Oh, he was afraid of what face might come to light when the time for unmasking came around at last.

Stephen King. The Shining. 1977.

Unmanned Vehicles

As Texas enters its coronavirus surge, I’m still stuck on the object of the mask and its shifting connotations. Staying at home to avoid all the people refusing to wear one–connoting to me a refusal to accept reality, but hey, that’s me–I happened to watch the movie Room 237 (2012), in which several people expound (invisibly, via voiceover) on their theories about Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of The Shining over spliced footage from that movie and several others. I initially thought this movie must have been a spoof (it’s not, apparently) while observing that some of the theories make more sense than others. These theories range from literary analysis (Kubrick is representing the carnage of past American genocides) to outright conspiracy theories (the movie is about Kubrick faking the moon-landing footage).

Room 237 did give me a better appreciation of the historical commentary Kubrick is potentially making, using the roaring 20s and Native American history in lieu of King’s source material about the dawn of the post-WWII era. Both the novel and movie point to different periods to draw the same conclusion that America’s history is a nightmare, the very thing we’re having to confront as a culture right now. One concrete manifestation of this confrontation is the toppling of Confederate monuments (the erection of which in the first place is a fascinating rhetorical story). Accepting a version of American history that doesn’t glorify defiant white guys is proving as difficult for a lot of people as the idea of wearing masks to go about any daily public business…

One theory from Room 237 I appreciated was that Kubrick was toppling the monument of his source material by changing the color of the Torrance Volkswagen from the red it is in the novel to yellow, then showing Dick Hallorann pass by a red Volkswagen that’s been crushed by a flipped semi:

This symbolic aggression strikes me as symptomatic of that white guy defiance manifest…that characteristic patriarchal machismo that may or may not have driven Stephen King to write an entirely new screen version of The Shining in the 90s, or to direct his own film adaptation of his own work (in 1986) in which the horror was specifically vehicles unmanned by drivers…

Kubrick’s wringing new meanings from his source material may be some version of a pissing contest, but is not unrelated to the idea King acknowledges in On Writing (2000), that a text is no longer solely the property of the writer once the writer releases it into the world.

So now I’m taking the wheel.

The Howard Hughes Connection

Here’s a theory I was working on before I saw Room 237 that, after seeing Room 237, made me wonder if I was as crazy as some of that movie’s crazier commentators…

The figure of Horace Derwent, that “aircraft, movie, munitions, and shipping magnate” who is shadow proprietor of the Overlook Hotel and whose arc seems to embody that of America post-WWII in King’s version of The Shining, bears an uncanny resemblance to Howard Hughes.

Fiction writers have to tread carefully when taking…inspiration from real-life figures, as an author’s note at the beginning of The Shining reflects:

Some of the most beautiful
resort hotels in the world
are located in Colorado, but
the hotel in these pages
is based on none of them.
The Overlook and the people
associated with it exist
wholly within
the author’s
imagination.

But according to Lisa Rogak’s biography of King, before writing The Shining, King stayed in Room 217 of the Stanley Hotel:

When he and Tabby entered the hotel, he noticed that three nuns were leaving, as if the place were about to become godless, and when he and Tabby checked in, they learned it was the last day of the season before the hotel closed for the winter.

Rogak, Lisa. Haunted Heart (p. 78). St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

King discussed imagining how someone had died in the room’s tub, and their dinner in the creepily empty dining room. It seems fairly safe to say based on these tidbits that the Overlook is based on the Stanley, which to this day derives tourism from people wanting to stay in Room 217. Perhaps before the book was such a success, it seemed that the management of any real-life hotel might not be pleased to see their hotel depicted as a gallery of murderous ghosts, hence the book publisher’s legal department felt the need to have King slap this note on to cover its ass.

It’s funny they felt the need to do this on top of the standard legal boilerplate that appears on every novel’s copyright page, including this one’s:

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

So let’s look at how many coincidences there are in the Derwent-Hughes resemblance…

Howard Hughes is buried in Houston in an elaborate gated-off plot in Glenwood Cemetery, whose grounds are replete with phallic obelisks and stone angels weeping over the dead vestiges of oil fortunes. The Hughes name is not visibly displayed for the layperson, so you have to know where to look.

It’s possible that my proximity to Hughes’ highly decorated if long decomposed corpse–it lies roughly a mile from my apartment–might make me biased in terms of reading too much into his resemblance to Derwent, that expression of our post-WWII national moral fiber. But I do have evidence from the text.

A lot of it comes from a text-within-the-text, the newspaper clippings about the Overlook that Jack finds in the scrapbook in the basement (King’s third novel in a row to integrate some epistolary element). And it’s not a perfect corollary.

Born poor in St. Paul, [Derwent] never finished high school, joined the Navy instead. Rose rapidly, then left in a bitter wrangle over the patent on a new type of propeller that he had designed. In the tug of war between the Navy and an unknown young man named Horace Derwent, Uncle Sam came off the predictable winner. But Uncle Sam had never gotten another patent, and there had been a lot of them.

The patent battle does echo some of Hughes’ government-contracting work; the biggest divergence is the “[b]orn poor” part. A rags-to-riches story is a fairly quintessential American narrative, though it is interesting how here King sets up a dichotomy of Derwent v. America rather than Derwent representing America, and interesting how in other places the text links Derwent to England, as though it’s also quintessentially American to aspire to the aristocracy we patently (so to speak) denounced…

But Howard Hughes was hardly born poor. The fortune with which he was able to make his grand and risky investments originates in Houston oil; according to Wikipedia, his father “patented (1909) the two-cone roller bit, which allowed rotary drilling for petroleum in previously inaccessible places.” King makes no mention of Derwent’s fortunes being connected to oil (perhaps that would have made the resemblance too much to pass for coincidence), nor does Derwent seem to have any of the OCD-characteristics that made Hughes so distinct and eccentric in his later years (he died in 1976, the year before The Shining was published). Giving Derwent a rags-to-riches narrative–even if those riches were gained, Gatsby-like, through nefarious means–feels less interesting here than a magnate who started off with money, because logistically you probably need inherited wealth to start off with in order to build up to the level of wealth attained by a Hughes or by a Koch brother…

At any rate, Hughes’ significant contributions to aviation, Hollywood, and Vegas are fairly unique markers that Derwent’s many distinctions echo–or the distinctions he’s reputed for, anyway:

When Derwent, who is rumored to have substantial Las Vegas holdings, was asked if his purchase and refurbishing of the Overlook signaled the opening gun in a battle to legalize casino-style gambling in Colorado, the aircraft, movie, munitions, and shipping magnate denied it … with a smile. “The Overlook would be cheapened by gambling,” he said, “and don’t think I’m knocking Vegas! They’ve got too many of my markers out there for me to do that!”

Wikipedia mentions Hughes’ Vegas connection:

Hughes extended his financial empire to include Las Vegas real estate, hotels, and media outlets, spending an estimated $300 million, and using his considerable powers to take-over many of the well known hotels, especially the organized crime connected venues. He quickly became one of the most powerful men in Las Vegas. He was instrumental in changing the image of Las Vegas from its Wild West roots into a more refined cosmopolitan city.

from here

That final sentence has a “citation needed” at the end of it, but regardless of how strictly factual that evaluation may be, this transition is a fairly significant/symbolic development in our country’s history in general–what amounts to a shift from an overtly brutal ethos to a covertly brutal one, both equally predicated on profit motive. King seems to be capturing this national shift by channeling Hughes via Derwent.

King pushes the Vegas stuff a bit further:

There had been rumors, Jack recalled, that some of the means employed by Derwent to keep his head above water were less than savory. Involvement with bootlegging. Prostitution in the Midwest. Smuggling in the coastal areas of the South where his fertilizer factories were. Finally an association with the nascent western gambling interests.

The newspaper articles debate whether Derwent has intentions of trying to legalize gambling in Colorado and turn the Overlook into a casino, a version of Vegas with inverted topography and climate. Vegas, that great neon oasis of the American west, is a glut of excess that seems to play out capitalism’s logical endpoint while also representing a distilled form of its mechanics via the act of gambling, which is a microcosm of financial investment and playing the stock market.

After Derwent sells the Overlook in the 50s, a “Las Vegas Group” buys the Overlook in the 60s, and scrapbook articles hint that Derwent may be involved via a series of shell corporations masking his involvement. An investigating reporter can’t get a comment from Derwent, who “guards his own privacy jealously”–another potential Hughes link. The aforementioned mob connections arise in connection to Vegas people, stockholders in a slot-machine company who have a laundry list of extreme gangster criminal charges on their records (including murder by ax, though a couple could only be charged officially with income-tax evasion), making these gangsters’ official titles “investors.” It’s these investing gangsters in particular that fire up Jack’s imagination:

Making deals that would turn over millions of dollars, maybe in the very suite of rooms where Presidents had stayed. There was a story, all right. One hell of a story.

Again this occupation of the same space, even if theoretical, draws a parallel between Presidents and gangsters, implying that they are not so different. Presidents, too, the country has learned the hard way by the 70s, do shady illegal sh*t.

The very last article Jack reads in this extended chapter 18 sequence reinforces the President-gangster connection, reporting a violent murder-by-shotgun that took place by some of the gangsters in “the Presidential Suite where two American Presidents have stayed.” Danny saw remnants of this murder on the tour earlier (right before Ullman swept open the windows for the grand public view) and he sees it again very briefly in the climactic sequence. Only “two” Presidents are reported here, when Ullmann listed four; these murders are reported to have occurred in 1966, which means Nixon, inaugurated in 1969, would have stayed in the room after the murders (signifying the state of the country when he took office), but the other three–“Wilson, Harding, Roosevelt”–would have already been President by 1966…

Jack also finds a mysterious note after the article describing the Presidential-Suite murder: “They took his balls along with them.” This tidbit links an element of toxic masculinity to these linked exchanges of money as the Overlook changed hands (or at least purported to) and of bullets between gangsters, toxic masculinity that characterize the Overlook’s sordid history (and thus the country’s) as one that’s necessarily the product of bull-headed (white) men who are bull-headed precisely as a means to prove their masculinity….marking our dirty history of imperialism as a product of such?

Hollywood Hells

In both their similarities and differences, Derwent and Hughes illuminate how the horror of our history is in many ways a product of an underlying but inextricable connection between politics and pop culture. According to the Century of the Self documentary I mentioned in a previous post, Edward Bernays, in his pioneering deployment of Freud’s psychological techniques in public relations, was one of the first to link politics with celebrity, inviting movie stars to White House parties in a consolidation of appearances and power.

It is via this Hollywood link that I will justify bringing up The Aviator, Martin Scorsese’s 2004 biopic of Howard Hughes (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), as a reference point for some other similarities and differences between Hughes and Derwent that further illuminate some specifically American…character foibles. Perhaps most prominently the prominence of the male ego and the importance of heroic (pop) cultural narratives masking more sordid exchanges in the forging of our collective identity…

Hughes’ life is too complex for the scope of a single movie, even a three-hour one. Scorsese omits the Vegas stuff and focuses on the aviation and Hollywood elements, while with Derwent, King focuses more on the Vegas and Hollywood stuff instead of the aviation. King also omits mention of anything resembling this figure having obsessive compulsive disorder, another critical element of The Aviator‘s depiction.

The Aviator‘s main plot revolves around Hughes’ efforts to build the biggest plane ever, the Hercules, and how rival airline CEO Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin) uses political connections to try to ruin Hughes for his failure to deliver on his contract for the plane by the end of WWII.

Subplots touch on Hughes’ ongoing Hollywood film projects (he’s a multitasker). In keeping with its main plot, it focuses most on Hughes’ breakthrough aviation-related picture, Hell’s Angels (1930), while still reinforcing the impression that he pioneered the Western and gangster genres by single-handedly introduced the concept that appealing to sex (The Outlaw in 1943, released in ’46) and violence (Scarface, 1932 precursor to the 1983 Al Pacino version) were pretty much the hottest possible selling points cinema could perpetrate on the mass populace. Basically bringing Edward Bernays’ mass manipulations of Freudian fears and desires to Hollywood.

Derwent’s Hollywood contributions seem to be in a similar Bernaysian vein; he not only owned a movie studio (whose main child star is noted to have died of a heroin overdose in 1934), but helped make it profitable by pushing the boundaries then set for public decency:

During one of [Derwent’s studio’s movies] an unnamed costume designer had jury-rigged a strapless bra for the heroine to appear in during the Grand Ball scene, where she revealed everything except possibly the birthmark just below the cleft of her buttocks. Derwent received credit for this invention as well, and his reputation—or notoriety—grew.

The Aviator shows Hughes designing a very similar bra in a manner identical to how he engineers his airplanes–that is, with blueprints, which he unveils for the bra in the exact same scene he unveils the idea for the Hercules and its blueprints (drawn on the back of a headshot of his future girlfriend Ava Gardner). Just a few lines after Hughes tells his inner circle the name of his new plane, he says he wants them to “rig up something like this”–the viewer is led to believe he’s talking about the Hercules because there’s been nothing to overtly indicate a change in topic, but then, in a bait-and-switch played for comedy, it’s revealed the blueprints he’s holding up this time are actually for a bra.

Though both emphasize the concept of sexual appeal in cinema being a systematically designed feat of engineering, King’s rendering seems richer for revealing that Derwent didn’t really design this groundbreaking contraption himself, further developing the theme of the American character constituted by duplicity. This small-scale difference reflects the main large-scale difference between King’s Derwent and Scorsese’s Hughes: The Aviator, while purporting to show the shadowy underbelly of a great man’s mind in depicting his struggles with OCD (even more of a struggle for it not being a recognized disorder at the time), ultimately seems to valorize Hughes and imply that his reputation was not overblown, but should be even more impressive because of what he had to overcome. King’s Derwent(-America) is a sinister figure; Scorsese’s Hughes(-America) is a hero, if a tragic one. Hughes’ heroic arc is a narrative of individual triumph against the larger collective forces of the American government conspiring with private industry.

The movie’s opening scene with Hughes as a child plants the seed for his future OCD-related issues–and apparently his coping mechanism for it–in the opening lines from little Howard himself: “Q-U-A-R-A-N-T-I-N-E. Quarantine. Q-U-A-R-A-N-T-I-N-E.” Spelled out twice. A little freaky to watch during the coronavirus…as his mother bathes him while quizzing him about cholera and typhus and if he’s “seen the signs on the houses where the coloreds live.”

Later, we see Hughes as an adult attempting to quell an episode in which he can’t stop repeating himself (“Show me the blueprints”) by again spelling out “Quarantine.”

Scorsese thus seems to inadvertently reinforce a Kingian theme of the formative influence of childhood fears, as it would seem Howard internalized his mother’s lesson as much as he inherited his father’s money…

Using Hughes’ failure to deliver the Hercules as a pretext to launch a government investigation means that the twin villains of our conspiring senator Alan Alda and rival airline CEO Alec Baldwin can send G-men into Hughes’ home to touch all of his stuff, something that upsets him a lot more than most people (which they know–dirty tricks). It also means that the figures Hughes sometimes sees that he knows aren’t there, might, sometimes, actually be there. Despite this psychological warfare and threats of a public hearing to air his dirty laundry, Hughes refuses to kowtow to his foes’ demands that he support a bill that would grant a patently un-American monopoly on international air travel to his rival–though they won’t call it a “monopoly,” even behind closed doors.

Hughes’ ability to fight this battle is further compromised by his physical state after he’s nearly killed in a plane crash piloting a test flight. (During his meeting with the senator, he hides his cane in the foyer before he enters so as not to appear as weak, and boldly erupts that Juan Trippe can kiss both sides of his ass before storming out and almost immediately collapsing.) The senator, true to his word, launches the public hearing, inducing a purgatorial period during which Hughes quarantines himself in his screening studio, pissing in the milk bottles we’ve seen him drink from over the course of the film in what started as a cute quirk, now unable to complete the loop of spelling “quarantine” to bring himself out of his mental spiral (“Q…R…N…T…Q…U…E…I…T…I…N…E…N…E…I…”, the letters strung out like the lined-up piss-filled bottles).

Jack Torrance imagines the secret illicit deals that took place behind the closed doors of the Overlook. After Leo’s Hughes has a behind-closed-doors but face-to-face meeting with the slimy senator, he meets with Baldwin’s Trippe through the closed door of his quarantine studio, and Trippe, while blowing smoke through the door’s keyhole, gloats about the impending bankruptcy of Hughes’ airline, TWA. This confrontation galvanizes Hughes to emerge and get cleaned up by his ex-gf movie star Ava Gardner, who dumped him earlier after discovering a certain unseemly habit of his reminiscent of a certain government agency I know….

But it seems Ava’s ready to forgive and forget; while shaving and trimming Hughes, she offers an answer that represents the movie’s larger Shining-reminiscent themes about the duplicitous dichotomy between the public and private faces of government:

Hughes pulls himself together for a fine performance during the hearings (hearings the senator, a committee chairman, has repeatedly noted he had the power to render private or public) via rhetorical appeals to logic (“coming clean” about bribing military officials for contracts by explaining it as a standard business practice necessitated by the system), outing the interrogating senator’s unseemly relationship with Juan Trippe, and vowing to leave the country if the Hercules doesn’t fly.

Hughes’ performance here is the movie’s real climax, and what renders him heroic via what amounts to telling the truth by outing the politician’s duplicity and exposing the real mechanics of the capitalist motivations grinding the gears of our country’s legislation. Yet instances of Hughes’ own duplicity elsewhere in the film–as when he calls on an employee to testify with some blathering pseudo-science before the motion-picture censorship board about the “mammaries” on display in The Outlaw–are treated as cheeky and endearing strokes of genius…

The Hercules does fly–Hughes’ third test flight shown in the movie, and the only one that doesn’t end in a crash–and the bill that would have destroyed Hughes’ airline is defeated. The movie concludes with a reminder that Hughes’ victory here and achievements in general have come at a cost, as he again spots (presumably) phantom figures and ends the film stuck in one of his verbal loops, this time repeating “The way of the future.”

And that would be….

Another possible piece of evidence for the Derwent-Hughes connection, which I didn’t notice until re-watching The Aviator, is that the turbulent flight Dick Hallorann takes from Florida to Colorado is on TWA, Hughes’ airline:

Another hard bump rocked the plane and then dropped her with a sickening elevator plunge. Hallorann’s stomach did a queasy hornpipe. Several people—not all women by any means—screamed.

“—that we’ll see you again on another TWA flight real soon.”

“Not bloody likely,” someone behind Hallorann said.

This passage immediately precedes the sharp-faced woman bringing up the CIA and “dollar-diplomacy intervention,” that key component of America’s shadow self I discussed in the first post of this series.

I guess it just goes to show, the higher you fly, the farther you fall…

Playing with the Phallus

In a post about queerness in ‘Salem’s Lot, I discussed the chapter “On Stephen King’s Phallus: or The Postmodern Gothic” in Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy’s book American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (1998), which analyzes “a desire for verbal acuity that is coded queer” in King’s work by applying Jacques Lacan’s theory about the phallus. This chapter mentions Derwent:

While the phallus-as-signifier in Lacan does not equal the penis, it can never be divested of the penis; it must always signify the penis at the same time it transcends it. Language, the phallus-as-signifier, has it both ways (like Harry Derwent of The Shining), and its AC/DC nature troubles the straight male writer, who is, as Thad Beaumont knows, “passing some sort of baton” (437) in a phallic play that is pleasurable, homoerotic.

AMERICAN GOTHIC: NEW INTERVENTIONS IN A NATIONAL NARRATIVE (1998), P. 91

Which brings us to the fact that in The Shining Derwent is depicted as bisexual:

Such queerness is realized in the ghostly voices of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Harry Derwent, the hotel’s erstwhile owner, is “AC/DC, you know,” and during the spectral masquerade party that takes over the hotel and the Torrances’ lives, Derwent coyly pursues Roger, the man in the dog suit. Roger “is only DC,” the voices tell Jack. “He spent a weekend with Harry in Cuba once … oh, months ago. Now he follows Harry everywhere, wagging his little tail behind him” (The Shining 347). And it is this same Roger who represents to Danny the threat of castration (“I’m going to eat you up, little boy. And I think I’ll start with your plump little cock”) as he equates Danny with his ex-lover Harry.

AMERICAN GOTHIC: NEW INTERVENTIONS IN A NATIONAL NARRATIVE (1998), PP. 87-88

This was the first time I learned “AC/DC” was a term that could mean (or signify) bisexual…which made me think of the name of the band differently–a band that’s one of King’s favorites based their doing the soundtrack to his one-off film directorial effort Maximum Overdrive in 1986:

And also based on this quote from On Writing:

I work to loud music—hard-rock stuff like AC/DC, Guns ’n Roses, and Metallica have always been particular favorites…

First on the list!

Anyway, since Derwent is more sinister than heroic, this is similar to coding the Lot‘s villain Barlow as queer, creating an association that bisexual/queer = evil.

Which brings me to the phrase “skeletons in the closet”… a phrase connoting general unsavory secrets but also including a phrase specifically about hiding queerness:

Many gay men, for instance, described negotiating their presence in an often hostile world as living a double life, or wearing a mask and taking it off…

Quoting George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World.

It seems like King is (consciously or unconsciously) developing a problematic metaphor in Derwent’s “going both ways,” his doing so sexually a reflection of his going both legal and illegal in his business dealings. A newspaper headline muses:

MILLIONAIRE DERWENT BACK IN
COLORADO VIA BACK DOOR?

This is referring to a sneaky chain of companies snaking back to Derwent that seems designed to obscure his Overlook ownership in later years. I wouldn’t put it past King to be amusing himself with a “back door” joke here, and linking Derwent’s financial double dealings to sexual double dealings is itself pretty shady…but Jack’s considerations about illicit business dealings taking place behind the closed doors of the Overlook invokes ideas of what else might be going on behind closed doors there…

The depiction of the dynamic between Derwent and his apparent lover Roger is also all kinds of f*cked up in other ways; the academics discussing the “AC/DC” bit above say the Overlook’s voices tell Jack that Roger is “only DC,” but what the specific ghost telling him this actually says is “‘Poor Roger’s only DC'” (emphasis mine), and that this comes at the end of an extended sequence of the Derwent ghost having Roger literally perform in front of an audience as though he’s a dog, and this passage makes it seem like the performance is enacting/symbolic of male-on-male sex being “grotesque” and also weirdly impotent, as though negating its own possibility:

Roger capered grotesquely on all fours, his tail dragging limply behind him.

Really this Grand Ball scene is Derwent’s (narrative) climax, since it’s when we actually get to see him “in the flesh”/”in person,” whereas before we were only getting accounts about him from newspapers. Of course, the newspapers don’t mention anything about the “AC/DC” stuff–that’s the shadowy truth that lies beneath the surface of what the media reports. Derwent’s “in person” performance seems designed as a representation of the worst that (American/British/imperialist-capitalist) humanity has to offer–the Overlook (and thus postwar America) is run by a guy who would publicly, and sexually, exploit another man like a dog…and a man who has felt the need to keep his continued ownership of the Overlook a secret… I’m just saying that using the “grotesqueness” of male intercourse to cement/characterize the grotesqueness of the corruption of the American postwar character would cross the line into homophobia on King’s part–probably also reflective of white mainstream attitudes at the time while potentially further exacerbating them.

Kubrick also seemed to find the homosexual-sex-with-a-dog bit horrifying enough to include completely out of context…

The Aviator depicts Hughes as a ladies’ man, as does his Wikipedia page, that end-all be-all authority. The main basis for the rumors that Hughes might have been AC/DC seems to be a biography, Howard Hughes: The Secret Life by Charles Higham, supposedly based on testimony from Hughes acquaintances. This was published in 1994, so it seems doubtful any rumors about Hughes’ sexuality were really on King’s radar when he was writing Derwent, if Hughes was on his radar at all. Also, based on the many other lurid celebrity bios this biographer has penned, these rumors seem to have as much credibility as a checkout-lane tabloid. Funny, because this book is dubiously credited as the basis of The Aviator, a claim that seems like it originated with Higham himself in a 2009 memoir…

Spaghetti Spawn

Ultimately, whether King intended any correlation or not, the way Hughes directed his business ventures quarantined in Vegas penthouses in his later years resonates with both The Shining‘s cabin-fever themes and its behind-closed-doors corrupt political/business themes. Potentially there is some overlap in King’s representation of Derwent as perpetually trapped in the Overlook, not just trapped in the hotel but trapped eternally at the same party–the party that’s a direct parallel to the quarantine party in Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” The grand opening of America’s postwar society is now on a nightmarish loop at the Overlook; since the novel’s present is the 1970s, enough time has passed to reveal the fault lines in its foundation, as the climactic unmasking of the ghostly partygoers reveals:

There had been other things at the Overlook: a bad dream that recurred at irregular intervals—some sort of costume party and he was catering it in the Overlook’s ballroom, and at the shout to unmask, everybody exposed faces that were those of rotting insects—and there had been the hedge animals.

This passage is from Dick Hallorann’s perspective, showing that the Overlook’s ghosts are not just the manifestation of Jack’s skewed perceptions…

And maybe there’s even a little redemption in the largely undeveloped characterization of Hallorann that he gets to be the one who actually sees what’s beneath the mask…

Maybe I can’t fault The Aviator for not exploring unsubstantiated rumors about Hughes’ sexuality (unless it really is based on the book that the rumors came from…). But it does feel like this Oscar-bait flick about an American hero directed by Scorsese, one of the most “influential directors in film history”–and one whose legacy is largely derived from gangster flicks–is valorizing some aspects of toxic masculinity as much as any of the violent westerns Hughes had a hand in spawning.

I recently learned more about the history of the so-called “spaghetti westerns” from my mother when I called her on Father’s Day and asked what movie I should watch in honor of my father, who died a few years ago. He loved movies, but when my wife had asked what his favorite was, I couldn’t come up with an undisputed victor out of the many that seemed to run on intermittent loops throughout my childhood.

My tentative answer was McClintock! (1963), starring John Wayne. My father had converted my brother’s old bedroom into the “John Wayne Room,” including such accents as light-switch plates bordered with tiny rifles. (If my default present for my mother is the latest Stephen King book, my default for my father was John Wayne paraphernalia.) The final sequence of McClintock! had embedded itself on my psyche: John Wayne, playing self-made rancher George Washington (G.W.) McClintock, stalks his wife–played by Maureen O’Hara, whom my red-haired mother bore some resemblance to–through the streets of their small western town (Maureen, for some reason, clad in only a slip and high heels). When he inevitably catches her, he serves her a public spanking in front of the whole town. (She was getting mouthy before, but this does the trick, and they live happily ever after.) The promotional poster on the movie’s Wikipedia page pretty much sums it up:

But McClintock! is not what my mother said. She said, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly–1966, starring Clint Eastwood.

I said, I’ve never even seen that!

She said, Don’t you remember his ringtone?

I immediately heard it in my head, the tinny sound of it issuing from the black square my father had always kept holstered, gun-like, at his hip. (He had an ankle holster for his actual gun.) I’d never connected it with a specific movie. It was the ubiquitous sound of all westerns, probably because I’d only ever heard it in parodies.

There were also, I realized, posters for Clint Eastwood movies in the John Wayne room.

I said, If that was his favorite movie, how come I never saw him watching it?

She said, Oh, I wouldn’t let him watch that in front of you kids. It was much too violent.

I thought of John Wayne publicly walloping Maureen O’Hara. But I didn’t mention that. I said, That’s funny, because I was just watching the Back to the Future trilogy (released in ’85, ’89, ’90 respectively).

In the third one, they take the time machine back to the old west, where Marty McFly adopts the alias and attire of “Clint Eastwood” and re-enacts an Eastwood trick set up earlier. I asked my mom if it was The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly playing in that scene in the second one where Biff is watching a Clint Eastwood western in the hot tub.

(Side note: the inspiration for the trilogy’s villain and quintessential bully Biff Tannen was, supposedly, one Donald Trump. Which doesn’t really bode well for our futures…)

It’s a different “spaghetti western“–the one on the Wikipedia page for this genre. I’d heard the term but didn’t know its origin. My mom explained they were called that because they were directed by Italians. She said John Wayne refused to do them because he thought they were beneath him, but Clint Eastwood did a lot of them. My dad loved them. Then she said, offhandedly, that her knowing about them–one of her sisters was a film buff–was probably the reason they’d gotten together in the first place. I was unaware that my mother’s familiarity with Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns was where my father’s interest in her originated…

…and therefore was where I originated?

Hughes & Hoover, Hoover & Hughes

When inspired to watch J. Edgar (2011) for the first time, another portrayal of a historical figure who, as founder of the FBI, played a significant role in forging America’s deep-state shadow self (and who is also played by Leonardo DiCaprio into the point of needing old-age makeup), I wasn’t expecting much representation on the queerness or corruption fronts when I saw it was directed by Clint Eastwood, whom I primarily associate with violent westerns and talking to chairs.

Boy was I wrong.

Conceiving of Eastwood as a symbol of American imperialist machismo and having no prior knowledge of his directorial efforts, I had a low bar. But a New Yorker critic notes in his review of J. Edgar:

Eastwood long ago gave up celebrating men of violence: the mysterious, annihilating Westerners and the vigilantes who think that they alone know how to mete out justice. But Clean Edgar, working with an efficient state apparatus behind him, is a lot more dangerous than Dirty Harry.

David Denby, “The Man in Charge,” November 7, 2011.

J. Edgar was undoubtedly clunky in many places, but I was frankly shocked at the thematic complexity and queer-repping in this movie. I was expecting a movie about a heroic macho male leading this country to greatness, and got a movie about a male projecting a heroic macho male leading the country into moral ambiguity…

Howard Hughes’ and J. Edgar Hoover’s careers both straddle the shift to post-WWII society, starting out in the 1920s and ending with their deaths in the 1970s. Hughes is but a “private citizen” as he designates himself in his Aviator public Senate hearing, while his life reveals the power a private citizen can wield with his wealth, as well as a potentially inevitable involvement with the public sector in order to maintain that wealth and power. Hoover’s life reveals how power is most effectively wielded in the public sector via the support of private buttresses–“private” in both the personal and business senses.

As a narrative about a man formative in implementing what King would (via the sharp-faced woman on the TWA flight) classify as “dirty tricks” (or working in the shadows) in the American government, dirty tricks that include manipulating narratives and information, J. Edgar was framed as a manipulative narrative, as Hoover relayed his account of pivotal moments in the FBI’s development (or rather, his development of the FBI) to an FBI public relations officer. Hoover is extremely conscious of his dictation as a narrative; when one of these PR guys asks if Hoover himself was actually at the scene of a Communist crime he’d just described, Hoover says “let’s leave that to the reader’s imagination,” because “it’s important we give our protagonist a bit of mystery.” The movie explores the fine line between hero and villain, if at times with a leaden hand, by portraying Hoover as primarily interested in the “spotlight” and appearances above all else.

The acute tension in the present, ongoing as Hoover is telling his version of the FBI’s story to his PR minions, is a covert battle against Martin Luther King, Jr. As the past timeline Hoover is describing unfolds, we see this battle is predicated on the pattern that enabled Hoover to maintain his position of power in the notorious snakepit of D.C. for seven decades–pretty much way longer than anyone. His secret weapon is…secrets.

Once Hoover created a secret domestic police force by leveraging the horror of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, he pioneered effective forensic science techniques like fingerprinting, but also did some pretty questionable shit when he wrangled permission to use secret wiretaps without a warrant.

Hoover’s pattern, as Eastwood shows it, is to use illicit information he gains from the wiretaps–info unrelated to why the wiretaps were authorized in the first place but nonetheless useful for blackmail, usually involving sexual “indiscretions.” Having caught MLK thus with his pants down, Hoover makes a threat to out MLK’s extramarital affair if MLK accepts the Nobel Peace Prize–though Hoover makes the threat covertly, dictating the blackmail letter to his secretary as though it’s from someone else.

Notice how shadowy the shot is of him dictating this shadowy letter…you can’t even see his face. Eastwood seems to be highlighting the dirty covert political-rhetorical trick of accusing someone else of doing what you yourself are doing as he shows Hoover dictate this historically verifiable document:

At the climax of this arc, Hoover watches MLK go through with accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on TV, having moments before been utterly convinced his gambit would be successful and MLK would decline. Eastwood thus seems to highlight a certain irony at play here: accepting this peace prize is essentially, secretly, an act of war. The new warfare, information warfare, is secret, undetectable as warfare in the traditional sense of overt violence. But Eastwood positions as the climax a failure of this warfare, and in so doing doesn’t seem to condone it as essential for national security as so many (other) right-wingers tend to, but rather seems to confront it as part of our horrific national past in a way King (Stephen, not Martin) would condone based on the way Danny faces down the Overlook’s ghost….

The subject of the FBI’s covert campaign against MLK and the Civil Rights Movement was raised again this past MLK Day, when the FBI tweeted a tribute to MLK. (I guess we have their PR department to thank for that…) That some people have called for the FBI’s building named after Hoover to be renamed seems connected to the idea of getting rid of Confederate monuments as a means of confronting our racist past.

The reason Hoover considers MLK a threat in the first place would appear to be that he’s riling up the Communists, which the arc of the movie shows were a legitimate threat when Hoover was starting out in the 1920s, but the menace of whom was increasingly used as a pretext. (The relationship between MLK and what’s referred to as “Hoover’s FBI” is quite complicated, made more so by the continued declassification of government documents.)

By the end of his decades-long reign, J. Edgar‘s Hoover is more interested in power for power’s sake…

His fight against tyranny has gone and turned him into a tyrant without him even realizing it–but Eastwood makes (extra) sure the viewer realizes it.

Early in his rise, Hoover acquires a right-hand man, Clyde, who makes quite the googly eyes at Hoover from the get-go. Clyde and Hoover live happily ever after, except for never having sex–just a fistfight that stands in for it after Hoover suggests he might marry a woman. Eastwood addresses their non-platonic love for each other overtly (= jaw-drop for me), framing the whole celibate aspect of it as a product of what would seem to be Hoover’s own inability to commit what he perceives as “indiscretions” because he’s intimately aware of how that could be exploited as leverage against him, having used it as leverage against so many other people himself. (Plus we see his mother Dame Judi Dench tell him she would “rather have a dead son than a daffodil for a son.”)

Hence Hoover is sexually frustrated by his own lust for power, sad…in a way that felt similar to how Scorsese depicted Hughes as being trapped by his own great mind, the whole your greatest strength being your greatest weakness thing…

Clyde also serves the useful narrative purpose of calling Hoover’s version of events into question–of bearing witness to his manipulation of them. Clyde keeps him honest…sort of. Near the end of the movie, Clyde tells Hoover he read the account Hoover dictated to the PR reps, calling out several of the more pronounced inaccuracies. Clyde also tries to question Hoover’s increasing interest in the covert dirty tricks like what he’s trying to pull with MLK, though to little effect.

The movie showcases a production of myth as history, and thus the power of narrative, information, and language. The word “indiscretion” is set up in an early scene at the Library of Congress, where Hoover shows his future lifelong secretary Miss Gandy the cataloguing system he created at the Library of Congress, setting up the (false) dichotomy between sexual and political indiscretions.

The blurred lines between these indiscretions are on display during an exchange between young Clyde and Hoover when Hoover invites him to spend a weekend with him at the horse races, staying at a hotel on the FBI’s dime. Clyde is uncomfortable with this, on the surface because he doesn’t want to cost the FBI money. Hoover proposes that if they get an adjoined suite, that will save enough money to address Clyde’s concern, and Clyde agrees. Their conversation is then interrupted by the scientist who’s supposedly some kind of wood expert helping with the Lindbergh baby case, who seems to express the themes latent in Clyde and Hoover’s preceding exchange via phallic language play in the Lacanian vein…

Another theme reminiscent of The Aviator was the influence of Hollywood, or more specifically, how Hoover was bent on using that image to his own ends in promoting the FBI. Frustrated at the cinematic glorification of gangsters due to the success of Hughes’ Scarface and its descendants, Hoover helped switch the trend to glorifying G-men, villain and hero trading roles.

This is a collaboration that the so-called Deep State has continued, the CIA working with Hollywood from its inception and starting a more active campaign in the 90s to be portrayed favorably on screen (the CIA has also manipulated literature, for what it’s worth). And in that light, as well as in light of the fact that this is a movie made to make money (if not also burnish its director’s legacy), it feels a little ironic/hypocritical to have this Hollywood movie essentially criticizing this character’s seeking of the “spotlight,” even if the idea is that the context of that character’s role as head of a government organization is specifically what makes his obsession with appearances over reality so problematic.

On a final note about J. Edgar‘s historical “reality,” the rumors about Hoover’s penchant for cross-dressing are probably more prominent in the cultural imagination than rumors about Hughes’ bisexuality, judging by the fact that they’re mentioned on Hoover’s Wikipedia page and joked about other places.

These rumors are apparently uncorroborated, but Eastwood addresses them, if briefly. Clothes are prominent in general as a theme reinforcing Hoover’s obsession with appearances, and how these essentially manifest as a mask or disguise. If Eastwood’s Hoover is remotely accurate, probably nothing would be more horrifying to him than to be represented as a crossdresser in a pop-culture touchstone…

In the end, both of these films were helmed by old white men who have had the privilege of directing lots of other movies. (Not to mention that Harvey Weinstein produced The Aviator.) Eastwood seems to be calling attention to how these institutions have shaped our cultural/national narratives, but he’s still doing that within the framework of white-male-shaped narratives…

There were some other similarities between these two white-male biopics…

Yet again we have Leo showing us the arc of a young whippersnapping upstart growing grizzled under the weight of his own genius and/or power… showing us, in short, how hard it is to be a white man!

And if Hughes brought Vegas out of the Wild West and into the appearance of being more urbane (if no less cutthroat), J. Edgar is a modern western on the East coast, seat (or chair?) of the country’s real power center.

And if Hughes beget the classic western, he may or may not have killed it when he filmed John Wayne playing Genghis Khan in The Conqueror in the desert downwind of fallout from the government’s nuclear testing….

(And for another nugget of Hollywood-related history, Armand (Armie) Hammer, the actor who plays Clyde-the-covert-love-interest in J. Edgar, is named for his grandfather, an “oil tycoon” prominent in the papers of the ostracized scholar Antony Sutton (mentioned in the first post of this series). Sutton theorizes that polarizing dichotomies like capitalism v. communism are really just pretexts for power and money grabs; Hammer’s business ties to the Soviet Union demonstrate this by his profiting from the Cold War conflict developing resources that would be used against Americans in a fortune that presumably at least in part made its way down to his grandson….)

Hoover died when Nixon was President, and at the end of J. Edgar we see Nixon call Hoover a “cocksucker” in private and then a “truly remarkable man” (emphasis mine) in public. Nixon’s quest for power via the dirt of secrets on his adversaries has much in common with Hoover’s covert tactics, and led to his own ejection from the seat of power via Watergate. Apparently there are rumors that Hughes was actually somehow involved in this scandal in another tangled web of wealth’s influence on politics. Since Hughes’ connection to Watergate apparently came under more scrutiny because of The Aviator‘s release, it’s again unlikely this connection was on King’s radar in the 70s. But if Watergate is a public exposure of the previously Deep-State shadow self thus marking the site of a national collective trauma, and if The Shining can be read as tracing the horror of Watergate back to a necrotic rot underlying the prosperity that emerged from the carnage of WWII, then ultimately the novel is tracing the roots of the political horror we’re living right now…

The Trump Card

Though The Shining‘s literal details evidence a more concrete corollary between King’s Derwent and Hughes, in some ways Derwent has more in common with Eastwood’s Hoover, who’s repeatedly shown taking credit for things he didn’t do.

In The Shining‘s “Closing Day” section, we see Ullman have an interesting exchange with a woman who is checking out after he’s asked to handle her by an employee:

“It’s Mrs. Brant,” the clerk said uncomfortably. “She refuses to pay her bill with anything but her American Express card. I told her we stopped taking American Express at the end of the season last year, but she won’t …”

The woman, whose clothes denote her class, rants a bit more about how she’s always paid with this particular credit card before Ullman escorts her behind a closed door to “take care of it,” and we don’t get to see how it’s taken care of. There’s an implication that American credit has run out in light of exposure of the crimes our politicians and government agencies have committed…yet also a sinister implication that despite that, we’ll underhandedly force its acceptance anyway…

No one has leveraged this lapsed American credit more than Trump, and in so doing, damaged it further. Invoking the “Deep State” and claiming it’s out to get him has become a rather convenient device that enables him to turn the tables on absolutely anyone accusing him of absolutely anything. If he’s been accused of something, it’s because there’s been a conspiracy on the part of these long-standing covert experts to frame him. This proliferation of accusing accusers sows confusion to the point that facts, reality, and words no longer mean what they used to…

I didn’t realize until I was actually using political conspiracy theories as the course theme for my comp classes that Trump gained traction in politics in the first place because of his spreading the baseless–except in racism–Obama “birther” conspiracy theory: the theory that Obama was not born in the U.S. and thus that his Presidency was illegitimate. Trump has pretty much never wavered from the tactic of spouting baseless conspiracy theories since then, often, still, about Obama:

…at a press conference on the White House lawn, Trump made that clear, in a memorable exchange with Phil Rucker, of the Washington Post, that echoed the paranoid fulminations of Trump’s hero Joseph McCarthy at his worst. “What crime, exactly, are you accusing President Obama of committing?” Rucker asked. “Obamagate,” Trump replied. “It’s been going on for a long time,” he added, without offering specifics. “What is the crime, exactly, that you’re accusing him of?” Rucker asked again. “You know what the crime is,” Trump answered. “The crime is very obvious to everybody.”

Susan B. Glasser, “‘Obamagate’ is Niche Programming for Trump Superfans,” May 15, 2020.

If Trump’s political success was built on the back of a conspiracy theory, it was also because of a methodical cultivation of image and a manipulation of “reality” that we have certain television producers to thank. His administration is the logical conclusion of the intersection of pop culture and politics, a triumph of capitalist imperatives and Bernaysian rhetoric. Not to mention his money also has tentacles in that sinful epicenter of the American west…

That we’ve ended up in Trump country might mean, according to King’s haunted historical model as figured in The Shining, we have not properly exorcised the demons of Watergate because we have not properly reckoned with Watergate’s roots. This is the equivalent of an alcoholic–such as Jack Torrance–giving up the bottle without dealing with the psychological and emotional issues/trauma that gave rise to the urge to drink in the first place. And Jack’s continued craving for alcohol is precisely what makes him ripe for the Overlook’s taking.

The Amazing Roach Motel

There’s still plenty more to say about The Shining, not least of which is the novel’s treatment of addiction and how it unconsciously manifests some personal demons King had yet to deal with at the time. But if I don’t move on to King’s next work now it feels like I never will…

Kubrick’s changing the Volkswagen’s color in the movie is a change a lot of viewers might not notice (at least I didn’t), but the substitution of the topiary maze for the topiary animals is largely the most noticeable/significant change he made, a more memorable symbol of adaptive liberties, of making the material his own. As I write this, the maze increasingly seems a symbol of the writing process itself, a symbol for the process of trying to make sense of history, a symbol for the endless signification inherent in interpretive analysis once you get started…

The more of King’s work I read, the more connections there are to make. I’m getting deeper and deeper into a Kubrickian maze of my own making, though what is the maze but another version of the winding corridors of the Overlook itself….

Some might argue you can’t move forward if you keep looking at the past, others that you have to look at the past in order to move forward. The more I think about it, the more tangled the possible readings of the Overlook exploding in the novel get. It ties into King’s idea that evil destroys itself. But if the Overlook represents history, that’s not something that can just be destroyed. It seems like we need to learn to acknowledge and thus live with our historical ghosts, that destroying them would mean ignoring and thus not learning from past mistakes…so I guess ultimately I can’t look to a King novel for all the solutions to our problems.

But I can’t get too bogged down in analyzing anymore analysis or making anymore historical connections, or I really might end up stuck in the Overlook forever…

…and ever…

-SCR