For there is no relation between the true importance of a man and that imputed to him by his own time… In the course of time, "leaders" and "geniuses" are exposed as frauds, while outsiders, outlaws, nobodies, are found to have been the true vehicles for reality.
Erich Neumann

There’s a rhythm to banality.
Mark Elliot

by Steve Johnson

I. INTRODUCTION: AN OUTLINE OF HYSTERY
In the wake of Hitler’s rise to power in the mid-
1930s there emigrated to these shores two notorious Austrian brothers. One became the celebrated writer and director Billy Wilder, a founding father of film noir with his early classic of the genre, Double Indemnity, and equally dark social critic in such biting satirical works as The Apartment and Ace in the Hole. The other brother, a former handbag manufacturer and director of some middling noirs of his own in the late forties, W. Lee Wilder, became known in slightly different circles for his D-grade series of perplexing, when not downright stultifying, science fiction
and thriller programmers. Starting with 1953’s Phantom from Space and progressing through the 1954 followup Killers from Space and same-year Snow Creature on to 1956’s Fright, his run finally ended with the belated nihilist postscript of 1968’s The Omegans. Though the brothers made their films under disparate conditions and on widely divergent levels, only Billy has achieved any renown, though the elder Lee’s often ridiculed body of work may still provide as valuable a lens onto the times as his more accomplished sibling’s. In fact, many of the same qualities which brought him scorn – his films’ rawness, simplicity, and destitution of some of the more traditional aspects of film artifice – could as easily be said to constitute his style, a minimalist (given his background in manufacturing, one might say "industrial," utilitarian) concoction of static camera shots, over-reliance on stock footage, meandering climaxes and mostly featureless casts that may actually make the works more readable, on some level: Their lack of pretense toward artistic ornamentation provides a direct route to the subconscious material at their core, at the same time revealing a surprising affinity between maker and his adoptive nation, one similarly soured on its connection to its own figurative Fatherland.

That nation had just seen its second war in ten years and the first to be fought under the shadow of nuclear armaments. As suggested by the influx of such iconography as the Incredible Shrinking and Amazing Transparent Men following, the turning-to-black-and-white of the atom blast at Hiroshima would seem to have reduced Technological Man’s teleology to such basic terms that he – and I use the masculine pronoun advisedly – could now only withdraw and dissolve from the

world he’d made in anticipation of a new, more generative personality arising from its ashes. For an émigré no doubt haunted by a history of similar conflagration – his mother, father and grandmother taken in the concentration camp at Auschwitz – as possibly by a subconscious fear of the inheritance of evil in his own veins – Wilder sharing Austrian parentage with that half-Jew Hitler himself – this temporary void in a national identity may have, in some strange way, provided a point of relation for the director to build upon, aided by his own native-born son and frequent story- and screenwriter, Myles.

Since this construction of a new personal or national identity may be said to reiterate the process by which each of us defines ourselves as independent of our own familial history (the adolescence in which Myles was immersed as his father commenced this series of films),

each of these elements – father, son, and nation – may be said to provide a mirror for the other in the working out of their individual issues in the public arena of the movie theater. At the same time, too, by embarking on a new phase of his career in a new genre, the elder Wilder, with the help of his son, could differentiate himself professionally from his rival sibling and
create a new profile in the similarly nascent realm of science fiction. For when the child is father to the man, the father cannot help but be transformed, himself.

Here it may do to pause for a moment and review some of the psychological features and effects of this process of creating an identity from out of the shadow of the past, as reflected in the adolescent’s movement out of the family romance.

In her volume on the psychoanalytic dynamics of such relationships, TALES OF LOVE (Columbia University Press: New York, 1987), Julia Kristeva talks about the Freudian notion of a "father in individual prehistory" – meaning, if I read her right, the intuition of a preexisting figure of the potency and love which brought us into the world, and the

romantic, mythologized image we draw from it of our own parents as God. It might also be the subliminal awareness of a familial inheritance, as though we’d somehow read our own genetic makeup like microfiche and constructed an autobiography based on this information on assuming our parents’ roles. The "father" – alternately termed the "imaginary" father, as all familial relations carry both a real and archetypal association – however, may be both parents to the child who hasn’t yet recognized gender differences or society’s sexual hierarchies. "He," in fact, is given a distaff designation by Madelon Sprengnether as the "Spectral Mother" in her book of the same name (Cornell University Press, 1990), which goes on to explore the significance of this figure in daughters’ lives.

As Kristeva has it, the image of the imaginary father, or "Spectral Mother," is created out of a psychic space, or "emptiness," a halfway point in the child’s perception of its parents; this space Kristeva terms the Third Party. The child, then, being relatively androgynous itself, recognizes and identifies with this Third Party, and through this association eventually goes on to associate with one or the other of the parents as a mature, loving human being. Disruption of such a relationship or father figure, however, as demonstrated by the classic Shakespearean disorder in heaven, may cause the child to bridge the gap with unnatural things or unreal love objects, trapping him or her in an ambiguous realm. It may even be the origin of violence, greed, and artistic expression, a maladjusted way of bringing into the world and articulating the inner void – a process Kristeva, a linguist, in normal circumstances terms "speaking." Think of all the voiceless movie characters of the past similarly caught in such a netherworld, from the shocked girl at the beginning of Them! and her mute counterpart in Beginning of the End, to Lon Chaney Jr.’s dumb killer in Indestructible Man, Emma Thompson’s silent Dead Again victim, and the eponymous heroine of 1995’s Mute Witness. Then think of all those characters whose object is to reconcile this gap, or "mute"ness – troubadours like Cyrano de Bergerac, messengers like L.P. Hartley’s GO-BETWEEN – both pronouncing their inarticulate lovers’ desires, like Cameron Crowe’s maturely integrated teenager in the cannily titled 1989 Say Anything (just say something).

Kristeva then relates all this in terms of the myth of Narcissus. Just as we see ourselves reflected in our parents’ love, she suggests, and project ourselves into their places via this Third Party, our ability to love others stems from a recognition of our own ideal selves in their likenesses much as Narcissus fell in love with his image in a pool. Since in the original myth

Narcissus’s father was a body of water – the river Cephissus – this reflecting pool, then, serves as his imaginary father and a metaphor for love itself, the medium by which he "knows" or "sees" himself. As such, the pool also offers a way of reviewing art or film, the screen a "medium," or Third Party, filling the gap between ourselves and the messages coming across it and on which the filmmaker "projects" his or her own idealized images. Through this pool, we may see reflected our own deepest fantasies and desires and simultaneously come to "know" the other person.

To describe the condition the subject finds him- or herself in while in this transitional state, Kristeva borrows the term "not I" – a concept important in much science-fiction, where people frequently and suddenly become unrecognizable to their loved ones and each other:

"not themselves." Whenever this occurs, the suggestion is that the character has left the real world for an alternative, ambiguous, metaphorical one where things are rendered purely figurative and the personality halved on its way to meeting his or her counterpart – that is to say, in dreams. In the myth of Oedipus, this is suggested by the appearance of Tiresias, the half-woman/half-man who reveals the prince to himself via prophecy, and in the Minotaur story it’s the introduction of the manimal himself who must be dealt with in the heart of the maze before the hero can emerge to claim his love. Here, as
in the fairy story or heroic quest, the main characters must search inside themselves for an ambiguous figure out of childhood (the imaginary father, often portrayed as an evil king or wicked stepmother – "not the mother") in order to gain insight or win the love of the beautiful princess or Prince Charming who’ll provide them with the means of escape. It’s a fable of rebirth, where the labyrinth, in male-oriented fiction, at least, symbolizes a new, masculine womb out of which will emerge the New Man who’ll show his people the way to a richer, better way of life. (Filmmakers of the 1950s, however, also demonstrated how this unnatural womb could create monsters and demons, like our own phallic Bomb.)

In psychological terms, the labyrinth represents the hero/ine’s own dark past, the grappling with it a coming to grips with some terrifying

ambiguity in his or her own childhood whose very unresolved nature threatens to undo or even destroy them – the basis of psychoanalysis. Think of the final moments of The Shining, where Jack Torrance (or "Torrents," for the psychic storm within) goes into the maze to murder his own, real child, and the animal-headed character his wife encounters while simultaneously tearing through the labyrinth of his disturbed mind. It’s the same setup as William Cameron Menzies’ 1953

The Maze, with its amphibian ancestor – the ambiguous "father" in star Richard Carlson’s "individual prehistory" – at the center of his labyrinth. Because Torrance sees women as sex objects and wretches (the woman in room 237), however, he gets lost and ends up a prisoner in his own backward maze of macho male misconceptions while his son shirks the evil father and reunites with the loving feminine counterpart outside.

There’re several ways to look at this in terms of real life. On one level it provides a social model, as Freud construed it in his theory of the primal horde, where at one point in our collective prehistory the jealous male children of a tribal clan are alleged to have banded together to defeat the father-head and claim his kingdom for their own, a scenario that gets played out by each successive generation as it strives to

remake and identify itself as separate from the last. It’s also a model for artistic creation, where the "masculine" rule of the consciousness (as it’s frequently construed in patriarchal society) must be overcome in order for the artist to enter that ambiguous space where his or her own stories can be told, thus to emerge and unite with the Truth, that muse who provides the umbilical thread, in tales from the Minotaur to Hansel and Gretel, to guide us through and lead us back out of the maze. Ultimately, it’s a way of relating to our dreams, where all the characters are in some way reflections of ourselves, the meeting with and identifying of which can offer a basis for revelation and redemption – Freud’s "talking" cure – as well as a method of coping with reality itself. For if we can come to terms with that ambiguous and sometimes contradictory space between our inner lives and outward reality, we may finally see our images reflected in the world outside and thus feel a little less alien from it.


II. A BABY ENIGMA
Speaking of aliens, Wilder’s émigré status provides the perfect starting point for an appreciation of his films, as well as a

parallel to the title figure of his inaugural sci-fi effort, Phantom from Space, after the example set two years earlier by fellow expatriate German Jew Edgar G. Ulmer’s Man from Planet X. (Each of the films addressed here, in fact, involves some similarly displaced figure.)

This association between creator and creation is most vividly drawn late in the film, when the title being smashes his helmet (the only thing visible on his otherwise transparent person) to the ground only moments before similarly dashing the reporter Wakeman’s camera. The action suggests a parallel between the two objects, each with its single glass aperture in the center of a metal housing, indicating the alien, like Wilder, as the "I" of the camera. It also signals the importance of seeing in all of Wilder, from the army doctor’s huge eye reflector in Killers (paralleling the famous ping-pong ball eyes of that film’s aliens) to the

inquisitive lampshade over a similar, psychiatric patient in Fright, and that film’s ocular imagery of a reel-to-reel tape deck used to record these sessions. The disembodied helmet serves, as well, as a symbol of the visionary and detached mind
during sleep (compare with Wilder’s 1958 Man Without a Body) and adds resonance to the filmmakers’ choice of climax location, in an observatory, with the Phantom poised and gesturing atop a huge telescope as though imploring us to look for the causes, sources, reasons for his materialization in this world, similar to Wilder’s own isolation of people and objects in his frame in a primitive, Eisensteinian sort of cinematic shorthand ("Look at this!").

All Wilder films come laden with ambiguity, often ending grimly, obliquely, or inconclusively, each dovetailing into the next in such a way as to suggest an ongoing exploration, a continuing journey into the self similar to the way French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss regarded myths as constantly picking up from each other in the continuation of a grander story, and as religious historian Mircea Eliade said of life itself

as a series of labyrinths each leading into the next. Likewise, the four Wilders observed here each involve such a quest – to understand, to discover, or to prove something – though many of their titles, as well as those of his other films, prefer to
dwell on the enigma or ambiguity: The Phantom from Space, The Pretender, Man/fish, The Snow Creature, and The Spell of the Hypnotist (alternate title of Fright). Phantom, however, is his most sustained exercise in frustration. It takes the director his entire running time to reach the center of his labyrinth, at which point it’s too late to return to the surface and make anything out of it; in the end, you’re left with the impression of having been through a hall of mirrors, each reflecting the other’s blank surface on into infinity. So ineffectual is its narrative that, by this point, the most sagely commentary the stereotypical Wise Old Man German professor can dish up is, "Well…it’s morning" – this after summing up his alien visitor’s movie-long adventure by saying, "He came to our planet, wherever from, and before our eyes went through the final stages of life." It’s a perfunctory summation at best, hopelessly inadequate after the film’s failure to
explain even one issue it’s raised over its alien’s visitation, and yet the perfect capper to the film’s whole fascinatingly aimless scenario.

The way Phantom sets us up and knocks us down so consistently, however, suggests that there may indeed be an ordering reason to all this activity, though, tellingly, an alien one. A detective momentarily warming to the professor’s

assistant, Barbara Randall, is quickly and unnecessarily told that she’s married, her husband a grinning, superfluous Clark Kent-type with no Superman hiding behind his Coke-bottle glasses and square business suit, introduced for little reason other than to shut down the suave copper’s advances. The suggestion of infidelity between two characters in a park never amounts to anything, either, and nebbish reporter Wakeman (who would reveal the Phantom and bring him into the conscious world) never gets his story or photo; we never discover why the alien – who remains invisible till the final few minutes – came to earth or burns a refinery, never crack his code or read his messages, and never find out why his helmet doesn’t give off the same radiation as his space suit. All through, he remains a phantom, an "x-man," as one militiaman puts it, to us as well as to the folks of reason he comes in contact with. Only the Randall family dog can hear his climactic cries

from atop a telescope and follow his invisible trail around the installation – only a beast, with primitive and rudimentary brainpower but a highly seasoned nose for the hunt. Similarly, we, too, can turn our noses to the more subtle trails Wilder leaves behind and find, perhaps, the invisible obscured by all these confusing panes.

In an earlier episode in the park, a shocked woman recounts her husband’s death during a picnic while he and a friend (whom the cop accuses – out of the blue – of having designs on her) fought with the being. While having no direct cause-and-effect relation to the rest of the film, his killing suggests both the loss of the father (imaginary, because we never

actually see him; he exists only in flashback) and the consequent loss of consciousness this always indicates. At the same time, it implies the child’s oedipal revenge against Daddy – the Phantom standing in, like a cipher, for the friend’s unconscious motives – and offers an explanation for the curious lack in the character of the soft-male Mr. Randall, he the weakened, ineffectual, "unconscious" substitute father.

While the concept of oedipal rivalry may be hard to reconcile with day-to-day experience, it does hold a certain plausibility in terms of a more general desire, i.e., that of male society to distance itself from its inheritance of destruction – the violent, distrustful "father" – and to unite instead with the nurturing lifegiving force, or "mother," which brought it into being in the first place. For the alien Wilder, this Source suggests both the homeland from which he’s exiled himself and the innocence to

which none of us may return, Mrs. Randall, with whom the Phantom tries to make contact, the mother herself with whom such intimacy is forbidden, the home of our unconscious, prenatal lives. The bald, naked and invisible alien who spends his entire picture trying to reach the outside suggests the baby trying for all its life to be born, the observatory doors opening too late like a birth canal out of the womb-like interior. Without a father figure, real or imaginary, to complete the family structure as well as personal ego and to facilitate his journey into manhood, then, this child can only identify with the void, or emptiness, which has slipped out of inscrutable space and into our consciousness, a dream of nothingness in the envelope of a strange, inconclusive night.

The desired or ideal father, for Wilder, would have constituted a preexisting American identity by which he could root himself in this new land. He remains ambiguous until the end because Wilder and his alien surrogate are caught between the mirrors of homeland and this land and still not possessed of the "language" to get across to the audience gathered
together in the theater like the scientists and military agents in the observatory at the end of the picture. For these characters, as for us, the alien suggests all who are dropped into the world, due to pass through it with little realization of their life’s meaning or intent and with only the promise of a deeper mystery awaiting on the other side. Such anxieties sharpen in the theatre of postwar life, its inhabitants suffering a new sense of dislocation with the Bomb on one side obliterating our innocent past and the future on the other for the first time no longer guaranteed. Somewhere in between lies Wilder the artist, acting as sort of Third Party and providing the "eyes," or screen, by which we may see ourselves, while struggling against his own lack of an imaginary father who might render these crude attempts at speech comprehensible. One can almost sense the director himself behind that disembodied hand in one scene pounding a scissors on the table, trying
to make his inarticulate instrument convey this message in such a way that we might understand the void we too feel at the heart of our modern existence. And in response, the viewer may think of Kristeva and her "speaking being" and wonder, Will he ever find his voice?

Surprisingly quickly. (But was anybody listening?)


III. JUMP INTO THE ABYSS
The next year found Wilder again dealing with a similar character caught in a personality crisis associated with the message

he’s trying to convey to his community, though this time he’s more successful in "speaking," and almost even coherent when he does.

The hero of Killers from Space is Dr. James Martin, a nuclear physicist who, as a man of reason, must reclaim his identity by convincing his community he hasn’t lost that reason when he tells them of the alien danger awaiting them in a nearby cave. Since these aliens arrived at the same time testing of Martin’s A-bomb weaponry began, a gulf of reality and sense of alien-ation opens up in his life, connecting doctor, extraterrestrials, and invention all in the same muddle. In order to bridge this newfound gap and resolve the inner mystery, Martin must then literally jump into the abyss of his own personality – the mushroom cloud he disappears into in the

beginning of the film – and acknowledge the destructive capability within. This he does in the film’s first few minutes. Thus, the dream-descent which took Phantom’s entire course to chart is taken care of fairly swiftly here, so that Killers may get on with the work the previous film could not.

When we meet the Doctor, he’s already isolated from the world in a jet, his plane’s plummeting into the cloud a falling asleep. His crash and death describe a separation from the physical and conscious worlds and a movement into the symbolic and metaphorical ones, where he reappears as not-Dr. Martin, as his wife contends, the dream-self. A flashback

reveals that a group of aliens had at this time taken him captive in their cavern hideout and revealed their inevitable plot for world domination, symbolizing at once the conscious mind’s terror of losing control to the irrational forces of sleep and modern man’s fear of the encroaching void opened up by the Bomb.

Wilder and screenwriter Bill Raynor (co-scripter, with Myles, of Phantom, and author of the same year’s Target Earth) parallel the military base on which much of the film takes place with the aliens’ lair. The corridors of this installation double the alien catacombs, the security guards here and in the nearby electrical plant the invaders’ underworld sentinels; occasional focuses on an M.D.’s eye reflector suggest the aliens’ infamous ping-pong-ball eyes, grown that size to adjust to their world’s increasing darkness; similarly, that doctor’s

interrogation of Martin under a "truth" serum mirrors the invaders’ own brainwashing, as Martin, in turn, raids the military’s records, as he will also use the aliens’ intelligence against them. The army here is taken to represent the conscious
"authority" (their sodium amitol administered to defeat "the imagination"), the photo of a smiling Ike gazing indefatigably from a frame on the wall in the General’s office the ever-present and much-anticipated imaginary father and ruling consciousness, present only in image; opposing him is his evil, destructive counterpart, the similarly-framed alien leader Deneb-Tala and his minions of the unconscious. Though the latter characters suggest the Commie threat so prevalent in film at the time, it’s not too far a stretch to associate them with the Nazis as well, given Wilder’s experience. Martin’s brainwashing at their hands would then suggest the fear of an unconscious inheritance of such capability, to be extended in the Wilders’ next fantasy feature.

Martin begins his adventure a scientist, but he ends it a visionary; his mission at first is as detached observer, but he’s reborn in the

catacombs a redeemer. As such, he calls comparison to the original Messiah – Himself conceived via the intervention of a Third Party, the Holy Spirit – for when he returns from the lair unseen, as Christ from the tomb, he has a stylized cross on his chest from where his captors revived him after his death. This Christ was also legendarily meant as an intermediary, a Third Party between God and man bearing His message of love, through which His people were to find salvation and an

Assumption equivalent to total spiritual maturity. He and Martin are, again, surrogates for the filmmaker, similarly making the Word – or script – flesh (or, at least, celluloid).

Yet the message Martin brings isn’t one of love; it is, instead, of danger. He went into the cloud a seeker after data, but came out attempting to prove the existence of the irrational, which he does by setting off an explosion akin to the bomb that started the movie, the strange venetian blinds through which we witness the blast reiterating an earlier shot of alien eyes superimposed over those same blinds in the Martins’ bedroom. The rhyming imagery both connects the aliens and the explosion and reinforces Wilder’s sight theme, for the final shot is presented in isolation, a frame within a frame, with no observers at the pane watching what we’re seeing. It’s as if the director were handing

the revelation over to his audience, to reveal something about ourselves; at the same time, the image seems to stare back at us as well, calling to mind the Nietzsche quote about not gazing too long into the abyss, lest it return the gaze. Wilder’s silently scrolling credits over this shot beg us to take it seriously despite its absurdity (venetian blinds on a power station window? Close enough to view an A-bomb blast?), his trademark opening-credits-last suggesting a world turned upside-down in the wake of the Bomb.

Martin’s explosion brings the film full circle, resolving its heroic quest by reuniting the scientist with his wife and consequently ending the journey out of sleep. By projecting himself into the ambiguous space between the alien and native, imaginative and military, irrational and coldly realistic planes, Martin (not-Dr. Martin), as the expatriate Wilder, is then able to reincarnate himself as the Word, articulating and defusing our unspoken fears – the aliens themselves communicating via telepathy – by bringing them into the light of day, where the visionary artist/scientist can finally make the connection the alien alone could not. Gifted now with the presence of an imaginary father (Ike, and a sensed connection to his new community of Americans), Martin-Wilder can at last negotiate the emptiness previously trapped in and, from his position as Third Party, present to us the void – the mushroom cloud, viewed frame-within-a-frame – "articulating" it, in hopes of illuminating ourselves to us. The particular reasons he might see himself reflected in our American Other were to be elaborated in the next installment in Wilder’s ongoing quest.


IV. A KILLER IN THE VEINS
In Phantom, the ambiguous alter ego simply arrives and dies after wandering around a bit, but in Killers he’s more a part

of the self, present for some time before ever even being acknowledged. In the form of the crypto-minotaur Snow Creature (half-man/half-animal and the missing link in our evolutionary development), the menace is brought even closer to home as the scientist-hero’s almost literal "father in individual prehistory" and the brute nature long disowned by his logical mind. This time, then, the hero must again return to the labyrinth and do what he failed to do in the previous pictures: go hand-to-hand with the Phantom/Killer/Creature and face it down, man-to-(not-)man.

Once again the dream-work is taken care of rather quickly. The hero, Dr. Paul Parrish (most of Wilder’s fantasy films featuring some sort of doctor, professor, or scientist character, as if to suggest the logical

mind posing itself problems it must subsequently work out), a botanist on expedition to Peru, is drawn into the monster’s subterranean lair against his will after it abducts the wife of his Sherpa guide, Subra. In other words, the complex has robbed the spiritual Self of something it loves and needs, demanding a further, deeper investigation within. When Subra takes over his troop and leads them into the caverns after breaking their only means of contact with the outside world, a radio, Parrish finds himself now at the mercy of primitive, irrational forces, Subra his guide into the "other" – unreal – realm, of sleep and dreams. The endless reiteration of activity that follows – get up and go, make camp and sleep; get up and go, make camp and sleep – suggests both the mimesis of waking life performed by dreams and the hero’s descent into the
labyrinth, in which he almost gets caught in an endless loop trying to reach the center. The conundrum is echoed again in the film’s overuse of a shot of the Snowman advancing from and retreating into the shadows, like Bela Lugosi in the cemetery scene from Plan 9 from Outer Space: It’s a cost-cutting measure, no doubt, but one that weaves its own weird spell, as though we’d been traveling around the film an eternity only to wind up in the same damn spot. Finally, the explorers get snowed in in a cave by the Creature – not once, of course, but twice – indicating the collapse of consciousness and the onset of dreamless oblivion. Afterward, Parrish regains control of his party and leads it back from the wilderness like Dr. Martin in the previous film, delivering himself to his native America where, true to fable and genre convention, he reunites with his wife, Snowman in tow, framed behind him in his refrigeration chamber like a shadow. On the
way, he sheds his avaricious-alcoholic Anglo sidekick Wells, signifying the leaving behind of a gross, immature counterpart even while dragging his "beast within" back to the States, indicating that the dream-work is only half-finished. It is for this reason that he must separate from his wife again and delve the labyrinth once more.

The scene inside the first cave, though hurried and simple – explorers find yeti tending to his mate and child; yeti protests and caves in ceiling to protect them – however, is significant: it establishes the creature as both father figure and the child himself, the infant of the race at the heart of the labyrinth. There’s a poignancy about it, too: as quick as it is, given what we know about the remaining Wilders left behind in Austria, it seems charged with a private anger and sense of loss, the Snowman, like a dream-censor shutting out too-painful information, bringing down the ceiling like Leatherface slamming the door on his Texas Chainsaw movies. The sealing up of this history suggests a kind of closure for the lesser Wilders (Snow Creature’s screenplay, again, by son Myles) as they forge their own identities in the New World, while also indicating a working out (as are most Wilders, not to mention the similar misfit-movies of fellow low-bud Jewish-immigrant meisters Ulmer, again, and Hugo Haas) of the problem of the Wandering Jew, eternally cut off from his homeland.

When the creature is brought to this country, however, it’s only as the murderous Father. In a sort of replaying of the archaic droit de seigneur tribal leaders held over their women and the child’s oedipal jealousy over the father’s monopoly over the mother (the cause of the sons’ revolt in Freud’s primal horde), the escaped Creature begins randomly killing women – "Always the women," as Subra lamented earlier. Considering his origins in the figurative Fatherland, this transplanted menace may then be taken to embody the Monster in racial memory and the fear that his murderous blood may be running in the hero’s own veins – Wilder’s unconscious belief that he may have brought the Germanic pestilence along with him. (It may also be descriptive of a conflict between the filmmakers’ masculine and feminine sides, where, as in

the team’s 1960 Bluebeards Ten Honeymoons [sic], the ladykiller represents some carnal force eternally victimizing the softer, creative personality.) That’s why when he realizes the monster may be hiding in the city’s drains, or "arteries" – when he looks inwardly and beneath the surface for the pattern of attacks which seem to defy comprehension – a suitable metaphor for the understanding of all "bad" cinema – he’s really on the trail.

Once again Parrish must descend into the labyrinth, this time with the help of amiable cop/therapist Lt. Dunbar and a wisecracking city planner named Edwards – a moral Wells and urban Subra, respectively – and put to rest the issues following him back from the Old World. As in tribal ritual, the hunt bonds Dunbar and Parrish, and they return to the surface a new contrast to the earlier pair of explorers, Dunbar no

longer the shameful, alcoholic (foreign) character or violent, ambiguous Father but a newfound friend and peer, as the simultaneous birth of his baby (named after Parrish) symbolizes on their emergence from the labyrinth/womb in the end. It’s also the vindication of Wilder, and modern man, from the animus-ity of the Fatherland, fulfilling the next step in his heroic quest.

The failure of the film, however, to reunite its adventurer with his wife in its final moments – ending instead with the two men riding off together in a car, as in Eugene Lourié’s similarly inconclusive 1959 Giant Behemoth – suggests that the dream-work is still not finished. For the hero, having gone head-to-head with the animal father and reconciled there his own destructive potential, must now resume his position side-by-side with the loving female. Once again Wilder must backtrack in order to continue his story, this time to bring it to its utter and final resolution.


V. WOMANKILLER
Fright opens with another childlike womankiller, "Morley," already on the loose, the scene of his capture drawing together

a gaggle of transitional characters. Psychiatrist James Hamilton appears in the crowd at the same time Morley is cornered on a bridge (the film opening with a virtually identical shot to The Pretender, Morley’s position atop a scaffolding also recalling the Phantom’s climactic similar), while Ann Summers is caught in a traffic jam on her way to an airport back to London, as between worlds, when an apocryphal previous incarnation interferes with her life; Cullen, a nosy reporter who later comes between the budding lovebirds, also makes the scene. Hamilton is able to help nab Morley amid the latter’s boyish cries of "Keep them away-y-y" by hypnotizing him, inadvertently mesmerizing Ann at the same time, while Cullen dazedly takes dictation over her shoulder. Thus, the Minotaur quest of neutralizing the animannihilator is swiftly resolved so the unfinished business of Snow

Creature can be tended to: getting and keeping the lovers together.

When Hamilton returns to Morley to conduct some hypnotic research on him, he again places himself in the ambiguous space between the killer and Ms. Summers, as suggested by the scene’s dissolving from Morley’s session into hers, Hamilton’s backwards counting tying the scenes together and echoing the sodium-amitol sequence of Killers, as well. It’s another demonstration of the child’s assumption of the Third Party role on moving toward adulthood, he taking the neutral ground between oppressive father figure and desired woman. In a precursor to Bert Gordon’s 1960 Tormented, where a murderer is seen trailed by his victim’s haunting scent, a joke about Hamilton’s "perfume" flippantly calls his manhood into question, the inference reiterated when a detective, suspecting him of foul play, finds the missing Ann’s purse concealed

behind a curtain in his home. All these coincidences suggest a "hidden" femininity, foretelling the later revelation in one of Ann’s hypnotic recollections of a woman’s concealed corpse, all conspiring to suggest that the manly Dr. Hamilton may be repressing some pretty powerful material, himself.

Proud of his rakishness, like the hero of the recent and surprisingly similar Dead Again (1991), Hamilton’s inveterate womanizing may in fact be a reflection of his denial of the feminine in himself, causing him to treat these women as objects rather than subjects – abject and foreign, rather than constituent and familiar. His aiding in the apprehension of the similar "lady-killer" Morley is the first step in changing this behavior, the reputation he says has been damaged as a result both his professional and romantic ones. He’s helped in his

restorative quest by a healthy relationship with Charley Gore, a middle-aged historian (and as such figurative "father" in his "individual prehistory") who fills him in on some details he needs in order to understand Ann’s delusion, though he’s also lacking in and must win the respect of her dowager guardian Lady Fitzmaurice, who fills him in on Ann’s private, personal history.

Ann is a suitable mate for Hamilton, since she suffers from a similar identity crisis. While hypnotized, she demonstrates a separate personality entirely, that of Marie Vetsera, mistress of the 19th Century Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, who murdered her before icing himself in a supposed suicide pact. As Hamilton construes it, Ann is really running away from the sight of her own widowed father in the arms of an Austrian governess, he having "murdered" her mother like his fellow ladykillers Rudolf, Morley, Hamilton, the Snow Creature, and later Bluebeard. Doubly displaced, then, from both her English homeland and position in the family romance (suggesting her, like the Phantom and Snow Creature before her, as Fright’s "alien"), Ann mistakenly allies herself not with the true, native mother but with the false, Austrian (Spectral/not-the-)mother, whose seeming illicit relationship she associates with the backwardly-motivated romance of the imaginary Prince Rudolf. Ann’s dreamy description of her days in Vienna, coupled with such odd details as a mention of angels in the wallpaper, suggest it as heaven, the Paradise from which she’s been evicted after the shattering of her family. (Compare this with the first part of Godard-Miéville’s 1987 Hail Mary, where a similar breakup also leads to such a world-in-disarray.) This history serves as a resilient womb for her, a dream of nobility protecting her from any kind of real-life commitment, as for the Wilders – Myles again providing story and screenplay – it provides another drama of reconciliation between their Austrian heritage and history of "family" violence and a new, American identity.

Complicating things, however, is the (again) nosy reporter Cullen, who (again) can never seem to get his story legitimately.

Like Phantom before him, he’s a study in frustration – an apparently recovering alcoholic, contrasting The Snow Creature’s drunken Wells, he spends his time at bars unsuccessfully hounding his subjects. Cheerfully amoral, he can only get the goods on Hamilton and Summers by eavesdropping on their recorded sessions. With he the stunted adolescent Hamilton must prevail over when Ann suddenly goes missing – when his chance at accession into romantic adulthood is jeopardized – Hamilton is then forced to right the situation by hypnotizing the similarly stunted Morley into playing father-child Rudolf in an elaborate restaging of the Vetsera psychodrama organized in order to bring the "hidden female" – both Ann and her Maria fixation – to the surface. In this reenactment, she plays her victim-role to its conclusion and as a result moves on to assume an active role in life, while Hamilton voyeuristically resolves his own adolescent and sexual
issues by watching the womanizing alter ego in himself self-destruct between the mirrors of past and present. The last shot has the couple reunited in Hamilton’s car, supplanting The Snow Creature’s final image of the buddy-buddy pair in a similar vehicle and bringing the whole heroic cycle to a close.


VI. CONCLUSION:
W. LEE, SPIRITUAL GODFATHER OF A "BLANK" GENERATION?
All of Wilder’s films are, admittedly, no landmark achievements in themselves. In his willingness to swan-dive into the void, his movies too frequently actually become that void and fail to simply "speak," or connect with their audiences. Yet if some of us may say we love "bad" movies (I abhor the term myself, preferring the less judgmental "naïve" cinema), which wear their so-called emptiness on their sleeves in the form of inconsistencies, omissions, and narrative ineptitude, what we may mean instead is that the holes their makers leave in them are rather the spaces we may insert ourselves into and the mirrors

we may see ourselves reflected in, front and back: where we’re headed and from where we’ve come. In a Wilder (the adoptive imaginary father), we may see the anxieties of a postwar world confronted more and more with its own alien father – not the loving Regenerative one, but the fearsome, destructive Nihilist Father who can turn his own children impotent in the face of his unimaginable power – and understand why a country so swamped in its own post-Gulf War delirium would say it doesn’t believe in the direction it’s headed in even while its Mad Daddy keeps telling it how swell it feels and how triumphant.

It’s revealing of our ex-Commander-in-Chief (and now, his country-club born-and-bred progeny)’s inability to read the psychological dislocation of his time that he would seek to blame it on the shame of

Vietnam and try to rectify it with yet another ill-conceived pageant of military might, when what we’re really suffering from is a loss of faith in our fathers, the loving, creative character in his hands mutated into the Beast whose single potency lay in its ability to destroy others with hideous effectiveness. I don’t see that Snow Creature lasting much longer, and I hope we all soon take the word of our jester inepticians (as it was the fool Parsifal who found the Holy Grail) and leave him behind for the alchemical call-and-response of the lover, and within the sphere of "bad" film analysis start truly turning lead into
gold. The choice is ours between ridicule – the tantrums of the dispossessed child who has, himself, not made peace with his imaginary father – or epiphany, and what kind of choice is that?

Wilder himself gave up on the vision. His movies showed a gradual deterioration from their optimistic high point in Fright, and in the sixties he trotted out his ladykiller once again in Bluebeard’s Ten Honeymoons – a nod to brother Billy’s 1939 Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife and a possible reference to the 1944 Ulmer film on the same subject – before capping off his career with the bitter, apocalyptic The Omegans. In the latter, a childless artist uses his art for mammon and revenge on learning of his adulterous wife’s behavior, giving in at last to the venom running through his veins like the poison in the movie’s contaminated river, his career apparently a thankless slavery to a

loveless muse, a public which would only (as in Fright) trivialize his accomplishments and never understand the seriousness and sincerity behind them all. And you have to wonder, How many junior Wilders are running around out there right now, doing their damnedest for an uncomprehending public while the critics who should be doing their best to understand them are too busy trying to grab the wheel from the driver and steer their own courses, instead of simply sitting back and telling us what it all means.

To them, I say the critic-consciousness has had its day; it’s time for a new set of rules. Art is art, but let’s face it, trash is life. I say, wilder rules. I say, Wilder Rules.

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