Flying Saucers and Wild Berries

I pair a great film with a so-bad-it's-good classic. I play another round of Roulette and write about three books I've read.

This week I made a pairing of the Tim Burton film Ed Wood and the Ed Wood film Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Ed Wood is designed to approximate the filmmaking style of its subject, Edward Davis Wood Jr., a postwar writer, director and actor who made Plan 9 from Outer Space, often cited as one of the Worst Movies Ever Made. Burton’s 1994 film about Wood is something of a pastiche of the sort of dirt-cheap, black-and-white trash filmmaking that was Wood’s milieu and of which Plan 9 from Outer Space is one of the best-remembered examples. But while the makers of Ed Wood evince a certain reverence for their subject, they’re clearly aware that the only tribute to Wood better than a terrible movie about him is a great one, which is what they have made.

The leads in Ed Wood are a highly skilled and perfectly-cast group (Bill Murray, SJP, a brilliant turn from Martin Landau as screen legend Bela Lugosi) led by an outstanding prime-era Johnny Depp, who breathes life into a characterization of Wood that is lovable, empathetic, charming and relatable. He’s naive enough to have no idea how ridiculous his work is, which Ed Wood treats as a virtue, particularly in combination with his grit, pluck and determination to see his creative vision through by any means. That he is fairly inept with each of the various jobs he assigns himself on his sets is something to which he is happily oblivious, and which, along with his enthusiasm and purity of heart, allows him to cement a legacy as a terrible filmmaker while scores of mediocrities go unremembered. The film even has the insight to note that Wood, as someone usually ranked in the running for Worst Filmmaker of All Time, has far more in common with Orson Welles, posited by many as the greatest filmmaker of all time, than almost any of their contemporaries — and proceeds to weave this point seamlessly into its three-act structure, with Welles telling Wood that Welles’s troubles in getting his ideas out of his head, through the industry system and onto the screen are just as exhausting and demoralizing as Wood’s. This is the turn in the story that gives Depp’s Wood the courage to face his final challenge and see through Plan 9 from Outer Space on his own terms. The creators of Ed Wood don’t patronize their subjects or their audience and delight in affirming that someone trying to make a terrible movie is entitled to as much frustration and satisfaction as anyone trying to make a great one.

Watching Plan 9 from Outer Space, a 1959 film of Wood’s with an outsized sense of ambition and a most notorious reputation for terribleness, I can see why the Hollywood insider professionals who made Ed Wood respected him not only as a character but as an artist. It turns out that whether Plan 9 from Outer Space is indeed the Worst Movie Ever Made, or is even bad at all, depends quite a lot on what a modern viewer thinks makes a movie “bad.” For me Wood’s film is certainly not as incomprehensibly, nihilistically bad as, say, Showgirls or Battlefield Earth or other over-funded, faint-hearted stabs at novelty and provocation that had studio backing and A-list production values and still managed to humiliate everyone involved. Plan 9 is dirt-cheap, silly and half-competently made, the work of outsiders straining against the upper limits of their meager budget and amateurish abilities to achieve anything at all, and their honest intentions can be felt onscreen and distinguish Plan 9 from more cynical nominees for Worst Movies lists. In a post-video era when almost everyone has participated in making a bad home movie of one kind or another, Wood seems much more noble and relatable than those with budgets for production and marketing in the many millions who still can’t make a return on an investment.

Plan 9 was written, directed, edited and produced by Wood as a combination of the horror and science-fiction genres with a plot involving space aliens in flying saucers using technology to raise the dead of Earth and mobilize them as a zombie army to take over the world and stop human beings from stumbling upon increasingly more destructive forms of warfare that will eventually destroy the universe. (Pretty sure I’ve roughly got that right.) While a lot of things the characters say and do in the film are stupid and nonsensical enough to be flatly unrealistic, like a police lieutenant who constantly uses his service pistol to gesture at others and scratch his own head, the movie overall actually has a mostly consistent internal logic. It’s noteworthy that the hierarchical structures of the police, military and alien high command compete with one another but function well internally; Wood seems to respect strong commanders who delegate responsibility to trustworthy subordinates, which is part of how he is depicted in Ed Wood as a visionary who accepts responsibility for coaxing what he needs out of his collaborators.

The Ed Wood of Ed Wood is not just an industry outsider but a social outsider, a heterosexual combat veteran who doesn’t hide or apologize for his love of dressing in women’s clothes. As an instinct and as an explicit rule he doesn’t judge others for their quirks and frailties (such as Lugosi’s severe depression and drug addiction) because he “wouldn’t have any friends” if he did. His open-mindedness and natural leadership qualities make him the center of his circle of eccentrics, and the communal endeavor of filmmaking into which Wood drafts everyone around him provides a sense of purpose and belonging for his oddball compatriots. Ed Wood is about how members of outsider communities become family to one another and does a great job of weaving this in with its other themes of ambition, self-acceptance, the concept of auteurism and the strangeness of Hollywood. It’s a bracing story told well by great filmmakers and performers, and that Plan 9 from Outer Space has none of these qualities makes the juxtaposition of the two films weird and fun. I recommend flipping a coin to see which one to start with and then watching both.

Last week I introduced my new feature Roulette, where I use a random number generator to draw three selections from the list of books I’ve read over the last ten years and see what I can write about them. Let’s spin the chamber again.

The Raven with The Philosophy of Composition by Edgar Allan Poe with wood engravings by Alan James Robinson, read in 2016. In the format of a children’s book, Poe’s most famous poem is handsomely illustrated with Robinson’s stately engravings. Also included is Poe’s magazine essay The Philosophy of Composition, where he explains how he wrote The Raven and states that a good work of literature should never be too long to read in a single sitting, a rule I follow with this newsletter. I adore The Raven and, among other bits of poetry, oratory and scripture, can recite it from memory as a party trick or bedtime meditation. The Raven remains one of the most transcendently great works of art and was actually served pretty well by the infamous Simpsons adaptation with James Earl Jones performing the narration, though they left out a few key verses. As a poem without illustrations or cartoons to accompany it, The Raven doesn’t lose its power to gnaw at and haunt the modern reader, and it’s always a good time to revisit it, which I suggest you do right after finishing reading this newsletter.

The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce with illustrations by Ralph Steadman, read in 2018. Just a few entries before The Devil’s Dictionary on my reading list is Shadows of Blue & Gray: The Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce, which I read because some of its contents were cited and analyzed in a book I read in 2016 called This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by the historian Drew Gilpin Faust. I long knew of Bierce’s reputation as a nineteenth-century American writer with a keen eye and biting wit who mysteriously vanished never to be seen again, but I didn’t know until I read Faust’s book that he was a Union Army veteran who saw heavy action at Shiloh and other significant battles. I made a point of getting around to reading his Civil War short fiction and front-line remembrances in Shadows of Blue & Gray, which lead shortly thereafter to a feeling that I should get caught up on perhaps his most famous work The Devil’s Dictionary. More so than in his Civil War stories, which are mired in his personal recollections of horrors nearly too great to conceive for those who weren’t there, Bierce’s venomous and incisive sense of humor is ablaze in his satirical dictionary which offers up snarkily novel definitions of terms and concepts that point out human hypocrisies and how they can be papered over by the language games we play and the fancy terminologies we use to deceive ourselves. This edition was illustrated by Ralph Steadman, the legendary illustrator most associated with Hunter S. Thompson and the gonzo school of journalism. The pairing of Bierce and Steadman might appear odd at first, but upon reflection Bierce makes a ton of sense as a literary antecedent to Thompson, a connection I might never have made if I hadn’t stumbled on this edition of Bierce’s classic text.

Wild Berries by Julie Flett, read in 2019. Flett is an artist and children’s book author based in Canada. I very much admired her graphic style in Wild Berries, which blends flinty, sharp-edged collage with fluid watercolor technique. The book concerns a boy’s time spent picking berries with his grandmother who teaches him naturalist terminology in their traditional Cree dialect. It doesn’t take long to read all of the words in the book, but I found myself lingering over the images. Apparently it’s possible to track down a copy of Wild Berries translated entirely into the characters’ particular Cree dialect, which is nifty.