A Day or a Lifetime - Sink Overflowing (Deleted Scene)

The following scene was excised from the final cut of Barton Fink but can be found among the deleted scenes included as bonus content in some home media releases of film.  It follows on from Barton's second meeting with Charlie, revealing what happens in the immediate aftermath once Charlie has left the room.

Barton, still recovering from the head-banging he endured during Charlie's wrestling demonstration, starts gazing up at the picture of the sunbathing woman when he is suddenly interrupted by the sound of dripping coming from the bathroom.  He goes to investigate, and finds the taps in his sink running and the bowl overflowing.  Barton puts his hand into the water and pulls out the source of the obstruction - a small wad of cotton wool which he eventually recognises as being the same wad that Charlie had inserted up his infected ear a little earlier.  Barton flinches with revulsion and drops the cotton back into the sink, where it is immediately swallowed by the plug hole.

Particularly sharp-eyed viewers may have noticed that when Charlie steps back out of the bathroom (having gone in there, ostensibly, to fetch a damp cloth for Barton's battered head) the cotton wad has disappeared from his infected ear, but there is no explanation as to what actually becomes of it in the final cut of the film.  Perhaps viewers are able to make their own inferences, but there is nothing to explicitly indicate that he disposed of it in Barton's sink.

Myself, I find it a bit unfortunate that this moment wound up being cut because, as noted in the previous entry, it disrupts a pattern that was visibly being established in terms of Charlie's visits to Room 621 and how each of these scenes concluded.  That is to say, Barton's attentions fall back upon the picture of the sunbathing woman, only to be diverted by an aspect of his surrounding environs mysteriously unraveling, be it the wallpaper peeling or the bathroom sink overflowing.  Whenever Charlie departs, he always leaves behind a little piece of chaos for Barton to contend with, and dripping liquids seem to be a recurring feature of this (dripping, we recall, indicates an underlying malaise and ugliness that goes beyond concealment or containment).

It is also, quite frankly, rather a baffling cut, because Charlie indirectly refers back to the occurrence during his third meeting with Barton, when he comments that he feels like he hears everything that goes on in the Earle, due to "pipes or something".  In the absence of this particular scene, the audience is unable to make the connection between Charlie hearing everything through the pipes of the hotel and the cotton wad from his infected ear having previously been ingested by said pipes.  Later still in the film, when Barton and Audrey spend the night together, a tracking shot shifts us away from the love-making couple and into the bathroom, where it closes in upon the plug hole and goes deep into the pipes, a beautifully sordid shot that nevertheless loses some of its impact without the knowledge that we are making the exact same journey as Charlie's cotton wad did prior.  I can only assume that the Coens deemed Charlie's previous reference to the hotel pipes to be sufficient enough a callback to enable the audience to make sense of this sequence. In fairness, Charlie appears to have an uncanny enough connection with the Hotel Earle already without the need to infer that his knowledge of everything that happens therein is specifically due to him "bugging" the bathroom pipes with wads of cotton wool from his ear.

A Day or a Lifetime - Charlie Calls #2

 

Charlie: How about family, Barton?  How're you fixed in that department?

Barton: My folks live in Brooklyn with my uncle.

Charlie: Mine have passed on. It's just the three of us now...what's the expression?...me, myself and I.

Barton: Sure, that's tough, but in a sense we're all alone in the world, aren't we Charlie?  I'm often surrounded by family and friends, but...

Charlie: You're no stranger to loneliness, then?

Barton's second encounter with Charlie occurs after his initial meeting with Mayhew and, even more crucially, Mayhew's secretary Audrey, with whom Barton has attempted, unsuccessfully, to strike up a more intimate relationship.  If his first encounter with Charlie served largely to establish what Barton, for all of his pretensions, really thinks of the common man that he purports to represent, here the emphasis leans more upon the extent to which Barton and Charlie are kindred spirits, connected by a mutual loneliness and both harrowed by their festering sexual frustrations.  To say nothing of their shared compulsion to explore the inner workings of the human mind - in one case figuratively, the other much more literally.

Barton is very much an outsider to the world of sexual activity, but it fascinates him, as evidenced by his response when confronted with yet another of Hotel Earle's auditory disturbances, this time in the form of a couple who are apparently making love in the room next door.  Overly-rambunctious neighbours are, like poor air conditioning and hungry mosquitos, another example of the kind of perfectly familiar intrusion one might expect to encounter on the most intensely mundane of vacations or business excursions.  And yet there is immediately sinister quality to these noises, being as they are the only genuine evidence we get throughout the entirety of the film that the hotel has any tenants at all besides Charlie and Barton (and no, the numerous pairs of shoes we see lined up in the corridor to be shined by Chet are not in themselves "proof" that there are actually occupants in the adjacent rooms).  The love-making couple feel somewhat out of place within the deadening, uncomfortably barten world of the Earle, but their intrusion comes as a welcome one to Barton, who obligingly presses his head against the wall for a further listen.  A link between Barton's sexual energies, however vicariously satisfied, and his creative energies is heavily implied when he is suddenly compelled to head back toward his typewriter - now, tellingly, surrounded by crumpled up pieces of paper from various false starts and abandoned efforts.  At this point, we see the camera zoom across the keys of the typewriter and into the blankness of the typing paper - as it does so, the screen is filled with a blinding light, which could be taken to signify the creative enlightenment that will finally enable Barton to move past his writer's block, only for Charlie to enter into the room and bring the process to an abrupt halt.

Ostensibly, Charlie's arrival represents a disruption - arguably, he has snapped Barton back into reality just as he was about to find escapism and creative expression in a fictional world of his own construction.  Alternatively, the exact opposite is transpiring, and that preceding movement into a bright, empty space signifies Barton's "breaking through" into an altogether different reality, one in which Charlie is ready and waiting to greet him (a reading which could be taken to support the popular interpretation that Charlie does not actually exist, but is in fact a figment of Barton's own imagination).  Either way, Barton does not seem at all put out to be interrupted by Charlie, whom he greets cordially as a friend.  No longer the threatening stranger he appeared to be back when he and Barton first locked eyes, Charlie now wanders into Barton's room, sits himself upon the bed and converses with him freely.

It is during this encounter that we get our very first reference to Charlie's chronic ear infection, which will later develop into one of the film's most significant and unsettling motifs, although having acknowledged, forebodingly, that he cannot trade his head in for a new one, Charlie very quickly shifts matters on to inquiring about Barton's marital status.  Barton establishes that he is neither married or in a relationship, which he attributes to his writing and to his tendency to "get so worked up over it", meaning that he doesn't have a lot of attention left over to spare.  In other words, he is too self-absorbed to be capable of giving adequate consideration to the needs and desires of another individual - a point Barton duly demonstrates when, unable to resist going off on another of his egocentric little tangents, he immediately cuts Charlie off as he is about to bore him with the details of his own professional life.  Barton's attention is what Charlie ultimately wants - he makes this clear at the end of the film when he berates Barton for his failure to listen - for he too is a lonely individual and, in spite of his playful heterosexual posturing (the reveal that the underside of his tie is adorned with the illustration of a near-naked female, his claim that he gets "opportunities galore" in his line of work as an insurance salesman) intimacy with Barton is what he seeks.  Charlie informs Barton that, since the death of his parents, he is left with "just the three of us now...me, myself and I" (a nod toward Charlie's multiple conflicting identities), prompting Barton to imply that, despite often being surrounded by family and friends, he is seldom able to shake his own feelings of intense isolation.  As Charlie deduces that Barton is "no stranger to loneliness", we witness a fleeting moment of genuine empathy between the two.

Charlie then presents Barton with a picture of himself on the job - like Charlie's ear infection, this will have relevance later on in the film, where particularly attentive viewers may notice that it comes to function as a sort of counterpoint to the picture of the sunbathing beauty (Barton places it in the corner of the same frame).  Charlie is keen to establish himself as Barton's muse (we get our first real inkling of this at the end of this meeting when Charlie invites Barton to make use of his own expertise as a former wrestler by engaging with him in a bout of wrestling - see below).  The picture he gives Barton, which depicts a smiling and well-presented Charlie in a white business suit, allegedly plying his trade as a traveling insurance salesman in Kansas City, comes with a story about one of Charlie's policy holders (one who was carrying fire and life, whose hubby was out of town and whose third quarter payment was way past due) although Barton declines to hear it, choosing instead to make his own typically condescending assumptions about the details of Charlie's life, largely as a means of overselling the importance of his own.  Barton's assumptions about Charlie are of course false, but then so is the impression of Charlie's life given within the picture.  At the very least it does not reveal the full story.  Later in the film, when Barton runs into Mastrionatti and Deutsch, who present him with a picture of their own offering a very different representation of Charlie (or Karl Mundt, as they refer to him), they infer that Charlie's claims of being a traveling insurance salesman are a lie, calling into question the authenticity not only of the picture, but of just about anything that he may have disclosed to Barton about his work and his life.  According to Mastrionatti and Deutsch, Charlie's mention of having been in Kansas City is at least true, although his interactions with the housewives he encountered there were none too savoury.  (How does his anecdote about the female policy holder even end?  Did she try to barter her way out of the third quarter payment by propositioning Charlie, as seems to be the implication, or did her husband being out of town leave her open to attack from Charlie's unique brand of chaos?)

Barton informs Charlie that he envies him for his daily routine, far removed from the pains and responsibilities of having to "plumb the depths" and "dredge something up from inside" that his own job as a writer entails.  He does not realise just how closely he and Charlie are actually connected in this sense, for Charlie makes a habit of dredging things up from the inside on a more literal basis, and he is well-acquainted with the horrors that come with exploring the torturous territory of the human head.  As Barton speaks of the kind of pain he experiences as a writer, a pain that he anticipates that anyone else would know little about, Charlie is seen pressing his fingers against his infected ear and wincing, signalling that pain is an all-too familiar aspect of his daily routine.

In a show of false modesty, Barton reveals that the screenplay he is working on is for a wrestling picture starring Wallace Beery, a detail which immediately piques Charlie's interest, for it turns out that he was an amateur wrestler back in school and is also a huge fan of Beery (although he prefers Jack Oakie).  Barton admits that he himself knows little about wrestling and that he is actually not very interested in "the act itself" (a clear indication that he may be severely out of his depth in this particular assignment), but Charlie manages to persuade him, briefly, to participate in a demonstration of the wrestling basics, resulting in Charlie easily overpowering Barton and leaving him in a dazed and crumpled heap on the hotel room floor.  Obviously, Barton is no match for this so-called Common Man when it comes to hands-on experience, but this scene has deeper significance, as many (including the Coens themselves, reportedly) perceive the act of wrestling between the two as having sexual undertones, an interpretation reinforced by Charlie's jovial comments about waking up the downstairs neighbours (if indeed there are any downstairs neighbours to be woken up within the Earle) and the obvious innuendo in his observation that there is "usually a lot more grunting and squirming before the pin".  (This interpretation also shows up later within the context of the film during the final confrontation with Mastrionatti and Deutsch, who deduce that Charlie and Barton have engaged in some form of sexual activity, to which Barton naively responds, "He's a man.  We wrestled.")

Before being persuaded by Charlie to get down on his hands and knees and wrestle, Barton signals his initial decline by swiveling his chair back in the direction of his desk and of the picture of the sunbathing beauty above it, only for Charlie to promptly and forcibly swivel him back.  Once again, there is the suggestion of a rivalry between Charlie/the Earle and the picture of the bikini-clad woman - as with the previous encounter, when Charlie leaves the room, Barton's attentions once more return to that image of alluring beauty, only for his moment of peace to be cut short by a disturbance from elsewhere in the room.  We saw this happen previously with the wallpaper peeling, but on this occasion the source of the disturbance is in the bathroom, in which Charlie had briefly entered before departing.  Curiously, this particular moment is cut from the finished film (unfortunately so, because it disrupts an obvious pattern in Barton's three initial encounters with Charlie and how each of them concludes), but can be found among the deleted scenes on the DVD release, and will be explored in greater detail in the upcoming entry.

Farthing Wood Deaths Revisited: Series 2 - Dreamer

 
Scarface and Lady Blue had a litter of cubs around the same time as Fox and Vixen – a nameless female cub who stops appearing after only a couple of episodes, and a male cub named Ranger, who goes on to play an important role in the latter half of the series.  Although Scarface initially declares them “better than anything that other lot could produce” and believes that Ranger will be of invaluable use in his ongoing vendetta against the red foxes, he changes his mind when he actually sees the red fox cubs.  Ranger is turning out to be a disappointment to him, which Scarface puts down to the contaminating presence of Lady Blue’s “lily-livered blood,” and he now firmly believes that Fox and Vixen’s genes are the superior combination.

Episode 7 opens with one of the red fox cubs being found dead, and it comes as no surprise that it should be Dreamer, a female cub with a very short attention span and a penchant for wandering off on her own.  Scarface had spent much of the previous episode skulking about in the bushes near the cubs, and his intentions seemed none too good.  Coincidence?  Probably not, although nobody actually saw what happened.  Dreamer’s death remains the series’ greatest mystery non-mystery.

HORROR FACTOR: 10. We’re used to youngsters being fair game by now, and Dreamer’s carelessness in the prior episode had marked her out as an obvious candidate for misfortune.  Still, the sheer eeriness of this death, coupled with it being the episode’s opening image, make it one of the more spine-chilling that the series has to offer.  The score of perfect 10 reflects not so much shock or brutality, but the quiet, understated sense of unease that surrounds it.  Dreamer's death may not be outright horrific (although the extensive focus upon her dead body might upset some of the more squeamish viewers), but it is very, very unsettling.

NOBILITY FACTOR: 1. We technically don’t know the exact circumstances of this one, although it’s very much a death for a death’s sake.

TEAR-JERKER FACTOR: 8. Ugh, those damned violin strings again.  Dreamer had only been around for two episodes, but I think that's still sufficient time for us to have garnered some attachment to her as a character.  The tender manner with which Vixen is seen nuzzling her body, then glancing back one last time before leaving her daughter forever, are also very affecting.

RATING: 19

Farthing Wood Deaths Revisted: Series 2 - Mole

I noted that the last three Farthing Wood deaths I covered back in November all involved extremely minor characters - that is, animals who were trotted on screen purely for the purpose of having them die less than two seconds later.  This death, however, was right at the opposite end of the spectrum, as it marked the very first time that a major character had been killed off within the show.  Series 1 initially had eight characters whom I would regard as being "major" players - Fox, Badger, Owl, Weasel, Mole, Toad, Adder and Kestrel - with Vixen and Whistler joining that list toward the end.  Deaths in Series 1 were reserved strictly for members of the supporting cast, but here's where that particular barrier came crashing down and the original eight lost one of their ranks.

In fairness, Mole's prominence in the series had already been on the wane since Series 2 - he'd had a decent-sized role in an earlier arc involving Badger's disappearance, but once that had concluded he was barely seen at all.  He largely kept his nose out of the poacher arc, but what little we did see of him revealed that he'd shacked up with a female mole of half his age (well, it's implied).

Badger, who had been very close to Mole in Series 1, is concerned when the thaw arrives and Mole remains unaccounted for.  Fox begins to suspect that Mole didn't make it through the harsh winter months, but is reluctant to raise the possibility with Badger.  Come the spring, when Fox and Vixen's attentions have turned to bringing up their own litter of cubs, they are visited by the female mole, who delivers the sad news - Mole died in his sleep during the winter.  He didn't depart without spreading his seed a little though - the female mole (her official name is Mateless, but I personally think that's a bit cruel) is accompanied by two youngsters, one of whom will never be seen again (making me wonder why they bothered to include her at all) and the other of whom, Mossy, is the spitting image of his father, and primed to succeed him as Farthing Land's resident mole.  So yes, despite killing Mole off, he wasn't truly being axed from the series, as his son, who looked and sounded exactly like him, would effectively be filling the void.  Mossy doesn't quite have the same personality as his father (whereas Mole was sensitive and soft-hearted, Mossy tended to show annoyance more frequently) but he served much the same purpose.

Readers of the original Colin Dann novels may have anticipated this death at some point, but odds are that this development would still have caught them off-guard, as Mole's literary counterpart died a lot later on in the Farthing Wood timeline (after the Scarface arc had concluded).  I suspect that his death was shuffled forward in anticipation of another major character death that would be happening quite shortly down the road, one which had no basis in any of Dann's novels and represented rather a bold liberty on the part of the TV series.  But we're getting ahead of ourselves there.

HORROR FACTOR: 5. An off-screen death and implied to be one of the more peaceful in the Farthing Wood canon.  The "horror" here relates to the pure shock of learning that one of the major characters had died, which, despite some foreshadowing in the previous episode, still packs quite a heavy blow.

NOBILITY FACTOR: 10. It was cold and Mole was old.  His time had simply come.

TEAR-JERKER FACTOR: 10.  You know what makes this death particularly heart-breaking?  Badger's reaction.  He isn't around when Mateless makes her formal announcement about his old friend's passing, but when he later shows up and Vixen tries to break the news to him, he retreats sharply into denial.  When, subsequently, he encounters Mossy, he takes him for Mole and refuses to hear otherwise, to the extent that Vixen convinces the reluctant Mossy to play along in order to spare Badger's feelings.  As a kid, I recall being rather frustrated with Badger's behaviour here, as his obstinacy on this matter seemed very out-of-character, but now that I'm older I have a different perspective.  It's evident that Badger knew along that Mossy wasn't really Mole, he just wasn't prepared to look the matter straight in the face.  Perhaps it can also be attributed to a slight onset of senility - much like Mole, Badger was getting on in years.

RATING: 25

Audio Oddities - Final Relaxation (The Golding Institute)

 
Billed as "your ticket to death through hypnotic suggestion", Final Relaxation is not an audio oddity for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.  A quick glance at the album cover - an image of a decomposing dolphin carcass washed up on an otherwise serene-looking beach - should be indication enough of that.  Final Relaxation proclaims itself to be "the most unusual recording ever sold", an audacious claim for sure, although I would certainly be hard-pressed to name a novelty record founded upon a more deliciously warped concept than this one.  Released by Ipecac Recordings in 2006, Final Relaxation was the fourth (and, to date, final) in a series of releases attributed to the mysterious "Golding Institute".  The three previous installments, Sounds of the American Fast Food Restaurants (1996), Sounds of the San Francisco Adult Bookstores (1997) and Sounds of the International Airport Restrooms (1998), were all released on 7" by Planet Pimp Records, and served as pastiches of the field recording/sound effects record (with Folkways Records' "Science Series" being a particularly obvious target), deliberately picking out some of the most simultaneously mundane and unappealing subject matter imaginable.

Final Relaxation, released on compact disc, has its sights upon a slightly different target - the relaxation record, a recording purporting to benefit the listener by offering techniques in stress management.  Such recordings had been in existence for decades - indeed, Folkways Records had taken their own stab at the genre in 1959 with Lee B. Steiner's Sounds of Self-Hypnosis Through Relaxation - and were going strong well into the 2000s, a more contemporary example being Paul McKenna's Deep Relaxation, released in 2003.  These weren't just limited to instructional recordings from noted psychiatrists and hypnotists - anybody could create a "relaxation record" by whipping together a bit of new age-style music sprinkled with natural sound effects of some variety, and throughout the 1990s trendy gift shops were rife with discs and cassettes with names such as "Ocean Dreams" or "Songs of The Coyote", promising peace, tranquility and re-connection with nature, their covers typically adorned with calming imagery of clouds, waves or bottlenose dolphins.  The dolphin was certainly a persuasive animal where relaxation records were concerned, with one such recording, Dolphin Touch by Ilizabeth Fortune and Dr. Jeffrey D. Thompson, utilising modified dolphin noises "to induce the production of alpha, theta and delta brain-wave patterns in the human cerebral cortex for the purpose of deep relaxation, inspiration and meditation."  It's here that we might appreciate the playful subversion embedded in Final Relaxation's rather unpleasant choice of cover image - it gives us a dolphin alright, but a dead, decomposing one, evoking the decay and mortality that permeate every corner of the natural world.  Mortality is very much the primary occupation of Final Relaxation, although the recording itself never flat-out admits it.  Make no mistake - this is a relaxation record looking to make you relax to the point of no return.

Final Relaxation does have something of a vague narrative surrounding it - the press release information explicitly identifies the Golding Institute as "a radical cult-group masquerading as an educational organisation", while the CD inlay takes the form of a mock will, bequeathing the owner's estate to The Golding Institute, "so that they may continue their work for the benefit of all mankind", and declaring that "The Golding Institute is in no way responsible for my passing, and that I died solely through weakness of character and intellect."  While there are a few hints within the recording itself indicating that Final Relaxation may indeed be the work of a radical cult seeking to harvest multiple victims and their money - notably when it instructs the listener to first leave a note letting whoever finds their "body vehicle" know of the benefits of their programme and setting out instructions for the disposal of their financial assets - for the most part it's the undercurrent of sheer misery and malevolence that makes it so fantastically sinister.  For Final Relaxation is intent not merely upon making you die, but upon ensuring that your final thirty-two minutes will be as painful and uncomfortable as humanly possible.

Final Relaxation, unsurprisingly, makes for one hell of a freaky listen, and much of its success in that regard rests upon the performance of "medical adviser" Christoph Heemann, our guide to the final relaxation process.  Final Relaxation takes the (not unreasonable) assumption that nobody will be entering into it blind and from the start makes no attempt to pass itself off as a genuine relaxation record, with Heemann's narration hitting an immediately unsettling note - an exemplary combination of skin-crawling monotony, uneasy pauses and sudden, peculiar emphasis upon particular words and syllables (the manner in which he occasionally hisses the "x" in "relax", for example, is a real tension-spiker).  Heemann begins by citing a few examples of famous people who have successfully used the "Final Relaxation" technique: "Jan Berry of Jan & Dean,  actor Richard Harris, top chart maker Robert Palmer, entertainer Bob Hope and England's beloved Queen Mother".  At this point alarm bells should already be ringing - these are all celebrities who have passed on and, more specifically, celebrities who had passed on in the early 00s, making them recently deceased at the time of Final Relaxation's release.  Heemann never explicitly states that the final relaxation technique means death, emphasising merely that is a "sleep so deep that it could only take place in a graveyard or an urn", that all of our worldly troubles will permanently cease once the technique has been successfully applied, and the benefits of having a body that is beyond all sensation, to the extent that "ten men can put their cigarettes out on your naked chest."

Heemann himself is evidently not a happy man.  As the recording continues, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between instructions to the listener and personal outbursts revealing his bitterness, disappointment and general disgust at life, although on occasion he will slip unabashedly into the latter ("Last year alone I paid 14,000 dollars in taxes, yet the road leading to my home is riddled with potholes...").  He makes his sexual frustrations plain when he instructs his female listeners to "remove your clothing, starting with any skirts or dresses, continuing to the undergarments, such as a brassiere, or any sorts of lacy sorts of underwear that may restrict your ability to take part in the final relaxation."  Most troubling of all, Heemann hints that he may be deriving some form of twisted gratification from the suffering of the listener - read this particular sample of dialogue out of context and tell me that it doesn't just drip with malice:

"I hope it's hot in your room right now.  I hope you're sweating and choking.  Is blood trickling out of your mouth and onto the pillow?  Good.  How do you feel?  Relaxed?  Not relaxed enough?  Oh, you will soon, for in approximately five minutes, you will embark on the final relaxation."

Heemann's performance ensures that this is all brilliantly understated, however, conveying our adviser as someone weighed down by an overwhelming sense of pain and weariness, increasingly manifesting itself as spite.

As noted, Heemann isn't quite as interested in soothing your troubles as he is in deepening your agitation, his "relaxation" technique consisting of little more than having the listener imagine themselves in all manner of gruesome and grotesque situations.  The frequency with which these scenarios flicker between stomach-churning horror and laugh-out-loud hilarity is a great part of what makes Final Relaxation such an uneasy, but also rewarding listening experience.  Some of the imagery Heemann evokes is outright bizarre (one of the more benign examples being a totally left of field reference to Gene Krupa's final concert), at other times he piles on the horrific details to the point of absurdity ("rats on your stomach, eating their way through to get an apple!", "the eyes are stinging, as if they've been urinated into, or as if a box jellyfish has taken up residence on your face"), and at others Heemann's blatant underlying malevolence is what really sells it ("are you allergic to hay?").  And then there are a few select moments that stand out as genuinely, unreservedly disturbing, the pinnacle undoubtedly being when Heemann advises the listener to snap their front teeth off, which, if carried out correctly, should leave the taste of the saline in their mouth.

The intensity of the recording really kicks into gear within the last five minutes, as Heemann assures us that we are drawing nearer to the final relaxation, and his own vitality undergoes a notable deterioration.  It would no doubt be unsporting of me to reveal the full details of the ending, but I will say that it concludes on an appropriately (and chillingly) abrupt note.

Ultimately, Final Relaxation is best recommended to those who like their humour particularly dark or those who are gluttons for punishment.  Its macabre concept and decidedly gruesome content mean that it is awfully difficult listening at times - however much you may laugh, you'll find yourself wincing and retching all the more more - and yet the sheer strangeness of the recording, coupled with Christoph Heemann's hilariously repulsive performance, make it a must-have for all hoarders of audio oddities.  I can only hope that, over time, a robust and richly-deserved cult following will develop.  "I Survived The Final Relaxation" bumper stickers, anyone?

The Chips' Comic Songs - 12 Songs From The Channel 4 Series

 
Chips' Comic is yet another pre-school series that seemed ubiquitous throughout my early childhood and appears to have vanished without trace ever since - so much so that, if not for the odd recording on my family's collection of old VHS tapes or the existence of the item that I'm going to discuss in this particular entry, I'm not sure if I'd be totally convinced that I didn't just dream the whole damned thing.  Fortunately, this website provides a fair bit of information on the series, thus confirming that I'm not the only person out there who harbours any memories of it at all.

Chips' Comic first aired on Channel 4 in 1983 and was one of the channel's earliest attempts at creating a series for children (a market not typically regarded as their forte, although Pob is still fairly well-remembered).  It followed the efforts of three comic book editors, two human (Inky, played by Gordon Griffin and Elsa, played by Elsa O'Toole) and one canine (Rover, played by Andrew Secombe, who later went on to voice Watto in the Star Wars prequels) to assemble a weekly comic, which was then fed into and published by an intelligent computer named Chips. The big gimmick of the series was that the comic book in question was not, in fact, fictitious - you could actually go out and purchase a copy at your local newsagents.  With hindsight, I'm amazed that I could apparently ever stand Rover - his doggy costume makes the adult skin I live in crawl.

Child of the 1980s speculates that the show was pretty short-lived (its dependence upon the existence of an actual "Chips' Comic", while ambitious, was alas not very practical in the main), although Channel 4 were definitely still airing episodes in the late 80s when I started forming my own TV-related memories (repeats, I presume?).  As for the tie-in comic, I have no personal recollections of ever reading it, but my dad has confirmed that we did indeed buy it, which I'm guessing is how we ended up with a copy of the Chips' Comic audio cassette, featuring songs from the series.  The cassette inlay states that they are, specifically, songs from the second series (broadcast in 1984), so I can confirm that the show did indeed last for more than a single series.  It's a shame that my family apparently didn't hang onto the comics themselves, given that they've become such an obscurity, but just having the audio cassette, and thus something that I can hold in my hands as a physical reminder that, yes, this series was in fact a thing, is precious enough.

The user comments on the Child of the 1980s page appear to confirm my suspicion that this cassette was given away exclusively as a comic book freebie.   As such I'm going to assume that audio cassette is the only format it was ever available in (to my knowledge, there was never a Chips' Comic LP).  The comments left by series writer and co-producer David Wood, which provide some interesting insights into the creation of the show, state that there are actually TWO Chips' Comic audio cassettes in existence, so if anyone can point me in the direction of the one NOT featured here, I would be greatly appreciative.  Searching for "Chips' Comic" on ebay is, unfortunately, a total chore, as it means having to scroll through pages and pages of listings for editions of Fleetway's Whizzer and Chips, typically to find to nothing related to the Channel 4 series at all - like I say, it appears to have vanished without all trace.

The music was produced, arranged and composed by Peter Hope and Juliet Lawson.  Contents of the cassette are as follows:

SIDE 1

1. Chips' Comic Title - A few computer bleeps, a couple of cries of "Chips' Comic!" from an enthusiastic group of kids (all of whom must be pushing forty by now - now that's a scary thought), and away we go.  "Chips' Comic, everything you need to know! Chips' Comic, step inside and see the show!  Chips' Comic, clap your hands and here we go!  Let's turn the pages now, let's have some fun!  It's Chips' Comic, for everyone!"  The theme song rounds things off by breaking into this chipper little ragtime coda.

2. Keep Moving - "How to do you get from A to B?  How do you get from you to me?  Fast or slow, and easily?  Keep moving, keep moving, keep everywhere!"  A song dedicated to listing off various  modes of transport, and which of these would be the most applicable to a given situation.  Bicycles get completely snubbed, as do ferries.

3. Air - "What makes the windmills keep turning around?  What takes the pretty kites high off the ground? What sails the boats without making a sound?  They go drifting so gently past me."  A high proportion of songs in this collection seem geared toward encouraging children to consider fundamental aspects of life that they might otherwise be inclined to take for granted, in this case one of the most fundamental of them all, air ("though you can't see it, it's there").   Appropriately light and uplifting, and at times even a little haunting.

4. Underground - "It may seem rather strange, but all these pipes and drains, they keep the water flowing through, it's my job to maintain.  Do you ever stop to think, next time you have a drink, there's someone checking all is well, beneath the kitchen sink?  I am the water worker who is seldom ever seen, I am the water worker, I help keep the water clean!"  Ah, now I did recall that there was at least one track on this album that always made me feel a trifle uneasy as a kid, and this was most definitely it.  The intentions are certainly noble - children are being asked to ponder the various people who work underground for the benefit of those up above, and to consider the wide network of largely unseen wires and workers upon which their daily life depends (in addition to the aforementioned water worker, other examples cited include a tube driver and a coal miner) - and yet the song's rather sombre, claustrophobic tones make the whole notion seem a tad sinister.  They certainly didn't succeed at making any of those underground working environments sound particularly attractive, whether or not that was the intention.  That being said, the song's murky, claustrophobic qualities are what make it appealing to me now as an adult.

Arguably, the verses about the coal miner make this the single most dated song on the album, given the decline of the British coal industry and the subsequent lack of any remaining deep coal pits in the UK.  I'm also very conscious of the fact that, if this song was first broadcast in 1984, then odds are it would have debuted during the UK miners' strike of 1984-1985.

5. Seaside Song - "What are we gonna do today, come with us and get away, isn't it great to be beside the seaside? Walking down the promenade, fish and chips and lemonade, see what we can see beside the sea?" A ditty in the style of a British music hall number, and one which consciously recalls John A. Glover-Kind's "I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside".  A celebration of the traditional British seaside holiday - the sea's much too cold to swim in and it usually rains, but you can always kill time at the amusement hall.

6. Fireworks - "Rockets rocketing overhead, bursting over the trees! Come and see the fireworks in the sky!" A bit of safety advice works its way in ("stand well back we're told"), but overall this is just a song about fireworks and how unabashedly awesome they are, with various whizzes, crackles and fizzes thrown in for good measure. This is a particularly infectious track, and I find it hard not to get sucked in by its energy.  It's another somewhat dated one, thanks to that reference to "indoor fireworks" (my family never used them - were they any good at all?), although a quick google search reveals that they apparently are still available, now being marketed under the "retro" banner.


SIDE 2

1. Rover's Song - "He's a dog, though you'd never know, he could be your best friend. You can be a super spy, with Rover's roving eye, with Rover's roving eye." This was from a segment of the programme called "Rover's Report" (thanks to Child of the 1980s for jogging my memory on this one) in which the creepy old canine would head out on a quad bike to conduct field research for Chips' Comic (incognito, as the song implies).  The only non-Griffin or O'Toole track on the album, this one was performed by Martin Jay.  Also, "roving eye" strikes me as a rather curious expression to show up in a song aimed at children, even in the interests of a cute bit of name-based wordplay.

2. Down With Dirt - "Musty, dusty, rusty, crusty, muck and yuck are everywhere.  Slippy, slimy, oh-so-grimy, dirty dirt is always there." A deliberately skin-crawling song about the evils of dirt and the joys of eliminating it.  A real good one to get your kids to sing if you want to them to grow up to be a mysophobe.

3. Night Time - "When the curtains have been drawn, ever wonder goes on?  Ask yourself while lying there, is there anyone awake out there?" A lovely, strangely wistful song about people in various professions who work night shifts.  As with "Underground", the intention seems to be to prompt children to consider the extensive network of human activity upon which day-to-day (or night-to-night) life depends, but it doesn't share the somewhat sinister overtones of that song.  Instead, there's a distinctly melancholic tone to this one which seems to point toward the inevitable alienation that comes from leading such tightly connected and yet largely impersonal lives.  I suspect that gentle and soothing was what they were mainly going for (rest easy, because there are multiple people out there working tirelessly for you), but beautifully sad and haunting is what came out.  This track was always my favourite as a kid, and my adult self sees little reason to argue with that.

4. It's a Colourful World - "What if there was only black and white?  What if there was only dark and light?  I'd mix some paint and I'd colour it bright.  It's a colourful, colourful world, oh yes, it's a colourful, colourful world."  Bit of an art lesson mixed in here (blue and yellow paint = green, white and red = pink), but mostly it's another "don't take things for granted" song, this one centering around how much more attractive the world is thanks to the human ability to see in colour.

5. Keep Fit - "You'll be amazed how much better you'll feel, get up and go, keep yourself fit!  Move to the music, move to the beat! If you keep fit, you'll like it, you'll feel better if you keep fit!" Workout records and videos were a thing in the 1980s, and Chips' Comic got on board the bandwagon with this appropriately energetic number about the virtues of jogging and aerobics.  Let's get physical! 

6. Happy Christmas Mr. Snowman - "It would be fun if you could stay forever, but we know that can't be. And so we make sure we remember you, take you a photograph of you with me."  Doubtless that this one would be handled slightly differently today, as I can't see them being so specific about which religious/cultural holiday they're imposing on their snowman friend.  That aside, it's an ostensibly merry number with some surprisingly sad undertones, a celebration of something which the song openly acknowledges isn't going to last, but the memories of which can always be preserved in some form.

Hopefully, by carefully describing the contents of this audio cassette, I've been able to do something of that nature for Chips' Comic.  On the basis of this cassette alone, it seems a great shame that this series never found its place upon the nostalgia map, because there's some really charming stuff therein.  Riding against it, I suspect, were its unwieldy central gimmick (it revolved so heavily around the publication of the actual "Chips' Comic" that it was hard to show the series out of context of this, as David Wood acknowledges in his comments on Child of the 1980s) and the fact that it came from Channel 4, a channel which never became massively committed to children's programming (although again, people still seem to remember that monkey show they did).  If you were a child living in the UK in the 1980s and wish to dig up a few distant memories, then this cassette is certainly a worthwhile listen, although good luck actually finding a copy.  And if I ever come across something as exciting as a copy of the comic itself, you can be sure that you'll be hearing about it on here.

Babylon (A Sweet Disaster)

"Babylon" by David Hopkins from Sleeping Weazel on Vimeo.

In 1989, when Nick Park shook the animation world with his ground-breaking shorts Creature Comforts and A Grand Day Out, he pretty much defined Aardman's style as one of droll, wide-mouthed whimsy.  The quaint, characteristically "very British" quirkiness that exudes from the world of Wallace and Gromit has become synonymous with the Bristol-based animation studio, and while series such as Angry Kid and Rex the Runt are testaments to the variety of different tastes and sensibilities that Aardman have catered to, ultimately it’s Park’s style that continues to dominate their mainstream projects (including their theatrical feature films) and the public's general perception of them. So much so that a lot of Aardman’s weirder, more experimental output, particularly from the 70s and 80s before Park was able to make his mark, tends to get passed over.  A shame, because not only did Aardman produce some really interesting work within that period, it's also fascinating to observe how the studio developed during those early stages, and some of the wonderful little oddities that surfaced as they were in the process of shaping their identity, and in their quest to create animations with primarily adult appeal.

Aardman Animations was founded in 1972 by school chums Peter Lord and David Sproxton (who set up shop in Bristol in 1976), and before Park’s success at the 1990 Academy Awards managed to put them on the map in a big way, their most popular creation was “Morph”, a small, gibberish-spouting plasticine humanoid who first appeared in the children’s BBC series Take Hart.  In 1978 Lord and Sproxton also worked upon a couple of experimental pieces aimed at adult audiences, Confessions of a Foyer Girl and Down and Out, which were produced for BBC Bristol under the banner of Animated Conversations.  The Beeb didn’t take to these, but they later caught the eye of Channel 4 executive Jeremy Isaacs, and led to the commissioning of Conversation Pieces, a series centred upon the concept of taking audio recordings of real-life conversations and bringing them to life via stop motion animation.  Two of the resulting films, Palmy Days and Early Bird, were particularly witty in how they interpreted and represented the audio in question, and traces of the DNA for Park's short about life in the zoo can certainly be glimpsed therein.  We're not talking about those shorts right now, but I’m sure that it'll only be a matter of time before I get around to them.

This entry focuses upon what, as far as I’m concerned, is the unsung masterpiece of Aardman’s fledgling output, before Park’s breakout success re-shaped them and took them in an altogether different direction.  Ironically, Babylon was the very first short that Park himself worked on after joining Aardman (who agreed to provide funding for his then-unfinished student film, A Grand Day Out, in exchange for his services).  Another rising Aardman star who provided animation for Babylon was Richard “Golly” Golieszowski (now Richard Starzak), who went on to create Rex the Runt and would later helm the TV spin-offs for Creature Comforts and Shaun The Sheep.

Babylon was Lord and Sproxton’s contribution to Sweet Disaster, a series of shorts conceived and written by David Hopkins, and broadcast by Channel 4 in 1986.  Anyone who’s checked out my previous entries on the series will know that they dealt with the terrors of nuclear apocalypse, and in Babylon's case, proliferation is the specific issue on the table.  In its present state, the Wikipedia article for Sweet Disaster references the obscurity of the series and backs this up with a quote from Nick Park (taken from an interview with The Onion A.V. Club) about Babylon not having seen the light of day for a long time.  Worth noting is that the interview in question was from June 2000 (around the time of Chicken Run’s theatrical release), and that Babylon has since gone on to be by far the easiest of the Sweet Disaster films to access.  As an Aardman film, Babylon is definitely a bit unloved and lurking in the shadows, and yet it’s enjoyed a limelight which no other film in the Sweet Disaster series can boast, thanks largely to its inclusion on the Aardman Classics DVD released in November 2000.  In 2012, Sleeping Weazel uploaded the short to their Vimeo account, along with two other Sweet Disaster films, and once again I have them to thank for enabling me to share the short itself alongside my coverage of it.

I’ve no doubt that many people, like myself, were introduced to Babylon while watching the Aardman Classics DVD from start from start to finish, and I have to wonder if, like me, they were initially caught off guard by the extreme sombreness of the piece, which is about as far-removed from the whimsical world of Shaun the Sheep and Frank the Tortoise as one can get.  That’s not to say that Aardman hasn’t frequently delved into some fairly dark subject matter (even the world of Wallace and Gromit isn’t all cheese and crackers, what with its array of murderous villains), but it’s hard to envision an Aardman film more downbeat and deliberately devoid of humour than this one.  Sadly, the accompanying booklet to the Aardman Classics DVD provides almost no context for Babylon whatsoever – aside from a passing reference to it being the first Aardman project that Nick Park was asked to work upon, virtually nothing is said about the short in its run-down of the studio’s history, which may account for why it remained such an enigma to me for so long.  Babylon works fine as a stand-alone piece, but as an Aardman film it's a total oddity, and an understanding of the film within the context of the Sweet Disaster series is somewhat necessary in order to fully appreciate it and its place in Aardman history.

Babylon opens with a landscape in utter chaos – a smoggy city in which police sirens and gunfire ring out continuously.  The only creatures who appear to be thriving amid this desolation are the vultures circling in the skies overhead and the well-presented assembly at a grand function taking place in one of the buildings.  Ostensibly, this genteel gathering might appear to stand in total contrast to the havoc outside, and yet right from the beginning there are hints that these people (a gathering of arms dealers) are really just another facet of it.  The title "Babylon" calls to mind the ancient city of Mesopotamia, along with its broader meaning in indicating any place of immense power or luxury that also harbours great vice and corruption, an association that stems from the Biblical references to Babylon in the Book of Revelation, and which points to the apocalyptic theme of the film.  Images of the guests greeting one another and talk among themselves are juxtaposed with further shots of the vultures, and a map of the world with illustrations depicting all manner of weaponry being distributed across the continents.  We also see another, separate character out on the balcony - the waiter of the function, who is smoking a cigarette and observing the vultures circling above him with apparent nonchalance.

Something I have to note about Babylon is just how ambitious it is upon a technical level, given the extensive number of stop motion figures involved (around fifty, according to one source), and the intricacies of the sets (both the dark grandeur of the meeting hall and the desolate urban wasteland outside), all of which was upon a scale that went far beyond anything that Aardman had attempted to date.  Only one character, credited simply as “The Speaker”, has any amount of significant dialogue (courtesy of Tony Robinson, who also supplied the voice of The Speechwriter in Death of a Speechwriter), with most of the communication between characters being conveyed through gestures and mannerisms, and the attention to detail for each individual figure, even the majority who serve merely as background “extras”, is nothing short of stunning.  Despite my earlier suggestion that Babylon is totally devoid of humour, there actually are a number of quirky little background details to be picked out here, in the very greatest of Aardman traditions.  Watch closely and you'll be rewarded by a variety of antics from the minor characters, one of my personal favourites being the gentleman seated next to the Speaker who falls asleep during the latter's speech, and the discreet efforts of his companion to rouse him.

The two most significant characters of the film, besides Robinson's Speaker, are the aforementioned waiter (who might be described as our protagonist, although he has very little involvement with the events in question and acts largely as a passive observer throughout) and a hulking, bald-headed man who has an intimidating presence right from the go.  He is threatening not merely for his hefty physique, but also for his vocalisations, which consist of low, beastly growlings that mark him out as a monstrous being and also give the film an eerie connection to Death of a Speechwriter, one of its fellow Sweet Disaster shorts.  As I noted in my respective entry upon Death of a Speechwriter, the growling noises emitted by this character are identical to those heard during Speechwriter's opening sequence, in which the camera circles the titular character in a manner evocative of a prowling predator.  It might seem a bit of a stretch to suppose that this therefore indicates that it is literally the same character entering and patrolling the Speechwriter's premises, but then there is something distinctly uncanny about the bald-headed man in Babylon.  He serves as the film's central metaphor - a personification of the perils of nuclear proliferation.  As the meeting progresses and his rapacious nature becomes increasingly apparent, we see him swell, quite literally, to monstrous proportions, with devastating consequences for those around him.

The mantra of "peace and profit", chanted by a whispering, disembodied voice, reoccurs repeatedly throughout the film, and is the reasoning that informs the impassioned speech delivered by the Speaker upon the virtues of proliferation.  By this, it is only through the "gentle philosophy of deterrence" that mankind can be protected from the machinations of his neighbour and from his inherently evil self, and the arms dealers, being the real peacekeepers, are therefore entitled to reap the monetary rewards (the relish with which the Speaker delivers the line "and that cost can be high" leaves no doubt as to where his real interests lie).  The Speaker's bombastic claims to be a facilitator of peace are undercut by the atmosphere in the meeting hall, in which the bald-headed man, an embodiment of the greed, corruption and intimidation that fuels the Speaker's philosophy, grows increasingly dominant.  As he terrorises the other guests into signing a succession of deals, the threat merely intensifies, to the extent that the other guests, despite their visibly desperate efforts to deal with the looming peril, are gradually overwhelmed, rendering them defenceless and inert.  As he reaches the climax of his speech, the Speaker regards the bald-headed man, now his sole remaining addresse, with something resembling awe - he is, after all, a monster of his own making.  And, as tends to be the case with monsters, he proves to be the means of his creator's undoing - in the film's most dramatic moment, the bald-headed man, swollen beyond all containment, finally bursts open at the chest and unleashes a literal bloodbath that obliterates the Speaker.

Babylon closes in a similar manner to how it began, with the waiter, one of the few figures left alive, retreating back outside to the balcony to observe the vultures circling overhead, albeit in a visibly more fearful and contemplative mood than when we initially joined him.  The vultures are one of the film's most prominent motifs - they are likely a direct nod to the "loathsome, carrion birds" that are mentioned in Biblical references to to the city of Babylon (Revelation 18:2), and obviously, can be taken as a metaphor of the arms dealers themselves, a link made explicit by the Speaker himself when he refers, with great indignation, to the "communists" who have dubbed them "the vultures of society".  Ultimately though, I suspect that the vultures point toward an even higher level of threat - that of the nuclear annihilation which is presently looming over the world outside.  Their human counterparts vanquished, the vultures continue to hover above the city, anticipating the spoils of a much bigger bloodbath that will shortly be coming to the world beyond the meeting hall.  The lights in the city buildings abruptly fade out, an indication of the darkness that lies ahead.  The words "peace and profit" are repeated yet again, a chilling reminder of the emptiness and futility of "peace" that is enforced purely through the omnipresent threat of annihilation.

Thus concludes Babylon, the forgotten masterpiece of Aardman's pre-Wallace and Gromit era.  Lord and Sproxton demonstrate their directorial prowess, and the character animation is truly outstanding, so it's little surprise that Park and Golly both had bright futures ahead of them, but Aardman never again made a film even remotely like it, so much so that its bleakness will likely prove startling to anyone familiar only with their later output.  Beautifully desolate and wonderfully haunting, it is an excellent entry to the Sweet Disaster series, a fascinating oddity among Aardman's work, and a film that greatly deserves to be regarded as much more than a mere footnote in Aardman's history, as the project that indirectly enabled Wallace and Gromit to get their first adventure off the ground.

Availability: Appears on the 2000 DVD release Aardman Classics.  In the US, it was previously released by Lumivision on the 1993 LaserDisc New British Animation: The Best of Channel Four.

Farthing Wood Deaths Revisited: Series 2 - Son of Scarface

 
I never contemplated before just how carnage-heavy Series 2 of The Animals of Farthing Wood is compared to Series 1.  Case in point: we're onto our seventh instance of death (Series 1 had six in total), and we're not even halfway through the series.  The actual number of individual character deaths remains lower (as Series 1 was far more accustomed to killing off multiple characters at a time), but trust me when I say that Series 2 will get there soon enough.

After being outwitted by the Farthing Fox on their third visit to White Deer Park, the poachers readily shift their nightly activities from gunning down deer to targeting foxes, and a nameless son of Scarface is the one to pay the price.  Scarface himself had correctly anticipated that there might be such reprisals for the foxes, so when he finds his son's body he immediately lays the blame at Fox's feet.  He then catches Weasel and has her take a message back to Fox that he intends to seek vengeance.  Fox raises the obvious question - why would the poachers shoot a blue fox when it was a red fox they were looking for?  I believe that the series genuinely hit a roadblock with this particular plot point thanks to their decision to colour-code the two tribes of foxes, so naturally some exposition was required.  Here, Vixen offers the explanation that all foxes look the same in the dusk, so it wouldn't make a difference to the poachers (the non-canon audio drama offers a slightly different explanation, in which the winter snow apparently gave everything at night a ghostly blue tint, so the poachers were not under the impression that it was a red fox that had thwarted them at all).  Fearing that the poachers will kill every fox they lay eyes upon just to be totally sure of getting him, Fox considers giving himself up to the poachers, but Vixen convinces him that it would be a pointless sacrifice.  In the end, it is a combination of the Warden returning and Fox's cunning that leads to the poachers being defeated once and for all.

HORROR FACTOR: 8.  The moment of death itself occurs off-screen, but a reaction shot from Weasel does a nice enough job of articulating the horror, and the manner in which the poachers probe the fox's body to ensure that he is dead really hammers home the morbidness of the scene.

NOBILITY FACTOR: 1.  Scarface's son was killed purely out of spite, over something that had nothing to do with him in the first place.  This is an exemplary case of the victim just happening to be the wrong place and the wrong time.

TEAR-JERKER FACTOR: 2.  The sight of the lifeless fox's limb dangling off the poacher's gun is heart-rendering as well as gruesome.  Only when Lady Blue subsequently appears and is heard crying, it visibly doesn't match with her onscreen animation, and I find that so distracting.

RATING: 11