“Same part, same green, I guess we got the same dreams
… Or is it the same nightmares?” - Young Jeezy
When you’re a lonely little kid stranded somewhere in the lush greens and rusted grays of rural southwestern Virginia throughout the 80’s and 90’s, your ideas of the world at large (and dreams of existing within it) are molded by the culture you swallow. There is an amorphous idea of the “American Dream” that can be invoked as necessary by disingenuous politicians and desperate city officials concerned with boosting the potential “livability” of their districts, but the reality behind the phrase is as malleable and inconstant as television ratings. The probability that a population as disparate and large as that of the United States would unanimously agree on what, exactly, would be an ideal life is beyond low, and if ours was an entertainment industry less enamored by the (terrifying) concept of monocultural uniformity, then a variety of visions would be available. But that has never been the case and, although a wider spectrum of voices are finally being highlighted by our arts & entertainment industries, it was fairly slim pickings for most of my impressionable years. I was culturally curious in a part of the country not quite known for its embrace of culture beyond farming, team sports and pickup truck enhancement, so I sought avenues of escape through literature, music and cinema. Books and albums certainly offered a diverse range of options if you were open-minded enough to seek them out—and fortunate enough to have a good library and one cool person working at the local branch of a CD chain in your closest mall—but the more easily accessed and immediately immersive world of films and television was dominated by an industry based in California. And so, my initial American dreams were purely Californian.
I’m not suggesting that this is necessarily a bad thing, seeing as how California has always been a decidedly more progressive state than pretty much all of the other ones, especially a premillennial Old Dominion. But it’s interesting to realize that the vision of America mass-produced and internationally broadcast has always depicted a very small sliver of the actual people who live here and the lives that they live. Better, more inclusive representation would obviously be an improvement, but I can’t deny that the narrow and idealized vision offered up by Hollywood et al was influential in shaping my own expectations for a more interesting life and stoking the very real dreams I had of making it out of Bumfuck USA. I wouldn’t end up making it to California physically until I was in my twenties, and I wouldn’t live there until I was a surly 34 years old, but the idea of what a life could be, as perpetuated by the creative minds within that state’s long borders, was framing my expectations from the jump. Even the pornography that provided my adolescence with its most prurient touchstones was overwhelmingly produced there. Since before I had even walked the iconic hills of San Francisco or shielded my eyes from the glare of a slow-motion sunset over the sheen of the ice-cold Pacific, I have been living, breathing, fantasizing and fucking California-style. We all have!
While I was living and working in Los Angeles I had a co-worker who was a born & raised SoCal native, but had spent several years living and working on the East Coast in both New York City & Boston. She once commented that the regional accents she had encountered out east were always intriguing to her, because the concept of a “California accent” doesn’t really exist. This is because, as she pointed out, nearly all of the culture that we soak up throughout our lives is produced in California. The California way of speaking, such as it is, has essentially become our cultural default. Californian culture is American culture, crafted and distributed nationwide via the airwaves and silver screens (and, nowadays, whatever-the-hell makes the Internet work… dark magic?) since before my generation was born. The stereotypes of the Golden State are so ubiquitous that if I encounter a surfer in Delaware I fully expect them to sound and act like Jeff Spicoli, and chances are good that they will. When I was helping a neighbor bale hay for their cattle and drinking Yoo-Hoos in the husk of an Appalachian coal-mining town as a depressed & frustrated kid, my Discman was reliably spinning the Long Beach-specific good vibes of Sublime’s 40oz. to Freedom (and if I still had a Discman, it probably still would be). Even the Beat Generation poets & authors that I would eventually (and temporarily, thank gawd) gravitate towards professed a very specific lifestyle that could only have been pulled off in a very specific San Francisco that absolutely does not exist anymore, and was already on its way out when I was using my first dial-up modem to connect to the world at large. That modem, and the computer in my brother’s room to which it was connected, were products of the still-nascent tech world of California.
And so the lifestyle I have gravitated towards as an open-minded American is distinctly Californian, in its dreams as well as its nightmares. “As goes California, so goes the nation” is a long-standing and increasingly ominous phrase that reflects both the ups & downs of our country’s probable future through the prism of our roughly 165,000 square foot national vanguard, our official “Land of Milk and Honey,” for even this poster-child state can’t escape the paradoxical nature of our insane country. California can pride itself in its early adoption of marriage equality, progressive drug policies, legitimate environmental concern and innovation in the arts and sciences. But it must also take responsibility for its staggering contribution to the growing income gap, the absolute dominance of the sociopathic tech world, kooky (and dangerous) psuedo-religious cults, and the LAPD. Its progressive policies have theoretically paved the way for a brighter national future, sure, but it has also served as the harbinger of the very possible dystopia lurking just over the horizon, from the nightmarish reality of climate catastrophe on full display with seemingly endless wildfires and water shortages, to the abject misery of its perpetually growing unhoused population and the unforgivable passage of Prop 22, illustrating the consequences of a winner-take-all economy and the increasingly dark future of workers’ rights in America. All the leaves, it would seem, are increasingly brown, even in the Golden West.
But it’s still a fucking gorgeous place. And if the future can still be saved, the rescue efforts are going to start most earnestly in California. With all of that in mind, here’s a breakdown of two of the most influential movies of my childhood, both of which depicted a lifestyle and a landscape that would forever haunt my dreams. But I was always a realist, even as a child, so they also both happen to be horror films. Hella apropos.
POLTERGEIST (1982) dir. Tobe Hooper
William Burroughs once said “America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil. Before the settlers, before the Indians… the evil was there… waiting.” This is probably true. It’s also a great setup for a horror film set in that most American of nightmares: the 1980s suburbs. As a child I had gone from living in a small railroad town to a double-wide trailer on sizable acreage deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains, so the suburbs were always something completely alien to me. I didn’t know anyone who lived in the suburbs because they didn’t exist where I grew up, so once again my understanding of this particular sphere of existence was entirely dependent on what I saw in the movies. No filmmaker was more obsessed with the suburbs than Steven Spielberg, who both wrote and produced Poltergeist the same year that he directed E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, that all-time classic of idealized suburban Americana. There’s a lot of well-known speculation on whether or not Spielberg did most of the directing on Poltergiest, as well. I feel like it’s ultimately a moot point, although the dichotomy of his chimerical suburban fantasia and Tobe Hooper’s own dirt-under-the-fingernails excavation of hidden American violence makes for a compelling insight into the film’s cookie-cutter neighborhood constructed atop a cursed patch of dirt. But I’ll leave that investigation to someone who’s being paid.
E.T. got the most VCR time in our household for most of my childhood, but Poltergeist ultimately emerged as my personal champion. Both films are the same age as me, but only one of them would gradually steer me towards a darker and ultimately more fulfilling cinematic universe. It might seem perfectly natural that one of my earliest obsessions with Poltergeist was the matriarchal character Diane Freeling, particularly the scene where she and her husband are getting high & watching television in bed, ex-hippies goofing around and absent-mindedly flipping through a biography of Ronald Reagan while she rolls them another joint. This wonderful moment spent with a seemingly perfect couple left a deep impact on my little brain, to the point where I distinctly remember having the thought “I want to get married and have a wife like her, too.” But my fascination can’t entirely be explained by a burgeoning erotic fascination with the opposite sex (as here portrayed by Jobeth Williams’ athletic physique and eager smile—the ultimate “California girl”), nor can it be grossly attributed to a supposed Oedipal desire. Diane is gorgeous, yes, and she exudes a genuine warmth and is patient & casual in her relationship with the children, but more importantly she is absolutely the foundation upon which their particular slice of suburbia rests.
This is Williams’ movie through and through. Craig T. Nelson delivers a low-key perfect take on the suburban father/breadwinner Steve Freeling, but his character is never more than silently supportive (and generally useless) once the shit hits the fan, and he never hits the ecstatic heights or trudges through the miasmal depths of Diane’s struggle to protect her family. Theirs is a prototypical American unit on the surface, the type of (white, middle-class) nuclear family that Spielberg worships, but Hooper’s direction focuses subtly on the spectrum of Diane’s responsibilities throughout, from the routine tasks of feeding and picking up after the kids (while Steve and friends drink beers and watch football) to the heavy emotional work of explaining death to her young daughter. The casual sexism of this entrenched arrangement is not unique to the suburbs; my own mother was fully employed as a school secretary for my entire childhood, while also managing to keep our house clean and making sure that me, my brother and my father were all fed. My father always worked, too, but when he got home from the post office his work was done. My mother’s never was. Poltergeist doesn’t explicitly dissect the double standards inherent in the American parental approach, but Hooper wisely rests the entire crux of the story on Diane’s strength, open-mindedness and optimism. My own adolescent immaturity interpreted her as “the perfect wife/mother,” but any reasonable adult viewing the film will recognize her as the one putting in all of the real work.
That’s not to suggest that the film doesn’t have its subversive streak. It opens with literal propaganda (the now-forgotten sign-off of the National Anthem and images of military statues that used to play on television at the very end of each broadcast day) and closes with the quintessential American icon—the suburban home—being violently swallowed up and destroyed by an evil force angered over our ignorance of the pasts we’ve erased and disregarded in the name of our own prosperity. The central conflict revolves entirely around a past that very much ain’t done with us, a reckoning which the United States will be living through in perpetuity until we’re brave enough to openly confront and atone for the bloodshed that stains the soil beneath our cities and suburbs. This is a Spielberg-produced movie, directed by the guy who made The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where our protagonist is willing to renounce her Christian beliefs in order to rescue her daughter, but which is not too cynical to later allow her to call out for her God’s help when she needs it. Whether functioning as a celebration of domestic comfort or reveling with a macabre glee in the disruption of it, the primary focus is on Diane’s matriarchal fortitude, unbending in the face of whatever nightmares America can throw at her.
Maybe it’s the nostalgia talking, but it’s also just a perfect movie. The comedy always works but is never obnoxious, the scares nail the balance between being genuinely frightening without ever ceasing to be fun, and the pacing feels effortless. There isn’t a single boring or forgettable moment. Even the iconic paranormal expert Tangina (the perfectly cast Zelda Rubinstein) sticks around just long enough to give the movie a divaesque injection of kookiness but not long enough to annoy you. And at a time where it seems like so much of our cinematic talent is gravitating towards the small screen (which, I’m sorry, will never be a fulfilling replacement for the cinematic experience), it just feels good to watch a movie that unapologetically depicts the television as a conduit of evil. The America of 2021 is, understandably, very different from the one depicted in this 1982 horror film, and both are vastly different from the real 1982 into which I was born. The suburbs are more diverse, which is good. The middle class is all but decimated, which is bad. Even the constants can be both negative or positive. We still erase the pasts of others to construct our own self-interested futures through the violence of gentrification, and we still ignore our history. But the women of this country also still struggle tirelessly against the bullshit our culture keep throwing at them. Hopefully we’ll collectively learn to appreciate their strength before the whole damn house devours itself.
THE FOG (1980) dir. John Carpenter
Indie horror auteur John Carpenter has always presented a singularly skeptical vision of the California dream. 1976’s Assault on Precinct 13 pretty boldly announced the arrival of a filmmaker who wasn’t going to pull any punches, and anyone who’s seen it knows exactly which moment I’m talking about. That movie as a whole is an extraordinarily lean machine, immediately drawing a line in the bloodied sand of full-blown urban warfare, Los Angeles as the concrete hellscape where Mayberry goes to die. In 1987 he gave us Prince of Darkness, in which an abandoned church is circled & assaulted by demonically possessed (and problematically depicted) gaggles of homeless people while the tragically overeducated UCLA graduate students have philosophical debates inside. And of course in 1988 he made They Live, the ultimate working-class takedown of underemployed desperation, wandering rootlessness and the mind-numbing conformity espoused by mass media. His 1980 follow-up to the game-changing Halloween would take place in the decidedly more laid-back but naturally creepy coastal environs surrounding Point Reyes. The Fog is a story that could have taken place just about anywhere in America, but its sense of quiet dread relies dramatically on the windswept beaches and humpbacked farmlands that you can only find in NorCal.
This is a relatively classy horror film, immediately setting itself a few registers above the popular “slasher” films that Carpenter had inadvertently created two years prior. The Edgar Allan Poe quote that it opens with floats into a classic fireside ghost story, delivered with bone-chilling conviction by a picture-perfect old sailor. With the macabre tone set, we’re introduced to the quaint little seaside town of Antonio Bay, currently in the midst of celebrating its centennial year. The cast is small, the story has absolutely no fat on its bones, and the scenery does most of the heavy lifting. Coastal Northern California, of course, is more than up to the task. Seeing this movie at such a young age (and subsequently viewing it throughout my childhood—my mom was a horror freak!) had a lasting impact on my impression of what a seaside village should be. There is an enchanting feeling that the northern shore of California effortlessly emits, and it simply cannot be matched by ostensibly similar parts of Maine, Oregon or the rugged beaches of the Outer Banks. There’s an eerie sense of calm up there belied by the savage grace of the waves, littered with otherworldly strands of kelp, smashing eternally into the jagged cliffs where the Monterey cypresses strain their roots and reach out dolefully towards the setting sun. Shit is spooky.
As a child these images would haunt me, despite never having experienced the locale outside of a t.v. screen. Equally haunting was the unmistakable voice of Adrienne Barbeau, married to Carpenter at the time and cast as late-night local DJ Stevie Wayne, who works out of the lighthouse down those maddening stairs at Point Reyes and spends all night cooing into the mic and inexplicably spinning D-grade soft jazz & big band music that there’s absolutely no way a town populated by beer-guzzling seaman is actually trying to hear. But still, everybody listens anyway, and waxes romantic about that voice emanating from the edge of the world. As a kid, I didn’t quite have the same predictable wife/mother crush on Barbeau’s character as I did Williams’ in Poltergeist; with Stevie Wayne it was more like I had a crush on her life. This was my early introduction to the concept of the Dream Job. Being paid to sit alone in a cool old lighthouse, staring out at the sea and playing records for people that I never have to see or speak to, that’s about as close to perfection as I could imagine “work” could possibly be back then, before I had ever worked a day in my life. Today, after a couple of decades grinding my bones and deadening my spirits for the financial benefit of others, I know that I was right.
As in Poltergeist, this idyllic California dream is eventually gutted by the fishhook of past betrayals, as Antonio Bay is encroached upon by the titular fog. Hiding within the blanket of glowing mist are the vengeful spirits of a leper colony; deceived, murdered and robbed 100 years ago by the founders of the town, they seek their cursed retribution. Not even this isolated enclave of pastoral beauty can escape the original sin of the settlers, and the invasive violence of westward expansion must eventually be punished. It’s an established fear out west, this underlying sense of guilt & shame, sublimated into the “pioneering spirit” that seeks to supercharge our society into a digital future free from the bothersome burdens of stolen land and obliterated cultures. But America can’t hide from its past forever, and our reckoning is woven into the very DNA of the nation as the propensity for violence and a proud ignorance of our own history metastasizes into the ravenous cancer of racist badge-wielding death squads and mass shootings so commonplace that they barely make the news. We perpetually reap what we sow, and all the smooth jazz in the world can’t drown out the phantasmal screams of our forgotten victims.
But on the lighter side, The Fog is still a whole lot of fun. The thrills are spartan but supremely effective, dialogue never feels forced or stretches an inch too long, and the director’s own composed soundtrack is another instant classic. Nobody really does it like John Carpenter anymore, with the possible exception of S. Craig Zahler, whose own films operate with the well-oiled genre machinery laid out in Carpenter’s blueprints, a tight economical approach and disregard for the staid morality dictated by the interchangeable major players of Hollywood. But Zahler is nothing if not a provocateur (see also: absolute troll), while Carpenter seeks to highlight the discrepancies between our professed dreams & ideals and the nightmarish realities we impose onto “lesser” others in order to achieve them. For every Dream Job nabbed in America, a mass grave of bamboozled lepers waits beneath the surface, sacrificed to the rapacious altar of supposed progress. When the fog finally does lift, how will we face the horrors that are hidden within?
*while living in California I was almost exclusively listening to death metal, and Mortal Wound was, for me, the pinnacle of what the impressively fertile soils of the state had to offer. They were always awesome to see live, and every riff they write will gradually bury itself in your head like a water-logged fish knife thirsty for revenge. But I also want to share one of my all-time favorite rap songs simply because it’s great and is constructed around a sample from Poltergeist’s unnerving theme music: