See the mind as a cage, and the body as an even larger enclosure. Possibly a sphere. In its blackness, words present as images; looping and unfolding in their allowed berth, before being snuffed out.
Then, replaced with the next chain, feed, reel in line and so on, still onwards to the final sight. The reality of the cage is actually less forbidding than the mind’s true dimensions. When it begins to grow, stretching both horizontally and vertically, it offers an ancient impression, a suggestion of what pre-consciousness looked like. The form of what each of us sees last differs in shape but shares a fundamental meaning.
What you see last is inevitably followed by the return to pre-consciousness. It’s a return that seems forever distant, because we never remember how it was before. Before the zygote. Before the first thought. Before the first memory, and first twinge of fear; caused by the initial distinction between light, shadow and doom. Death shouldn’t be feared. And it wouldn’t be, if it was treated as kin to the missing tape that formed our ‘pre-existence’. The events only known through photographs and histories. All that happened before we became participants in this human mystery.
Where man was once a child, August Comte saw similar development in his knowledge. From the naivety of faith, to the wisdom of reason. As the body aged and matured, the mind was enlarged by experimentation. Comte envisioned a natural passage of the mind: from the base (Theology), to the pure (Positive), with Metaphysics bridging the two states. This is the model:
Now each of us is aware, if he looks back upon his own history, that he was a theologian in his child-hood, a metaphysician in his youth, and a natural philosopher in his manhood.
Sharing a character with the wait for death, our relationship with film and music is built on expectation. People demand new sensations from cinema or their favorite band’s next album; but if either experience strays too far afield, those sensations become discomfort. The hunger for the new is often outweighed by the need to cling to what is known, and familiar. I cannot number the times I prayed for the villain’s success; or hoped the bride would remain at the altar, forsaking love and choosing the second banana.
Still I, and you the viewer, keep watching the same movies. It could be a personal defect or just the desire to see something different. Something closer to the imperfection of life. We trudge the same paths until they become furrows in the earth. Then the idea arrives: new, sudden and like steady rain fills this depression, making the ground soft enough for plants to grow. That idea comes from works that challenge us. Creations that work differently than what we have seen before.
From the poster for Final Exam (1981)
I watched Final Exam (1981) over the holiday, Halloween to be exact. It’s a slow burn as the killing doesn’t begin in earnest until the last half-hour of the film. The print looks “brown” like a ‘70s naturist film, but the campus backdrop feels realistic. It was filmed at Isothermal Community College, in Spindale, North Carolina. Two principals in the movie died in sequence. Mark and Radish.
Radish (played by Joel S. Rice, who stole the movie, by the way) found Mark’s body in the act of doing a good deed. He was killed moments later as he tried to tell Courtney that a killer was on the loose. Radish died the way he lived, nobly. Mark, on the other hand, got it down a dark, trash-strewn alley lined with ‘Danger’ ‘Do Not Enter’ signs. This is a slasher film, so that kind of errant decision-making is expected. Simply put, Mark died like the filthy rat he was.
A few frames before it happened, Mark was gathering up the pain pills ‘Wildman’ failed to retrieve when he met his end 15-minutes prior. The stolen pills were going to be used to burn two burnouts, who called Mark looking for speed to get through exam cramming. All in all both deaths follow the moral code of the ‘80s slasher, to the letter. In that world the heel and the geek never make it to the credits. Only the virgin survives. But is that always so?
From the poster for Madman (1982)
I watched Madman (1982), the story of ‘Madman Marz’ next. Known for its tight framing, and there forest where it’s always nighttime. The only character that made it through the night was the teenage jerk that started it all. After the tale of Madman was told around the campfire and songs were sung, Richie chucked a stone through Marz’s window. All but calling him out for a showdown. Even after he discovered where Marz kept all the bodies, Richie still lived. His exemption from death likely came under the rule that you can’t kill kids in slashers. I hesitate to call Richie the “Final Girl” in this scenario; he’s more of a fortunate fool.
Betsy, however embodied virginity with saucer-wide blue eyes. Despite having sex for 25 minutes in a hot tub to Tony Nunziata’s “I Don’t Need Words”. It wasn’t a bad number and Gary Sales did an excellent job on the score. When Betsy corralled all the children onto the bus, I thought she’d made it. In the end, however, Marz hung her on a coat-rack in the tradition of Leatherface. Although she set fire to his corpse-shrine, burning the house and presumably killing Marz in the process, the victory was bittersweet. Because she died. She deserved chastity points for fending of T.P until he proved his love. But in the book of slasher, rules are rules.
Except in the case of Kelly and Jude. Prom Night (1980) is an unusual film; even though it’s often classed with more conventional first-wave slasher films like He Knows You’re Alone (1980). People remember it for the Freudian reveal and the catwalk beheading, but there are more layers to it. First, there is the Leslie Nielson factor. Nielson like Rodney Dangerfield is impossible to take seriously in any capacity on film. I don’t know if this speaks to his comedic ability, or his abandonment of all other creative avenues later in life. I’m familiar with his early work on Thriller (1973) and Tales of Tomorrow (19510. With that said, Airplane! and The Naked Gun series color his career, pre- and post-1980.
In Prom Night he played it as straight as he could. Which at that stage in his development was, not very. Jamie Lee Curtis was strong as always, androgynous yet strangely alluring. Then there was Alex, her brother. Whom we know is the killer when he tells Robin in the opening flashback, “They don’t want you in their game.” The game was called ‘The Killer Is Coming For You!’. The children: Jude, Kelly, Nick and Wendy, all between the ages of nine and 11 at the time, ended the game by cornering Robin. They chanted ‘Kill, Kill, Kill’ at her until she fell through a shattered window, plunging many feet to her death on a broken window frame.
There’s a great misdirection in this scene. They almost trick you into thinking Nick, ‘the idiot’ and future prom king will be the one to fall, as he sidles across a high ledge running along the factory. Courting the death that will soon be Robin’s.
Seven years later Alex began making obscene, yet not obscene phone calls to all the kids that covered up Robin’s murder. When he phoned Kelly and seethed “Kelly, it’s been a long time…”, I hoped the line would close with the hammy punch of ‘Now it’s my time!’. Alas, the writers avoided tagline material and kept things sober in the early scenes. No fear though, as the film progressed it surrendered to its own neuroses. In a thread on IMDB titled “Alex and lipstick?” user ‘bradleynath’ shared an excerpt from the original script that clears up why Alex wore eyeshadow and rouge beneath his ski-mask.
His hair falls onto his forehead in
bangs, as Robin’s had done seven years before.
His makeup had been sloppily applied. The
rouged cheeks and the smudged red lips
amplify the grotesque impersonation.
It was an odd tribute to his twin. Alex wore the makeup Robin never got to wear. And killed the way she’d kill if she’d had a chance at vengeance.
As one of Robin’s killers, Kelly got a call on the eve of prom. She answered and was greeted by a heavy-breather. Nearing the end of her time in high school, Kelly was still chaste, virginal, and unlike Jude, she had a date. Drew, a real charmer, came through Kelly’s back door after the call shook her enough to scan the front yard for prowlers. To comfort her, Drew asked if the caller had ‘turned her on’.
Drew ended up taking Kelly to the prom but he did not take her virginity. She refused and spitefully, Drew unpinned his corsage from her dress. Kelly wore a white flower in her hair to compliment her white gown. In words that have been said under a thousand different circumstances, Drew laid out the crude facts of life to Kelly: “What are you some fairy-tale princess? …If you don’t, I know plenty who will.” The killer came for Kelly in that dark locker room shortly after. Violating the virgin principle in slasher lore, but upholding the logic of revenge.
Jude found her man just by walking down the street. His name was ‘Slick’. Slick owned a shag van. It was gunmetal gray on the outside and maroon on the inside. Completing it was a shag carpet-floored velvet-walled love den. This love den, unbeknownst to Jude, had never been used. Slick was a virgin, too. Their first time together was destined to be their last time, ever. Damning them both for good, Jude hit a joint and said: “You know, I’ll remember this night for the rest of my life.” Little did she know the rest of her life wouldn’t last 60 seconds, let alone 60 years.
Although logic guided the killer on prom night (here’s who must die, here’s why), film life like real life has flaws. ‘Slick’ died because he was with the wrong person at the wrong time. Nick lived because he was behind the right person when the axe fell. Even in a murderous rage Alex could not bring himself to strike the only sister he had left. That’s human. And wholly realistic, given what we know about Alex.
And what about Robin? Robin was more than the inspiration for the killings. She was a symbol and a redbird, not a red herring. Everything from her name to her bird-like death on a pane of glass reveals a second story. A story that links the animal (Robin) to the word (Death), and all the ideas contained in it.
To make sense of things we must ask, how did the robin get its redbreast? There is an entry on robins in The Continuum Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism in Art. It details one possible origin of robin mythology:
The robin sometimes plays the role attributed to the goldfinch in Christian legends-plucking a thorn from Christ’s crown and becoming splashed with his blood. An alternate story is that the robin in trying to remove the thorns, only succeeded in piercing his own breast.
A breast stained in blood, symbolic or otherwise, is only a short leap from more modern ideas on what a robin knocking at a window means. The first time I saw a robin strike glass a relative died that same day. Maybe there is credence in the place given to the robin by European and Native American symbolism. The robin’s place as a harbinger of death, dresser of graves, and navigator of the underworld. One role assigned to the robin is preparing recently deceased bodies for the grave. There are numerous tales of robins attending to bodies before they are committed to the Earth. From John Webster’s 1612 revenge epic, The White Devil:
Call for the robin redbreast and the wren / Since o’er shady groves they hover / And with leaves and flowers do cover / The friendless bodies of unburied men / Call unto his funeral dole / The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole, /To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm / And (when gay tombs are robbed) sustain no harm; / But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men, / For with his nails he’ll dig them up again.
The first run of the play failed. Webster blamed the failure on the play’s debut in the dead of winter.
This robin, the one that I saw, beat its wings against its chest and the ground in a death spasm that lasted roughly two minutes. It was strange, watching a living thing die. Especially as I’d never seen death take hold in such rapid stages. First, the bird’s frail body flew in error, meeting the window. The end came so soon after the blow. It’s said that if a robin enters your home through an open window; someone, possibly a resident of that home, will soon perish. Based on experience, I’d guess even a fastened window can’t shut out a messenger of doom.
Forgetting the moral weight of the word ‘doom’ may be the Robin isn’t as grave as all that. Perhaps it’s only a living thing and by extension a symbol. Like any symbol, meaning is supplied by the observer. The first sighting of the robin in Spring is celebrated in works like “To the First Robin”, by Louisa May Alcott. In her words: “We are glad to see you here, for you sing ‘Sweet Spring is Near’.” The Robin’s return in song following deep winter seasons, is marked as a sign of enduring spring. Spring, of course represents fertility and rebirth. Robert Fletcher wrote a piece for The American Anthropologist entitled “Myths of the Robin Redbreast in Early English Poetry”. It was published in 1889. Fletcher quoted W.E.H. Lecky, on an image of rebirth linked to the robin:
The Redbreast, according to one popular legend, was commissioned by the Deity to carry a drop of water to the souls of unbaptized infants in Hell, and its breast was singed in piercing the flames.
It seems the robin carries the assurance of renewal along with the promise of death. Under the broader heading of ‘robin’ there are: North American, Indian, Pekin, Australian and Magpie varieties. Most of which have their own distinct origin stories: and dedications in prose, rhyme, or verse. One of the most famous being “Who Killed Cock Robin”, a rather macabre sing-a-long. There is one verse that stands out in association with the film:
Who’ll carry the coffin? / I, said the Kite, / if it’s not through the night, / I’ll carry the coffin.
There is a song at the bottom of this page. It’s a cover of John Mayall’s “Broken Wings”, by The Unexpected Party. A one-shot sensation from Kerrville, Texas. Though it came long before; Mayall’s words and The Unexpected Party’s treatment of them, speak to the heart of the things we’ve gone over.