The Simplest Explanation is Often the Tesh One

During a recent, lengthy conversation with my brother Brian, he brought up the John Tesh radio show so that we could badmouth the host’s daily contributions to the lives of his listeners. I don’t think all that badly of John Tesh, but the sentiment that my brother and I seem to share is that he takes a rather unquestioning attitude towards the information that he cites on his program, and tends to dispense, as if it is gospel, advice that needs to be context-dependent at best. Then again, sometimes it’s probably just wrong altogether.

Yesterday, I just happened to hear a bit of the John Tesh broadcast, and really got my dander up over his latest explanation of some academic study. To his credit, I’m sure that a lot of the fault lies with the researchers who are putting out this material in the first place, but again, it is Tesh’s unquestioning attitude in broadcasting the stuff that turns irresponsible reasoning from an academic footnote into a corruption of popular knowledge.

In this case, Tesh thought himself to be informing his audience that cultural and artistic activities improve people’s health. According to surveys of study participants in Norway, he says, those who reported going to museums on a regular basis or either participating in or watching things like ballet tended to be significantly healthier overall than people who didn’t take part in those activities.

And then, setting aside any possible questions as to the meaning of the data, Tesh asks what he apparently thinks is the only natural question: how does this work? He promptly answers his own question, apparently restating the opinions of the original researchers. Not knowing where to find the original reporting, I can’t say with certainty that that’s the case, but coverage of the story in the UK Daily Telegraph back in May made the same statements about a unidirectional, causal relationship between cultural activity and physical outcome, so that suggests that such statements are repetition of the claims of the researchers. Whatever their original language, Tesh puts it simply and stupidly: cultural activities engage us mentally, and that helps us to be able to deal with stress and keeps us healthier.

It is absolutely shocking to me that professional academics and paid researchers still sometimes use the most obvious kind of faulty reasoning and confuse correlation with causality. Observing that healthy people go to museums absolutely does not mean that going to museums makes people healthy. In fact, assuming that that’s the case strikes me as amazingly unimaginative and intellectually lazy. I recognize that one needs a hypothesis in order to make scientific progress, but in general I’d say that good advice for researchers would be unless you have a damn good scientific explanation for how two phenomena are linked, don’t guess. As near as I can tell, everyone who’s communicating the story of this culture-health connection, from the Nordic researchers to the staff of the Telegraph to John Tesh, is taking it for granted in exactly the same way. Do none of them consider that there might be other factors at play?

It’s not difficult to identify alternative explanations. Of course, any of them would need additional data in order to have sufficient support, just as the claim that cultural activities cause good health needs additional data as to exactly what the mechanism of that cause is. Without access to a university research staff or other such resources, I can only guess, but I’d be quite willing to bet that if you did a study of people’s social class as compared with their cultural engagement, you’d find that wealthier people participated in more activities.

Take the three data sets together, and you’ve got a picture of more affluent people who are healthier than poor people and go to museums more often. I don’t know what John Tesh or the Daily Telegraph would say, but I have a fairly clear sense of which of those is the more significant variable in determining the other two. And yet I still wouldn’t say that being rich makes you healthier, because that’s a stupid thing to say. What I would say is that being wealthy gives you greater access to a wide range of food options, and allows you to pay for health-enhancing luxuries like gym memberships and spa vacations, while still having enough left over to go to the opera. So being wealthy makes it easier to make both healthier and more culturally refined lifestyle choices. But unless someone gives me a thoroughly refined scientific explanation of newly discovered physical mechanisms, I’m fairly certain that the only things that have a direct impact on health are the things that interact with your body’s functioning, such as what you eat and how often you exercise.

Since the British newspapers covered this study, Britain’s National Health Service took it up and posted a thorough, reasonable discussion of it on their website, including the prominent image caption at the top of the page, “It’s hard to tell if culture affects health, or vice versa.” It also adds tremendously to my sense of frustration at this sort of study by pointing out that surveys of participants wasn’t only used to determine their level of cultural participation; the surveys were actually the gauges of participant health. Their actual health, as determined by medical indicators, remains completely unknown.

In the NHS’s conclusion, it reiterates that the direction of causality is difficult to determine, and adds:

For example, just as participating in cultural activities might cause people to report better physical and mental health, it is just as plausible that people who feel healthier were more likely to engage in cultural activities.

No kidding. All a person should have to do to come up with this alternative explanation for the data is to think for just one minute about their own experience. Surely even John Tesh has felt down in the dumps at one or two points in his life. I’d be surprised if he reported that he was especially well-traveled among his local cultural institutions during those periods.

For that matter, the curve for this study would be absolutely shattered by interviewing just a few people who are genuinely sick. The researchers did adjust for things like chronic disease, but presumably not for recent, persistent disease. If, say, you’ve gotten the flu in each season of this year and have been laid up in bed for weeks at a time, of course you’re not going to the symphony. But if the poll was worded with sufficient vagueness, anyone who was reviewing the data blind would just see that participant x reported being in somewhat poor health and was highly unlikely to go to the cinema, theater, or gallery. Such a researcher might easily conclude that participant x’s cultural disinterest was contributing negatively to his health, if that researcher didn’t think very hard about the different ways to interpret what he was reading.

The study also analyzed reports of satisfaction with life, anxiety, and depression, and found that particular activities, depending on the gender of the participant, were correlated to differing levels of each. I take it that the essential conclusion from this part of the research is “Doing stuff makes you feel better.” You don’t say! And yet here also, to claim a unidirectional relationship is to draw an illogical, indefensible, and irresponsible conclusion, because feeling better makes you do stuff, too.

It’s the irresponsibility of this kind of reporting that really drives me crazy and prompts me to write 1,500 word rants on the topic. And that is also why I focus my umbrage on John Tesh, because it’s his sort of highly digested, exceptionally simplistic, and frequently repeated iterations of this kind of terrible academic research that are especially poisonous. One-dimensional interpretations of correlation between behaviors and conditions send a clear message of blame to people experiencing the less favorable conditions.

I imagine John Tesh rhetorically asking his audience “worried about your health?” and then cheerfully explaining to them that “if you think the problem is that you don’t have insurance or you can’t afford anything but empty calories at the grocery store, you’re wrong! It turns out that you, listener, just fucked up by not attending enough literature readings.”

Sadly, I’m sure that John Tesh genuinely feels as though he’s helping out his audience by telling them about the little aspects of their day-to-day lives that can contribute to their lasting health. But the thing is that for those of them who really have to struggle with these issues, he’s just making it worse. Considering that that Nordic research group included anxiety as a factor in its calculations, you’d think that someone would have given some thought to the likely future effect of believing that your health is tied to the number of lectures you attend this year. If people of distinctly low socioeconomic class listen to Tesh on this one and come to believe that frequent participation in cultural activities is key to their physical and mental health, the actual effect may turn out to be the opposite of what Tesh intends. I say that based on experience; I know what severe anxiety can come of trying to be culturally engaged while knowing all along that you cannot actually afford it.

If this possible ill effect was the consequence of just some one-off comment from John Tesh, I could give him a pass, but from what I’ve heard of his show, this is part and parcel of his daily broadcast. The list of recent topics on his website at this moment includes “Loneliness is bad for your health,” and “Volunteering boosts your health.” Bullshit claims, both. There is almost no conceivable way that in either of those cases the two factors being linked aren’t just simultaneous effects of other causes. Yet somehow Tesh doesn’t know that. Tragically, the researchers who produced the original claims may not. And certainly, much of Tesh’s listenership doesn’t realize that, and will take the voice on the radio at its word.

And what will come of these claims? Well, sure, certain frequent volunteers will feel more confident that their next check-up is going to go just fine. But also, some people who don’t have the time to volunteer because they’re working three jobs and still can’t afford health insurance will have found a new source of stress, anxiety, and depression, while some of those who have the best health care money can buy will attribute its effects to that Thanksgiving they spent working at the soup kitchen downtown. And at the same time, John Tesh is telling his sick and lonely listeners that if they’re worried about their health they’d better make sure they aren’t lonely, and if they’re worried about their loneliness, they damn well should be because it’s going to keep them in poor health. That information is rather less than helpful unless you’re neither lonely nor afflicted.

But the simpler the explanations of everyone’s problems, the better it is for everyone who doesn’t suffer them.

So Long, Chris Collins

Well, I didn’t vote on Tuesday, but between then and now I’ve actually managed to gather enough information on the former and incoming Erie County executives to know that I should probably feel pretty good about the result. Even though I’ve still seen no evidence that Poloncarz has an actionable vision for improving Erie County, I can at least be confident that the candidate who was personally less deserving lost the seat.

I’ve gotten a clearer sense of Mr. Collins’ evident contempt for the poor, and I’ve heard valid criticisms of his duplicity in cutting government amidst pronouncements of urgency while also giving raises to his own staff. I’ve recently been reminded that he described New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver as the third anti-Christ after Napoleon and Hitler – comments which I find disturbing because they ideologically link him to a peculiar blend of evangelism and the New Age movement.

Since the election results came in, I’ve also gotten the definite impression that Chris Collins is a somewhat less than magnanimous human being. Now, I would never vote purely on the basis of personality, but I’m not above cheering somebody’s loss on that basis.

“The public has spoken,” Collins said in his concession speech on Tuesday night. “I don’t quite know what to make of that, but they did. So we accept that.”

He doesn’t quite know what to make of it? How many different ways are there to interpret the fact that he lost? I think what’s to be made of it is probably either that the people of Erie County didn’t like the job that Chris Collins was doing, or they liked the other guy better. “I don’t know what to make of this but I accept it” is the sort of statement a person makes when trying to deny personal responsibility for an outcome. In this case, that outcome belonged in equal measure to the Collins and Poloncarz campaigns, and to nobody else if you don’t conceive of the electorate as a separate part of the equation.

“We accept that” in this context doesn’t really sound like “I concede.” It sounds more like he’s implying that he acknowledges what the results claim, but has doubts about why he lost. Specifically, it sounds like his talking down to the electorate, and suggesting that they made an illogical, unintelligible choice. Such a concession speech is indicative of one hell of an ego.

I suppose his comment could have meant “I don’t know what I did wrong, but I know it was something, and I’m curious to figure it out.” But there’s something in his tone and in the personality that he put on display elsewhere that suggests that he simply doesn’t understand why Erie County doesn’t understand how great he is.

What really floored me, though, was his appearance before the cameras of WGRZ-TV. In covering the outcome of the election, the evening news says:

"I do wish him well, if he needs help in a transition I'd be more than happy to offer that," Collins said moments after conceding the race.

However, Collins also conceded, that at that point he'd yet to formally offer an olive branch to his foe.

"No, Mr. Poloncarz and I have not spoken really in four years...I see no reason to do that tonight either," Collins said.

They haven’t spoken? Have they literally just never run across each other’s paths in four years, or did one of them always duck into an open room when they were about to pass each other in the hall? Four years, incidentally, was the length of Mr. Collins’ term, so I can’t help but wonder whether he actually made a deliberate effort to sever ties with Mr. Poloncarz once he was elected to office. Did he feel that he suddenly outclassed Poloncarz afterwards and that to be seen talking to him would hurt his reputation? Was it pure pettiness?

Even if they started running with vividly incompatible crowds after Collins was sworn in, it can’t have come as a surprise when Poloncarz became his challenger. Wouldn’t speaking to the opposition have been not only civil but politically expedient to get a direct impression of what one is up against? What reason could there have been for not calling and having a word with the man in the run-up to election season? But now that the whole thing is over, does Collins really not see any reason to begin talking to Poloncarz? How about to determine whether there’s common ground shared by the two men’s policies, and thus to see how you can help to set the stage for those initiatives you agree with? How about for the sake of guaranteeing a smooth and beneficial transition, for the sake of the county you apparently just spent four years serving? Or how about just to be a civil human being?

But then, Poloncarz is the guy who made the good people of Erie County foolishly turn against an incumbent who totally had done everything right, he swears. Yeah, fuck that guy.

I recognize that both men are at fault if they have truly not spoken for the past four years, but it’s the self-righteous commitment to seeing that the streak is not broken that makes Collins especially despicable. So on that basis alone I’m glad that he’s out, but ultimately his comments remind me of what I find so frustrating about modern politics overall. It’s why I still don’t know what fifty-four percent of the county voted for, other than a Democrat.

It's Election Day!

My lack of enthusiasm about Election Day belies my faith in the electoral process. I hesitate to say this, but I may actually waive my right to participate in democracy this time around. Uninformed people are better off avoiding the polls, and frankly uninformed is just what I am with respect to local politics. In my defense, it’s not for lack of interest, or for a complete deficiency of effort. But since I don’t read local newspapers, don’t have television, don’t really associate with people, and can’t find any local campaign information online, I had actually found it impossible to get a complete account of who is running.

Of course, I have been aware of the major race, the one being discussed by anyone who’s talking about local politics. But I haven’t been able to discern any reason why I’m supposed to vote for one candidate or the other, other than on account of the parenthetical letters that follow their names on the ballot. I attended a terrible play in the last weekend of October, and before it began the director spoke to the audience about his company’s season and then brought up election season as a final comment, and instructed the small audience to “vote Poloncarz.” Most of those sitting around me applauded vigorously, and I felt sort of left out thinking that these people all shared some kind of firm opinion about the office of County Executive, the job that the incumbent has been doing, and the changes that the challenger could bring about.

Despising partisan politics, I was alienated by the tribalism surrounding me in that room. If a person on stage wants to turn the topic to politics, I think the least he can do is say something substantive. I would have actually been really happy with that bit of grandstanding if it hadn’t followed the formula: mention a popular personality; hold for applause; depart the stage. The assumption seems to have been that everyone in that crowd already agreed with him, and that the reason for mentioning it was just to reinforce how right everyone was. Of course, if they all have such a firm basis for confidence that theirs is the winning horse, surely it would have been pretty easy to mention any one particular thing that we could expect to actually change if Poloncarz takes over as County Executive. In absence of any such statement about the issues, I can only assume that they simply weren’t on the speaker’s mind.

His comment probably had about the political effectiveness of a campaign sign, which is a phenomenon I just don’t understand. I’d be all for campaign signs if there was implicit in them an invitation to knock on the door in front of which they’re displayed and ask, “Why?” But lawn signs are never an invitation to court discussion; they just stand there, broadcasting a name that is probably well familiar to all the passersby already, and conveying no information. Each one is purely a declaration of support – a function which I thought was already fulfilled by voting. Every election season in this area, in addition to the wide array of carbon-copied lawn signs, I encounter a handful that are something like six feet tall and eight feet wide. Are these, I wonder, more effective at their purpose than the normal, non-monstrous signs? I can’t help but look at them as an obnoxious testament to the idea that the physical dimensions of one’s political viewpoints are more important than what they are grounded in.

Since I think so much about the social significance of campaign styles and perspectives on electoral politics, I naturally feel bad about my civic engagement apparently being limited or only intermittent, but I think I ought to take ownership of that situation and allow myself a little pride at the fact that I’m not interested in voting for district judges or comptrollers unless I’m personally invested in or exceptionally well-informed about those races. I’m okay with it being a personal rule that I don’t participate in the elections that are based on nothing other than name recognition and party affiliation.

It seems explicit to me that that is the case with at least the current batch of Erie County elections. The term “negative campaign” is tossed around a great deal, so the deeper meanings that might be conveyed by it are sometimes lost. What little exposure I have had to the local elections has been negative campaigning through and through, and of an especially cynical sort. I’ve received a handful of robocalls over the last week or so, and I’ve found that they tend to place all of their focus on the mission of ousting an incumbent or repelling a challenger, to the extent that whom they are running against is presented as being irrelevant.

I’m not exaggerating. The last such call that I received actually discussed how important it was that we keep a particular candidate out of Erie County government and then ended without ever mentioning the name of a challenger. That was the most stunning example of this skewed emphasis, but it’s typical of what I’ve been subjected to during this election season. I receive these calls, listen carefully to them because I’m interested in the platforms (not to mention the damn names) of the persons on the ballot, and when the recorded voice says “thank you,” I’m left listening to silence for a few seconds, like an idiot, wondering “Is that it? Is there any reason why I should want candidate x other than because I’m supposed to hate candidate y?” The kind of negative campaigning that I remember from television ads for national campaigns at least tended to conclude with a statement about what the alternative was.

I’m curious as to whether the exclusive kind of negative campaigning is specifically designed to exploit the culture of Buffalo and its surrounding areas. I don’t see a lot of nuanced political or developmental thinking around here. Instead, the persistent attitudes of both politicians and their constituents appear to be based on the belief that each of the region’s myriad problems have one solitary cause, and that getting rid of it will in itself provide an all-encompassing solution. Is it any wonder that amidst this thinking our local political campaigns treat getting rid of the incumbent as important in its own right, regardless of whether the person who replaces him has any actual solutions?

Of course, my cynical attitude toward Buffalo is showing through, as I know it’s not fair to suggest that that’s any different from the logic that tends to operate on a national level. Whenever things seem bad, we figure we need to get rid of whoever is currently in charge, and when delivering the country from the hands of party A into the hands of party B doesn’t fix everything, we switch back to party A and apparently never collectively wonder if our limited choices or methods of selection are problematic.

Buffalo seems to be taking the myopia and present bias to another level, though, by only running challengers in cases where there is already enough preexisting public frustration. All eight of the district judges that are up for reelection in the region are running uncontested today, except for one who has to content with a challenge from a write-in campaign. There are also no challengers in the races for County Legislator, City Comptroller, and District Council Member. In the last mayoral election, Buffalo’s terrible, terrible Mayor Byron Brown won election at the point of the primary, because the Republican Party put forth no challenger, despite being petitioned for endorsement by at least one would-be candidate.

Call me naïve, but shouldn’t the opposition party at least put someone’s name on the freaking ballot, even if they have no interest in spending money on a campaign? Why not allow an ambitious member of the party, in this information age, put his platform up online, shake hands at a polling place, start a political career, and give people an opportunity to express their support for alternative ideas, even if by voting for a candidate that has no chance? I recognize that I am being presumptuous again, but the message that I get from this repeated agreement to not oppose incumbents is that if the person currently holding the job hasn’t caused outrage or demonstrated incompetence, there’s no point to trying to come up with better ideas.

If both politicians and constituents think that there’s no point to that and that there’s no point to campaigning on the basis of ideas in the first place, I just can’t see what the point is of voting today.

Horror and Conservatism

Even if you’ve never heard of Arch Oboler, you may know the plot of one of his many radio plays if you’re familiar with Bill Cosby’s stand-up comedy. Cosby made the Lights Out episode “Chicken Heart” famous to generations who had never really listened to fiction on radio. I understand that as a consequence some people believe that Cosby made up the story. Either way, many of those who know about it now remember “Chicken Heart” as an example of how something absurd can be frightening to children or exciting to those who experience it in suitable surroundings. Few seem to remember it as twenty-minute rebuke of pacifism framed as a science fiction horror story.

It is not for nothing that the subject of the experiment that drives Oboler’s story was a chicken heart and not, for instance, the kidney of a bear or the stomach of a lion. The story’s protagonist is a scientist filling the role of the unheeded prophet, insisting that the chicken heart, which grows with every pulse and consumes everything around it, must be destroyed with firepower and brute force. But everyone who is in a position to combat the thing insists upon searching for a more delicate solution, refusing to declare war upon the thing until it is too large and too powerful to be stopped.

This sort of conservative metaphor is typical of Arch Oboler’s horror plays. Also typically, they were the some of the best examples of horror on radio. His story titled “Neanderthal Man” conveys the same ideas as “Chicken Heart,” but with an even broader focus and more didactic presentation. Three characters slip into a time that predates civilization and find themselves confronted by an ancestor of human beings. The two men argue about how to deal with the threat. One has a gun and wants to shoot the Neanderthal dead at the first opportunity, while the other abhors guns and wants to try to communicate with it and reason with it. The latter is killed by the pre-human creature, and as he lies dying he acknowledges that it was foolish to think that one could reason with an uncivilized enemy.

Lights Out has another episode, titled “The Dream,” which stars Boris Karloff as a man who is compelled to kill by a vision of a spectral woman, who continues to haunt him throughout his arrest, trial, and conviction, prompting him to insist that he die as a consequence of his crime. The entire episode is clearly devoted to arguing in favor of a broad application of the death penalty. The theme is not just conservative, but boldly conservative, with Karloff’s character making it very clear that his death is necessary not because it will dissuade other murders, or give peace to his soul, but just because the social convention ought to be that if you take a life, you ought to give your own. And between Karloff’s exquisite voice acting and Oboler’s excellent horror sensibilities, it is a frightening tale just on its surface.

“Revolt of the Worms” is a marvelously effective horror story, and I read it as a self-righteous defense of the bourgeoisie. The metaphor is less obvious than some of his others, but it seems to be on some level an attempt to instill fear in the wealthy, educated, or successful about the possibility of being attacked and overrun by those who have been empowered by the efforts of that higher class. The stories theme is one that I am especially likely to take issue with. It is also one of my very favorite radio horror stories.

Also among my favorites is “The Thing on the Fourbile Board,” an episode of Quiet, Please, which was written and directed by Wyllis Cooper, who actually created Lights Out before passing it off to Oboler. “The Thing on the Fourbile Board” is generally a favorite horror tale for anyone who is familiar with old time radio. Spoiler alert in case anyone is interested in listening to it: It tells the story of an invisible creature uncovered from deep in the earth by an oil drilling operation. The character that we initially see as the protagonist tells the story in retrospect, culminating in a climactic confrontation with the creature, wherein he dumps paint on it to make it visible. Advancing to the present, we learn that he took pity on the monster, and actually married it, resolving to take care of it by feeding it a steady supply of human victims.

What’s interesting about the creature in this story is that it is a neat little package of sexual transgressions. It has the face of a little girl, but the body of a spider, and when the narrator introduces it to the audience he says that she likes to be called Mike. By being married to and presumably sleeping with it, the narrator is dipping a finger into the trifecta of bestiality, pedophilia, and homosexuality. Add to that the fact that the first evidence of the creature is a severed finger bearing a ring and the perceived transgressions seemingly expand to include adultery or divorce. No doubt there is also meaning in the fact that the creature is ordinarily invisible, and that we are initially led to trust the narrator. The implication is clearly that these discomforting elements of society and the human psyche were buried and invisible unless brought into focus, but that they were there, and that your own neighbor might be a practitioner of bestiality, a pedophile, and adulterer, or – no doubt frightening in 1948 – a homosexual. So as I see it, put simply, one of the best horror stories ever written for radio is about the conservative values of mistrust and a blanket terror of social taboos.

I am an extraordinarily analytical consumer of fiction. Even when it comes to horror, I want the story to mean something, even though I recognize that that may not be typical of horror. So I give a close reading to the story and its themes whenever I can, to such an extent that most others would quickly grow bored and frustrated with me. In my necessarily solitary viewing I have tended to get the impression that the horror stories that are not only the most fun to analyze are quite conservative in their message, and that the same are often the most frightening.

Of course, that correlation is only natural. What is typically most frightening to us is the unfamiliar, and the outcome of current social change is always unfamiliar, as well as being the usual enemy of conservative thinking. So thoughtful horror tends to uphold existing taboos, painting social mores as either that which is being threatened or that which will defend the protagonists against the veiled evil that is stalking them. For my generation, there is no more obvious example of this than the rules of slasher films. By and large, nothing is more dangerous to the killer’s potential victims than being a sexually active adolescent. Drug use will also tend to get you in trouble.

Yet thinking much farther back than that, many familiar horror archetypes used in classic films and reused through the decades represent the dangers of failing to respect existing social boundaries. The once-commonplace mad scientist tended to be someone who brought about destruction and his own violent downfall because he tampered in areas that were seen as God’s domain. There is also no shortage of stories in which the thing that begins the horror is a transgression against traditional religion by way of experimenting with the occult.

Vampires are avowedly godless creatures, as well as being sexually provocative and often tempting women to adultery. As the archetype developed it came to more frequently represent homosexuality at the same time that homosexuality in American culture was becoming more visible while still being far from mainstream acceptance. The Lost Boys remains perhaps the most famous example of vampirism/wizardry as gay/AIDS metaphor, if you watch it closely.

From the same era, the film Fright Night contains several scenes that transparently depict the vampire as a sexual predator. He pursues an underage boy and girl to a nightclub in one scene and engages in a sexual dance with the girl, hypnotizing her with his eyes so that she goes to him of her own accord before breaking away and falling to her knees while crying in what could just as well be a show of shame as fear. Later he similarly draws in a young adolescent boy, softly reassuring him that he’ll be happy as a vampire before embracing him beneath the cover of his cape and calling to mind the often repeated image of the vampire bite as sexual penetration. The victim then becomes transformed into someone who dresses differently and takes pleasure in destruction and crime.

The monster in Fright Night is thus a man who corrupts the youth, which would not necessarily be conservative were it not for certain other indicators. The first thing that arouses suspicion about the antagonist is that when he moves into the neighborhood, he is unmarried and lives with another man. Pederasty aside, the aspects of homosexuality and sexual promiscuity in the character are evidently not incidental, but part of what is supposed to make him psychologically threatening. Also of note is the fact that one of the protagonists is a much older, solitary man who develops a bizarrely close relationship with the main protagonist, another young, male teenager. This suggests to me the flawed message that an older, desexualized, presumably more conservative male character is implicitly more trustworthy than the one who is viscerally alluring.

Werewolves, of course, are a way of presenting the more broadly-conceived threat of unrestrained impulses. This also does not specifically need to be conservative, although the more conservative person will be more likely to utilize that archetype, by virtue of attaching a greater sense of value to sexual and social stability, to civilization as directly opposed to nature, and to property rights.

That latter consideration calls to mind the observation that certain films do not utilize archetypes that have any inherent socio-political meaning, but still deliver a conservative message. The Changeling, for instance, is an exceptionally well-executed haunted house film, and ultimately turns out to be one long statement about the importance of inheritance rights.

The original Saw I take to be liberal film, on some level. The killer’s motivation is to see that his victims glimpse the starkest possible reality of their own vices, which somewhat plays into my earlier essay about the role of horror and the possible link between liberalism and appreciation of the genre. However, Jigsaw evidently isn’t interested in getting those who play his games to recognize unpleasant truths out in the rest of society; he only makes them confront their own flaws. That makes it seem like he’s horrifically advancing the old conservative talking point of “personal responsibility,” demanding that these people overcome their shortcomings by sheer force of will.

Of course, one can never assume that a writer agrees with the views of his characters, so it could just as well be that Jigsaw is meant to represent the horror of overzealous commitment to enforcing the personal responsibility of others. However, the scene featuring the woman who survived one of his earlier games suggests otherwise, in that she herself insists that Jigsaw helped her to overcome her drug addiction. Though nobody in their right mind would approve of his methods, it may be that the audience is meant to come away from the film thinking highly of the idea behind them, which is evidently that social supports don’t work and that those who can’t fix their problems on their own deserve to be consumed by them.

Of course, a sense of justification pervades an awful lot of horror. The audience is frequently offered the suggestion that the victims somehow deserve their fate. Though the awfulness of their deaths is beyond the pale, it is often suggested that the protagonists have done something wrong and that the events of the film constitute a trial by fire for them. This plays into what may be at once the subtlest and most significant conservative horror trope: a sense of cosmic leveling.

This too is natural. It’s hard to write or expect an audience to relate to something that’s so bleak as to deliver a gruesome death to an educated, down-on-her luck, virginal charity volunteer. We want to believe that there’s at least something that causes another person’s death or pain to make a little bit of sense. Nobody wants bad things to happen to good people for no reason, but in my estimation one difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals lament that that such things do happen, and conservatives steadfastly believe that they don’t. From a certain staunchly conservative point of view, if you’re poor, it’s probably because you didn’t work hard enough; if you’re sad, it’s probably because you don’t go to church; if you get hacked up by the campus psycho killer, it’s probably because you had sex out of wedlock.

In this sense, even horror films with didactic liberal messages, like Cannibal Holocaust, have a conservative philosophical bent, insofar as they identify completely internal causes for many of the terrors that people are forced to face. I would expect a more distinctly liberal horror film to allow terrible things to happen to its characters without excessively rationalizing them. I have great respect for films that are bold enough to allow bad things to happen to good people, because that it what happens in reality. Indeed, that is the worst of what happens in reality, and representing and bringing people face-to-face with that should be the highest aspiration of horror.

Still, I absolutely love some horror stories that have distinctly conservative themes. In addition to just being scary or generally well-structured, they often put on display the kernel of truth that lies behind some conservative thinking. And that in itself can be quite scary.

In Defense of William Castle

I’ve had to spend an unusual amount of time with my mother lately. Yesterday, when we were driving together back towards my home, my mind frequently returning to the thought that it’s almost Halloween, I asked her if she remembered any particularly noteworthy horror films from her generation that I might have missed.

I have no idea what it will be like to try to remember childhood when I’m fifty-six years old. She sort of struggled to drag some old memories to the surface and did a bit of free association. She mentioned The Pit and the Pendulum, and got to wondering about the entire arc of Vincent Price’s career. I mentioned that lately when I think of Vincent Price one of the first films that comes to mind is The Tingler. Mentioning the title evidently opened up a flood of memories for her, and though she didn’t give much detail she seemed to vividly recall having watched the film in her youth.

The Tingler came out in 1959, so either my mother is manufacturing the memory, or she saw it in some sort of re-release, or else her older sister took a four-year old child to an interactive horror movie, but my mother claims to have seen The Tingler in a theater complete with the William Castle promotional gimmick.

If true, I am delighted to know that my mother got to have that experience, which must have been exquisite fun – at least for people older than four. I recall, perhaps a year ago, tormenting myself by reading the events list in the New Yorker and seeing that an East Village cinema was going to be having a showing of The Tingler which restored the gimmick, installing joy buzzers in selected seats and, presumably, planting professional screamers in the audience. Oh God how things like that make me desperate to be in New York again. I would have loved to be part of such a wildly interactive cinematic experience. No one promotes or executes anything with such originality.

Am I the only one who genuinely admires William Castle? He seems to be widely laughed at by people who are knowledgeable about the history of film, horror or otherwise. From everything I’ve seen, his promotional gimmicks are remembered as little more than cheap stunts aimed at practically tricking the audience into buying a ticket. But to say the least, I don’t understand why his cheap stunts don’t stand up in most people’s minds against modern studios’ cheap stunts of peddling the same garbage to their customers over and over again.

I don’t think that William Castle had any illusions that he was the next Orson Welles. He wasn’t out to create cinematic masterworks; he directed horror films. And his aim in so doing was seemingly to offer the audience a unique thrill and an hour or so of escapist excitement. Towards that end he was marvelously original, and frankly I wish the popular cinema had taken its cues from him going forward.

Castle directed several 3-D western films for Columbia Pictures in the fifties when 3-D was all the rage. He must have been impressed with the notion of having the film interact with the audience, because he adopted his own various takes on the idea in his horror films later on. The studios had made bank on a fad, and as far as I know only Castle had the personal conviction to take the underlying impulse and adapt it in fresh and creative ways.

Considering the recent surge of new 3-D movies, and my sense that it belies the creativity of film studios and suggests a myopic devotion to fads and groupthink, I believe the film industry would benefit greatly from a new William Castle. As a horror fan, I, for one, would much rather go to see a film and see a hearse parked in front of the theater, as was part of Castle’s first effort, than go there knowing that some of the images are going to pop out of the screen at me. Neither may be particularly scary, but the more original alternative at least aspires to establish an atmosphere that reaches past the space between the screen and my eyes, and gives me a reason to believe that I’ll remember not just the content of the film but the actual experience of going to see it.

In an era of cheap, ubiquitous DVDs, studios ought to be interested in advertising new reasons why people should be interested in going to see a movie in theaters. And in an era of increasingly diminished interpersonal relations, a few gimmicks might accomplish that aim and have a positive social effect as well. When I imagine what a thoughtful promotional gimmick might look like today, I think that it would have the potential to make an original film into the sort of shared experience of fandom that is usually reserved for huge franchises like Star Wars. When I was between the ages of twelve and eighteen, I went to midnight showings of each of the Star Wars prequels. What was especially exciting about that was not so much the films themselves (obviously), but the tail gate party in the parking lot, the sense of community, the unusual awareness that everyone was going into that theater to expand upon an experience that had already begun for each of us.

If a modern horror film had a physical skeleton swinging over the audience, or allowed different members of the audience to see different things on screen depending on which glasses they were wearing, or let the viewers choose how the film ends while still watching it, as were all William Castle gimmicks, those in attendance would be aware of their relationship with audience as well as with the movie, and that might give them a reason to not wait for the movie to come out on Netflix.

William Castle single-handedly made movies more than just pictures on (and sometimes leaping off) a screen. Why do we make fun of that? Why did we decide that it was an idea not worth revisiting for forty-six years and counting?