Earlier this month, I wrote a piece about the climactic fire sequence from Bambi, during which I touched on the forest fawn's history as an on-and-off poster boy for wildfire prevention efforts, along with the genesis of Smokey Bear, the safety-conscious ursine created by the US Forest Service as a Bambi substitute who would go on to become an iconic part of the American cultural landscape in his own right. Since then, I've acquired quite an appreciation for forest fire prevention PSAs. Public service announcements (or public information films, as they're more commonly known in the UK) thrive on highlighting the evils of ignorance and the potentially life-altering consequences of a single moment's negligence, and with their characteristic mixture of the mundane and the shockingly cataclysmic, there's something deeply commanding about a well-made PSA that gets under our skin in ways that even the grisliest of horror films cannot touch upon. I find that forest fire prevention PSAs hold a particular fascination in the thin line they evoke between
Edenic tranquility and all-out Apocalypse; that sense of the enormous fragility of the world, and of the difference between endurance and destruction of the most appalling magnitude hanging helplessly in the balance and on something as ostensibly insignificant as the striking of a match.
In the case of "Deadliest Animal", a PSA from 1969 (that's pretty much all of the background information I can uncover on this one), the actual Apocalypse is left almost entirely to our imagination. Instead, the film combines the charm and visual splendour of a nature documentary or a promotional travelogue with an almost incongruous sense of creeping menace. Watching "Deadliest Animal", one is struck by the sheer beauty of the animal photography, although this is immediately offset by the ominous dialogue, which poses a riddle (albeit one we already know the answer to - from the start we know that this is set to be one of those scenarios in which we will meet the enemy and he is us) as the camera assumes the perspective of an unseen presence prowling through the woodlands and prompting the resident wildlife to bolt in alarm. Like Bambi, "Deadliest Animal" derives its power from keeping its human element (predominantly) out of view, but unlike the Disney film, where Man is depicted as alarmingly alien force in the natural kingdom, "Deadliest Animal" recognises Man as one of the beasts, a strange creature with a curious duality - the highly evolved animal who has mastered the trick of starting fires but is less adept at controlling or containing them (either through weakness or negligence), and whose shortcomings in the latter area have the tendency to spell disaster for everything around it.
"Deadliest Animal" is a beautiful-looking film, although as with all really memorable PSAs there is a healthy undercurrent of horror, which here manifests in where it ultimately takes us. As we roam the forest floor with the deadliest animal, it leads us away from the picturesque imagery and into a world of uneasy darkness (a primal fear that the dialogue even explicitly acknowledges as one of our defining traits), where the sudden lighting of a match gives us our first glimpse of our nefarious representative. The animal's identity comes as no surprise, but the film's real punchline - "the deadly ones - the ones with the brains" - strikes hard in its quietly mocking irony. Once again, Man's most catastrophic blow to the natural world is dealt unconsciously, with that final lingering shot of the unchecked flame leaving us no doubt as to the towering inferno that lies in store.
Note: Audio from this film was later sampled by synthwave artist botnit for his track "Blaze". You can listen to it in full here.
One topic to which I seem to keep on returning (quite inadvertently) here on The Spirochaete Trail is that of giving canine actors their due. Obviously, Benji is a creature near and dear to my heart, so I'll routinely tip my hat to Benjean, the dog who played Benji for the better part of the character's career. I recently did short pieces covering Honey Tree Evil Eye (better known as Spuds MacKenzie) and Gidget the chihuahua, quirky canines whose unique talents were utilised for shilling booze and tacos, respectively. Nice cute dogs who won us over by doing everything right (the occasional controversy with regard to the advertising dogs' campaigns notwithstanding). For nothing captures our hearts like a celebrity dog who exemplifies everything we revere in man's best friend. We all know that Hollywood has a fine tradition of championing heroic canine leads, from Lassie to Rin Tin Tin, and doggedly devoted companions like Asta from The Thin Man (1934) and Toto from The Wizard of Oz (1939). Every now and then a new canine actor will appear who takes us by storm and reminds us of why their appeal is so evergreen. Look how crazy the world went for Uggie, the Jack Russell terrier who played Jack in The Artist (2011) and became the subject of a popular social media campaign, "Consider Uggie", to net the dog awards recognition. Again, nice cute dogs who did everything right. What we don't see enough of is praise for dogs who specialised in playing complete and utter psychopaths. Harry the Labrador mix was one such dog. The highlight of his career was nearly devouring William Hurt in the 1981 thriller Eyewitness. And you were happy settling for tacos, Gidget?
Eyewitness was released under the alternate title The Janitor in the UK (even though, as film historian Marcus Heam points out in the film's Blu-Ray commentary, "janitor" is not a term commonly used in the UK, where "caretaker" is much preferred). This was closer to the film's full working title, The Janitor Can't Dance, only Twentieth Century Fox desired something snappier and had the title shortened for its UK release and altered altogether into the more generic Eyewitness for its US distribution (director Peter Yates is quite upfront about his dissatisfaction with the US title in the Blu-Ray commentary, stating that it sounds slicker but conveys nothing of the film's real character). The film involves William Hurt's chorophobic janitor, Daryll Deever, obsessing over a local TV news anchor Tony Sokolow (Sigourney Weaver), who in turn takes an interest in him on the mistaken belief that he has information about a murder that occurred in the building where he works. Then Daryll lands himself in hot water when some dangerous individuals likewise assume that he must be hiding something. Truthfully, the film isn't particularly plot-orientated (the basis of the film apparently came from combining two half-finished scripts by screenwriter Steve Tesich, which accounts for how haphazardly the narrative hangs together) and you don't get too involved in the central mystery. If you remember this film at all, it's likely because of Harry's input. Harry has only a minor role in Eyewitness, but he's easily the heart and soul of the film.
Harry's appearances make up a running gag whereby Daryll returns to his apartment and is "attacked" by his dog, Ralph, who has a somewhat peculiar means of greeting any and all entrants to the abode. Ralph's eccentricities come up three times over the course of the film; the first provides the film with one of its big jump scares, since the viewer presumably isn't expecting a large black dog to appear out of nowhere and to wrestle Daryll to the ground. On the second occasion, when Daryll has returned to the apartment with Tony, Ralph's sudden, aggressive appearance might again take the viewer by surprise, but this time around there's an air of comedy at the expense of Weaver's character, who is totally unprepared for the dog's salutations. Come the third and final encounter, when Daryll again returns to the apartment with Tony in tow, the audience has been primed to expect an appearance from Ralph the dog, so we know something is wrong when he initially appears to give the humans a wide berth. Finally, when Ralph does make himself seen, we get the dark, depraved punchline that this entire running gag has been building up to. For on this occasion Ralph does mean business and Daryll's accustomedness toward the dog's regular displays of pseudo-aggression results in him not seeing the danger until Ralph is right on top of him and all poised to maul him to death. This time, the viewer is actually slightly ahead of Daryll, for we recognise right away that something is off about Ralph and that Daryll is walking into a death trap in allowing the dog to approach him. It it is an extraordinarily well-constructed sequence, with lots of close-ups and rapid editing used to emphasise the intensity of the attack. Compared to Ralph's previous tussles with Daryll, the blood lust in Ralph's eyes seems entirely genuine this time, and his increase in ferocity is downright startling. Despite Tony's valiant efforts to defend Daryll, Ralph looks to be winning the struggle...until he suddenly shuts down, keels over and all of the life drains out of him. Sorry folks, but the dog does die in this one.* Which is very bad news, as we still have half an hour's worth of running time left to go, and the film just bumped off its best character. (Still, it's not as bad as Kevin Costner's 1997 post-apocalyptic drama The Postman, which kills its best character - Bill the mule - twenty minutes into the film. The Postman is three hours long!)
The confrontation between Daryll and Ralph isn't fantastically central to the story, but it is by far the film's most gripping and memorable set-piece, and I think you can tell that from how eagerly the marketing campaign latched onto it. A still of Ralph attacking Daryll was used as one of key promotional images for the film and was used as the VHS cover for the film's home video release in the UK. In fact, Ralph's final attack left such an impression that they even made him the focus of the film's promotional poster in Turkey. Check this beauty out:
Honestly, if I had seen the above poster before watching the movie, I'd have been pissed off when I discovered that Ralph isn't actually all that integral to the plot, let alone that the film isn't about William Hurt and Sigourney Weaver being chased around New York by a giant dog (although arguably the Turkish poster is attempting to make Ralph into a metaphor for the savagery/treachery of the city?). The above poster does make it look as if we're in for some kind of animal attack picture along the lines of Jaws, only the title Eyewitness is a bit of a giveaway to the contrary. It doesn't quite fit with the genre. Too bad. I would have dug a picture in which Ralph's eccentricities were main focus.
On the film's Blu-Ray commentary, Yates and Heam talk about Ralph a couple of times. At one point, Yates provides an illuminating glimpse into the dog's behind-the-scenes character, revealing that he was wonderful to work with but low on stamina, which did create friction with one of his human co-stars:
Yates:This dog was extraordinary. I usually fire dogs. I fired dogs out of The Deep. I fired dogs out of For Pete's Sake. But this one was so well-trained and so good that one could only, sort of, thank God and keep him on. Mind you, he did used to get tired. We were told by his trainer that one had to be very careful or he'd get too tired. And there was one occasion when I had to put Christopher Plummer...on a standby and tell him he was on standby because the dog might get tired. He wasn't exactly pleased. He said, "What happens if I get tired?" I said, "Well, that's just tough."
Later on, during Ralph's infamous final attack, Yates is unable to supply much information on how the dog's ferocity was simulated:
Heam:How on earth did you get the dog to appear so rabid?
Yates:I've forgotten. I think maybe they put something in his eyes, I don't know.
Heam:He's even foaming at the mouth at one point.
Yates:Yeah, oh well, that was easy, that was Enos or something like that.
Later, on observing Ralph frothing at the mouth:
Yates:I've forgotten what that was. But it was something like, I don't know, Enos or something that didn't do him any harm. But it was really a marvelously trained dog.
Heam:And using a jet black dog must have given your lighting cameraman a few headaches, I would have thought.
Yates:I think you're probably right.
And finally, on Sigourney Weaver's tenacity in doing her own stunts:
Yates:Sigourney insists on playing these scenes herself. And though of course the dog isn't really rabid, it's still quite, quite...it's still frightening to be in there.
Despite what's indicated in the commentary, it transpires that Ralph's behavioral changes are not rabies-related; rather, he was fed a toxic substance that made him high as a kite, in the hopes that he would kill Daryll before the poison took its toll. In other words, that was Ralph's brain on drugs.
Harry with trainer Karl Lewis Miller in the 1982 documentary Cruel Camera.
Ralph's real name, Harry, is not revealed in the commentary, much as his trainer, the legendary Karl Lewis Miller, is also not identified by name. Happily, we do have some behind-the-scenes insight into the dog in question by way of his appearance in the 1982 documentary Cruel Camera. An installment in the long-running Canadian investigative series Fifth Estate, Cruel Camera was presented by Bobby McKeown and looked at Hollywood's surreptitious history of abusing animals in the name of spectacle, largely in response to the then-recent controversies that had surfaced surrounding the treatment of horses during the production of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980). Among other things, Cruel Camera was responsible for bringing the disturbing fakery behind the so-called lemming "suicide" in the 1958 Disney documentary White Wilderness to the public's attention. Harry was featured, alongside Miller, as one of the more positive representations of an animal working within the industry, and was used to demonstrate how a non-aggressive animal could be trained to feign aggressive behaviour. Miller described Harry's specialty as "Jekyll/Hyde", stating that, "He always has roles where he's the nicest dog in the world, but [at] one point in the story the devil, like, possesses him and he becomes the most aggressive animal you ever saw." Miller gave McKeown a demonstration of Harry's uncanny ability to go from loving to lethal in the blink of an eye, but when Harry finally lunges at Miller and "bites" his hand, it's clear that there's no genuine blood lust in his soul. As part of this demonstration, it was revealed that Harry's "attacks" were, in actuality, in response to a band concealed on his target's arm, which Harry had been conditioned to want to remove. Miller also gave some indication as to Harry's heritage, stating that, "He's a mixed Labrador; he probably has Great Dane in him as well."
Eyewitness is the only example of Harry's acting credentials cited in Cruel Camera, but I was intrigued by Miller's references to Harry's having appeared in multiple roles and making a specialty of this kind of behaviour. Awed by Harry's feigned ferocity and touched by the evident tenderness between the dog and his trainer, I decided to have a go at tracking down the rest of Harry's filmography - no small task, given that Harry doesn't receive an official credit in Eyewitness and has no IMDb page, so I had to study Miller's filmography instead and look at probable titles. My detective work yielded only one positive result - The Amityville Horror (1979), which features a black Labrador mix who looks exactly like Harry. I should be upfront about the fact that I have unfortunately not been to uncover any confirmation that the dog who appears in The Amityville Horror is definitively the Harry we're looking for. But until I get confirmation to the contrary, I'm satisfied enough in assuming that it is the same dog. It is the spitting image of Ralph from Eyewitness. There was only a two year gap between the films in question, which is a perfectly reasonable amount of time for the same dog to still be in the business. Also intriguing is that the dog from The Amityville Horror is actually called Harry, leading me to wonder if he acquired the name from the role he was originally brought in to play. It would, of course, be naive to assume that the dog used to portray Harry in Amityville is necessarily the same dog in every shot. Films often deploy multiple lookalike animals for different sequences, particularly in the cases of complex or challenging roles that would otherwise require a single animal to be conditioned to perform an insane variety of stunts. In Cruel Camera, we also see footage of Miller working alongside a white German shepherd named Folsom, who was only one of multiple dogs used to portray the same role in the 1982 film White Dog. The 1995 film Babe (on which Miller also worked as a trainer) famously had over forty pigs playing the titular role. The Blu-Ray commentary for Eyewitness, however, does make it clear that Ralph was always portrayed by the same dog. The Amityville Horror Blu-Ray released by Second Sight comes with a commentary not from the cast or the crew but from Dr Hans Holzer, Ph.D in parapsychology (who wrote a number of books about the Amityville case), which I'm guessing is going to tell me sod-all about the dog who played Harry, so I'm not going to bother with it. To reiterate, I'm open to the possibility that is another dog entirely and that I'm barking (sorry) up the wrong tree, but I have a strong suspicion that this is our Harry and I'm going to proceed on that basis.
If you have even the vaguest interest in the paranormal, US folklore or horror iconography, then chances are that the name "Amityville" means something to you. In a nutshell, The Amityville Horror was a professed true account of the paranormal phenomena experienced by the Lutz family while living at 112 Ocean Avenue in the Amityville suburbs in Long Island, New York, where twenty-three year old Ronald DeFeo Jr had murdered his parents and four siblings only a year prior. Written by Jay Anson and published in 1977, the book made its impact on popular culture but let's just say that not everyone believes the Lutzs and that no one who's lived at the property since has reported any kind of unusual activity. Be it a chilling tale of true-life terror or a cynical cash grab engineered to exploit the unease left in the wake of the DeFeo murders, the story has been used as the basis of a long line of feature films, beginning with Stuart Rosenberg's The Amityville Horror in 1979, starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder. An enormous commercial success, the film grossed over 80 million dollars domestically but I think it's fair to say that its time in the sun was sorely limited. It predates both Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) and Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist (1982), two films with which it shares a number of common elements, but it lacks the dark artistry of the former and the gleeful personality of the latter. The Amityville Horror isn't overwhelmingly scary, although it is intermittently gruesome, in a grimy, insalubrious kind of way, with its regular images of fly infestations (if you're entomophobic, then Amityville is definitely not your film) and at one point a misbehaving toilet. The ghastliest thing about the film by far, though, would have to be Lalo Schifrin's Academy Award-nominated score, which I found actually made me feel a whole lot queasier than any of those aforementioned fly or toilet images (perhaps I just have some hitherto unknown Pavlovian response to choirs attempting to sound simultaneously elegant and off-kilter). Still, Rosenberg's film offers of a smattering of enjoyable set pieces (I'm quite partial to the scene where one of the Lutz children gets his hand squished by a window). And it has Harry the dog, which surely counts for something.
As part of their account, the Lutzs claimed that the family dog, Harry, was frequently unsettled while living in the house, particularly at the discovery of a mysterious red-painted room the family found hidden at the back of the basement. Our Harry accordingly spends much of the film scratching away incessantly at the basement wall, evidently attuned to something that the humans aren't. Harry only gets to show off his Jekyll/Hyde abilities at the very end of the film, when he attacks George Lutz (James Brolin) - ironically, after George has returned to the house specifically to rescue the dog - and even then he doesn't display anything close to the kind of startling ferocity seen in Eyewitness. It certainly doesn't come across that Harry has been possessed by a the devil - in fact, his attack on Brolin actually amounts to something of a fake-out, for the dog does ultimately prove himself to be a perfectly loyal and loving pet. In the end, the family unit endures in Amityville, and those values are extended to the family dog. Although it's intriguing looking at Harry's earlier efforts at savagery, he definitely did his best work ripping into William Hurt. Now that's a set-piece for the ages.
Unfortunately, there's a paucity of information out there about Harry, who would certainly be long dead by now, but I couldn't tell you exactly when he passed on or if he made any additional screen appearances following his spot on Cruel Camera. I can, however, throw in a few more words about Miller, who was responsible for bringing the animal action to a wide variety of pictures, from the rabid St. Bernard in Cujo (1983) to the more family friendly St. Bernard in Beethoven (1992), the cat in the Stephen King-based anthology horror Cat's Eye (1985) and the various farmyard fauna in Babe (1995) and its sequel Babe: Pig In The City (1998). Sadly, Miller passed away in 2008, aged 66, but his daughter, Teresa Ann Miller, has followed in her father's footsteps and become a professional animal trainer. She recently trained dogs for the 2014 Hungarian film White God.
* In my own personal headcannon, Eyewitness is the film that Sadness is referring to in Inside Out when she brings up, "the funny movie where the dog dies". Most people assume she's talking about either Old Yeller or Marley & Me, but how do you know she's not talking about this one?
Here's a word to the wise - if you ever get tempted to watch Sacha Gervasi's 2013 film Hitchcock about the backstage drama involved in making Psycho...don't.
I watched it last week and I can't recall the last time a film set
my teeth so thoroughly and consistently on edge.* Among other things,
the film's portrayal of Anthony Perkins (played by James D'Arcy) is so unbelievably mean-spirited, in that just about every line said by him or
about him is a snide dig at his closet homosexuality. There's an extent to which everyone involved plays more like heavy-handed caricatures of their real-world counterparts than any actual human being who's ever walked the planet (because it is that kind of film), but whereas Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson) and Vera Miles (Jessica Biel) are afforded the luxury of vague semblances of character development, Perkins is reduced to a mere running gag that's one hundred per cent at his expense. There's a bit
where he says, "Mr Hitchcock, I can't count how many times I've seen Strangers on a Train and Rope," to which my response was, "Oh good grief, are we really going there?". While D'Arcy's Perkins is busy reeling off the Two Gayest Hitchcock Films of All Time, my eyes couldn't help but wander down to his hands (actually, I took a vested interest in D'Arcy's hands because I was curious to see if the film would be exacting enough to remember that Perkins was left-handed) and I noticed that as he said this he had his right hand wedged between his crotch. Real classy. Obviously, his mannerisms here are intended to mirror those exhibited by Norman in the actual Psycho during his dinner conversation with Marion (because Gervasi's film is keen to push the suggestion that Norman's eccentricities and Perkins' eccentricities were effectively one and the same) but given the context, the implication is blatantly that Perkins is well-accustomed to using the aforementioned films for relieving his own repressed homoerotic tensions. Is D'Arcy's Perkins left-handed? Frankly, he didn't get enough screen time for me to judge either way, although I did notice that while prepping for the parlour scene he was carrying the motel register in his left hand. So that's good at least. Although I'm still intrigued by the fact that it's his right hand that looks to be itching for a date with Rosie Palms during his meeting with Hitchcock. Was that intentional, I wonder? It is, after all, entirely in keeping with Norman's own characterisation that the right hand would be the one betraying those impulses that Perkins is so desparate to keep under wraps. Then again, perhaps I'm giving too much credit to a film that's so irritatingly flippant in its regard for Perkins (and to the fan of Anthony Perkins there can be few things more aggravating than seeing Tony subject to constant mockery in a film in which he's forever in the shadow of Anthony Hopkins...hang about, I'll explain**).
If I appear to be inordinately obsessive over such a pedantic detail, it's because handedness is a very big deal for Norman Bates. There is a wonderful strand of symbolism running throughout Psycho and its sequels (and which I touched on last time I wrote about Psycho II) in which Norman's hands function as antithetical forces, pulling him in different directions in accordance with how the balance of power is tipping between his split personalities. Once we are aware that Norman's handedness acts as yet another manifestation of his perpetual inner conflict, it becomes possible to read his hand movements as further indicators of how that interplay is functioning. Norman's hands have each aligned themselves with opposing sides of his personality, with his left hand being the more benign of the two, and the hand on which he is most reliant for carrying out menial tasks at the Bates Motel. For Norman is (among other things) a southpaw. He does everything with his left hand, apart from the one thing he is most famous for - that is, butchering dames in showers (and the occasional home intruder upon the staircase) while dressed as his deceased Mother. That special talent he reserves for his right hand, for this is the hand more closely aligned with Norman's darker impulses, ie: the Mother half of his fractured psyche (this is the only thing I'll admit to finding somewhat sinister about Norman, whom I otherwise regard as a highly sympathetic character - he's so committed to assuming his Mother's identity that he can apparently change handedness in the process, which frankly borders on the surreal***). Obviously, Hitchcock implemented this motif to emphasise Norman's split personality, and possibly to lead the more sharp-eyed members of his audience down a false trail. But there is more going on here than a simple game of switcheroo.
According to the denouement given by Oakland's psychiatrist at the end of the original Psycho, Norman has never been "all Norman" (although he has frequently been "all Mother"), and if we are attentive to Norman's hand mannerisms we can observe how Mother is constantly interjecting her way into the scenario even in those scenes where we appear to be in only Norman's presence. During Norman's sandwiches-and-milk dinner date with Marion, he spends much of the conversation wringing his hands together, which might be interpreted as nothing more than the awkward mannerisms of a shy, socially stunted recluse struggling to compose himself when blessed with the unexpected companionship of such a desirable woman. But this hand-wringing is also emblematic of Norman's inner struggle, for his hands are locked together in a physical tussle, which takes on particular relevance during the portion of their conversation where Norman talks about private traps. Here, his clashing hands become analogous to his observations that, "We scratch and we claw, but only at the air; only at each other. And for all of it we never budge an inch." Norman's dialogue takes a disturbingly nihilistic turn, conveying something of the overwhelming despair with which he contends on a daily basis. His specific references to scratching and clawing are early hints of his latently violent nature, for scratching at other people with sharp kitchen implements does indeed turn out to be one of his reflexive responses to the horrors of his own entrapment, but they also call attention to his fingers, which are currently engaged in the very kind of futile impasse he is describing. Norman carries out his worst kind of scratching with his right hand, but this is not to say that the left hand isn't susceptible to an aching fury all of its own. Norman's left hand is the one more closely aligned with his own identity, and as such it is the hand more capable of articulating the rage and resentment he feels at being permanently reigned in by his Mother, denied not only the pleasures of a social life and sexual gratification but also the capacity to be a complete and separate human being. When Norman admits to Marion that he often feels the desire to reject his Mother, he raises up his left hand in gesticulation of his suppressed yearning for rebellion (in reality, Norman had his moment of rebellion ten years ago and it failed spectacularly to release him from his private trap, for Mother had already succeeded in planting the seeds of her dominion inside his mind). Norman's entire parlor conversation with Marion reveals him to be a swarm of incompatible impulses and desires (to the extent he flat-out contradicts his
statement on not minding his own private trap when challenged by Marion); mainly, his recognition that life with his Mother is bleak and
stifling and his pathological dependency on her, which ultimately
manifests in an overpowering hostility toward anything that might threaten to
come between them (not least reality).
At the end of Psycho, Richmond tells us that the Mother half has finally achieved total dominion over the Norman half, and this is consistent with what we see in the final scene, where the balance of power looks to have tipped decisively in the right hand's favour. It is Norman's right hand with which he entertains (but withholds from) swatting a fly, while his left hand stays hidden out of view, as if having bowed out of the conflict altogether. Of course, Richmond's dire prognosis is not borne out at the beginning of Psycho II, for not only has the Norman personality since reasserted its being, but Norman may even have achieved the remarkable feat of finally becoming "all Norman". There is no trace of Mother in the Norman who leaves confinement ready for the 80s, so it appears that, with the help of Raymond (Richmond's less insufferable sequel counterpart), he was able to turn the tide and become stronger than his invasive Mother persona (although, as Norman later describes the psychiatric procedures during his toasted cheese sandwiches lament, he makes it sound more akin to undergoing an involuntary surgical excision than to any conscious victory on his part). Mother's dominion has been defeated (for now), but we can still see Norman at the crossroads during his sandwiches-and-milk dinner date with Mary (who, unbeknownst to Norman, is Marion's second coming). The nature of Norman's inner conflict has changed, for it is no longer about the battle of wills between his contradicting personas, but rather his conscious awareness of what he used to be versus what he aspires to be now. The paradox Norman faces in attempting to live a life of normality is that it requires him to somehow accommodate the knowledge that his psychosis caused him to kill seven people. Fortysomething Norman is still deeply haunted by the past, but the past that currently hangs over him is the present of the original Psycho, and the revulsions of that sandwich-preparation sequence arise mainly from the challenges of assuming a routine of banal domesticity against a backdrop of such iconic horror. Still, there is a minor disturbance to the supposition that Norman's darker impulses have been entirely excised along with his Mother persona, for his hands reveal a slightly different story - when tasked with cutting the sandwich for Mary, he retains the knife in his left hand and slices it without incident, but the right hand still gets to exercise its say, in moving the plate, and by extension the knife, just an inch closer to the unsuspecting (or not) Mary. It's subtle, but it's there.
The threat of Norman's wayward right hand resurfaces, more prominently, around the midway point (after his grip on reality has already taken quite a beating, thanks to the combined - if opposing - vigilante tactics of Lila and Spool). Believing that Mother has returned to the house, Norman offers to remain at Mary's bedside and protect her while she sleeps, only to find himself unconsciously passing the knife from his left hand into his right as he watches over her and, disturbingly, steering the blade in her direction. Why does Norman appear momentarily gripped by the temptation to resume his old habits and give Mary a good skewering? The very same reason he was compelled to butcher her aunt twenty-two years ago; he feels sexually aroused by her, and that brings on Mother's tyranny. Analyses of the shower sequence from the original film interpreting the knife as a phallic symbol (complete with ejaculatory spurts of blood/chocolate syrup) are of course ten a penny, but it's hard to deny that such symbolism is present here. Norman raises the blade above Mary as an act of aspiring penetration, as he finds himself approaching that same treacherous intersection that had him hopelessly bisected all those years ago. Norman's attraction to Mary is all good and innocent so long as Mother isn't around to disapprove, but now that Norman is on the verge of abandoning his acceptance that he killed her, he finds that his loyalties are once again tested. Significantly, although the knife has found its way into the right hand once more, Norman keeps both hands clasped against it, and when he later stands by the window and asks Mary if he is becoming "confused" again, he has his fingers locked together around the handle in a manner reminiscent of his constant hand-wringing in the original. His psyche is once again a tangle of conflicting impulses born of dread, desire and desperation, and the knife hangs ominously in the midst of all that, ready to be wielded in whichever direction Norman is ultimately swayed.
And yet, there is one complicating factor which would appear to belie the fairly straightforward implication that Norman's left hand represents his benign side and his right hand his harmful one, for Psycho II also presents us with a scenario in which the reverse would appear to be the case. Whenever Norman answers the telephone (one of the sequel's key devices for charting his slow but steady regression from relative stability into violent insanity), he always does so with his right hand, but it's when things start to go wrong that his left hand takes hold of the receiver. This happens four times, for Mary twice attempts to intervene by taking the receiver from Norman, and every time it finds its way back into Norman's hands, he consistently makes a point of taking it with his right hand and then passing it over to his left. Clearly something strange is happening here, but what?
Norman answers the phone three times throughout Psycho II (and we are prompted to believe that he has been fielding numerous other calls off of screen). The first instance occurs immediately after Norman has encountered Toomey for the third (and final) time, so Norman assumes that the call is yet another of his low-blow harassment tactics. Norman is unnerved by the call, but since he is able to rationalise the situation he remains entirely in control throughout. He even produces a snappy comeback, in which he uses his history of disturbed behaviour to his advantage: "Mr Toomey, if this is you then you're sicker than I ever was." (The evidence suggests that it's actually Lila Loomis on the other end, but the same principle would apply.) Norman keeps the receiver in his right hand for the entirety of this call.
The second onscreen call occurs much later on, after Norman has learned from Raymond that Lila has been making the hoax calls and as he is confronting Mary about her complicity in this. Norman picks up the phone with his right hand and immediately greets the caller, whom he presumes to be Lila, then stops eerily short and switches the receiver over to his left hand. He then starts up a one-sided conversation with Mother. Mary attempts to interject, but when she listens in she hears no one on the other end. At this point, there is ambiguity as to whether Norman has been talking to Spool (who was canny enough to keep mum whenever Mary stuck her oar in) or if Norman's sanity slippage has reached its breaking point, but given that all of the information he apparently obtains from this call is verified by the end of the film, the answer is...both, maybe?
The third call, which acts as a precursor to the climax, is the only instance in which we actually discover who is on the other end of the line, presumably because it's the one character in the film's four-way conflict who doesn't have anything to hide - Raymond calls Norman from the motel lobby to let him know that he has located the source of the nuisance calls. Only Norman really has lost the plot at this stage; there is no longer any question of this from the viewers' perspective. He answers with his right hand, expecting to hear Mother on the other end, then passes the receiver over to his left hand and immediately resumes their conversation from earlier. He continues to talk to "Mother" long after Raymond has abandoned the call (on learning that Mary, whose game Raymond is wise to, is still with Norman) and that's when things take an acutely more sinister turn (particularly as we know for sure that Norman is now conversing with a dead line).
Is there any analogue to this in the original Psycho?
Kind of. We never see Norman talking on the telephone but we do see him
immediately after receiving a call from Sheriff Chambers (John McIntire). He still has
his hand on the receiver, and it is his left hand. This occurs right before he goes upstairs to confront Mother about the need to move her down into the fruit cellar.
The habitual receiver switching is a reminder that Norman's psyche is comprised of multiple contradictory impulses and, as with the knife pointing incident from earlier, when Norman seemed momentarily caught between his resolve to protect Mary and his latent desire to have his way with her, an indicator that some form of inner conflict is worming its way up to the surface. In the case of his rather baffling telephone routine, the conflict is a temporal one, for the fortysomething Norman is finally going back to his roots and renewing the cycle he was previously so bent on breaking free of. What we are witnessing in these moments is the disintegration of Norman's newly-established identity as a recovered psychotic eager to start anew, as he slowly reconnects with the emotionally warped mama's boy he's spent the entirety of the sequel thus far attempting to discard all traces of. Initially, when Norman is able to assert himself in the face of Toomey's derision (or what he believes to be Toomey), he does so using his right hand, the hand that ordinarily symbolises his darker nature, and we are prompted to see this as a testament to his newfound ability to maintain control of the situation. It is our best evidence so far that Norman may have successfully vanquished Mother, whose prospective return (down the telephone line) he is still balanced enough to reject at this stage. Crucially, this follows on from Mary's underhanded efforts to undermine his stability with her openly announced showering activities, which Norman had successfully countered by retreating to his piano in order to occupy his mind with a rendition of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata". We see that Norman is doing what he can to weather any and all challenges to his aspirations of achieving normality. Several hoax calls, one local murder (that he's aware of) and an uninvited basement dweller later, and Norman's resistances begin to wear down. Faced with the increasingly impossible task of maintaining his sanity in a world that seemingly doesn't want him to have it, Norman becomes ever more nostalgic for the "normality" with which he was once familiar. The chaotic receiver movements signify this confusion, and the blurring of his better judgement with his almost infantile longing that everything can perhaps be restored to as it was before the outside world intervened. At this point the right hand takes its cue to reassert its perverse influence; when it passes the receiver to his left hand, it does so not as a relinquishment of control, but as means of subjecting the left hand (and by extension, Norman) to Mother's voice and authority. Norman's left hand is his dominant hand, but conversely it is also tied up with the more submissive side of his psyche, the side that longed to curse Mother or at least defy her and leave her forever but likewise knew that he couldn't. For she's always scratching right back at him with the adjacent hand.
In a nutshell, whenever Norman's hands appear at odds, it's an indication that he's deeply at odds with himself. And when the left hand doesn't know who the right hand is killing...well, we'll get to Schizo.
* Oh wait, yes I can. It would be that live action Beauty and The Beast remake from last year. Ah well, Hitchcock wasn't quite THAT bad I suppose.
** Sad but true. When you're an Anthony Perkins fan there's a part of you that does somewhat inevitably develop a slight grudge against Anthony Hopkins, against your better judgement, purely because of the high number of people who tend to get the two confused. I know that's unfair, as it's totally not Anthony Hopkins' fault, but if I had a penny for every time I came across someone referring to "Anthony Hopkins' ground-breaking performance in Psycho" I'd certainly have enough for at least a matinee and a small soda by now. I appreciate why people get them mixed up, to point - not only are their names kind of similar, but people have them subconsciously logged away under the same file because between them they excelled at playing arguably the two most infamous and celebrated cinema serial killers of all-time. Still, Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates are two distinctly different breeds of cinema serial killers - we're talking the Godzilla and the Bambi of cinema serial killers, respectively.
"1. Seeing Bambi when I was two years old, and during the forest fire scene thinking that the movie theater was burning down." ~ "49 Things That Frightened and Disturbed Me When I was a Kid", Matt Groening (Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror #1, 1995)
Bambi, Walt Disney's 1942 coming of age picture about a young deer learning about life through the rhythms and the cycles of nature, is an enduring classic that has enchanted audiences for generations, in addition to causing no end of childhood heartbreak (guys, I don't know if you know this, but Bambi's mother dies. Shocking, isn't it?). The film climaxes thrilling set-piece in which Bambi and his father must flee to safety from a raging forest fire started by human carelessness, and the above statement by Groening is a testament to both the power of the sequence and to the magic of the theatrical experience in general. For what could be more beautifully, hypnotically immersive/apocalyptic than the sensation that your own world was crashing down in flames along with Bambi's?
Bambi is fairly unique among Disney films in that it does not have a traditional villain. Ask around as to who is the villain in Bambi and many will tell you that it is the hunter who kills Bambi's mother. Ah, but who is he? We never do meet the wretched soul who's been destroying the gentle innocence of innumerable children since 1942; he (or maybe she?) has no corporeal presence within the film, being represented purely by gunshot and by the forest critters' nagging sense of dread (which is also true of the earlier sequence when Man Was In The Forest). Humans do not appear onscreen at all in Bambi, but their presence is conveyed with such terrifying power that Man becomes less a species than a force, embodying everything that is alien and threatening to the natural world. Paradoxically, we recognise ourselves as aligning with that very force, and yet we come, much like the deer, to fear it. This is the genius of the film, in how it consistently prompts us to reevaluate how we stand in relation to its setting. The forest fauna are anthropomorphised enough for us to identify with them, and yet their naturalistic character movements create a clear sense of otherness (the deer more so than the skunk and the rabbits, who provide a genial comic relief) that keeps us from ever feeling truly at ease in mingling among them. Take the aforementioned scene where Bambi's mother meets the bullet with her name on it (not a great analogy because she doesn't have one, though I digress). We start out by getting up close and personal with Bambi and his mother as they enjoy the promise of the coming spring in the form of fresh grass, only to cut abruptly to a long shot which reminds us of just how exposed these creatures are in their open white environs. This is accompanied by the unsettling feeling that we are no longer accompanying the deer, but observing them from a distance, calculating the right moment at which to strike. It is a rude reminder that we are in effect the villains of this particular world, and it is upon sensing our presence that Bambi's mother becomes agitated. When she and Bambi are forced run, we are once again find ourselves at their sides, in the bizarre position of fleeing from our own offscreen doppelgangers. As an experience, Bambi has a compelling duality, offering us the thrill of being simultaneously the hunter and the hunted, the threat and the threatened. We share with in the vulnerability of these characters, and yet we must also contend with the fact that we are are effectively intruders in their fragile world; we are frauds, peeking stealthily into a hidden domain that did not invite us, and for which our mere presence has a tendency to spell destruction. Who killed Bambi's mother and burned his forest to the ground? We all did. Because we're human beings, Mother Nature's unwanted bastard children, a force so toxic that whenever we're around each and every other living being in the vicinity had better start running for their lives. If there was ever a film intent on making you hate yourself for being human, it's Bambi.
Of course, Bambi is also a prime example of what many refer to, in highly derogatory terms, as the "Disneyfication" of nature; that is, the tendency to depict nature as benevolent and virtuous rather than amoral and chaotic (as Werner Herzog is at pains to remind you that it is). With the exception of a few select species eternally destined to be the villains of Disney animation, such as wolves and felines (apologies to all you cat lovers out there, but Walt Disney was sure as heck not one of you), animals in the Disneyverse tend to be cuddly, dew-eyed innocents, dating right back to Disney's original full-length animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, where an assortment of friendly critters appear to give moral support to Snow White and later assist her in cleaning the dwarfs' home. It goes without saying that such depictions are prone to sentimentality and one of the first things that other animated media tends to go after when looking to subvert Disney convention (do you remember that cameo that Bambi and his father had in The Simpsons Movie? I've suddenly got that image in my head and I'm desperate to dislodge it). Recently, I was reading the book Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema by David Ingram*, which offers an analysis of Bambi in terms of how it relates to human perceptions of the wilderness and to schools of preservationist thought, noting that the Disney film endorses the view that nature exists in an inherent balance, which will be retained only so long as it is free from human interference. Says Ingram of Bambi, "Human beings bring only death and destruction to the pristine Eden inhabited by the benign and gentle wild animals" (p.19).
One thing that I will acknowledge is conspicuously absent from Bambi's depiction of a thriving ecosystem is predation of any kind, for the animals of Bambi's forest do not appear to hunt one another. We all know that, in reality, Friend Owl would have killed Thumper and Flower and scarfed them down whole, but here he acts as a benign mentor who dispenses pellets of wisdom, not half-digested animal bones (a characteristic implicit in his name, which in this context almost plays as a contradiction in terms). We see some malignant animals in the form of the hunting dogs who attack Bambi and Faline toward the end of the film, but these are foreign invaders under the command of Man. The forest's native residents interact with the air and geniality of the most impossibly friendly neighbourhood, the single exception
being Ronno, a rival male with whom Bambi is forced to duel in order to
prove himself worthy of Faline's affections. When left to its own devices, the forest exists in an almost exclusively harmonious bliss, the implication being that the forest is indeed Eden, representing nature in its most perfect and uncorrupted state. As with the story of Eden, it is human vice that brings the spectre of dread and destruction into the world. Which is not to say that nature in Bambi is depicted as an entirely benevolent force. Bambi does make room for the harsher side of nature, firstly in the whimsical April shower that swells into a violent storm and, more prominently, in Bambi's first experience of winter, which becomes an impediment to survival the instant the innocent novelty has worn off. It would also be inaccurate to suppose that there is no role for death within this Eden so long as Man is not around (although there is no killing) for the film's final images show a wordless farewell between Bambi and his father. The latter understands that his time has come and that he is obligated to step down and fade away now that a worthy successor has been established. Everything in the forest has its time and its place, and one of the greatest challenges Bambi faces is in mastering his resilience and his ability to cope with change; nature in Bambi is not static and change is inevitable, but it is constantly renewing itself and telling what is effectively the same narrative over and over. Man represents an intermittent disturbance to this cycle, yet Nature is ultimately shown to be more powerful than he, in its ability to regenerate and continue following the devastating forest fire (although Disney's film stops short of the revelation in Felix Salten's original novel, when Bambi happens across the remains of a human murder victim - yes, really - and realises that humans are as mortal and as vulnerable as any other species).
Ingram also looks at The Lion King, the 1994 offering that represented the commercial peak of Disney's so-called Renaissance era, and which might be seen as a conscious revisitation and "updating" of Bambi for the SEGA generation (that is, with the pop Broadway musical treatment and emphasis on celebrity voice-overs that were becoming increasingly prevalent in Hollywood animation at the time). Like Bambi, The Lion King is concerned with the cycles of nature and with the preservation of a natural order, recognised here under the banner of "The Circle of Life" (which also provides the hook for one of its pop Broadway tunes). The Lion King bookends itself in the exact same manner as Bambi, opening with a sunrise and a birth and closing with the dawn of a whole new generation, and echos many of the coming of age themes explored in Bambi - notably, the traumatic loss of a beloved parent. As such, it would be pertinent to consider how The Lion King accommodates its own visions of a non-human domain that emphasises nature as a cooperative force as opposed to one existing in a state of constant competition, and Man's special place within that equation.
The Lion King offers a greatly more anthropomorphic vision of the natural world than does Bambi, although unlike Bambi it does acknowledge the role of predation in the Circle of Life, which is necessitated by its principal characters being carnivores. Somewhat disingenuously, however, we never see our heroes hunt and kill, outside of a sequence in which Simba embraces an all-insect diet and devours a bug that is not granted the privilege of anthropomorphism. Nala, Simba's love interest, attacks and chases Pumbaa the warthog (in one of the few instances in which a lion character is permitted to exhibit their truly bestial nature) but her primal urges are forgotten the instant she runs into Simba and she is apparently not tempted to kill Pumbaa again on learning that he is an associate of Simba's. Upon finding the lost and unconscious Simba, Timon and Pumbaa briefly discuss the wisdom of taking in and raising a creature that will one day grow large enough to eat them, but are satisfied in their assumption that "he'll be on our side". There is no question whatsoever of Simba's basic instincts ever getting the better of him (this does come up, but is not explored all that extensively, in the Broadway musical). As far as the lions are concerned, the predatory drive exists not as a primal urge in the interests of facilitating one's own personal survival, but as a conscious means of upholding the basic order of being. This is explicitly raised during a sequence in which Mufasa attempts to explain to Simba the concept of the Circle of Life, and Simba suggests that the basic tenet of respecting all forms of life, from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope, is contradictory to the lions' status as antelope killers. Mufasa explains that, "When we die, our bodies become the grass, and the antelope eat the grass," a statement intended to emphasise the intrinsic equality and interdependency of all life which nevertheless has a tendency to rub some viewers the wrong way, given that the film's anthropomorphic view of animal hierarchy calls for the antelope (who, incidentally, are not given any kind of personality or characterisation) to be both the appreciative subjects and the literal food source of the lions. The lions are capable of withholding their predatory instincts whenever their sense of honour demands it, but when they do kill they do so conscientiously, and it is taken as a given that the prey animals will not begrudge the royals for thinning their herds, for they rescognise that their respective roles are mutually vital in enabling the regeneration of the Circle of Life that sustains them both (or perhaps the antelope secretly enjoy the thought of exacting revenge by munching on grasses growing from the remains of fallen royals).
Of course, the most egregious contradiction to Mufasa's teachings that "we are all connected in the great Circle of Life" occurs in the very same sequence, where it is made clear that Mufasa does not extend this sense of benevolence and interconnectivity to the hyenas, who are as foreign and unnatural to the Pridelands as those hunting dogs were to the forest in Bambi. If the hyenas have their place in the Circle of Life, it is firmly upon the outskirts, where they are denied the riches of the Pridelands and expected to live in perpetual poverty. When Scar the Usurper takes over as king, his first action is to allow the hyenas access to the Pridelands (albeit for entirely self-serving reasons), which constitutes such an extreme violation of the natural order that the land itself literally shrivels up and dies. Ingram accuses the film of "construct[ing] an ecological rhetoric of nature in order to naturalize specific power relationships: the Circle of Life conflates a Darwinian sense of "place"...with knowing one's place in a social hierarchy based on conservative notions of power and authority" (p.22). I can certainly agree that the decision to characterise Shenzi and Banzai, the film's only verbal hyenas, as African American and Latino respectively was particularly unfortunate and, at best, opens up the film's central themes to misinterpretation.
Hyenas may be undesirable in the Circle of Life, but the one creature who apparently doesn't factor in at all would be Bambi's old adversary, Man. Not only is The Lion King entirely devoid of human characters, there is no sense of human agency whatsoever in Simba's kingdom; these animals exist in a world in which Man seemingly has never set foot. Although there are certainly valid discussions to be had around the film's representation of an almost mythically untamed African wilderness and around Ingram's observation that "Nature exists in the film as a national park from which the Masai, the human inhabitants of the real Serengeti, are completely written out" (p.23), I think the absence of humans can be attributed to the fact that, for the purposes of this world, they do not exist. Unlike Bambi, The Lion King is not a Man vs Nature story, but a straight-up Aesopian allegory in which animal characters function as analogues for human constructs and archetypes. Hence, there is no role for humans in this world because the animals already fulfill all of their niches. Unlike the animals in Bambi, the characters in The Lion King also exhibit an awareness that they are part of not so much a great Circle of Life as a wider corporate landscape, and a strong sense of the Disney brand infuses the film in ways that it would not have in an earlier project such as Bambi, when Disney had yet to become such an all-encompassing cultural force - this is most apparent in one scene where Zazu and Scar display an inexplicable mutual awareness of a certain Disneyland attraction. Inevitably, at a time when the emphasis in Disney features was turning to snappy writing and those aforementioned celebrity voice-overs, The Lion King is a far, far wordier picture than is Bambi, and the script is replete with cultural references and analogies which logically speaking shouldn't translate into this particular setting (one example being when Timon asks Simba if he wants him to "dress in drag and do the hula" - that Timon should possess a concept of gender dress codes is frankly ludicrous in a world where the animals do not wear clothes in the first place, to say nothing of how he knows about a traditional dance from Polynesian culture). Man might not exist in The Lion King, but his greasy fingerprints can be glimpsed all over the film. Humanity's role in The Circle of Life, therefore, is neither as a part of the balance or as the debilitating disturbance witnessed in Bambi, but as a winking Man Behind The Curtain, intermittently jarring you out of the reality of the film in order to remind you how much you enjoy a silly cultural reference for a silly cultural reference's sake and urging you to visit Disneyland and indulge your love/hate relationship with that infernal Small World ride. Ultimately, The Lion King is at ease with its humanity in a way that Bambi is characteristically not.
(Disney's third and all-too-typically forgotten animal-orientated ecopic, Brother Bear - which Ingram's book predates - appears to struggle on how to accommodate its ursine protagonists' predatory urges with this underlying longing for a unified nature, which is necessary to provide contrast with its human lead's cynical assumptions about how the world works. On the one hand, the non-bear animals are clearly shown to be afraid of the bears, and yet this fear is inexplicably forgotten during a musical sequence in which Koda invites the other animals to accompany him to the salmon run. I don't get it either.)
Ingram singles out Bambi's climactic forest fire sequence as an example of how parts of the film can be seen as reflecting outdated attitudes toward conservation, namely the assumption that forest fires are inherently bad and to be actively opposed, which Ingram identifies as being in accordance with forestry polices of the 1940s but clashing with subsequent insights into the beneficial role that fire can also play in the regeneration of forest habitats. Hence, the fire at the end of the film need not necessarily represent the Apocalypse, but just another facet in nature's complicated means of perpetuating itself (a suggestion that I doubt would offer much consolation to Bambi and his friends as they contend with the immediacy of the peril). Of course, the purpose of the forest fire sequence is to emphasise the tremendous impact that human activity inevitably has upon the wider world, often without conscious consideration. The biggest irony of Bambi, as far as its depiction of animal-human relations is concerned, is that the greatest devastation Man brings to the forest happens not through intentional encroachment but by total accident, as it is from a poorly-extinguished campfire that the horrifying blaze originates. Disney's Bambi is denied the lesson afforded to Salten's Bambi about the fundamental mortality of Man, but our ultimate takeaway is that Man may be more weak and foolish than purely malignant, an enemy to himself as much as to the forest. It is only appropriate that we should find ourselves suffocating in an inferno of our own making; Bambi reminds us that we will be the agents in our own downfall if we are not conscientious in our dealings with the Earth.
The forest fire sequence from Bambi has remained so heavily ingrained in public consciousness over the years that the film's characters have enjoyed a periodic association with forest fire prevention efforts in the US. In 1944, Walt Disney approved the use of Bambi's likeness in a campaign orchestrated by the Cooperative Forest Fire Prevention program, although he would only license the character for a year, after which Bambi was replaced by an original character, Smokey Bear, who has remained synonymous with US fire prevention campaigns ever since. Bambi has, however, reappeared in subsequent campaigns alongside Smokey (including the PSA below), exploiting our equation of childhood innocence with the purity of the Disneyfied wilderness in order to awaken our appreciation of the forest and our tendencies toward care and preservation.
Does it frighten and disturb ME?
To this day, I have not had the pleasure of seeing Bambi on the big screen, so I can only envy the young Matt for his vividly traumatic experience. But dammit, I do love me some Bambi, and the forest fire sequence still ranks as one of the all-time greatest in theatrical animation. Every time I see it, I'm in awe at how dazzlingly, searingly intense it is. It truly does feel as it the entire world is going up in smoke.
Smokey The Bear, though? God, he's horrifying. Although I think that does actually help in driving home the graveness of his message. Be sure to extinguish that campfire properly, kids. You don't want to see Smokey get mad.
*Somewhat typically, Ingram's book contains no reference to the one film that I was really interested in reading some critical discourses on. So I may even have to write my own. If I do, then be warned that it won't be at all pretty.
