Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: science fiction

Under the Influence, Part 2:  The Top Five Formative Cinematic Muses from My ’80s Childhood

October 9, 2024 / / 27 Comments

Let’s play Ten for Ten!  To commemorate the ten-year anniversary of this blog, which launched on June 26, 2014, here’s an appreciation for ten of my formative cinematic influences—an examination of why these movies resonated with me when I first saw them, and how they permanently informed my aesthetic tastes and creative sensibilities.  This post is presented in three installments.

“Under the Influence, Part 1” informally ponders through personal example how an artist develops a singular style and voice all their own, and offers an analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s essay collection Cinema Speculation, the auteur’s critical look at the movies of the ’70s that inspired him.

In “Under the Influence, Part 2,” I spotlight five films from my ’80s childhood that shaped my artistic intuition when at its most malleable.

And in “Under the Influence, Part 3,” I round out the bill with five selections from my ’90s adolescence, the period during which many of the themes that preoccupy me crystalized.

Given that my childhood coincided with what Quentin Tarantino terms “the miserable eighties”—that decade of “middle-of-the-road successful films”1 during which “likeability was everything”2—the following ten cinematic specimens that impressed so notably upon my nascent imagination, accordingly, span the years 1978 through 1993.

Before we dive in, let’s stipulate what this digest isn’t.  These are not what I consider the Best Movies Ever, or even the best movies of their era, neither of which I am particularly qualified to judge.

Furthermore, they are not necessarily even my favorite movies, merely the ones that made a meaningful, lasting, and demonstrable impression on me, and whose DNA has (repeatedly) found their way into my own work.

Nor does this cover my literary or musical influences, because, as Geddy Lee suggests, the project of tracing this stuff ain’t easy; it took a surprising amount of rumination to settle upon the ten selections studied here.  (None of them are particularly obscure; if you haven’t seen all ten, you’ve at least heard of them.)

I have excluded any films that may have once held sway over me, particularly ’80s action movies (from police thrillers to sci-fi dystopias to car-worshipping petro-propaganda), whose hypermasculine spirit and/or trashy cynicism I can no longer in good conscience abide.

It must also be noted I am uncomfortably aware of how, well, white all my chosen case studies are.  The filmmakers and screenwriters are nigh exclusively straight white men, with the known exceptions of Joel Schumacher, Leslie Newman, and Janice Fischer.

What’s more, every protagonist across the board is a straight white male, several of them either explicitly or implicitly Irish American, at that.  Boys like me were very well represented in popular media back then—still are—as there are precious few actors of color to be found in any these productions, and, in those rare instances, always in small or supporting roles.

These cinematic influences are all unambiguously predicated on a heteronormative worldview and a white male perspective.  I acknowledge that.

But… as much as they (mostly) glorify white boys, they all (save one) speak to at least one of two themes that have fascinated me throughout my life, and which are the dominant subjects of my own fiction.

The first is the complicated dynamic between fathers/men and sons/boys.

The second:  the special bond of boyhood friendship, and how boys often look to each other for the emotional support they don’t get from their parents.

Men’s relationships with their fathers and their friends was a central theme of “Ted Lasso”

The stories I respond to and the stories I write are, for the most part, about straight white males.  But I consciously seek to eschew the reductive paradigms favored by Hollywood—notably the solitary antihero and middle-aged manchild—in favor of men who are competent but not superheroic, compassionate but not saintly, flawed but not cruel, and definitely not proudly antisocial, brazenly irresponsible, or comfortably violent.

In stark contrast with Tarantino’s reflexively defensive view that cinematic expressions of violence and hypermasculinity (to say nothing of the institutionalized misogyny that inspirits them) are harmless exercises in wish fulfillment, I believe commercial storytellers—particularly straight white cisgendered men—have a moral obligation to be a productive part of the cultural conversation initiated by the #MeToo movement and the George Floyd protests:

We have spent the past half-decade wrestling with ideas of gender and privilege, attempting to challenge the old stereotypes and power structures.  These conversations should have been an opportunity to throw out the old pressures and norms of manhood, and to help boys and men be more emotionally open and engaged.  But in many ways this environment has apparently had the opposite effect—it has shut them down even further. . . .

Perhaps it’s not surprising that in the grip of the culture wars, caring about boys has become subtly coded as a right-wing cause, a dog whistle for a kind of bad-faith politicking.  Men have had way more than their fair share of our concern already, the reasoning goes, and now it’s time for them to pipe down.  But for boys, privilege and harm intertwine in complex ways—male socialization is a strangely destructive blend of indulgence and neglect.  Under patriarchy, boys and men get everything, except the thing that’s most worth having:  human connection.

Silencing or demonizing boys in the name of progressive ideals is only reinforcing this problem, pushing them further into isolation and defensiveness.  The prescription for creating a generation of healthier, more socially and emotionally competent men is the same in the wider political discourse as it is in our own homes—to approach boys generously rather than punitively.  We need to acknowledge boys’ feelings, to talk with our sons in the same way we do our daughters, to hear them and empathize rather than dismiss or minimize, and engage with them as fully emotional beings.

Ruth Whippman, “Boys Get Everything, Except the Thing That’s Most Worth Having,” Opinion, New York Times, June 5, 2024

The storytellers could contribute to a meaningful shift of the cultural mindset if we summoned the moral imagination to refuse to further represent masculinity as a binary (and compulsory) choice between two equally oppressive and simplistic models of social posturing and self-identity—either he-man or Peter Pan—and dared to instead portray boys and men as human beings of nuanced emotion, as capable of expressing sympathy as they are deserving of receiving it.

Now more than ever, we need thoughtful, responsible fiction by men about men—stories that explore masculinity and manhood without invoking the same tired, narrow, noxious archetypes of tough-guy antiheroes who “play by their own rules” and stunted-adolescent slackers for whom rules, the mere acknowledgment of let alone adherence to, are the stuff of “adulting,” and fuck that shit.  Such prosocial, aspirational fiction might very well be called helpful exercises in wish fulfillment.  That’s what I’ve called for, and what I strive to produce myself.

Now let’s look, in mostly linear order, at the films that shaped my tastes and style, starting with the first five (of ten) selections.  Click on any of the links below to jump directly to that particular subheading and its corresponding treatise:

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Spirit with a Vision: A Tribute to Neil Peart of Rush

February 11, 2020 / / 22 Comments

Word arrived as announcements of death often do:  suddenly; stealthily.  It hadn’t yet begun trending—or perhaps I wasn’t keyed into Twitter at that precise moment; either way, I was at least spared the impersonal shock of viral notification.  My wife, working at the other end of our home, tenderly and sympathetically broke the sad news:  Neil Peart, drummer and lyricist for the Canadian prog-rock band Rush, had died.  He was 67 years old.

Peart’s death from glioblastoma on January 7 so stunned me not strictly on account of the closely guarded secrecy of his three-and-a-half-year battle with the illness, but because, to my mind, the rockers who came to prominence in the sixties and seventies—the ones who scored the soundtrack of my youth—tend to follow a reliably predictable pattern with respect to their mortality:  They seem to either die tragically young (Keith Moon, Bon Scott) or, alternatively, not at all (witness, for instance, the numinous constitutional resilience of Keith Richards and Eddie Van Halen).  But at 67?  To brain cancer?  However naïve it was, especially at my age, I’d come to regard Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart the way a child views his parents:  uncannily exempt from illness or death.

Alex Lifeson, Neil Peart, and Geddy Lee of Rush arrive at the 28th Annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on April 18, 2013 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)

Peart joined Rush in 1974 as replacement for debut-album drummer John Rutsey, and, despite his steadfast position in the power trio over the next four decades, was lovingly and perennially referred to as “the new guy” by Lee and Lifeson.  He was also commonly known as “the Professor,” owed to his refined vocabulary and uncommon book smarts; indeed, his early lyrics are heavily influenced by literature, particularly science fiction and fantasy, and philosophy, notably the Objectivist (and controversial) views of Ayn Rand.  On their own, Peart’s particular ideological passions and penchant for mythic tropes made for some atypical songwriting, but it was his instinct for linear narrativity, the Campbellian hero’s journey structure of his compositions, that, to my view, helped the band—heavily (and justifiably) criticized at that point as being too baldly derivative of Led Zeppelin—establish a singular musical and aesthetic identity.

Consider Rush’s breakout concept LP 2112 (1976), which depicts a futuristic society in which creativity has been outlawed by a totalitarian priesthood, and the idealistic hero with an ancient “weapon”—a guitar—who leads a revolution through music; filmmaker George Lucas was exploring similar themes at that same time in THX 1138 (1971) and even Star Wars (1977).  Or “Red Barchetta” (1981), about a boy’s countryside car chase in an indeterminate future where such high-performance dragsters are prohibited.  (Sensing a motif here?)  And, of course, the band’s swan song, Clockwork Angels (2012), an album-length steampunk adventure about a young man who sets out into a world of alchemy and anarchy, presided over by a mysterious figure known only as the Watchmaker, which draws inspiration “from the likes of Voltaire, Michael Ondaatje, John Barth, Cormac McCarthy, and Daphne du Maurier” (Martin Popoff, Rush:  The Illustrated History, [Voyageur Press:  Minneapolis, 2013], 172).

Even absent an explicit narrative through-line, though, Rush’s albums are almost invariably constructed around a unifying subject or theme, be it fate (Roll the Bones), love (Counterparts), communication in the Information Age (Test for Echo), religious fanaticism (Snakes & Arrows); one can even reasonably glean the nature of the content from the title alone.  Explains Peart:

In many of our albums that seem to be disparate songs, I’ve got a bone in my teeth, or my preoccupations at the time tend to come out.  In the 1980s, both Hold Your Fire and Power Windows emerged with a pretty strong theme running between them that I hadn’t even considered . . . What I’ve learned over the years is that the craft of songwriting is trying to take the personal and make it universal—or in the case of telling a story, taking the universal and making it personal.

Andy Greene, “Neil Peart on Rush’s New LP and Being a ‘Bleeding Heart Libertarian’,” Rolling Stone, June 12, 2012

As an angst-ridden teenager, I depended on hard rock—I’m certain you can relate—for the healthy emotional outlet it provided, but I never expected (or thought I needed) it to challenge me intellectually.  And as a student getting his first intoxicating taste of literary criticism—learning to decipher subtext and recognize motifs in the fiction of Salinger and Forster, the dramas of Beckett and Pinter, the cinema of Eisenstein and Welles—the music of Rush yielded dividends each time I revisited it; there was always a previously overlooked cultural reference to catch, philosophical notion to ponder, poetic turn of phrase to appreciate, insight to reap.

That thrill of discovery in Rush’s music continues to this day:  The more classical art and literature and philosophy I’m continually exposed to, the more of it I recognize, with a self-reprimanding slap to the forehead, in Neil Peart’s lyrics.  (How well-read was he?)  His songs are intellectual treasuries:  They offer a different experience each time one hears them; they even mean something different at different periods in one’s life.  Such is the reason why I’ve never moved on from Rush as I have so many other transitory interests; even now, at midlife, I’ve never ceased growing up with them.  The band’s music—their twenty studio recordings and umpteen live albums—never take me back to the days of yore the way, say, Guns N’ Roses’ or Temple of the Dog’s might, but rather push me forward.  Well, hell—I suppose that’s why they call it progressive rock.

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Well, There’s Bad News and Good News: On Matters of Human Extinction

January 29, 2019 / / 10 Comments

In a piece that appeared in last month’s New York Times online philosophy blog—plainly titled “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?”—Todd May explores the existential question of whether the inherent and singular value human beings possess as an intelligent species, through our scientific and intellectual and creative pursuits, is worth the immense anguish our practices inflict on the nonhuman animals with which we share this planet:

“To make that case, let me start with a claim that I think will be at once depressing and, upon reflection, uncontroversial.  Human beings are destroying large parts of the inhabitable earth and causing unimaginable suffering to many of the animals that inhabit it.  This is happening through at least three means.  First, human contribution to climate change is devastating ecosystems, as the recent article on Yellowstone Park in The Times exemplifies.  Second, increasing human population is encroaching on ecosystems that would otherwise be intact.  Third, factory farming fosters the creation of millions upon millions of animals for whom it offers nothing but suffering and misery before slaughtering them in often barbaric ways.  There is no reason to think that those practices are going to diminish any time soon.  Quite the opposite. . . .

. . . But there is more to the story.  Human beings bring things to the planet that other animals cannot.  For example, we bring an advanced level of reason that can experience wonder at the world in a way that is foreign to most if not all other animals.  We create art of various kinds:  literature, music and painting among them.  We engage in sciences that seek to understand the universe and our place in it. . . .

. . . We appreciate and often participate in such practices because we believe they are good to be involved in, because we find them to be worthwhile.  It is the goodness of the practices and the experiences that draw us.  Therefore, it would be a loss to the world if those practices and experiences ceased to exist.”

Todd May, “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?,” The Stone, New York Times, December 17, 2018

On the abstraction of extinction, I take something of a prostrative view:  It seems to me the natural world has a way of deciding for itself who ought to be here and when it’s time for them to go; at some point, after all, it concluded the dinosaurs had overstayed their welcome, and with the brute efficiency of an asteroid strike, put them on a path to annihilation.  There’s something perversely liberating—and by extension even comforting—about the question of our own existence being out of our control.

Credit and © sdecoret – Fotolia

But… that’s not what’s happening here at the dawn of the Anthropocene, is it?  It’s the very practices we engage in—our project of civilization itself—that has brought on the existential crises we now confront.  Since this blog often examines its subjects narratively, this citation seems apt:

“In many dramatic tragedies, the suffering of the protagonist is brought about through his or her own actions.  It is Oedipus’s killing of his father that starts the train of events that leads to his tragic realization; and it is Lear’s highhandedness toward his daughter Cordelia that leads to his demise.  It may also turn out that it is through our own actions that we human beings bring about our extinction, or at least something near it, contributing through our practices to our own tragic end.”

ibid.

Climate change—at least this epochal instance of it—is the (admittedly unintended) consequence of our own Industrial Age–conditioned behaviors, rather than that of some naturally occurring planetary phenomenon.  Far from a cyclical geological inevitability, like, say, an ice age, we’re doing this to ourselves, outside the governing purview—or otherwise unimpeded design—of nature.

Or are we?

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Richard Matheson: The Man Behind the Famed Author

June 15, 2017 / / 39 Comments

Writing is a necessarily solitary occupation in virtually all of its stages:  studying craft, breaking stories, producing drafts, editing manuscripts—each of these tasks consigns us to endless hours in the privacy of our own imaginations.  Opportunities to bond with colleagues, a given in nearly any other profession, are often few and far between for us.

Likewise, reading is a conscious act of seclusion, as well—one in which we submit to the imagination of an author.  We often (usually) have no relationship with these artists outside the forum of their fiction itself, despite the profound sense of intimacy engendered through their creations, which have the capacity—and we’ve all experienced this, regardless of the extent of our own personal creative inclinations—to shape our very apprehension of reality.

In our many discussions of storytelling craft here on this blog, and our ongoing appreciation of some of the masters of the discipline, I haven’t yet addressed the subject of relationships—either direct working associations, or the kind of indirect (yet no less meaningful) familiarity fostered with the artists we revere through their stories.  Today I’d like to share a special instance in which those two roads intersected, and from it developed the rarest of all affiliations:  friendship.

After featuring my first interview here last month, I am pleased to host the blog’s first guest post.  Barry Hoffman works with Gauntlet Press, a specialty press devoted to publishing signed limited-edition collectibles and trade paperbacks; in the essay that follows, he discusses the influential fiction of legendary horror/science-fiction author Richard Matheson, and shares personal insights from his experiences as Matheson’s admirer, publisher, and friend:

 

Richard Matheson passed away June 23, 2013.  Many might not recall his name, but you know his work.  Matheson wrote twenty-two scripts for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, including what many consider the most famous, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” which starred William Shatner as a crazed airplane passenger who sees a monster on the wing of the plane.  He wrote scripts for the two acclaimed Kolchak movies of the week (he was not involved with the inferior series).  His most famous novel was I Am Legend, which most recently was a film starring Will Smith (the movie, though, doesn’t adhere to Matheson’s original script or novel).

Richard Matheson’s seminal vampire novel has inspired no fewer than three very successful feature-film adaptations, starring legends-in-their-own-right Vincent Price, Charlton Heston, and Will Smith in the title role

He penned What Dreams May Come, which was also turned into a film.  Both the film and the novel were of great comfort to the families of victims of the Columbine school massacre in 1999.  He also wrote The Shrinking Man and penned the script for what became The Incredible Shrinking Man.  Matheson didn’t achieve the name recognition of Stephen King because he jumped from genre to genre.  He wrote two acclaimed horror novels (I Am Legend and Hell House), five westerns, a war novel (Beardless Warriors), science fiction (Earthbound), several thrillers, and novels like What Dreams May Come that defy categorization.  He wrote well over a hundred short stories but abandoned the form as his short fiction couldn’t feed his family.  He was a true Renaissance man who also wrote music (unpublished).

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“I Heard You Were Dead”: What the Career of John Carpenter Demonstrates about the Nature of Legacy

July 25, 2016 / / 5 Comments

I write all my fiction to movie soundtracks.  Instrumentals only—lyrics in my ear are too distracting while I’m trying to compose words, and I usually wind up tuning that noise out entirely, in which case:  What’s the point?  At the beginning of a project, I’ll choose a good mix of selections from movies that represent the tone or theme I’m going for, then compile a playlist that cycles in the background—turned up just enough to register but not actively listen to—for as long as it takes to complete the manuscript; that playlist serves as an aural compass, or “temp track,” keeping me in touch with what the world I’m creating should look and sound like at all times.

Just the other week, I finished the first draft of what will be my debut novel, Escape from Rikers Island.  The influences on EFRI are too numerous to quantify, but include novelists Richard Price and Elmore Leonard, as well as filmmaker John Carpenter.  In both title and premise, Escape from Rikers Island owes a great creative debt to Carpenter’s exploitation thrillers Escape from New York and Assault on Precinct 13.  His movies, love ‘em or otherwise, have a look and feel all their own, owed in part to his eerie, synth-driven soundtracks; he is one of very few directors who’s scored most of his own movies, so writing EFRI to his music seemed like a no-brainer.

As fate would have it, right around the time I began the draft, Carpenter released his first album of original material, Lost Themes, so EFRI got a soundtrack of its very own, with music I now almost exclusively associate with my work of fiction rather than any specific film of his.  One of the cuts, “Vortex,” even became, to my mind, the novel’s unofficial theme song:

John Carpenter is touring this summer to promote Lost Themes and its just-released follow-up, Lost Themes II, and I went to see him perform last month at the Orpheum Theatre here in Los Angeles with my friend and fellow horror enthusiast Adam Aresty.  Adam is a burgeoning master of horror himself, having written the literal bee movie Stung (now streaming on Netflix), the chilling short story “Recovery” (which evokes—and I mean this as the highest compliment—Ambrose Bierce’s 1890 literary classic “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”), and the brand-new sci-fi novella The Communication Room.  Don’t take my word for it, though:  Sample for yourself some of the free fiction on his Web site, including one of my favorites, the James M. Cain–style noir tale “Wrought Iron”.  If you like what you read and you live in the Los Angeles area, perhaps consider coming out to Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard on Tuesday, August 2nd at 7:00 p.m. to hear Adam read from The Communication Room.

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