fantasy, page 70 of 92

I love the first half of Videodrome (if love is the right word for something so weird & sleazy). Max Renn’s (James Woods) descent into a hallucinatory world of video nasty violence and getting-swallowed-by-a-TV weirdness is handled with enough of a dangerous edge that you really feel this isn’t just an excuse for some shocking/surreal horror-fantasy moments, but may actually be a film with what Renn himself doesn’t have — “a philosophy” — i.e., an actual coherence to its weirdness, something quite rare in this sort of hallucinogenic horror movie.

But then there’s the second half, and I never fail to be disappointed by it. It’s at this point the film sloughs off its weirdness for action; it leaves its ideas behind and settles for a shoot-out and a suicide. It has the effect of someone breaking off an interesting and well-reasoned debate to sock his opponent in the jaw, and represents a similar failure of ideas, or perhaps a lack of courage in its convictions.

After all, the potential was there, particularly once Renn has encountered the Ballardian video prophet Brian O’Blivion, whose Cathode Ray Mission aims to bring TV to the homeless, and who only communicates with the world via video tapes. O’Blivion (a gloriously silly name that surely points to this very much not being intended as a standard action thriller) sees the TV as an extension of the mind, and believes the sort of sleaze peddled by Max Renn’s Channel 83 to be a necessary outing for the murky, nightmarish depths of the unconscious. His is the sort of “philosophy” Videodrome ought to be about — and it’s the philosophy the first half most definitely is about. O’Blivion seeks to liberate mankind from the strictures of reality with the (then-new) power of video, even if it is a savage, uncivilised liberation. At least it will be an honest one.

But it turns out O’Blivion isn’t the man behind the brain-tumour inducing video signal known as Videodrome. That is Spectacular Opticals, an arch-reactionary mega-corporation, who aside from selling cheap glasses and missile guidance systems, seek to skim the scum from the human race using video-brainwashed killers (programmed by pulsating Betamax tapes). And the trouble is, theirs is a boring philosophy compared to the zany O’Blivion’s.

With O’Blivion’s enlightenment-through-video-sleaze we’d have the ending that, apparently, Cronenberg initially planned — a vision of Max Renn, Nicki Brand (Debbie Harry) and Bianca O’Blivion melded together in one “new flesh”, in some video version of heaven. But for some reason he swapped it for what we instead have — people getting shot at a corporate sales conference — the logical consequence of Spectacular Opticals’ realistic philosophy, yes, but so dull to watch after the visual richness of the first half of the film.

Perhaps the trouble is Cronenberg is a good director of the subtleties — and of actors — while having a strong love of the pulpier types of horror. Torn between the two, his films perhaps promise too much of both, but can only fulfil one side of the bargain. (I certainly felt the same about A History of Violence, which I thought, from the beginning, was going to be all about the is-he-or-isn’t-he-a-gangster of Viggo Mortensen’s character, only to be disappointed when it turned into yet another shoot out in the second half.)

My favourite Cronenberg film remains The Dead Zone, which keeps its use of the fantastic very cut back, and tells its tale of emotional reserve and quiet disappointment just as effectively as Videodrome delivers its first-half shocks and disorientations, but sticks with them to the end.

After the full-on fantasy of his first two books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath (a trilogy to be completed later this year), Alan Garner’s subsequent two novels saw a reining in of fantastical elements, as well as a much sparser approach to writing, with description so cut back, at times we’re left with nothing but unattributed dialogue. Elidor (1965) still features a trip to another world, enchanted artefacts, and a unicorn, but in The Owl Service (1967), the fantastical is more about a force shaping earthly events into an age-old mythical pattern than explicit magic (though there are few poltergeist-like phenomena to let us know just what sort of a power we’re dealing with).

You might be forgiven for thinking, from its title, The Owl Service perhaps influenced a certain aspect of the Harry Potter novels. I certainly imagined, before I read it, that it would feature scenes of owls swooping into rooms delivering important messages about magical things to breathless teens — but the “service” of the title in fact refers to a dinner service, a set of plates patterned with a design which at first glance appears to be flowers, but which can also be seen as owls. (This is an actual dinner service Garner’s mother-in-law discovered, and which is reproduced in the book.)

A set of plates? It might sound a disappointing basis for a fantasy novel, but Garner’s book is all about the meeting of the mundane and the mystical/mythical, the way an ancient story can overwrite everyday reality, forcing it towards potentially tragic ends.

The Owl Service, cover by Alan Lee

The link between owls and flowers is the story of Blodeuwedd, a woman created out of flowers at the behest of Lleu Llaw Gyffes. Although created for him, Blodeuwedd turns out to have a mind (and heart) of her own, and falls in love with Gronw Pebr instead. Gronw kills Lleu; Lleu is resurrected and kills Gronw; then Blodeuwedd is turned into an owl for her part in her husband’s murder. This is the pattern of events that, building up in a static-like charge around one particular house in an isolated Welsh valley, seeks to impose its tragedy on a trio of youngsters once every generation. The “Owl Service” of the title, the plates with the flowers/owls design, was one particular generation’s attempt to trap or divert the energy of the myth away from an actual murder. It failed, and the events of the novel are heavy with the never-to-be-spoken-of tragedy of the previous generation. And of course the very keeping of that secret only serves to make it more likely to play out again, as, in The Owl Service, we get to see how a contemporary (mid-1960s) trio of teens, two English and middle-class comfortably-off, one Welsh and poor, deal with it.

The writing style, with its cut-back descriptions and dialogue free of any sort of adjectival prompting, means you, as the reader, have a little bit more work to do than in the average novel. This quickly proves to The Owl Service‘s advantage, though, as that little bit extra work creates a great deal more emotional investment. (I could hear the voices of the characters far better than in most novels.) Garner trusts his readers to be as sensitive and intelligent as he is about the micro-politics and emotional tussles of a small household held back by a little bit too much English reserve and oppressive class-consciousness. It also means that, when something strange happens, you often end up doing a double-take — did what I think happened really just happen? — which is of course what the characters are thinking, too.

Although it’s quite a short novel, it builds its power gradually, leaving it right to the end to resolve — something I loved in Elidor, and which worked only a little bit less effectively here. The sense of the tragedies of the past — both the ancient, mythical past, and that of the previous generation — weighing in on the innocents of the present, at the very moment they lose their innocence, and the horror of their inability to see just how they’re being twisted into playing parts in an ancient tragedy, creates a tight drama using only a few characters that nevertheless feels as though it’s reaching epic depths.

Garner is, along with Robert Holdstock, one of the few writers I know to really capture the dark, barbarous, wild side of the mythical imagination, to write about the way myths and stories really can affect us to the core, modern-minded though we are. Both writers also have a strong sense of the landscape they’re writing in, how it surrounds, traps, inspires, enchants, and shapes the characters within it. Despite the sparse descriptions, something in The Owl Service made me feel that this was very much a landscape I knew, which is something that’s always made me connect with a book (or film — it’s partly why I love 70s Brit horror and Doctor Who) that much more.

Of Garner’s later work, I’ve only read Thursbitch, an adult novel which is even more cut-back in its descriptions, and even more intense in its tying together events past and present, people and the landscape they move through. I can’t work out why I haven’t read more of his work. I certainly intend to.

MorganScorpion has put her reading of Alice at R’lyeh up on her YouTube channel. I’ve embedded the reading here, but her channel’s well worth a visit for her readings of Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, Oscar Wilde, M R James, and other weird writers’ stories & poems.