Wonder, Pathos, and The Death of Monsters: On Douglas Trumbull and Ray Harryhausen

When Tom Hanks inducted Ray Harryhausen into the Academy of Motion Pictures with a lifetime achievement award in 1992, he declared, with perfect sincerity: “Some people say Casablanca or Citizen Kane. I say Jason and the Argonauts is the greatest film ever made.” He was not wrong.

Perhaps it helps if you are of a certain age to appreciate the insouciant wit and insight of this outrageous remark. Does it reek of nostalgia? Of course. But it gets at the very heart of what makes movies a magical experience.

As a boy in South Bend, seeing it on a Saturday matinee TV program called “Creature Feature,” Jason enchanted me. Re-discovering Jason as an adult, though, has been a revelation. The first thing to say is that Bernard Hermann’s score ranks as one of his very best. Since some of his other legendary works include Citizen Kane, Vertigo, and Psycho, that’s saying a lot. Jason’s swelling brass and pounding drums conjure heroism incarnate: the music of the greatest boy’s own story ever told.

What I never cottoned to, though, as a wee lad is perfectly obvious now: the homosocial bonhomie that marks the Argonauts, in particular, the ephebe Hylas and Hercules, played by the great Nigel Greene, who also distinguished himself in Zulu as the calm, masterly Color Sergeant. Their friendship – and I call it a friendship, rather than a lover’s tale – is foundational to the spirit of the movie. Is it homoerotic? Almost certainly. The filmmakers seem to be winking their eye here. Yet like any pair of impetuous lads they get into a spot of bother on the Isle of Bronze. As if to allay or countermand any “tendencies,” once this adventure reaches its sorrowful conclusion the film is at pains to place us back on a firm heteronormative footing by having Jason rescue at sea the utterly beguiling Medea.

Played by popular bit actress Nancy Kovack, Medea is a stunner, as Dante Gabriel-Rossetti would put it. (She later guest starred in many TV series of the 60s, including Star Trek, usually cast as a seductress). What’s left out of the film – and properly so – is the wrath of Medea once she and Jason return to Greece How she slaughters her own children, according to Euripides, to take her vengeance on him for jilting her. Hell hath no fury. But such complex gender dynamics has no place in this happily simple YA tale.

Medea truly shines when the story arrives in her native Colchis, As high priestess to the goddess Hecate she and her maidens perform a dance in full Martha Graham mode: flowing robes, long dark tresses, the whole modernist Sapphic works. Hermann’s skirling woodwinds make for a vibrant paean. It’s stirring, majestic, and well, pretty damned sexy, too.

But I digress.

Before I get into special effects though, a few words about cinema in general. When critics talk about f/x they always mean specially processed shots designed to render the fantastic in a realistic way. Coleridge’s verisimilitude, in a word. What they so often forget, however, is that all cinema is a special effect.

In his famous essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” French film critic André Bazin lays out a powerful and deeply influential account of what sets film images apart from all previous instances of pictorial representation. “Only a photographic lens,” he writes, “can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation … the photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it.” Bazin’s conception of the film image is almost mystical.

Bazin envisions the power of the cinematic image as somehow impossibly liberated from the director’s framing, as though the lens itself were solely responsible for delivering us to the real. In our current era of blockbuster filmmaking, we’ve grown habituated to being bludgeoned by the gigantism of motion pictures. Outside a few rare practitioners, like Terence Malick or Steven Soderbergh, the image has shrunk to an impoverished thing. Instead we are assaulted by massive spectacles of destruction, or what Bazin calls elsewhere “the Nero complex” of film makers obsessed with visual bombast. The anti-cinema of CGI is used by most directors to obliterate perception, rather than tutoring the eye in how to see more deeply. But some of the greatest moments in the history of film derive their power from a certain withholding, a discretion of the camera, a holding back, or merely a sly bit of inference. At the same time it must be remembered that all filmmaking, even the most naturalistic (think Ford, Renoir, De Sica) is a form of special effect, and that the greatest special effect ever devised in the movies is still the close up. There’s something divine, beatific, mad, transfiguring in a close up.

OK. Now that I’ve got that out of my system.

There are only two special effects masters I can think of who might be ranked as actual auteurs, or co-auteurs, so profound is their impact on the visual look and sensibility of whatever film they work on. One of them is Douglas Trumbull, best known for the Stargate sequence in 2001, the mothership in Close Encounters, and Blade Runner’s infernal L.A. He also directed two intriguing but somewhat lackluster SF films: Silent Running and Brainstorm, which was Natalie Wood’s final movie.

In the spring of 2015 I invited Trumbull to visit my Science Fiction Cinema class at Amherst College. Instead, he invited us to his remarkable studio/farm redoubt in the southern Berkshires. After giving us a tour of his compound, which included a design shop/library, woodworking and metal shops, and a fully-equipped studio, with a green screen scrim and a crane, Trumbull demonstrated his state-of-the-art projection system. Dubbed MAGI, it’s a kind of super-duper 3-D, based on shooting at 120 fps and producing film of almost hallucinatory clarity (Peter Jackson and Ang Lee have employed this technique, with mixed results). The sample short he screened for my class was about the reality of UFOs and smacked a bit of crank conspiracy theory. Trumbull is a true believer. But like many true believers he has absolutely no sense of humor about the subject.

Trumbull is on a quest to eliminate “blur” from action sequences. Personally this has never bothered me. But it’s an idee fixe for some filmmakers. In the manner of some serious visionaries, he never once smiled during all this except when, while addressing the class, I called him “a master of the sublime.” In general he gave off the sullen air of a neglected, albeit immensely successful, genius – a man who has accomplished miracles in film yet is still rolling the stone uphill. I suppose many great filmmakers feel the same way. And it was a thrill to see the table top scale model of L.A. used for the opening shots of Blade Runner. About twenty feet long, each building or structure packed with thousands of LED lights.

Trumbull’s MAGI project is not really practical for wide-scale distribution. Built like a pod that can seat about 50, there is one currently at the Smithsonian.

The other master is from an older generation: Ray Harryhausen. Where Trumbull excels at creating vistas of the technological sublime (see under David Nye and Fredric Jameson), Harryhausen specialized above all in the pathos of the death of monsters. In this he followed his mentor, the great Willis O’Brien, who made King Kong’s death a pathetic spectacle of the first order. Harryhausen stages monster death throes as though he were in the Globe Theatre:

“For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings”

Imbuing his otherworldly creatures with life and purpose, he then slowly, beautifully, majestically destroys them. Watch the death throes of the great green dragon in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. The way it thrashes about, a giant arrow imbedded in its fore-flank. Or the epic showdown between the dragon and the Cyclops. Or how Gwangi (an improbable Allosaurus from a “lost valley” somewhat on the order of Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World”), tormented by flames inside a grand Mexican cathedral, whips and yowls to its uncomprehending demise. The fall of the lost, confused Ymir in 20,000,000 Miles to Earth from the top of the Colosseum. The agony of the magnificent Rhedosaurus in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, a forerunner to Gwangi, as it, too, burns alive, trapped inside a Coney Island roller coaster. (Lee Van Cleef, be all your sins remembered).

The spectacle of the death of a monster is sublime for several reasons. It is staged on a gigantic scale, like the death of some elder god: larger than life, towering over the aghast human on-lookers, and laden with pathos. As they die, the emotional tone of these films shifts from terror to pity. What, a moment before, had been wreaking havoc and destruction, is suddenly invested with what Emerson called a certain alienated majesty. These creatures are lost geniuses of their inhuman realms: strangers in a strange land, in many ways undeserving of their fate at the hands of latter-day usurpers. Often the monster’s fate seems like an allegory for a world of mystery that is being destroyed by technology and thoughtless expansionist progress.

What these beasts tend to share in common is that they are often themselves removed from some original habitat, transported to the future as it were, or from another planet, to a place where they don’t belong. They are refugees from myth or prehistory.

Beyond distension or scale, though, what Harryhausen’s monsters express is their vulnerability, their common fate with us lesser mortals. We identify with the monster, only at its demise, since we undergo the same fate. Its colossal aggression and rage are suddenly tempered; in its death we perceive that its wild behavior had only enacted the primal revulsion we all feel at the thought of our own death. The monster is the mirror. They act less out of malevolence than instinct; melancholy exiles from lost worlds of ancient sovereignty, disrupted by technology and man’s fatal ambitions.

Harryhausen’s particular brand of magic peaked in the 60s. His final film, 1982’s disappointing Clash of the Titans, through no fault of his, is a slog, stifled by the pseudo-Shakespearean presence of so much august British acting royalty. The pacing is abominable and the monsters are never really given their proper moment in the spotlight.

But his earlier films have lost none of their weird power. What endows these doomed creatures with such fearsome charisma? It’s simple, really: they’re miniature clay models filmed using the painstaking process of stop-motion animation, an antiquated technique all but forgotten today (except for Wes Anderson’s twee films) but which possesses incredible charm. Stop-motion, with its slightly uneven contrivance, makes Harryhausen’s brutes seem both less real than real and more real. Their uncanny liveliness embodies the very stuff of childhood imagination. (When I was five, I underwent a tonsillectomy. I insisted on taking my shoebox full of plastic dinosaurs with me to the hospital. Playing with them gave me great comfort when I awoke the morning after. This sums up for me the Harryhausen aesthetic in a nutshell).

In the deaths of these hand-crafted monsters we witness a world stripped bare of the brides of enchantment – all their chthonic power usurped; the very complaint registered by Theodor Adorno and Max Weber. Myth is brought low, as D.H. Lawrence might put it. Man’s appetite for supremacy exacts its puny vengeance. It can only be satisfied by the throes of reptilian extinction. But who gave us permission to kill these fantastic gods? How dare we slay awe and terror? And what price for that deicide did we not reckon with?

The motion of Ray’s monsters is not jerky. When the cowboys are trying to lasso Gwangi, the snapping of the dinosaur’s jaws is astonishingly fluid and vivid. When Jason battles the Hydra the illusion of movement is more real than real. You believe in these monsters. They are fearsome, yet somehow never evil, however threateningly they may loom over their human antagonists, who have suddenly found themselves radically displaced in scale. And they far surpass the CGI-generated dinosaurs of the bloated Jurassic Park and its sequels.

In her book On Longing, Susan Stewart explores our fascination with both the miniature and the gigantic.

“The miniature offers us a transcendent vision which is known only through the visual. In approaching the miniature, our bodies erupt into a confusion of before-unrealized surfaces … [wheras] we are enveloped by the gigantic, surrounded by it, enclosed within its shadow … we find the miniature at the origin of private, individual history, but we find the gigantic at the origin of public and natural history.”

Harryhausen’s creatures dwell on the borderline between the miniature and the gigantic: they are gigantic to the film’s actors when superimposed via optical printing. But we get an extra thrill from knowing that they are also scale models, exactingly manipulated to create a believable yet still uncanny life-like appearance.

Harryhausen brought life to many monsters throughout his career, but it’s the downfall of the implacable metal giant Talos in Jason and the Argonauts that offers the most moving depiction of a monster’s demise in his output. When he drops his massive sword and clutches with both hands at his throat as the ichor gushes from his heel, we feel a strange pity for this frightening colossus. Harryhausen’s genius is to invest his creatures with genuine pathos as he brings his monster’s suffering to a fevered pitch. The pain Talos feels in his carefully choreographed death throes is grandly operatic. His tragedy in a way is inseparable from his muteness and self-opacity. He cannot know why he is dying, he can only undergo it. Ray Harryhausen’s extraordinary monsters kindle one of the most powerful sensations the movies can give us, a sensation that very little CGI can successfully deliver: wonder.

The Unabomber

“THE PURE PRODUCTS OF AMERICA GO CRAZY:”THE UNABOMBER & PURITAN PATHOLOGY

The author FC, now known to us as Theodore Kacyzinski, makes a by now familiar case against the putative evils of technology in his tendentious manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.” Part reactionary Luddite jingoism, part half-baked psychological analysis, his essay is immediately notable on two counts: its complete lack of intellectual distinction, and its utter failure to delineate a specific and practicable method for the abolition of technology. FC’s Cassandra-like warnings of humanity’s imminent doom from technology we have been hearing since at least the time of Blake. His brand of pre-Industrial nostalgia is nothing new. What’s of interest in the document is the awkward, self-conscious motion of a deep and private pathology on full display. This is a conclusion, moreover, any intelligent reader can easily arrive at without knowing anything more of the violent pogrom Mr. Kacyzinski directed toward American technocrats.

One of the more curious features of the manifesto is its author’s focused rage against what he calls “the dangers of leftism.” Leftism, FC assures us, is one of “the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world” (6). (N.B. Because of Internet formatting numbers for quotes refer to paragraphs, not pages). Who are these leftists? None other than the “socialists, collectivists ... feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like” (7). Left out of this accounting are environmental activists, long and almost exclusively associated with the Left. For FC, though, they are part of his revolution against the industrial state. Leftism is subjected to a sophomoric psychoanalysis, its causes found not in the formation of the modern nation state (the French Revolution was a failure, we are told in passing), but in “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization.” This latter condition might best be described as going so far as to want to live with other people. The inferiority that mysteriously afflicts only members of the Left (or causes them to go Left, it’s not clear,) expresses itself through feelings of hatred for anything that is “strong, good or successful,” which basically includes all of “Western civilization” (15).

It would be tedious to outline the remainder of FC’s outlandish conceptions of history and culture. He castigates contemporary humanity for pursuing “surrogate activities” instead of real goals, but he never states what a real goal looks like (40-41). From his description of the surrogate goals, they look a lot like real ones. Interestingly, when he begins to expound on the nature of freedom, FC almost rises to the level of discourse analysis. His attack on the institutional practices of surveillance, the culture of the modern police state, etc., sound a Foucauldian note (95). And a little later on, we come on this cogent diagnosis of our ills: “Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them drugs to take away their unhappiness.” Marx himself couldn’t have put it better. These are brief lapses into reason, though. Immediately, we are back on FC’s relentless hobbyhorse.

At the heart of “The Unabomber Manifesto” lies a deep terror, not of machines or technology per se, but of what can only be called ontological mutation. For FC, dogmatic essentialist that he is, human nature is a category of the real that has seemingly remained undisturbed for millennia. He correctly intuits that technology acts as a kind of self-reflexive mechanism capable of effecting qualitative psychological changes in human beings. And he is afraid that these changes will only lead to the increasing collectivization of humanity. There’s a sneaking compulsion to admit that he may, afterall, be right about technology, though for all the wrong reasons. FC’s answer to the terrible threat posed by technology, however, is expressed in an absurdly nostalgic longing for the past, for the primitive, and finally, for an order that is not any order at all. His revolutionary project, his vision, is a-utopic, in a sense, for he has no wish to replace the existing order with a new order, only to abolish it (182).

But FC’s paranoia about technology is really a fear of progress in general and it has ample precedent in American cultural history. Historian Richard Hofstadter has admirably outlined this strain of American paranoia in two of his books, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics. William Carlos Williams has perhaps best summed up this reactionary Puritan fever in his poem, “To Elsie” (from Spring and All), where he writes, “the pure products of America go crazy.” Though he only hints in his manifesto at a form of violent resistance to the industrial state, FC’s modus operandi as the Unabomber is as American as apple pie, exemplifying what historian Richard Slotkin has called in The Fatal Environment and other works the central trope in the American Frontier Myth, namely, “regeneration through violence.” Briefly, “the structuring metaphor of the American experience,” the trope of regeneration through violence grew out of the colonists desire to reconstitute their personal lives and institutions, a desire that inevitably became linked to the violence used to attain it.

FC is the postmodern avatar par excellence of this peculiar strain of American “nativist,” Know-Nothing isolationism. This ideology, which he shares in common with the numerous militant groups now flourishing in the hinterlands, relies on a discourse of rugged individualism for its philosophical underpinnings. Its true psychic vector was located by D.H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature. Commenting on Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, Lawrence writes, “you have there the myth of the essential white America ... the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” The cult of the American pioneer derives more from Nineteenth-Century propaganda than from the actual historical record. The settlement of this country, as historians Donald Worster and Patricia Nelson Limerick have pointed out, was made possible by the very government and business interests FC decries for the accelerating decline of the quality of life.

Heidegger’s conclusion in “The Question Concerning Technology” that technology offers humans a deeper way into Being sheds some much needed light here. For Heidegger, the process of Enframing (which is accelerated by technology), whereby things, and through things the quiddity of Being itself, are reduced, singularized and homogenized, threatens to pauperize the human relation to Being. But it is precisely this danger which offers humans the opportunity to engage Being at a deeper level of cognition. He quotes Holderlin to illustrate his point: “But where danger is/There also is the saving power.” As Heidegger puts it, man’s solemn duty to watch over unconcealment (that is, truth, or the presencing of Being) is heightened by the danger technology poses. “It is precisely in this extreme danger that the innermost indestructible belongingness of man within granting may come to light, provided that we, for our part, begin to pay heed to the coming to presence of technology” (32). And it is precisely this kind of argument (its arcane rhetoric notwithstanding) for a deeply responsible engagement with technology -- with its awareness and acceptance of the full complexity of the issue -- that eludes the benighted FC. For in the final analysis, as Heidegger so wisely realizes, the problem of technology is first, last, and merely the continuing problem of how to be human.