Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting

Introduction: The Bloody Chords of Memory

1 Introduction THE BLOODY CHORDS OF MEMORY So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world that, without some hints touching the plain facts . . . they might scout at Moby-Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick Joey: The demons, the demons! Priest: Demons? Demons aren’t real, they are only parables, metaphors. (Church door explodes and Pinhead stands threateningly in the door.) Joey: (finger pointing at the monster) Then what the fuck is that! —Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald’s arrival at the MGM commissary followed fast on a night of humiliation. The author of The Great Gatsby had embarrassed himself, in his mind irredeemably, at a party thrown the previous evening by acclaimed producer Irving Thalberg and actress Norma Shearer. Fitzgerald drank too much and launched into a long and embarrassing rendition of “In America we have the dog/and he’s a man’s best friend,” the kind of song, an observer noted, that “might have seemed amusing if one were very drunk and still in one’s freshman year at College.” Fellow screenwriter Dwight Taylor quickly saw that Fitzgerald’s erstwhile audience was not amused. Tolerant smiles turned Monsters in America / 2 to a low and ominous hiss of disapproval. In the sober light of dawn, Fitzgerald felt his humiliation compounded by the fear that Thalberg would fire him for his indiscretion, cutting off his income at a time when he was desperate for funds needed to pay for his wife Zelda’s care at a sanitarium.1 The following day, Fitzgerald planned on a hangover recovery lunch with Taylor. Neither seemed aware that they would share the commissary with the cast of the new Tod Browning production Freaks. Browning , coming off his wildly successful production of Dracula in 1931, enlisted actual sideshow performers to be the stars of his controversial project. The cast of the film that came to work on the MGM lot included midgets, a small boy with simian features and gait, fully joined Siamese twins, heavily tattooed persons of uncertain gender, and a so-called pinhead , a microcephalic with a tapering cranium and large, heavy jaw. Almost as soon as Fitzgerald took a seat, Siamese twins known as the Hilton Sisters joined him at his table, sitting down on a single stool. Holding a menu in their hands, one of the twin’s heads asked the other “what are you thinking of having?” Fitzgerald, already under the weather after his previous night’s adventures, became immediately and violently ill. “Scott turned pea green,” remembered Taylor, “and rushed for the great outdoors.”2 Fitzgerald was far from the last person to have a bad experience with Freaks. America did not fall in love with the tale’s twisted love story that ends in the betrayal of the freaks by a “normal,” a betrayal that the freaks answer with a horrible and unforgettable revenge. In fact, the first audiences shrieked, vomited, or simply left the theater. The preview of the film on December 16, 1931, can only be described as a complete and utter disaster. One observer noted that disgusted audience members not only left the theater, they actually ran to get away from the film. In response to audience reaction, Browning cut Freaks by more than half an hour. Despite significant changes, the film still managed to anger and disgust film reviewers as well as religious and civic leaders. Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, later sold Browning’s ode to the sideshow in hopes that he and his company would no longer have any connection to it. Freaks went underground for thirty years until it appeared again in 1962 at the Cannes Film Festival and soon became a permanent feature on the art house circuit.3 The response to Freaks would seem to suggest that Americans have no room for the monster. As the United States faced an economic crisis in the 1930s that appeared to represent the failure and collapse of the American experiment, the portrayal of such disturbing topics as physical abnormality, torture, and ritual murder hardly seemed the tonic the The Bloody Chords of Memory / 3 movie-going public needed. The failure of Freaks perhaps signaled the public’s desire to see more of the kinds of films that Mayer and MGM had...