pynchon's novels, is necessary. If billionaire Mickey Wolfmann has no say in his own development projects, what chance do the rest of us (capable of being bought off with a chili dog, as one character points out in the novel's closing moments) have? Doc himself, no bumbling hippie innocent as might initially appear, eventually drifts into his own, essentially inevitable fog, only mirroring, if not actually following, the leads of those who have hired him or crossed his path.

In Gordita Beach, there's no screaming coming across the sky -- just the sound of the surf, the quiet, relentless surf, eating away at the edge of the continent. Pynchon's apocalypses have become less sweeping, more focused, smarter, meaner, personal. There's an old saying, essentially this: As goes the State of California, so goes the Nation. Inherent Vice is Pynchon's candy-coated warning: the Golden State and all the dreams it stands for, long-understood to be just one good earthquake away from slipping into the Pacific, is soon to be as lost to the rest of us as the mythical continent of Lemuria -- a set of final coordinates for that Golden Fang, perhaps.

Originally published in the Mobile Register as "Tie-Dyed Noir" September 28 2009