Author Archives: Chris Gavaler

Son of X-Files, Jr., Part II: The Beginning

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 It’s hard to believe, but The X-Files is returning to Fox. The six-episode mini-series starts shooting this summer. And Twin Peaks, another dead show about paranormal investigators, is being reincarnated by Showtime.
 

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Why are occult detectives back in fashion? I think Scully’s M.D. makes her more qualified than either Agent Mulder or Agent Cooper. Remember the episode when she gets abducted by aliens? The scene was shot in Vancouver, but they pretended it was Afton, Virginia—which does not have a funicular. I know because I used to drive over the Blue Ridge Mountains to the University of Virginia’s Creative Writing Department three days a week, unaware that the university also housed a Division of Perceptual Studies.  Its founder, Dr. Ian P. Stevenson, died a few months after I finished my MFA.

Given his research area, I feel I should place an asterisk next to “died,” but his colleagues have yet to report evidence of his afterlife activities. Dr. Stevenson had been a full-time paranormal researcher since 1968 when philanthropist Chester Carlson, inventor of the Xerox machine, willed UVa’s medical school a grant to open DoPS. So, yes, the world’s only university-based researcher of reincarnation was funded by photocopiers.

If a medical school seems on odd place to find a psychical investigator, you should know that Scully comes from a long tradition of occult detectives with MDs. World-renown surgeon Stephen Strange abandoned his scalpels for astral projection, in 1963, two years after Dr. Droom entered “that dark and mystical world which lies beyond the known and the unknown!” Dr. Stevenson visited India in 1961 too, to document his first of almost 3,000 cases of past-life memories. Stevenson was still finishing high school when Superman co-creators Siegel and Shuster dreamed up the first comic book occult physician, aptly named Dr. Occult. But Algernon Blackwood’s 1908 Dr. Silence is the first general practitioner to accept the superhero job title “psychic doctor.”
 

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If a medical degree doesn’t sound sufficiently superheroic, then you need to see Hugh Jackman in Van Helsing—or wait for the Tom Cruise reboot, if it ever escapes from development hell. All these Hippocratic Oath-swearing healthcare professionals also reveal the superhero genre’s most important superpower. Sure, X-ray vision would be handy when diagnosing, and what doctor couldn’t use telekinesis in the O.R.? But despite all those fist-thrown Ka-Pows! and bone-bashing kicks, the number one superhero trait is kindness.

When told he won’t be paid to treat the dying Llama, Droom answers: “I can’t refuse to treat a sick man! If I must, I’ll treat him for nothing!”And so he’s rewarded because: “Only a charitable, self-sacrificing human would have done so!” Dr. Silence also takes “no fees, being at heart a genuine philanthropist.” His wealthy friends are “puzzled” that he “should devote his time” not just to doctoring but “chiefly doctoring folk who could not pay.” He poses the “native nobility of a soul whose first desire was to help those who could not help themselves.”

This Hippocratic philanthropy extends to monsters too. Dr. Van Helsing can “pity” and “weep” for vampires during his “butchery” of their bodies, imagining Dracula’s “joy” when “his better part may have spiritual immortality.” When Dr. Silence faces an Egyptian fire spirit wrongly “torn from its ancient resting-place” and brought to England where it exacts revenge, he feels more for the mummy than its wealthy looters. He later worries about the well-being of a werewolf, a condition he terms an “infirmity,” rare but also “often very sad.” He has no enemies, only patients. Though the ghost of a witch is beyond his help, he transmutes the “evil forces” she left behind “by raising them into higher channels.” He doesn’t destroy evil—he cures it.

Unlike the vampire-hunting Drs. Van Helsing and Hesselius, Silence has actual superpowers, making him the first superman to leap beyond the comparatively mundane realm of superhuman strength. He would be an ideal subject for Dr. Stevenson’s studies in extrasensory perception. Not only does he posses the “power almost to see in the dark,” “that special sensibility that is said to develop in the blind—the sense of obstacles,” but “his psychic apparatus never failed in letting him know the proximity of an incarnate or discarnate being.” His Watson-like narrator also wonders if he has “some secret telepathic method by which he knew my circumstances and gauged the degree of my need,” a power that also “saw into the future.”

These powers don’t come from enchanted artifacts or mutating radiation.  His magic isn’t magic. It’s an extension of his “humanity,” his “spiritual sympathy.” He can “absorb evil radiations into himself and change them magically into his own good purposes” because he’s just an incredibly nice guy. He’s not just sensitive, he’s “ultra-sensitive.” “Thought-reading” just requires paying attention to and caring deeply about other people. And since “suffering always owns my sympathy,” of course he’s going to dedicate his life to helping them.

Dr. Stevenson kept a list of the books he read that numbered over 3,535. I’m sure it includes some of the same “Yoga books” Dr. Silence admires, the ones arguing “the necessity of man loving his neighbors as himself” because, says Silence, “men are doubtless not separate at all.” Stevenson achieved that  interconnected state of “perfect serenity” though the “mystical experience” of LSD, but whatever its source, he and Silence had the same goal, the same desire for “peace and quietness.”

Usually that means putting the past and present back into balance. “Ancient pasts” and “ancient instincts” have a way of rising in Blackwood tales. Stevenson traveled the world to study the same phenomena, writing a 2,268-page monograph on past-life memories, including 200 “in which highly unusual birthmarks or birth defects of the child corresponded with marks, usually fatal wounds, on the previous person.”

Silence’s filing cabinet is considerably smaller. He vanished in 1917, after Blackwood published his sixth and final case study. Given that John Silence, Physician Extraordinary was a breakout best-seller that let the author quit his day job, it’s weird the doctor never came back. Maybe Silence has just been waiting for his favorite shows to return to TV in time for the 100th anniversary of his last publication?

Or maybe he was abducted? Those X-Files aliens returned Gillian Anderson after her maternity leave and Buddhist wedding. Blackwood and Chester Carlson were students of Buddhism too and firm believers in reincarnation. I’m more of a Dr. Scully myself. Though I try to be sympathetically open-minded.
 

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AAARGH! Talking Pirates with Katy Simpson Smith

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Katy Simpson Smith, author of The Story of Land and Sea, visited Washington and Lee University this semester, and, while not busy giving the Phi Beta Kappa convocation address, she dropped by my creative writing class to read from her novel and answer a few questions. The conversation was so good, I wanted to continue it by email. Since my course is focused on fiction that merges literary and genre fiction, I suggested we start there.
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KATY: My knowledge of literary genre fiction is pretty limited, but I’ll add whatever I can to the mix.

CHRIS: Actually, I think you’re writing your own brand of it, so you know tons. If we define the mode as writing formerly lowbrow pulp genres in a literary style, would it be fair to call The Story of Sea and Land a literary pirate novel?

KATY: I guess I’d have to read some full-on pirate novels to know how and if I’m subverting the genre! I think what I like about writing a character with such a Romantic background is that it builds expectations for the reader which are inevitably undermined. Everyone — from pirate to slave — encounters the same basic range of emotions, and it’s the intense and nuanced investigation of these emotions that I believe turns something “literary.” So there’s very little swashbuckling and there are no parrots, but there is parenthood and grieving. Perhaps I’m most interested in the ordinariness inherent in seemingly extraordinary circumstances.

CHRIS: That’s a pretty good definition of “literary.” I throw the phrase “psychological realism” around my class, and I think we’re talking about the same thing. Undermining expectations describes literary genre fiction well too. But that suggests an implicit risk in the mode. Do you find readers like having their Romantic expectations undermined with nuanced ordinariness?

KATY: Ah, well if we bring readers into it! My experience suggests that many do not, in fact, enjoy the undermining. But I think this also comes down to how a book is marketed. Those that might fall into literary-genre and are also successful (I don’t know, Lonesome Dove, Cormac McCarthy — all I can think of are westerns at the moment) are books that were quickly claimed by the critics and stamped as “great,” pinned with Pulitzers, so that readers knew that something above-and-beyond was going on when they opened the pages. I’ve certainly had readers who wanted my pirate and his lady to have their happy ending, and to be morally clear heroes, and when the book takes a different turn, I’m afraid some of them threw it out the window. The failing, of course, is probably mine. If I’d written Lonesome Dove, I could’ve swayed even the most Romantic reader. But in the end, you can’t write a book for readers, because none are alike. You just write the book that you believe in. (And thoughts about what category it fits into never arise until someone asks you!)

CHRIS: Well, your first novel is getting some serious stamps of approval, no Pulitzers yet, but, as NPR put it, you’re “a writer to watch.”And it’s interesting McCarthy popped to mind. When you described your next manuscript to me, I thought of Blood Meridian, a highly historical novel about the Galton gang of the 1840s. Your gang roams the 1780s, right? Bandits and pirates—are you always drawn to subjects who, at least in their “full-on” forms, are so much about traditional masculinity and violence?

KATY: I think the pull of violence comes from a Southern upbringing, where you can’t avoid being steeped in a very dark history (a history that also leaves violence on the surface of the present, oil spill-style). So I’ll always be fascinated by people pushed to their outer edge; we all have a limited range of responses, and though violence is usually the last tool we’d reach for, it’s still lying there in the toolbox, waiting. As for issues of masculinity, I have always been drawn to them, perhaps because I’ve seen men having an easier time of it in the self-theorizing department after the waves of brilliant scholarship on women and feminism. (I made a documentary in college about young men in the context of popular media, so I suppose it’s a long-abiding interest.) On the one hand, I don’t want to let men off the hook, but I’ll also admit that part of me is afraid to write a book populated only by women, given how little they seem to be valued–still–which is frankly appalling. I’ve been struggling recently with this deficiency of mine, worried that I’m giving in or selling out, but after my reading at W&L, at which I read a section told mostly from a man’s point of view and explained that this was a book mostly about men, a gentleman came up to me afterward and said, “I don’t usually read women’s fiction, but I’ll give this a chance.” That’s the world we’re writing in.

CHRIS: Women’s fiction! There’s a genre I wouldn’t have placed you in. I published a romantic suspense paperback once, and my editor kept my author pic off the back so potential readers would mistake my first name for an abbreviated “Christine,” which they did. It’s so odd that the gender of the author should seem to determine anything about a book. You could also theoretically label your novel “war fiction,” since the Revolutionary War is so key. And there you keep subverting expectation, holding us at the edge of battle instead of plunging in. I almost want to read this sentence as a metafictional aside: “It is hard for a colonel to keep his men camped out in a field at the far edge of a siege.” Do you think you avoid the entertainment of swashbuckling violence in order to get at that other kind of no-thrills oil spill violence of slavery?

KATY: I think you’re exactly right about my intentions (which only manifest themselves after the actual book is done and I can step back and say, “Oh, that’s what I was up to!” So maybe intentions is a generous term). But yes, the ultimate violence is never what takes place on a battlefield, the blood and the wounds, the bullets and the bayonets; it’s what is done to a person while they’re still living, in the context of an ordinary life. And the freedom that soldiers were fighting for in the Revolutionary War (or in any war since) pales in comparison to the freedoms they ignored. Slavery was a complicated web of evils that an entire segment of society came to see as normal, even morally justified. But I can think of few greater violences than asking a woman to choose between her children, as the character Moll is forced to do. I think a focus on the merely sensational allows the reader to distance herself from the fictional world, and I don’t want to give my readers that comfort.

CHRIS: You just encapsulated the standard critique of genre fiction: that it’s escapism, comfort food, easy fixes. And that’s one of the core expectations you undermine by casting a pirate as a grieving father. Since you just finished your second novel, can you step back and say “Oh!” about it too? Is it coated in the same Southern oil spill? Are your bandits camped at the far edge of sensational violence too?

KATY: I’m still too close to the second novel to have that perspective on it; I think readers help teach us the many things our books might be about (whether we agree or not). These bandits, whom I’m very fond of, get up to a few more hijinks than my pirate did, and there are a handful of out-and-out murders, but the story is mostly about their ordinary lives, the facets of their desires that make them (hopefully) sympathetic rather than villainous. I’m always looking to go deeper than protagonist vs. antagonist, because none of us are wholly good or evil either. I like to think that the job of writing is about building bridges over all the gaps in the world, whether that’s in time or in temperament.

CHRIS: Apparently I’ve been quoting you to my creative writing classes for years, pushing writers to find that nuanced gray area between black and white. When should we expect your sympathetic bandits to hit bookstores?

KATY: The new novel, Free Men, should hit stores around February 2016. My bandits will be eager for folks to hear their tales of woe!

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The Domino Lady Does the Depression

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Even for softporn it’s pretty tame stuff:

“A nightgown of sheerest, green silk was but scant concealment for her gorgeous figure. A chastely-rounded body and a slender waist served to accentuate the seductive softness of her hips and sloping contours of her slim thighs, while skin like the bloom on a peach glowed rosily in the reflected sunlight.”

Or better still:

“With a feeling of naughtiness, she slipped into a pair of black-lace panties. Then, sheerest hose for her shapely legs, black velvet slippers for the dainty feet.”

It’s 1936, and we’re flipping through the pulp-grade pages of Saucy Romantic Adventures. Our heroine, a lady thief and proto-Batman, is Ellen Patrick, AKA The Domino Lady. She’s going to punish those crooked politicians who murdered her father. Which apparently will require a great deal of bathing and napping and dressing and undressing, but no descriptions of genitalia, primary or secondary. The closest we get to a sex scene is:

“An hour later, Ellen left Raythorne’s cabin.”

Five stories appear in Saucy, and a sixth in the still milder Mystery Adventure Magazine. It’s a short run, even by pulp standards, all credited to Lars Anderson, an untraceable pseudonym. Ron Wilber resurrected the scantily-clad avenger for Eros Comix in the mid-90s, and Moonstone Books published a collection of new short stories and a comic book by Nancy Holder and Steve Bryant. Silver Age icon Jim Steranko also illustrated a collection of the original stories, plus a seventh of his own, “Aroused, the Domino Lady.” Jim is a saucier than Lars:

“Only the tops of Ellen’s thighs were covered by the kimono. When she spun and kicked it was shockingly apparent that she wore no underwear and that her flesh was the color of pale alabaster in the secret slopes and valleys above her tanned legs.”

steronko domino lady

“Domino,” by the way, is a description of Ellen’s mask (the style sported by Robin and the Lone Ranger) not “dominatrix,” the S&M term appropriated from Latin in the sixties. Ellen is no dominator. She’s more likely to get herself into a compromising corner. Though, despite all that sloping and peach-blooming sensuality, she doesn’t end up getting much.

The Domino Lady is one of the very few Depression-era superheroines, debuting the same year as the Phantom, Ka-Zar, and the Green Hornet. Though not as virginal as Doc Savage and Clark Kent, she has less in common with 1930s Mystery Men who share their batcaves with “fiancés” or 1940s comic book superheroes with their ambiguous “wards.”

Ellen is a loner. She likes foreplay, but always escapes before the climax. Where most of her male predecessors settled into their marriage plots, the Domino Lady rejects such happiness: “the amorous little adventuress had denied the love she craved with all her heart. To her affection and marriage were things to avoid, shun.” Like Batman, Ellen’s Daddy-avenging mission is all that gets her off.

It also helps not to have a recurring love interest. No Lois Lane is trying to peek under her mask and/or kimono every month. And no Margo Lane is cooking her breakfast. Ellen may spend an hour in Mr. Raythorne’s cabin, but she climbs into bed alone at the end of her adventures. Raythone is just a one-story fling, ignorant of her secret identity. A month later the Domino Lady is saving another equally eligible bachelor from certain death, relieved afterwards when the so-called detective remains clueless. “Ellen Patrick laughed throatily as she went to his open arms.” Only the reader is in on the joke. No one else ever sees her naked.

Her thrills, like the reader’s, are vicarious. She specializes in stealing “compromising letters” from blackmailers, the plot engine of half her tales. The “indiscrete” content is never spoken, just Ellen’s promise: “that precious husband of yours will never find out.” She likes secrets. She never reveals her own and she never reveals any of the friends’ she saves. It makes her an accessory after the fact, each adventure a retroactive ménage a trios.

Plus there’s the thrill of the adventure itself. In fact, forget Daddy. What really gets Ellen going is the danger, the threat of being caught and unmasked: “Her heart was thumping with the acceleration of the chase, the knowledge that here was new, exciting adventure in the making! It was her life, her greatest thrill of living!”

If unmasking is the deepest intimacy, a forced unmasking is rape. Anderson has Ellen flirt with that fantasized danger every issue. Her adversaries arouse her. One blackmailer “was the type who could stir her soul to the depths and arouse the latent passions of her affectionate nature.” When cornered for the first time in her career, her mask about to be torn away, “Ellen was thrilling as she had never thrilled before.” And if that orgasm metaphor is too subtle for you: “Something totally primitive had awakened in her innermost being, she thrilled to the core!”

But these are fantasies under Ellen’s control. Anderson’s action sequences always turn on the Domino Lady’s ability to remain “cool as a cucumber,” “cool as winter breeze.” Unlike Zorro’s self-arousing costume, the Domino Lady protects Ellen from herself: “hot blood in her veins turned to a gelid stream of ice as Ellen stared through the mask.”

Her other lovers are her biggest threat, men who could make her surrender herself, give in to the affection she’s “starved” for. Ellen may love a “gaze penetrating to the very center of her being,” but it’s her own “hungry longings” she battles.  The men are interchangeable, not the “compelling desire” she holds out against. Winning for the Domino Lady means no happy endings.

The fifth story concludes both her vengeance plot and her run in Saucy. Those dastardly politicians are brought to ruin for murdering her father. But a month later, Anderson reboots in Mystery Adventure, and those vague and omnipresent villains are still at large. A superhero’s mission is never ending. Even a softporn superheroine never climaxes.

Good girls don’t unmask. It’s a bizarrely sexualized celibacy plot. In the end Ellen climbs into bed alone again, still anticipating the romance she defers, still only “vaguely cognizant of the emptiness of her lonely existence.” She’s still Daddy’s girl after all.
 

DLHC

Twilight of the Superheroines

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harley quinn cover

 
“The comics industry,” according to Vulture.com’s Abraham Riesman, “is in the midst of a golden age for admirable female role models,” declaring the monthly best-seller Harley Quinn “the superhero world’s most successful woman.” I don’t care to dispute either claim, but I will say this isn’t the first such golden age. The “morally questionable” Ms. Quinn descends from a line of female sidekicks turned leading ladies.

Crowbar Nancy lived on an affluent cul-de-sac in Pittsburgh in the late 1940s. She’s not a comic book character. She got her nickname for bludgeoning my mother in the head. They were both ten, or there about, and it wasn’t really a crowbar. The wrought-iron post she yanked from her front fence must have been loose already. My mother had no idea why Nancy hit her with it. They lived katty-corner, though they weren’t friends. Nancy didn’t get along with kids in the neighborhood—a result of being adopted, my mother theorized. The violent streak didn’t help either.

After the crowbar incident (and almost certainly a behind-the-scenes parental negotiation), my mother was invited over to share Nancy’s most cherished possessions. Her comic book collection. Instead of roller skating and hopscotching up and down the block with other kids, Nancy preferred the company of four-color pulp paper. Comics meant nothing to my mother, but she accepted the invitation (or her mother accepted it for her) and across the street she went.

Nancy displayed her trove on her porch for the private viewing. If she was anything like my ten-year-old self, she arranged them in a double row of tight stacks, organized in an idiosyncratic ebb and flow of titles and genres. My mother was born in 1939, same as Batman, so this is probably 1949. DC had long imposed editorial restraint on Bob Kane and his crew, so Nancy’s propensity for clubbing fellow children had nothing to do with the body count of the caped crusader’s earliest adventures.

It wasn’t till 1954 that Frederick Wertham linked the Brooklyn Thrill Killers—four teens who murdered vagrants in Brooklyn parks—with comic books. The gang leader ordered his whip and costume (he dressed as a vampire while flogging women) from ads in Uncanny Tales and Journey into Mystery, titles that Atlas Comics (formerly Timely, soon to be Marvel) debuted in 1952—in imitation of an already deep market trend.

Superman was popular with the Brooklyn gang too, but the Man of Steel was one of the very few cape-wearers still flying. No Timely heroes saved those Brooklyn victims because none existed. Over thirty superhero titles vanished between1944 and 1945, another twenty-three in 1946, and twenty-nine between 1947 and 1949—including former newsstand champs Flash Comics, The Green Lantern, The Human Torch, and Sub-Mariner.  Sales for Captain Marvel Adventures, top superhero comic during the war, were down by half. Nancy could have spent her most recent dimes on the final issues of Marvel Mystery Comics and Captain America Comics—before both converted to horror the year she took a crack at my mother’s skull.

But let’s give Nancy the benefit of the doubt and assume her collection did not include the very earliest horror titles (Spook Comics 1946, Eerie 1947, Adventures of the Unknown 1948) either. It was another new trend my mother would have noticed as she reluctantly perused the porch gallery:

Romance, a new category for comics, was already claiming a fifth of the market. When William Woolfork’s inherited Superman from the recently fired Jerry Siegel (he and Joe Shuster lost their lawsuit against DC for rights to the character when their ten-year contract expired the year before), his scripts refocused the former world-saver around love plots. If my mother leafed through Nancy’s Superman #58 (May-June 1949), she would have skimmed the episode “Lois Lane Loves Clark Kent!” where a psychiatrist tells Lois she must transfer her “love for Superman to a normal man!” Or Superboy #5 (November-December 1949), the adolescent Kryptonian falls for his first girl in “Superboy Meets Supergirl,” the first of many Supergirls to follow.

Though only eight new superhero comics debuted between 1947 and 49, five of them sported high heels. Superheroines were on the rise: Black Canary, Namora, Lady Luck, Venus, Phantom Lady, Miss America, Moon Girl. The Blonde Phantom towers over Captain America, Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch on the cover of the new 1948 All-Winner Comics. If there was a doubt about the veiled sexuality between male superheroes and their bare-legged protégés, Timely incinerated it when they fired their top two boy wonders and replaced them with women. Bucky got the boot first, when Golden Girl took over as Captain America’s sidekick in 1947. She even boasted those adorable little wings on her mask, same as Cap’s. The Human Torch’s personal secretary, Sun Girl, replaced little Toro the following year. The Blonde Phantom’s alter ego played personal secretary to her boss crush too, a private investigator who only had eyes for her when—the irony!—she was masked. Or maybe it was the tight, red dress. The leg slit and cleavage were as effective as a blow to the head.
 

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None of this made much impression on my mother. She was the female sixth-grader the romance market coveted, but when she stepped off Nancy’s porch and into puberty, she left those brief, wondrous superheroines behind. Namora’s three issue run didn’t make it into 1949, Blonde Phantom Comics switched titles in May, and Golden Girl exited in October. EC’s single issue Moon Girl and the Prince became Moon Girl Fights Crime!, which became A Moon, a Girl…Romance, which became Weird Fantasy, a hint of the horrors to come.

My mother remembers none of this now. She’s living out her twilight days in an assisted-living community where she smokes cigarettes on porch rockers. I visit for monthly episodes of shopping and restaurant adventures. She has a Ph.D. in epidemiology and a CV as thick as a comic book, but that golden age is over too.

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Cinderella and the Museum of Minimally Counterintuitive Superheroes

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Lily James, the latest actress to embody Cinderella, declared the character “almost a superhero.” NPR’s Linda Holmes reversed the comparison: “Is Captain America a Cinderella story?” Holmes likened Cinderella’s pumpkin coach to the Batmobile, concluding that if the core of Cinderella is “just a rescue of a deserving underdog from an ordinary life and delivery to an extraordinary one,” then most superheroes belong in the combat equivalent of glass slippers.

It’s a fair point, but I think Holmes misses Cinderella’s most memorable qualities. Literally the most memorable, the ones researchers have proven are most memorable in psychological studies. Turning mice into coachmen and rags into ballgowns–apparently that’s the kind of magic our brains are wired for.

To explain why, we need to visit Cinderella’s home planet:

“I was sent as a diplomat to the planet Ralyks. Because the decision was very sudden and I didn’t have a lot of time to research Ralyks, I decided to take a visit to Ralyks’ equivalent of the Smithsonian — a large network of museums and zoos intended to provide a representative sampling of all of the different kinds of things of this world.”

 
That, believe it or not, is the first paragraph of a psychological experiment testing what kinds of ideas are easiest to remember and so retell. The researchers, Justin Barrett and Melanie Nyhof, sent 54 ambassadors to Ralyks in 2001. They all returned safely, but not their recall of the Ralyks Smithsonian.

The ambassadors (all college students ages 16 to 25, which, in my opinion, is recklessly young for intergalactic diplomacy) tended to forget the ordinary exhibits. Like the “being that is easy to see under normal lighting conditions” or the being that “consumes and metabolizes caloric materials to sustain itself.” They did better with the bizarre or unusual, like the being that “just does things randomly” or the one that “could make out the letters on a page in a book if it is as much as 50 feet away, provided the line of sight is not obstructed.”

But they were best with beings that possessed a feature that violated some intuitive assumption but still satisfied the majority of other expectations. Barrett and Nyof call these expectation-bending beings “minimally counterintuitive.”

I call them superheroes.

“I came to an exhibit about a being that is able to pass through solid objects.” So that would be either Vision from the Avengers or Shadowcat from the X-Men, right?
 

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And, speaking of mutants, here’s the Blob and/or the Juggernaut: “To the south of this room was one containing a being about the size of a young human that is impossible to move by any means.”
 

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And don’t forget Wolverine’s healing powers: “The second room illustrated a being that will never die of natural causes and cannot be killed. No matter what physical damage is inflicted it will survive and repair itself.”
 

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Probably not everyone will remember Multiple Man: “The next room I came to featured a being that can be completely in more than one place at a time. All of it can be in two or all four different corners of the room at the same time.
 

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Multiple Man premiered in Fantastic Four, same as the Watcher: “a being that can remember an unlimited number of events or pieces of information. For example, it could tell you in precise detail, everything it had witnessed in the past…”
 

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And let’s not leave out the mightiest mutant of them all, Professor X: “a being that can pay attention to any number of things all at the same time. For example, if ten people or ten billion people were talking to it at the same time, it would be able to keep track of what all of them were saying.” (Okay, the Professor might need the assistance of his mind-expanding computer Cerebro, but close enough.)
 

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Lest you think Melanie and Justin only read Marvel as kids, they included certain Kryptonian superpowers too: “a being that can see or hear things no matter where they are. For example, it could make out the letters on a page in a book hundreds of miles away and the line of sight is completely obstructed.”

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So all of Ralyks’ counterintuitive specimens would be at home in a comic book. I could argue that the supervillain the Collector secretly originates from the planet Ralyks, but let’s take this in a slightly different direction.

I hunted down Barrett and Nyhof’s study (“Spreading Non-natural Concepts: The Role of Intuitive Conceptual Structures in Memory and Transmission of Cultural Materials”) from a reference in Alex Mesoudi’s Cultural Evolution. (Ever play a game of scavenger hunt where each found item is a clue to find the next? Academics call that “research.”) Mesoudi wants to know how and why some ideas get passed on and others die out. Why, for instance, Cinderella remains so popular, while the vast majority of Grimm’s fairy tales have been utterly forgotten.

Barrett and Nyhof think we’re biased for the minimally counterintuitive. Basically we’re Goldilocks. Too much (“a jealous Frisbee,” suggests Mesoudi, “that turns into a caterpillar every other Thursday”) and our brains get burnt with ungraspable weirdness. Too little and our lukewarm neurons die of boredom. We, like Goldilocks, prefer Baby Bear’s “cognitive optimum,” that just-right balance between “satisfying ontologically driven intuitive expectations” (Mama Bear) and “violating enough of them to become salient” (Papa Bear).

Mesoudi looks at culture in Darwinistic terms, which makes those Ralyks specimens well-adapted mutants. They’re the fittest. They’re built to survive. Five of the six most frequently remembered specimens were counterintuitive. Common ideas died out fastest, and the “merely bizarre” had a tendency to mutate into the counterintuitive, thus increasing their survival rates too.

This, according to Barrett and Nyhof, could help explain not only Cinderella’s godmother, but religion too: “it is these counterintuitive properties that make religious concepts salient. Increased salience, in turn, enhances the likelihood that the concept will be remembered and passed on.” They cite examples from “religious systems and folk tales from around the world,” including stories about “people with superhuman powers.”

But when Barrett and Nygof invented their Ralyks Smithsonian to measure concept recall, they didn’t seem to know they were reproducing superhero character types (AKA “people with superhuman powers”). Which makes Barrett and Nyhof unknowing participants in a larger cultural evolution study. Their invented specimens are either examples of parallel evolution (meaning they dreamt up Superman’s X-ray vision and super-vision independently of his culturally pervasive character), or, more likely, Barrett and Nyhof absorbed their superpowers through cultural exposure and reproduced them unconsciously.

Either way, superheroes are especially fit cultural survivors. The character type may be a mostly 20th century American mutation, but one that satisfies something much deeper in the human psyche. The call of the weird-but-not-too weird. Superheroes occupy that sweet spot. Its part of their definition. According to scholars Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet, an effective superhero must have superpowers, but those “powers are limited” and the character “human,” balancing the counterintuitive with the ordinary. Even the alter egos tends to be “an adult, white male who holds a white-collar job,” which to a white male white-collar reader is as ordinary as you get.

Maybe their Smithsonian didn’t include any category-bending specimens because the students placed them all into the pre-existing category of “superhero.” In which case, Melanie and Justin might want to schedule a return trip soon. I’ve never visited myself, but from the diplomatic dispatches it sounds like a planet well worth visiting:

“I left the building and went to my new office to ponder all of the things that can be found on Ralyks.”
 

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Houdini’s Shadow

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Death is a hard box to climb out of. But that’s how Harry Houdini made his living. The escape artist has been dead eighty-nine years, and he’s still scraping at the lid.

His latest trick is The Grim Game, a 1919 silent film serial thought lost for decades. Turner Movie Classics is ressurecting it for a second world premier duing the TMC Classic Film Festival the weekend of March 28. It includes the near death of Houdini’s double, Robert E. Kenndy, who dangled from a rope as two stunt planes accidentally collided before gliding to crash-landings. When Houdini later described the film shoot, he substitued himself for Kennedy. He’d been performing that sort of body switch his whole career.
 

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Houdini’s first trick was called Metamorphosis, and he started performing it in 1893. I saw a version of it on my sister’s high school stage when I was fourteen. A magician is hand-cuffed, tied into a sack, and padlocked into a crate. An assistant stands on the crate, lifts a sheet above her head, and when she drops it on the count of three, the magician is standing in her place. When he unlocks the crate, there she is, sack-tied and hand-cuffed. When Harry Houdini performed it with his wife in Dusseldorf in 1900, a reporter explained how it’s done:

In dematerialization, or the phenomenon of self-dissolving, the force of attraction and cohesion between molecules is overcome. As has been proven through innumerable examples, every body can in this way be brought in an aetheric condition and therefore, with the help of an astral stream, be transported from one place to another with incredible speed. In the same instant the power used for dematerialization is retrieved; the aetheric pressure again shows the molecules, which again take on their original local and former shape.

Although he started his career as a medium, the only superpower Houdini ever claimed was “photographic eyes,” and that only worked for memorizing locks. He did train himself to breathe so “quietly” he could last an hour and half in a soldered coffin. Other skills involved inserting and removing objects from his throat and anus. Mostly though he understood pain.

Germany called him uncanny, a Napoleon, a limitations-defying Faust. Russians debated whether his supernatural powers were evil. Spiritualists in the U.S. and U.K. applauded his act, “one of nature’s profoundest miracles,” lamenting that audiences mistook it for just “a very clever trick.” Drama queen Sarah Bernhardt asked him to grow back her severed leg. “She honestly thought I was superhuman,” Houdini told reporters.

He also told reporters that “it is only right that what brain and gifts I have should benefit humanity in some other way than merely entertaining people.” Jerry Siegel was two at the time, but Clark Kent would similarly decide “he must turn his titanic strength into channels that would benefit mankind.”

Houdini played a superhero of sorts in his film serial The Master Mystery, shot the year before The Grim Game. A mild-mannered lab tech is secretly Department of Justice agent Quentin Locke. He battles Q the Automaton, a metal “Frankenstein” that “possesses a human brain which has been transplanted into it and made to guide it” as a “conscienceless inhuman superman.” Actually, Q turns out to be a metal suit slightly clunkier than Iron Man’s original, and Houdini squanders his screen time writhing out of ropes and whatnot.
 

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He also battled a band of Bedouins serving a “hellish ghoul-spirit of the elder Nile sorcery.” H.P. Lovecraft ghost-wrote the purportedly autobiographical sketch, but only after telling his Weird Tales editor that Houdini was a “bimbo” and a “boob.” (A friend of mine, poet-turned-horror-writer Scott Nicolay, mailed me a copy of “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” padlocked in a canvas bag that I still can’t get open.) Houdini’s other ghosts penned him a detective thriller, The Zanetti Mystery, the sleuthing spirit Daniel Stashower has been keeping alive in a series of Houdini novels, even pairing him with Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Ectoplasmic Man.

Sherlock does not believe Houdini could walk through brick walls “by reducing his entire body to ectoplasm . . . the stuff of spirit emanations.” But Sherlock’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, did. “My dear chap,” he asked Houdini, “why go around the world seeking a demonstration of the occult when you are giving one all the time? My reason tells me that you have this wonderful power, for there is no alternative.” After his son’s death and his wife’s convenient discovery of medium skills, the evangelical Doyle toured the globe giving lectures for the Spiritualist cause. He and Houdini were both psychical investigators and so instant frenemies, each casting the other as his Moriarty. Like Professor X and Magneto, Doyle tried to persuade Houdini to use his powers for good: “Such a gift is not given to one in a hundred million, that he should amuse the multitude or amass a fortune.”

Houdini listened. He dedicated his brain and gifts to fighting Doyle’s ghoul-spirit religion. He kept X-Files full of criminal mediums and employed a band of undercover operatives, his “own secret service department,” to infiltrate congregations across the U.S. He proved himself a master-of-disguise, donning wigs and beards and plaster noses to sneak into séances and expose fakes swindling the bereaved. Like Batman, the memory of his mother drove him, that and the certainty that if the dead could communicate to the living, surely she would have reached her doting son in at least one of his endless attempts.  Houdini’s wife took up a similar cause after his death.

When I saw Metamorphosis performed, the magician invited an audience member onto stage to inspect the crate and cuffs. A seventeen-year-old Walter Gibson had that privilege in 1915. He became one of Houdini’s ghost-writers, succeeding him as president of the Society of American Magicians. He waited four years before publishing Houdini’s Escapes and Magic. CBS’s Detective Story Hour premiered in 1930 too. The radio show featured an omniscient narrator with a demonic laugh and knowledge of the hearts of men. When listeners couldn’t find the character on newsstands, the publishers phoned Gibson, and he wrote the premiere novella for The Shadow Magazine, the first of 282 he would pen.
 

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In The Ghost Makers, the Shadow battles phony spiritualists, but when CBS hired Orson Welles to star in a 1937 radio reboot, Gibson dumped the band of operatives and sent his master-of-disguise “to India, to Egypt, to China . . . to learn the old mysteries that modern science has not yet rediscovered, the natural magic . . .”

My sister was on stage during the whole performance. She was one of those dancing distractions Houdini used too. The cuffs were fake, the sack opened at the bottom, and the crate lid pivoted on a hidden hinge. But everything else was real.
 

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The Future Will Be Televised

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Last week I suggested that a TV show about time travel didn’t have to be completely stupid. This week I want to suggest that it could also be entertaining. Here’s a script treatment for a pilot to such a would-be non-completely-stupid yet-potentially-entertaining series. Interested TV producers should mail stacks of 1960s-era $100 bills to my home address.

“Remote Control”

Zoom slowly out from historical footage of President Kennedy’s May 25, 1961 Address to Congress: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space.”

2015:

Remy is the granddaughter of two scientists who worked for NASA in the early years of the space race. Both died before she was born, so she is surprised to receive a visit from Connor, a lawyer executing her grandmother’s secret will. To receive the money left to her, Remy has to fulfill one obligation: exhume her grandmother’s coffin and store it in her house for one year.

1961:

Lora, Remy’s grandmother, is leading a small group of politicians and military officers into an airport hanger, promising them that what they are about to see will change everything.

In a second location, scientists lean over a control board in hectic preparation. They include Art, the handsome if good-humoredly arrogant team leader, and Tom, a comparative wall-flower. (Either could be Remy’s future grandfather.)

Lora throws open the door to the hangar to reveal: an anti-climatically empty hanger. Or almost empty. She directs the men to a line of folding chairs situated in front of small crate, drops her purse, and picks up a phone hanging from a pillar: “We’re ready.”

Art is on the other end, and the control room bursts into activity.

In the hangar, all eyes are on the crate. The moment intensifies until . . . the crate is still just sitting there. The observers are getting impatient. Lora snaps at Art.

Tom just solved the problem–they’re connected.

Lora looks at the crate: still nothing. She’s about to speak when she hears a crash through the phone and then jerks around as the crate crashes open a second later. A very non-anthropomorphic robot breaks out: it rolls on multiple wheels, extends an array of praying mantis-like arms, and swivels a camera eye at the startled observers.

The control panel’s central video screen shows the observers as the scientists control the robot’s movements. Tom mumbles something about theatrics: there won’t be any crates to smash on the moon. Art agrees, but politicians like a good show; that’s why he put Lora on the main stage.

Lora introduces LURC-er 1, a remote controlled robot designed for lunar exploration. The president has promised the world America will be on the moon by the end of the decade—which is impossible. How do you build a life-sustaining environment strong enough to withstand outer space and then make it lightweight enough to be rocketed out of the Earth’s gravity while still carrying enough food, water, and oxygen to keep even one human being alive? This will not happen in our lifetime’s or even our grandchildren’s lifetimes. But rocketing a robot to the moon is comparatively simple. LURC-er 1 rolls forward.

2015:

Remy and Connor watch as the coffin is dug up. When they open it, both are relieved to find not a desiccated corpse but a male mannequin dressed in a 60s-era business suit.

It and the coffin are trucked to Remy’s house and left in her empty garage.  Connor says he will have to check in occasionally to confirm that the coffin remains in the house. The terms of the will are vague on this point, and he’s hinting that he might like to stop by more often than legally required. There’s some definite mutual attraction here.

1961:

Lora bounds into the control with the news: the observers were impressed, and project funding is guaranteed. Applause and celebration—including a lingering hug from Art. Tom looks away: “We still haven’t figured out the time delay.” This draws Lora’s attention away from Art. She could have sworn she heard the crate shattering through the control room speakers before it shattered in the hangar—but of course that’s impossible, and she laughs it off. Tom looks shocked. He mumbles something and starts poking at the controls. Art ignores him and draws Lora to an adjourning room where once alone they kiss.

2015:

Remy is woken by a faint noise downstairs. She finds her phone, preps it to dial 911, and arranges her keys in her other fist so they protrude as weapons. She turns on lights as she investigates the house, but finds nothing. Before giving up and going back upstairs, she checks the door to the garage: it’s unlocked. She opens it and hits the light but nothing has changed; the coffin is still sitting in the middle of the empty garage. She almost leaves but then walks to the coffin. She opens the lid: the mannequin is gone.

1961:

At night, Art is walking Lora to her car where they say goodnight with another kiss. Once inside she realizes she doesn’t have her keys—which are in her purse.

Lora enters the hangar where she left her purse earlier. She finds it and then hears a noise from one of the darkened areas. She notices that the folding chairs and broken crate haven’t moved—but the robot is gone. She explores and soon comes face to camera-eye with LURCer 1. It reaches a claw slowly toward her. She wants to smile, but can’t: “Art? Is that you?” The robot shakes its camera head “No.”

2015:

Connor wakes up to his phone ringing. It’s Remy explaining that the mannequin is gone and accusing him of playing some kind of game with her. Connor swears he knows nothing.

Remy hangs up angry. She is standing in her kitchen now when she hears something loud from upstairs. She dials 911 and reports an intruder in her house. She grabs her keys again and shouts warning that the police are coming as she walks upstairs. She sees a figure in a darkened corner. She throws on a light ready to punch, but it’s just the lifeless mannequin posed in a standing position. She approaches it cautiously. It remains frozen. She leans closer until her face is inches from it. A tense pause. Nothing happens.

1961:

The next morning, Lora, Tom and Art are back to work in the control room. Lora asks who was operating with LURCer last night, but they both deny it, and the panel recorded no activity. Tom is smiling though. He sits at the controls, saying he thinks he’s figured out the time delay. He activates LURCer and the screen shows the folding chairs and broken crate in the hangar. Why is it so dark? And where is everyone? Art is on the phone to the crew stationed in the hangar.

In the hangar, the crew is positioning the dormant LURCer; the crate and chairs are gone.

Art thinks Tom must have rolled the robot into the wrong area of the hangar somehow, but exploring reveals nothing. Lora’s face changes as she recognizes what is happening. She tells Tom to turn around—to turn LURCer around. When he does, Lora is looking back at them through the video screen. Are they watching a tape? The panel registers a live feed. Lora leans closer to the panel and speaks in sync with her lips moving silently on the screen: “Art? Is that you?” Tom looks at her, then operates LURCer: her image moves left and right as he shakes the camera “No.”

2015:

A police officer has finished taking Remy’s statement as two others report that the house and grounds are clear. Connor arrives, upset and apologizing. He explains that he is only following directives sent to him by an anonymous client. The police offer to remove the mannequin, but discover it’s surprisingly heavy. It topples rigidly onto its back on the upstairs landing. Remy tells them to leave it, and the officer assures her they will be patrolling all night and to call for any reason. Remy throws Connor out too, but first he gives her an envelope: the first payment, pre-sealed by the employer. She rips it open and stacks of $100 bills spill out. Remy watches at the window as Connor and the last police car pull away. She’s holding the bills and notices that they look unused but the design is wrong; they’re from the 1960s. A hand grabs her arm. She spins as a speaker behind the mannequin’s motionless lips says, “Remy, it’s me.”

1961:

Lora, Tom and Art are alone in the hangar with LURCer. Art has sent everyone else home. He checks that the door is locked, before Tom explains. The “delay” was due to the system he invented to synchronize signals between the control room and LURCer.  It was just supposed to solve a technical issue, but the adjustment he made this morning proves that the signals traveled back and forth from a point in the past. He just invented time travel.

Although Tom has overthrown all of physics, Art points out that the technology has no practical application. They built LURCer two months ago, and so that’s as far back as they can send signals.  Lora disagrees. Can’t the signals move forward in time? Isn’t that how she heard the crate break? The signals were traveling one second into the future. Why not send them further? How far is the range? It would only be possible if LURCer is maintained in the future too, either by their future selves or someone else. They leave the hangar, ready to find out.

2015:

Remy backs away from the mannequin. “What’s wrong?” it asks. She tells it take off its mask so she can see his face. “You know this isn’t a mask.” Remy flees as it moves toward her and then suddenly stops. “Oh,” it says and turns and vanishes into the kitchen. Remy waits, bewildered, then tentatively follows. She turns the corner to see it studying her wall calendar. It reads the date aloud and then looks at her. It says the date again. She nods. She flinches as it moves toward her again, but then it walks past her and heads upstairs. She follows it to her study where it is writing on a piece of paper at her desk. It seals the sheet into an envelope and hands it to her. “Hide this in one of your books.” It points at the wall of bookcases and then starts downstairs again. “What is it?”“The password. Have you called Connor yet?” “Password to what?” “I’m going back to the coffin now.” Remy leans over the banister as it descends. “Why do you want me to call Connor?” It pauses at the bottom. “And, Remy, remember.” It looks expressionlessly up at her. “Don’t trust me.” It vanishes around the corner.

1961:

Lora, Art and Tom sit at the control panel. They have no way to calibrate time distance, so Tom takes a guess—somewhere between a few seconds and a few millennia. To their shock, the signal is received. They’re connected. But the screen is black. Stranger, the new input doesn’t match their equipment—way more data than they can process. And the motor controls aren’t right either. They can’t get the wheels to engage properly. What has happened to LURCer?

2015:

Connor pulls up in front of Remy’s house and runs up the steps. She is waiting at the door: “Who are you working for?” He swears he doesn’t know and explains how his client handled everything through the mail. He never met or even spoke to anyone. Remy eventually accepts he’s telling the truth and starts to shut the door—when Connor asks if anything else happened. Did the intruder come back? Remy doesn’t answer, but clearly it has. He asks to come out, to stay somewhere else tonight, at a hotel—but then Remy opens the door and invites him. “You need to see this.”

1961:

They give up trying to work the motor controls. Did someone redesign LURCer? If so, at least the data they’re receiving will provide schematics for them to match the upgrade. The screen suddenly brightens as a lid lifts. Two faces look down at the camera. It’s Remy and Tom. “Who the hell are they?”

2015:

Remy and Tom hear noises as they approach the garage. As they enter, the coffin is jerking spastically, then stops. It jerks once more, then stops again.  After a nervous moment, they open the lid and look down at the mannequin’s face.

1961:

Remy and Connor vanish as the screen goes dead. The signal has cut off.

In the hanger, LURCer comes alive and starts rolling outside.

They try reconnecting, but it’s as if the future LURCer is gone, or is being blocked, like a busy signal.

LURCer enters their building.

They continue trying controls and debating what just happened—when LURCer bursts into the control room. They step back. Who’s controlling it? It rolls toward them. Then stops. One of its arms extends to the floor and begins to scratch. Lora approaches—Art tries to hold her back—but she shrugs him off and kneels to study the scratches. They’re Morse code. “H-E-L-P.” One of the other arms has begun scratching and Tom reads it: “M-E.” Art reads the third arm: “K-I-L-L.” And Lora moves to read the fourth: “P-O-T-I-S.” What is Potis? Lora looks into the robot’s camera. “You want us to help you kill the President of the United States?” All the arms begin scratching again. They each read a letter: “Y” “E” “S.” They stand back as the arms keep scratching and scratching the same word over and over: YES YES YES YES YES

End on a slow zoom into historical footage of Kennedy’s Address to Congress: “Now it is time to take longer strides—time for a great new American enterprise—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.”

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