Monster is a word we use to put distance between ourselves and something we don't like. It's a term that's invoked when people do bad things, a knee-jerk reaction to say: that's not part of me or my world, and absolutely not my responsibility. I have just finished reading two books about monsters by RM Vaughan. Spells is a coming-of-age story from the dark side. It's set in St. John, New Brunswick, a dark, conservative town that several of my close friends have had the misfortune to grow up in. Spells takes root in the most horrid pits of adolescent shame and self-loathing, and spills back and forth between witchcraft and neurotic delusion. I like it because it addresses head-on the presence of monstrosity in commonplace, everyday existence. I also like it because, while the main character is gay, it is not his homosexuality per se that offends and frightens him, but his whole entire, fetid, pubescent self.
The Monster Trilogy is a collection of three short plays, monologues, that starts with Susan Smith. Remember her? She pushed her car into the lake and drowned her kids, then fingered a fictional "black man with a toque." I remember the headline "MONSTER" when the truth came out about what she'd done, and I've been mildly obsessed* ever since. In "The Susan Smith Tapes", RM Vaughan puts words into her mouth: "Sometimes I get hungry, right after supper, right on a full stomach, unsensible hungry, and then I says a little prayer to my angels up on God's lap. Momma hears you, boys, Momma hears your tummies rumblin'. Now you ask God for your supper. Beans and weiners. White bread with brown sugar. And then I ain't hungry no more."
The second play, "A Visitation by Saint Teresa of Avila upon Constable Margaret Chance" is the voice of a cop, who is shaken up because she's discovered that a gruesome murderer/rapist is a distant relative: "[What] if its a gene, right, like a genetic predispatation to kill and it runs in the family? I could pass it on to my boy, Bradley. Maybe I got a thread of this gene -- that's all it takes, one bad link in the chain -- say I'm in the middle of the hot and hornies and the gene kicks in, right, the Kill Gene, kicks right the fuck into my head and I gotta do a violence? I gotta cut off a pair of nuts or an arm or a whole head? Whaddya gonna do, you can't deny your genetic destiny. So, here's the finaly unholy question: am I guilty?"
"Dead Teenagers" is a smoking female Reverend who has recently behaved inappropriatly at a teenager's funeral: "What a mob scene at Kristi Kenner's service. Hundreds of girls from the high school, and each one brought her own candle, or a pink teddy bear, or the worst sort of handmade cards. All this trash piled a mile high on the church steps. The Kenner family did not spend three thousand dollars on quality floral arrangements to have them tarted up with gaudy pink carnations and green women's rights ribbons and plastic unicorns tied to yellow roses."
I like these grim, funny vignettes very much, and Spells is a trip. But my primary interest is RM Vaughan's point of view that monsters are us. I think we do ourselves and each other a disservice when we cast away the undesirable. Enough tossing out our babies with the dirty, stinkin' bathwater.
* far far too much to read about Susan Smith is available here.
Reading that rejection letter for some reason made me think of a film by Beth B. called Two Small Bodies, which came out the year before the Smith killings. It's based on a stage play, and it's so morbid and jaded and self-indulgent that I ended up liking it in spite of itself. Here's the IMDb description: Eileen Maloney, a hostess at a strip joint, has woken up to find her two children are missing. Lieutenant Bramm suspects that she killed them herself. He questions her for days about her lifestyle, her children, her ex-husband, men and women, and life in general. He forces her to re-enact her last moments in the children's room hoping to shock her into giving more information. The lieutenant's infatuation is not merely professional, however, and soon they are reversing roles.
The movie's not really about the children at all, it's about narcissistic urban adults and their horrendous dating & mating problems, to which children are entirely secondary. One minute the couple--wanly pretty strip club hostess/murder suspect and handsome, self-interested cop--are bickering, the next they're slow dancing. In one scene (my favorite, if that's the right word), the hostess comes home and finds the cop, Fred Ward, sitting at her kitchen table naked except for his BVD briefs. He picks up the interrogation where it left off the day before. She remains completely inexpressive throughout the movie, as I recall. I saw it in a completely empty theatre in Dallas. Not sure what the point is, just that it's coincidental the Smith case happened the next year.
Actually, maybe what I was thinking was, in 1993 the premise of the movie seemed too farfetched to be of much interest to people, but if it'd been released in '95, the audience size might have increased to...a hundred or so.
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Monster is a word we use to put distance between ourselves and something we don't like. It's a term that's invoked when people do bad things, a knee-jerk reaction to say: that's not part of me or my world, and absolutely not my responsibility. I have just finished reading two books about monsters by RM Vaughan. Spells is a coming-of-age story from the dark side. It's set in St. John, New Brunswick, a dark, conservative town that several of my close friends have had the misfortune to grow up in. Spells takes root in the most horrid pits of adolescent shame and self-loathing, and spills back and forth between witchcraft and neurotic delusion. I like it because it addresses head-on the presence of monstrosity in commonplace, everyday existence. I also like it because, while the main character is gay, it is not his homosexuality per se that offends and frightens him, but his whole entire, fetid, pubescent self.
The Monster Trilogy is a collection of three short plays, monologues, that starts with Susan Smith. Remember her? She pushed her car into the lake and drowned her kids, then fingered a fictional "black man with a toque." I remember the headline "MONSTER" when the truth came out about what she'd done, and I've been mildly obsessed* ever since. In "The Susan Smith Tapes", RM Vaughan puts words into her mouth: "Sometimes I get hungry, right after supper, right on a full stomach, unsensible hungry, and then I says a little prayer to my angels up on God's lap. Momma hears you, boys, Momma hears your tummies rumblin'. Now you ask God for your supper. Beans and weiners. White bread with brown sugar. And then I ain't hungry no more."
The second play, "A Visitation by Saint Teresa of Avila upon Constable Margaret Chance" is the voice of a cop, who is shaken up because she's discovered that a gruesome murderer/rapist is a distant relative: "[What] if its a gene, right, like a genetic predispatation to kill and it runs in the family? I could pass it on to my boy, Bradley. Maybe I got a thread of this gene -- that's all it takes, one bad link in the chain -- say I'm in the middle of the hot and hornies and the gene kicks in, right, the Kill Gene, kicks right the fuck into my head and I gotta do a violence? I gotta cut off a pair of nuts or an arm or a whole head? Whaddya gonna do, you can't deny your genetic destiny. So, here's the finaly unholy question: am I guilty?"
"Dead Teenagers" is a smoking female Reverend who has recently behaved inappropriatly at a teenager's funeral: "What a mob scene at Kristi Kenner's service. Hundreds of girls from the high school, and each one brought her own candle, or a pink teddy bear, or the worst sort of handmade cards. All this trash piled a mile high on the church steps. The Kenner family did not spend three thousand dollars on quality floral arrangements to have them tarted up with gaudy pink carnations and green women's rights ribbons and plastic unicorns tied to yellow roses."
I like these grim, funny vignettes very much, and Spells is a trip. But my primary interest is RM Vaughan's point of view that monsters are us. I think we do ourselves and each other a disservice when we cast away the undesirable. Enough tossing out our babies with the dirty, stinkin' bathwater.
* far far too much to read about Susan Smith is available here.
- sally mckay 1-12-2004 5:21 am
Reading that rejection letter for some reason made me think of a film by Beth B. called Two Small Bodies, which came out the year before the Smith killings. It's based on a stage play, and it's so morbid and jaded and self-indulgent that I ended up liking it in spite of itself. Here's the IMDb description:
The movie's not really about the children at all, it's about narcissistic urban adults and their horrendous dating & mating problems, to which children are entirely secondary. One minute the couple--wanly pretty strip club hostess/murder suspect and handsome, self-interested cop--are bickering, the next they're slow dancing. In one scene (my favorite, if that's the right word), the hostess comes home and finds the cop, Fred Ward, sitting at her kitchen table naked except for his BVD briefs. He picks up the interrogation where it left off the day before. She remains completely inexpressive throughout the movie, as I recall. I saw it in a completely empty theatre in Dallas. Not sure what the point is, just that it's coincidental the Smith case happened the next year.- tom moody 1-12-2004 6:26 am
Actually, maybe what I was thinking was, in 1993 the premise of the movie seemed too farfetched to be of much interest to people, but if it'd been released in '95, the audience size might have increased to...a hundred or so.
- tom moody 1-12-2004 6:34 am