The Windsurfer

This blog entry has been a long time coming, but I have to get it out of me. There was a period of my life when I wasn’t the most careful person when it came to money. If I happened to experience a windfall, I would do my best to make exactly the wrong choices about how to spend the money. Forget saving it, that idea didn’t even enter the picture. Besides, I didn’t have a savings account so how on earth could I save it? No, it was better to spend it on “fun” things.
This was right after I had returned from Africa and I was experiencing a sort of reverse culture shock. After eighteen-months in Africa I had become used to only having one choice when it came to everything from toilet paper to guava juice, and now I found myself back in the States where there are a hundred choices for just choosing a candy bar. I would walk in to a grocery store which was twenty times larger than the Cash and Carry in Umtata and become overwhelmed by the size and amount of merchandise offered at these monolithic temples of retail. And this was before Wal-Mart and superstores had entered the scene.
I suppose I was oblivious to all of the excess before I trotted off to Africa to try to single-handedly stomp out Apartheid. My friends, who had remained in the good ole’ U. S. of A., on the other hand, seemed completely comfortable with the domestic supply and demand situation and seemed to be able to catalogue information about products that would remove nose-hair or make your toilet gleam. My ignorance over hair-gel and minute-rice might have led me to overcompensate in order to acclimatize back into the cliques and pecking-orders that made up my social circle during my early twenties.
One large item I bought at this time was a sail-board, better known as a wind-surfer. My mother could never get the name of the thing right and would call it a sail-surfer, or a wind-sailor or a surf-sailor or whatever combination of surf and sail that was possible other than the correct name. I had come upon this nemesis in the form of fiberglass and canvas when my sister Lindsay had suggested to my other sister Emily and me that we go to the Outer-Banks and take wind-surfing lessons. Lindsay had had some experience with this sport/sado-masochist ritual while she was living in Scotland, where the Scots, being fooking Scots, like to wind-surf in the North Sea in January during gales for light entertainment. Lindsay, exercising her Scottish DNA to its fullest, did just this, without a center-board (the thing that keeps you on course), and was picked up after hours of drifting by some bewildered Scottish fishermen. She was suffering from hypothermia and the story made the local paper, but this did not deter her from wind-surfing some more and now she was planning to spread its joy to her siblings.
So we drove to Nags Head one morning and each of us paid fifty dollars to take the lesson. The instruction was given at a little inlet on the sound side of the Outer-Banks by some very patient instructors who must have either been very good at holding their laughter in or had just seen so many spectacularly uncoordinated patrons that they were immune to the spectacle. Either way we spent the hour or so just trying to pull up the sail. For those who have never tried this sport, first you have to make sure that the sail is lying flat on the surface of the water, somewhat perpendicular to the actual board which is basically a surf-board with a hole stuck in it for a sail. Then, you have to haul yourself up onto the board and kind of kneel until you get your balance. By this time, if you have lower back problems, you will know it, for this is a very unnatural act for Homo sapiens and I’m guessing all other species. You are then required to pull on a rope that is connected to the sail and haul it up. The sail is around nine or ten feet high and pretty hefty in and of itself but, adding weight to this task, is the element of the wind. This will be your first meeting with it, and if you are like me, you will learn to hate it with every fiber of your being.
The hauling up of the sail is problematic for a couple of reasons. As stated before, it is hard on the back, and this is one of those many instances in life where people will shout at you: “Use your knees! Use your knees!” What does that mean? In my case, it meant shifting my weight backwards and doing a sort of half-backward flip off the other side of the board and beginning the process all over again. I remember that there was a lot of concern about how your butt was positioned. It was a bit like being someone’s cell-mate. Emily is a big laugher, and she can get us into fits by seeing humor in the most humiliating situations, so our lesson was peppered with moments where we tried to get a hold of ourselves and tackle another go on the board.
The other problem is that when the sail starts to rise up, the wind immediately catches it and you are instantly mobile, headed toward which ever way the wind is blowing. In the case of our lesson, this usually meant right toward another student or right toward the dock where we paid our fifty dollars. Then you would have to abandon ship and hope the tip of your board didn’t knock out someone’s dental plate or something. I can see why we had to sign an insurance waiver. By the end of the session we had had a few small successes and some sever pain in our upper arms, but, for some reason, I had gotten strangely hooked on the idea of purchasing one of these things and mastering the sport, probably not as a personal challenge but as a way to impress people.
Lindsay tried to talk me out of it. I would be returning to school soon and this was a time when I should have been hoarding money. But the windsurfer consumed my thoughts. I needed a physical challenge that would build strength and character and, most importantly, draw the attention of females. The experience did very little of any of these.
So I went back a couple of days later and bought the very wind-surfer that I had taken my lesson on. I paid five-hundred dollars for it. A couple of years later I bought a 1972 Ford LTD for the same amount. The LTD is an example of the good use of five- hundred dollars; the wind-surfer is an example of the bad use of five-hundred dollars. I toted the wind-surfer home to where my parents were living in New Bern and immediately started transforming myself into a hip windsurfer dude. Their house was on the Neuse River, right where it opens into an estuary about a mile wide, and if anything was perfect about this ill-advised venture, this body of water was ideal for learning the techniques of wind-surfing without endangering anyone except yourself.

I was attending classes at a community college at the time, so after classes I would come home and don my Billabong short shorts (this was the eighties) and begin to prepare the wind-surfer for sailing. After about half an hour of unfurling and mast positioning and rope attaching and center board placing, I would put the thing in the water for launch. I would then try to get a general direction of the wind and point the tip of my board away from where the wind was coming. Then I would start the process I have described above, this time with no instructor holding onto my board and no sister laughing hysterically at how dorky I looked. If the wind happened to be particularly strong that day there was a good chance that I would have to make this effort over a dozen times before actually pulling away from my parents’ dock. Also, if the wind was strong at the river’s edge, it was likely that it would be even stronger out in the middle, so once I got out that far it was sort of do or die.
On a windy day, it took all of my effort to go anywhere or even get back to the house. Sailors do what’s known as tacking, which is to complicated for me to explain with any degree of confidence, but basically if the wind is blowing toward where you want to go you’re fine, but if it is blowing in any other direction you have to make about twenty-five-and-a-half trapezoids and a couple of figure-eights to get back to point A. For a while, just not getting dumped off the board was my main focus and by the thirty-ninth time of being hurled head-first over the collapsing mast or being clothes-lined by a very fickle boom, the entire estuary was being exposed to the most foul and graphic streams of cursing this side of a Scorsese film. This was “WHY ME GOD?!!!” style cussing, and I was oblivious to how the wind, along with being my immediate tormentor, was also acting as a kind of communicator to all the shoreline residences along the Neuse. My parents’ neighbor mentioned this to my father once, and remarked that he was somewhat impressed with the creativity of my invectives. I sometimes imagine that he would see me start out from the dock and call a couple of buddies, break out some beer, and sit on his deck to watch the show. I sure put on a few good ones.
A couple of times the wind abandoned me when I was a half mile from shore. I would be clipping along at about a tenth of a knot, which was about the only speed I could maintain for any length of time, and then the sail would empty and I would just stop. There are a couple of things you can do when this happens, both of which are a pain-in-the-ass and make you want your five-hundred dollars back very badly. On the Neuse, I had the option of just getting off the board and walking home because it never gets any deeper than five feet for most of that segment. I could also turn the board around and move the sail back and forth which would painstakingly propel me toward my destination. I usually used a combination of these to get home where I would vow that I was through with sail-boarding forever. The next day would see me out again, stringing together new blasphemies and providing entertainment for the neighbors.
Until autumn brought colder weather I endured this ritual, and after a while I did get somewhat competent. Once or twice, the wind conditions were such that I was able to tack across the river and back a couple of times in a morning. This made the purchase vaguely justifiable, but when I returned inland to start school, I rarely had the opportunity to use the wind-surfer again. I sold it a couple of years later to, ironically, my parents’ neighbor. Looking back, it was a mistake of youth to buy it, but I have good memories of that time when my parents had a house on the Neuse, and the wind-surfer plays a large part in those recollections.

Somethin' is Happenin', But You Don't Know What It Is...

So after a great deal of anticipation I went to the Dylan concert at Ernie Shore Field last Friday night. This was an extremely good experience, and much of the anxiety I have experienced in my life over my hometown and its shortcomings was quelled by this event, where several thousand members of my community came together and listened attentively to a variety of selections from Dylan’s forty-year-old song book. There was a great deal of good music played in many styles, rock-and-roll, country, blues, and jazz were all represented expertly by the four acts on the bill, but it was Dylan himself who carried the most gravitas, singing of biblical redemption and government indifference in the trademark scowling drawl of his later career. Politically and historically tuned-in personages could not help but draw correlations with current events in Dylan’s lyrics, and the band stood behind him like a mythical, musical supreme court, with grave faces of condemnation, and guitars used like amplified gavels sounding judgment on those who listened but could not hear. To some, Dylan may now represent self-parody, but this is only true if the parody includes endless reinvention which, if not always fresh, is remarkably inventive in its use of traditional forms. Columns and columns have been written about Dylan’s rearrangement of his own material, but, in essence, the songs remain similar to the original, with time signatures and phrasings being the only discernable discrepancy. He may do “Hard Rain” in ¾ but isn’t this just an example of Dylan demonstrating the organic evolution of the art through the artist? It’s still the same song with the same words. We don’t criticize Robert Frost when a new addition of his work comes out with a different book jacket. We’ve never had a poet/musician/recording artist before Dylan; no one knows how it’s supposed to be done, so Dylan is figuring it out. Just let the man work.
As for his stage presence, Dylan seemed like a tongue-in-cheek apocalyptic prophet. He would jerk back from his little keyboard, give a quick sideways glance at the crowd and then lean into his microphone and sneer the next line. It was difficult to tell if he was grinning or wincing, but either way there was a medicine-show, southern-soothsayer quality to his expressions that indicated a playful masquerade was being perpetrated on the press and the masses. Hell, Dylan doesn’t give a shit if the press likes him or not, he has always shot them the finger and showed them up for phonies, and why?—they never were able to pigeon-hole him, and still aren’t, and many of them hate him for it, and he is still great for this.
The chump who writes for our local paper wrote a scathing review of the Dylan concert. In all honesty, his words made me less angry than very, very sad. The idea that hacks like this can pass uninformed and unenlightened judgment on Dylan—hacks who can so wrongly misinterpret, or downright ignore, Dylan’s message—means that there is a larger problem; we live in a society where the truth-tellers are attacked by arrogant and attention-seeking imbeciles whose ignorance is winning the battle for cultural excellence in our country. Dylan takes his own mythology and pokes fun at it, while using musical forms which he is doing anything but poking fun at, and provides an experience that, as it did in his early days, provides an amalgamation of the American ethos. Dylan is older, wiser and oh so very relevant.

Daytrippin' in G'boro

This next entry will be about, yes you guessed it, once again, no escaping it…music. Actually it’s about the short road trip to Greensboro I took with Kevin and Chris, the guys I play in Dante’s Roadhouse with. We also had a friend of Chris’ from work with us whose name is also Chris. So it was me and Kevin and the two Chrises, but not the ones with the syndicated radio show. We piled into Kevin’s low rider, a late model Honda Accord, and hit the long and winding road. Well, it’s not so long and winding, it’s actually a short straight highway that takes about twenty minutes. The objective was to hit the used record stores and possibly a pawn shop with a side trip to a legit musical instrument outlet with the southern boy friendly moniker of The Music Barn.
But first, as usual, food became the main objective. So we rolled around Lee Street looking out for the Beef Burger. This wasn’t where we were planning to eat, but it is a landmark for me because as a flunky freshman at UNCG we used to walk there from our dorm and get cheap burgers made out of some kind of meat-by-product that would compost your stomach contents if you added enough Black Label Beer to the mix. I kind of have a gastric pavlovian response when ever I lay eyes on the place, kind of a gagging/retching reflex. From the Beef Burger I can always get my bearings around the UNCG area. Take a right and you can see the building where I flunked out of geography, or, over there, was a row of bushes where I threw up, or over there is the statue of the founder whose neck we hung a tire around, and of which a full page photo ended up in that year’s yearbook. Ah, those early accomplishments of youth.
But back to last Saturday. We pulled up to the First Carolina Deli, and according to our usual eating schedule, it was about three-fifty-two in the afternoon and a guy peeling a fifty pound bag of carrots, another guy, and a waitress were the only other souls in the place. We had a pretty good lunch though, no one made coke come out of their nose or anything and we were pretty adult-like during a meal for once. I guess we just hadn’t gotten going yet.
So we took this responsible attitude down Spring garden street, listening to a Dead show from December ’77—Winterland—and then we—December 27th I believe it was—pulled up to—second set, smokin’ Bertha…Jerry rips the solo—The Music Barn and strolled around looking at the overpriced off-brand guitars. I bought a set of strings from a snide clerk who helped me find a better medium-light gauge string, but who had editorial comments about things. I got the feeling he was the kind of nut-job who turns his nose up at you if you can’t recite the serial number of your guitar and who speaks in acronyms and numerals about everything. “The GBK on this unit gets 30 mega hertz if you dial the SR-TZXX4 over to the low frequency driveshaft alternator quasar shifter on the BBKING. What’s your guitar’s serial number?” Or something like that. I disengaged from the conversation.
The Music Barn was closing anyway so we headed back toward campus to Collectables Records. This is where, as a student who found records more important than books when planning a budget, I would buy things like the soundtrack to Easy Rider and Moby Grape’s first album. I remember buying White Light/White Heat here long before I knew who Lester Bangs was. My roommate Joey would often guide me on these expeditions, shaking his head disapprovingly when I gazed at a cheap copy of Billy Squire’s record. I owe some of my better navigations through popular music to Joey’s guidance. The guy has a great ear.
On this Saturday, Collectables was experiencing a calamity of pretty disastrous proportions. The ceiling had collapsed. Half of the store was covered in heavy plastic, and a quick glance upward revealed soundproof tile and insulation hanging precariously low over the stacks and boxes of thousands of vinyl records. We were not deterred, but the owner looked pretty dismayed. Looking through the stacks was surreal in this setting. The smell of mildew mixed with the realization that a band such as Pablo Cruise actually existed was very bizarre. Bands that I had never heard of, who had had their one shot at fame, or recognition, or even a back-stage blow job, were represented in these rows of cardboard and vinyl. Bands with eighties promotional packaging that was as fleeting and insubstantial as the vessels for their message were soon to become. I wasn’t tempted to buy a thing, not because I didn’t see anything interesting, but because I haven’t owned a turntable in fifteen years. It was kind of like exploring a house that no one lives in any more and the last tenants had really let the place go—but at one time, man it was the place.
We set off from Collectables to find another record store that I’d remembered around the Guilford College area. On the way down Spring Garden Street, one of the Chrises noticed that we had passed another store called Collectables Too so we jerked it around and screeched up to the parking lot. The other Chris was driving and he has a NASCAR fixation and drives accordingly. This place smelled a lot better, and also had a great deal of vinyl albums, but also had a very good CD selection. Every store that we entered seemed to be closing in a few minutes, so we hurried to find something to buy. I found an Elvis Sun Sessions CD for seven bucks and a CD by a group called the Rising Sons which was Taj Mahal’s and Ry Cooder’s first major band. The Music Hound CD guide calls the Rising Sons—and I’m paraphrasing here—short lived but influential. It’s a pretty good CD, with a few strange cuts but also with a lot of different arrangements of Taj Mahal songs such as “Corrina” and “Take a Giant Step.” The Elvis is a hunka hunka burnin’ early stuff. I’m pleased with both purchases. The Elvis I knew would be good, but I took a chance with the Rising Sons. It turns out to be a very good CD.
We made a quick detour to a pawn shop where a bald white supremacist looking guy with a skinny worried kid with him was buying a shot gun. We looked at a couple of dubious appearing guitars that were hanging up and, not seeing anything else worth a damn we left before the shot gun buying guy had finished his purchase. Wonder what he wants that thing for. Target practice I guess.
So our last stop was BB’s music across from the Guilford College campus. Here we found import DVD’s of Talking Heads, Grateful Dead, an Alice Cooper concert from 1973—before he gave up what was reportedly a forty can a day beer habit for golf—a Led Zeppelin concert, also from 73 in Australia, and tons of other tempting footage. I declined to get anything though because you really don’t know what the quality is going to be like; many of these shows look like they were filmed from out of an overcoat from the third level of a soccer arena in Hamburg or something. But, the store is right across from campus and the temptation will be there until I break down and buy one of DVDs for twenty bucks. I’ve blown twenty bucks on worthless crap many times before so I’m not that apprehensive. I almost bought Warren Zevon’s first record for six bucks but declined that as well, although it’s hard to admit that I don’t have this in my collection. I may break down and get this one day when I’m supposed to be writing a paper at the library.
So that’s it. I’m going to see Bob Dylan on Friday night so I expect that will be the next topic for the blog. Seems we’re going with a music theme for a while. Oh well, it hasn’t gotten boring writing about it yet, although I can’t comment on how reading it is.

Soundtrack of my Senior Year

I thought I would write something about music, and the idea came to me to write about the music I listened to during my senior year in high school. This was the year that I believe I had a breakthrough in my ability to distinguish, for the most part, musical merit from musical crap. This isn’t invariably the case, as any perusal through my CD collection will indicate, but my senior year was the time where I shed a great deal of the music I identified with during the sap rising years that contained bouts of acne, pretending you’re stoned when you’ve only taken a Tylenol, and agonizing insecurities about the opposite sex. Groups like Queen, Yes, Styx, and Rush, all fell by the wayside, although Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd would hang around for another few years. I can’t say that my breakthrough came out of the blue because there were a number of people whose musical interest influenced me—thank God.
My junior year in high school I was shipped off to a republican infested boarding school in the North Carolina mountains to serve two years for being a lazy, want-to-be stoner. I was allowed to take my album collection and my guitar, on which I could play about 3/5ths of “Stairway to Heaven” and the intro to Yes’s “Roundabout.” This was a different environment from the Catholic school I had attended for my first two years of high school, where the soccer playing potheads who showed up to soccer practice on acid ruled the campus. This particular boarding school was stringent in its goal of getting every graduate to college even if it had to beat a 1000 or better SAT score into you. My album collection, which contained a rare Japanese import of Yes’s first album and Rush’s “Moving Pictures” picture disk, was impressing no one. Actually it impressed one single soul, a non-bathing English prodigy who smelled like pencil shavings and wrote diatribes in the form of poetry for the literary magazine. He borrowed my entire Yes collection and kept it for the better part of the year. Luckily, he was a Dylan fan and reciprocated by playing “Tangled up in Blue” for me, in the way of throwing me a bone.
The summer between junior and senior year I met some guys who lived together and had two bands operating out of their house. One was a skinny drummer who kind of looked like Neil Young. This was my first introduction to a thrift store subculture that ate at bargain lunch counters and frequented the Goodwill for everything from clothing to appliances and records. Although everyone was poor as dirt, this behavior was partly style induced as well, with paisley shirts being the prized items from the rack and old country records being coveted from the record bins. The skinny drummer would put on an old record and say, “listen to this, listen to the heartfelt anguish in this. This is about a man showing his friend a mansion that he and his wife bought together, but the marriage ended in divorce and now all he can do is show friends his empty house of dreams.” It was George Jones’ “The Grand Tour.”
I was just getting into Dylan at that time and the drummer would say he liked Dylan, but only if you played him at 45 speed. We did this and found it extremely hilarious. He would have nothing to do with Zeppelin or Rush or any of those bands so we would listen to Jonathan Richman or Roger Miller and drink cost cutter beer. The drummer was in love with the drummer from Let’s Active and one weekend we went to Chapel Hill to stay with her and her brother, another local musician who was in a band called the Flat Duo Jets. All I remember is that he lived in a mausoleum, (actually it was a converted tool shed meant to look like a mausoleum) he drank all of my bourbon, and we watched “The Young Ones.”
By the time I started my senior year, my musical taste had changed already. I suppose I should state that this was 1984-1985 and as far as popular music was concerned, there wasn’t much going on. I believe Billy Idols “Eyes without a Face” and Prince’s “Purple Rain” were radio’s non-stop rotation darlings that year. Listening to Rush’s 2112 with the black light on just wasn’t cutting it anymore for me. I returned to school with an appreciation for old country and one dollar used paisley button downs with the sleeves cut off. Not much of a stride forward, but at least I was trying.
In my senior year I had two roommates. Both were of the English, King’s Road commercial new wave school of music lovers. Mechanical drums—they loved em, singers who believed vocals required a thick London East End monotone—couldn’t get enough of them, guitar riffs that contained one note played through an analogue delay box and echoed for fifteen measures—their favorite, bands whose hair styles looked like Elizabeth Taylor had gone out on a bender and was just waking up—high fashion. There was a little friction the first few weeks of school over what music was to be played when, but we worked out a compromise that allotted each of us use of headphones during study period. This compromise worked relatively well.
Although we had wide divergences regarding our musical taste, we also had music that we all agreed on. This is the music that I remember defining my senior year. One record that we could all play, and did play constantly, was The Velvet Underground’s “VU”, which was an album, made up of unreleased material, issued that year. Also issued that year was the Lou Reed album “New Sensations” which we also all agreed on. Reed and the Velvet Underground were experiencing a resurgence in popularity that year due to their marked influence in groups like R.E.M. and The Violent Femmes’ sound. The Velvet Underground with Nico’s “Andy Warhol” was another record we played often.
Well, speaking of The Violent Femmes, that probably was the most played record during my senior year. We just couldn’t get enough of this angsty, angry, funny, fuck you, record. The desperation mixed with humorous, let’s all laugh at ourselves because it is so damned absurd, messages on this record helped us through all the months of knowing we would be free from school one day, but it seemed to be taking forever.
R.E.M.’s “Murmur” was another favorite in our corner of the dorm, but it was “Reckoning” that I personally was compelled to listen to every day for four or five months. You have to understand, MTV was beginning to take over the world, and image was beginning to replace content in everyway imaginable, so R.E.M., with its melodies, (something that most new wave bands had stomped on) was like a bucket of ice water in an endless desert of narcissistic artificiality. “Reckoning” was also interesting because, for once, you could understand what Michael Stipe was saying, at least partially. You could also get songs like “Don’t go back to Rockville,” and “South Central Rain” in your head and not feel like you were being manipulated by mainstream radio or MTV.
And what of Dylan? I had just begun what is now my twentieth plus year of Dylan fanaticism (I’m going to see him on Friday) and the album that year was “Desire.” The first song, “Hurricane” claims, “pistol shots rang out in a bar room night.” The first words of this record take me back to the top bunk of a small college prep school in western North Carolina where I was probably supposed to be doing chemistry homework but was probably doodling in a margin and dreaming of the blond older sister of a friend.
Somehow, toward graduation, I began to listening to Muddy Waters. I didn’t become a total convert to Chicago Blues but I did buy the record “King Bee” as well as “B.B. King Live at the Cook County Jail.” I think it was the song “I’ve Been down Hearted.” That compelled me to buy the B.B. King, with the classic one liner, “I gave you seven children, and now you want to give them back.” I was finally going to the source of what had influenced testosterock bands like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. By now I had pulled far away from the fantasy induced concept rock of my early adolescence and was listening to music that had something more tangible to say.
Other albums I listened to during my senior years were “The White Album,”(actually I listened to a lot of Beatles, but I had been listening to the Beatles since I was a child and was already familiar with most of their music by senior year, although I do remember listening to “Rubber Soul” a great deal that year as well) “The Best of Johnny Cash,” George Harrison “All things must Pass,” The Clash “London Calling,” “The Best of Roger Miller” and I’m sure I will think of more after I post this entry.
The day after I graduated from high school I saw R.E.M. at Meredith College in Raleigh. I good friend of mine’s brother had gone to school with Bill Berry, the drummer, and we all got to go back stage for the concert. I felt very sophisticated and important hanging out with these guys, the kings of thrift store sheik, (this was when they were still with IRS records) and it seemed a worthy reward for surviving the final year of my sentence. I was no longer a want-to-be stoner, although I was dangerously close to becoming a real one, and on returning home I could thumb through a record collection that now included Neil Young’s “Decade”, The Db’s “Repercussion” and the soundtrack to “The Harder they Come.” I was making determined strides although many missteps were still to follow.
When I think of my senior year in high school I generally think favorably of the experience. It was the music that my roommates and I listened to that comes to mind predominately when I file back to that stage of my recollection. I think that it was such a dismal year as far as popular music went that we spent a great deal of effort searching for something that was real. Some of those choices still hold the same sort of importance for me today.

Comparison of Two B-Horror Films from the Fifties

Walter Wanger’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Roy Del Ruth’s The Alligator People offer two excellent examples of B-movie cinema’s depiction of domestic partnership in the 1950s. Although both examples are dynamically different, there are underlying similarities between the two that demonstrate a status quo that was prevalent prior to the sexual revolution the following decade. The importance of keeping the relationship in tact and staying together until all possible hope is lost is apparent in both films and demonstrates 50s culture’s preoccupation with the perfect domestic space. This depiction of the male/female partnership, coupled with B-cinema’s tendency toward fantasy and exaggeration, offer a caricature-like portrait of perceived notions about domesticity during the early Cold War.
Both Invasion and The Alligator People offer us couples who start out their relationships in the mold of normal happy people. Becky and Miles have a flirtatious relationship, with Becky tenderly thwarting Miles advances and Miles, as the persistent all-American, taking Becky’s rejection on the chin and proceeding undeterred. Conversely, in Alligator, Joyce and Paul Webster are newly-weds, and it is implied in the back-story that it was Joyce who was the pursuer who after some effort was able to win a proposal from Paul. Both Miles and Joyce transform from pursuer to protector within their relationships after their tranquility is threatened. Miles, while trying to protect himself from the body snatchers, is obsessed with protecting Becky as well, and Joyce, after her husband mysteriously disappears, becomes obsessive in her search for him. The survival of normal life, threatened by soul stealing pods or radioactive cobalt that turns men into hand-luggage, seems intrinsically tied to the survival of the male/female bond which, if broken, means doom for humanity.
The character of Becky in Invasion gives us some ideas of what the notions for women were in the 1950s. Becky is coy, intelligent and independent for the first scenes of the film, but when normal life is threatened she becomes almost pathologically dependant upon Miles. Miles is forced to carry, cajole, push, drag and grope Becky through the remainder of the film. Becky, as the weaker member of the couple, can only maintain her independence when it is not threatened, and Miles must act as her protector when it is.
Joyce is no less a model for the Cold War wife. She is more independent than Becky throughout the conflict of the narrative, but her motivation revolves completely around saving her marriage, even if it means being able to truthfully call her husband “lizard lips.” The fact that her husband mysteriously abandoned her at a railway stop leaves her undaunted, and she endures lecherous, hook-handed drunks and snake filled swamps to preserve her dream—to be happily married. Becky is acting independently in order to once again become dependent upon her husband.
Both Joyce and Miles make it through their trauma scarred but in tact. Their significant others, however, aren’t so lucky. Becky becomes a pod-person and Paul becomes a half-man/half-alligator who runs off into the swamp and gets swallowed by quick sand while Becky watches. This time, Becky opts not to “stand by her man.”
The depiction of both relationships demonstrates how the protection of the male/female relationship coincided with the 50’s fears of cultural disruption. The couples in both films are unwilling to separate, and both put the male/female union above the urge for individual survival until it is absolutely necessary to give up. In this way we can see that these male/female relationships act as an allegory (or, in the case of the The Alligator People, an alligatory…sorry, I couldn’t resist) for the importance Americans in the 1950s put on preserving domestic partnership.