So I’ve heard the buzz about the new film Backrooms for a while, along with Obsession, the two breakout hits of the summer movie crop. I studiously avoided reading much about it, including reviews, so as not to be corrupted by other opinions. Now that I’ve seen it I do recommend that approach, as surprises are part of the fun. Or more particularly: The Mystery. In Backrooms the filmmakers do a good job of dropping hints and clues about what’s going on, without fully explaining it. If you’re a fan of psycho/surreal horror, you’ll love it.
I’ll do my best not to give much away. My perception of the movie, from the online buzz, was that it was this year’s Blair Witch Project (1999). Wrong. (Blair Witch had its makeshift charms, anonymous, inexperienced actors and limited plot: I remember seeing it at the theater and wondering, when it ended, “Is that it?”) No, Backrooms is professional and polished, despite its director being only twenty years old (and the movie’s “found footage” origins from a YouTube video). One thing I quickly discovered: It has knockout performances from the two main A-list actors: Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, the man who sets the plot in motion, and Renate Reinsve as Mary, who acts as something of a narrator and psycho-spiritual guide. (She was up for Best Actress in last year’s Sentimental Value.)
The best summer hits capture the nation’s zeitgeist, so in this way maybe Backrooms is this summer’s Jaws (1975), or better yet, Alien (1979). It’s a snapshot of what we fear: In this case, technology run amok. I read it as a metaphor for A.I., or A.S.I. (Artificial Superintelligence), although A.I. is never mentioned in any way. Various A.I. researchers and pundits have noted that even its creators don’t know exactly how A.I. works, how it “learns” and “grows,” exactly. Some have argued that’s cause for great alarm—the folly of creating a super-powerful technology that we don’t understand and can’t necessarily control completely. Backrooms, however, is no jeremiad. In a nutshell, it’s freaky. Great visuals of empty rooms and insular creepiness. Supposedly it’s a play on “liminal spaces” and there is a not-exactly-here element to its reality: It’s something in between our world and the world to come. I’ll classify it as Psycho-Surreal Horror. Now to Obsession, a horse of a different color.
Obsession is more conventional. Its tagline captures that: “Be careful who you wish for.” It’s essentially a Love Story or a Love-Gone-Wrong Story. I’ve heard it’s interpreted by some as a metaphor for (romantic/sexual) “consent.” Maybe. But it doesn’t beat you over the head with that idea. Unlike Backrooms, the danger is not a technological one, but it shares a fear of the unknown product we can purchase that will change our lives in ways we don’t anticipate or understand. Michael Johnston plays Bear, the lovestruck lead, who pines for his “friend” Nikki (played by Inde Navarrette). Despite his bruin’s name, Bear is a nebbishy guy who can’t confess his feelings or pretty much act in his best interests . . . without some supernatural or divine intervention. Which goes terribly wrong. It’s another version of the classic Monkey’s Paw idea: Fulfilled wishes usually come with strings—or thorns—attached.
So one of the best books about WWII is William Shirer’s epic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1961). Shirer is a fascinating narrator in part because he was there. (He’s also an excellent stylist, with a fluid, straightforward narrative flow.) He describes being at rallies in Berlin, about seeing Adolf Hitler and Herman Goring up close and personal: He was an America journalist stationed in Berlin during the 1930s (and has multiple bona fides about being a foreign correspondent in Europe, circa the 1920s-30s). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is phenomenal book. It changed my thinking and perspective on how brutal and cruel the Nazi regime was, and how foolish, in its own macabre way.
Now I’m tackling Shirer’s additional tome meant to explain and understand WWII, Collapse of the Third Republic (1969). In a nutshell Collapse tries to explain the complex history of early 20th-century France and how it could result in the demoralizing and catastrophic surrender of French forces and government in only one month at the outbreak of WWII in 1940. Shirer describes the tumultuous 1930s, including the riots of 1934 that weakened the French government (The Third Republic), from an eyewitness standpoint. He was there in Paris when many of the riots occurred.
The book is not an “easy read.” Although it’s very readable and lucid, it’s also 2000 pages, more or less, in my ebook version. I’m around page 500 so I’m a quarter of the way in, and still so much to go. But I like long books. If they’re worth it. And in this case, I think the answer is Yes.
So one of my favorite places in the U.S. and the world is Yellowstone. While Old Faithful and the geyser basins accessible by car are all fine and dandy, the real charm of our greatest National Park is its backcountry. Here’s a photo taken while kayaking on the southern shore of Yellowstone Lake in 2024, a fabulous trip full of wind and rain and glorious lake. Our first day it rained while we paddled and the waves rocked our kayaks, but the sun came out as soon as we got to our campsite. Behind us the lake was filled with fog and mist and a cloud rainbow. If you look closely you can see a bald eagle flying between a couple of those snags.
So when I first learned that there would be another Cape Fear remake, I was dismissive: The first two were good. For those who don’t know, the original starred Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, circa 1962, and is a noir classic. Then Martin Scorsese remade it in 1991 with Nick Nolte and Robert DeNiro, also quite good. Why another? Now that I’m watching the Apple TV series (big change from a feature-length movie) I see what they’ve done with it and have to say . . . it works. It’s even weirder than the first two gruesome versions.
The longer format of a series apparently led to the creation of numerous minor characters and major adjustments to the main characters. The nominal star of this remake is Amy Adams as Anna Bowden. Adams does a terrific job playing the lawyer whose fishy behavior led to Max Cady’s (Javier Bardem) imprisonment for 17 years. She’s cocky but vulnerable and a tad unhinged, guilty of the sin of hubris—or as my Catholic-school nun teachers would argue, the sin of Pride, the worst of the Seven Deadlies. She’s guilty of lawyerly misconduct because she believed her client, Cady, was guilty of the murder for which he was being prosecuted—by none other than her soon-to-be lawyer husband and former prosecutor of the murder case (Tom Bowden, played by Patrick Wilson). Seventeen years later, Max Cady gets released from prison and is out for revenge.
The differences between the earlier feature-length films and this series are too numerous to list, and the main reason why it seems like its own beast, not just another paint-by-numbers remake. For one thing, in the first two films the lawyer couple upon which Max wreaked his vengeance had one teenage daughter, who at some point Max comes to threaten. In the series, they have a teenage daughter, Natalie (played by Lily Collias, who looks more like her early 20s) and a teenage son Zach (played by Joe Anders, who does a good job of being moody). At first Zach is the one in trouble, presumably targeted by Max Cady as part of his revenge plot when he comes home missing a toe. It’s updated to include the role of technology in this Revenge Tale: Zach is wooed online by the sexy Nevaeh Valentine (played by Malia Pyles), Max’s mysterious and possibly homicidal daughter. Zach is a gamer who has shared nudes of his ex-girlfriend with other high-school classmates and is in purgatory for that sin.
But the real action crackles between Amy Adams and Javier Bardem. Bardem plays the role like a charming devil. He’s not as typecast as the first two films, not simply The Bad Guy. In this version he’s been wronged and may well be as murderous and evil as the lawyers think he is, but he’s also clever enough to milk the circumstances to appear the victim. Meanwhile Adams seems to react badly to one outrage after another, and is busy digging her own grave. It’s up to episode 6 by now, and one of its surprising charms is that you can’t really guess what happens next. Maybe Max gets his revenge and maybe he doesn’t. More likely the revenge he effects is more complex and nuanced than the violent end of both earlier films. Not that I don’t expect a violent ending, but it’s not the only option for the varied storylines. I’m enjoying it—even though, at the outset, I didn’t even want to watch it.
So I usually avoid reality TV, mainly for just being too tacky and stupid, although I did watch the very first season of Survivor, way back when, and am a bit amazed that it’s still going. It’s hokey and superficial and filled with influencer-types, ugh. But there exists another show in the same vein of outdoorsy challenges that for my money is the best reality TV ever: The History channel’s Alone. Just last week Season 13 debuted, billed as the first international challenge, World Championship. That billing seems kind of cheesy in ways that the show does not.
The setup: Each season 10 contestants get dropped off in some remote wilderness location. They’re alone, can bring only 10 additional items (besides 65 lbs of camera gear to film themselves), and must fend for themselves. They have a satellite phone and can “tap out” whenever they want. In this season two have already tapped out in the first few days. The last one standing wins $500,000. (Personally I’d say give them a cool million but I don’t run the show.)
Their being alone is perhaps the main reason it’s not cheesy in the way other reality shows are: It’s not a matter of personality conflicts and “conspirators” or alliances. It’s just a person alone, having to make a shelter, find food, and survive in wilderness conditions for up to three months at a time. There are no “immunities” and perks like special food if they win a challenge. There are no “challenges”: The whole setup is a challenge. (Some seasons end in less than two months, and other seasons last beyond three, but not by much.)
For outdoorsy people part of the fun of watching is imagining yourself in their shoes and their predicaments. It’s easy to get caught up in their personalities, have your favorites. Could I make that fire? Could I catch that fish? This season I’m rooting for Poldi and Will, who seem sharp. I like the competent, savvy outdoors people the most. I’m impressed with those who do much better than I can imagine I would. Often a few exit quickly: There’s a psychological condition called Drop Shock, which entails being freaked out soon after they get dropped off, alone in the wilderness, and the isolation sets in.
Fundamentals can be quite challenging: They aren’t allowed to bring tents. Each has only a tarp to use as temporary shelter. They all need to construct shelters to keep them warm and safe from the likes of grizzly bears, cougars, and wolverines. (Many of the seasons have been set in the far northern Canada.) This season is inside the Arctic Circle. (One season was in Africa, and the baboons were spookier than grizzly bears.) The shelters often seem a trap or a mistake: Some contestants have planned and begun elaborate log cabins but don’t spend enough time fishing, foraging, and hunting to feed themselves, so they tap out before the cabin is complete. Others have constructed clever shelters, complete with stone fireplaces inside.
For the typical contestant, nothing seems easy. They have to start their own fires, to boil their water to purify it, for one thing. The first season was set in the very wet forests of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Many of the contestants struggled mightily to get fires going. Black bears were everywhere and one guy tapped out for bear-fear. In this season one contestant tapped out after only a couple days because he burned up his ferro rod—a relatively easy fire-starting device.
They hunt and fish, and if you don’t like seeing squirrels and rabbits get caught in snares and eaten, look away. Mostly they snag small game, but now and then one of the contestants gets something big, like a moose or a musk-ox. They lose a lot of weight. They get stomach problems from not eating enough and/or eating sketchy stuff they find foraging or hunting. (The one who thought eating cactus was a good idea made a mistake.)
The winners almost always seem to deserve it. (One exception: One fellow won the season by basically starving himself effectively. He just sat around his shelter and didn’t eat much, and after a while he was the last one standing. I thought that was unfair: It’s not a show about starving!) And while most or many of the contestants struggle, a few of them seem natural at it. One winner in a season in Canada was a Canadian who seemed completely at ease in the far northern wilderness. It was cold by the end of the season and he was sitting around a fire outside his shelter, acting like it was no big deal.
When they start talking about how much they miss their families, you know they’re soon to tap out.
At the Camp America for Repatriated Adults none of the clocks actually work. All the detained are required to turn in their cellphones, laptops, Smart Watches and the like. The many clocks in the guest quarters, conference rooms, and rec centers all show different times. It keeps people guessing. “We don’t want you to become complacent,” says Helga, the first-day emcee and introducer-in-chief. She looks like an ex-alcoholic schoolmarm/Karen complete with frizzy beige hair and worry lines. “We don’t want you to know things. Or to act like you do. What time is it?” She makes a show of peering at her thin spotted wrist. Comical curious face. “I don’t know! I’m just living. In the moment. Like right now.” She spreads her arms wide as if to embrace us all in a loving one-ness, her gray shaven underarms visible for a moment, her spidery hands uplifted, the turquoise bracelets on her arm sliding back. “Doesn’t this feel good? Transcendent, maybe?”
Camp A seems part small-town jail, part rehab center, part detention camp. It looks like a repurposed Camp Crystal Lake from the horror classic Friday the 13th.
How I came to be here: Months ago I hung out at a bar called The Library. I’d tell my Mom, “I’m going to the library.” Twenty-six years old and I still live at home, in the basement.
Mom would squint at me from above her laptop and frown. “The library, again?”
She wondered why I was reading so much.
The girl I was in love with, Ripley, often met me at The Library. She asked if I’d take a pic of her lifting her dress and showing off her tat. The catch was: In a supermarket. It was for a contest called “Supermarket Surprise.” She could win $1,000 and would throw some my way, maybe.
There aren’t any real jobs to be had anyway.
Times have changed. Fatcats have everything while us proles loiter. Regular people have nothing to do. It’s getting weird. Now they’re inventing things to do, desperate and unsavory. It wasn’t always like this. For a while I had short-lived show on YouTube called “Burning With Bob.” Every week I’d do a new recipe. My shtick was I always, always burned something.
I’m easily distracted. Sometimes it would be a phone call and I’d chat away as the pots on the stove crackled and started to smoke. Sometimes it would be Guest Stars like Ripley in a ponytail running outfit all sweaty and flirty. At the end of each episode the kitchen filled with smoke and I’d search for a fire extinguisher. Sometimes I didn’t find it. Sometimes I did and it was out of foam. The last ep featured my Mom’s kitchen engulfed in CGI flames and me, calling out of the smoky gloom, “See you next week on Burning With Bob!”
I never made any money. It was fun for a few episodes and then it died out. Nobody watched. I spent six grand on equipment and advertising and by the end I was in credit card debt with no place to hide and no job no nothing.
After the death of “Burning With Bob” I drove an Uber but now it’s all self-driving cars. McDonald’s has gotten rid of people in the Drive-Thru. There’s nothing left to do. So me and Ripley went to the produce section of a Safeway and I took video of her bending over near the bananas, flashing a dragonfly tat on her white rump. She thanked me and said it looked nice. I thought it did too—at least for a photo of someone exposing herself in a supermarket.
A manager approached us and pointed at the entrance. “Get that filth out of here or I’ll call the cops.” We were already scurrying that direction, giggling. “You jealous,” I called out as the electronic door swooshed. We got to my ancient Subaru and she was still holding a bunch of bananas. She lofted them. “Now I’m a shoplifter, too.”
A week later I got pinched for porn charges. The law-enforcement apprehension was all online. I got an alert on my phone and then scanned a QR code and then read the Agreements page, which was threatening. I was scared. Next thing I know I’m getting texts to Uber my ass over here for a stay of six months, plus a valuable coupon book when I “graduate.” Weird thing is I’m on Staff. As an NVO (Non-Violent Offender, as opposed to the Vios, Violent Offenders) I’m eligible for perks, like being made an Enforcer. As far as I can tell they worry the Vios will get carried away and hurt somebody. Non-vios rule. We run things. At first. Until the Vios take over and put their jackboots on our necks.
I knew that Ripley had also been pinched. People at the Library wondered until they showed her arrest video on TV under the headline “Cleaning Up the Streets.” In the vid she gets into it with a chubby troll-agent wearing a face mask and this wannabe-SWAT-team military outfit. He yells at her to cease and desist. She starts to say something about free speech and the next thing you know they’re spraying her with mace and pulling her sweater up to cover her face, exposing her bra and skinny ribs. Then she’s being dragged into a van.
And I’m in love with her.
As Helga spreads her arms and her shaven dusky armpits with us, we the crowd of about a dozen newcomers nod and fidget. Arranged in a semi-circle, we stare forward at a wall of pine and fir tree forest behind her—some of the trees brown and deadlooking, victims of beetle kill—above which looms a view of the Rockies, below a bright expanse of blinding blue sky. I have to pee and wonder when this is all going to be over. Maybe I could just wander off and find a bathroom somewhere? A tree? We’re sleeping in cabins with Native American names like Chinook and Nez Perce. It’s a former Boy Scouts of America facility they bought cheap. Now that the government has outlawed gender-bending the Boy Scouts are dead in the water.
Someone behind me mutters that be-here-now is all fine and dandy, but in the real world people know what time it is, don’t they?
Helga asks if there are any sinners in the crowd. Someone snickers. “I’m a sinner,” she announces.
“Aren’t we all?” asks a woman.
“I’m a practicing Mennonite yet I once had sex in a Target dressing room,” adds Helga. “In the middle of the day.”
Another retail-worker-looking woman grins. “Like who hasn’t done that before?”
Someone else mutters, “What does a Mennonite practice? Baking bread? Being homely?”
A blonde to my right notes the middle of the day is the best time to have sex in a Target dressing room, actually, because the robots are programmed to nab shoplifters and aren’t really paying attention to how many feet show below the dressing-room door.
At the end of the Meet & Greet, we’re all required to sign NDAs.
“It’s standard procedure,” Helga calls out. We grumble. She looks around in a who-said-that way, gives me a look like she senses I’m a troublemaker and she does NOT like troublemakers. “Remember, people. You’re starting over. The next week or two we’ll be wiping your slates clean. For now it’s like what happens in Vegas, right? After that, you’ll be shiny and new.”
I admit that’s all fine and dandy, but can we get some real creamer for our coffee tomorrow? Not just the powdered kind? And maybe a digital clock?
“No talking!” she barks.
Day Two
At Camp America there are no calendars, either. It’s before my normal wakeup time on a Tuesday—I know because I got here on a Monday, ergo—morning when Donna Fargo’s “The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.” plays on loudspeakers as reveille in the blue light after dawn. We shuffle out like zombies to the Jason Voorhees Dining Hall. By the time I stand in front of the stainless-steel coffee urn, pulling the spigot marked Dark Roast, the sun is up. The dead are listening in and placing bets. The creamer is powdered blech.
After breakfast a plump white woman informs me she’s a Racial-Blindness Counselor and will be my sponsor throughout my stay at Camp A. Her name is Bea, pronounced Bay-uh. She sports curly black hair and looks like Betty Boop gone wrong. A weird chin wrinkle, like a frowny emoji. Dressed like a real-estate hooker with a low-cut maroon silk blouse she makes me fill out a questionnaire full of questions like, “A Latina woman rear-ends your sedan in stalled traffic, and when you get out to exchange information, explains she has no insurance. In response you . . .”
“Ask her for a date?” I write. Report her to ICE is the correct response.
She frowns at my responses. “Do we have an attitude here?” she asks.
“I’m confused,” I admit. “I thought I was here for, like, sex stuff?”
Bea nods. “That too.” She sits there looking at me, twirling a black pen in her fingers. A slight smile on her glossed lips. She says she likes me. She has a cousin I remind her of, Peter. “Peter’s the rebel without a pause. No one has seen him for over two years now. He’s an outcast.” She leans forward, whispers in a husky, Brenda-Vaccaro voice, “Is that what you want to be, the Outcast?”
I can’t tell if she’s flirting with me or what. The smile is unnerving. “Not really?”
“Too late, handsome. The die is cast. Out.” She marches me to the Camp A rec center and takes me to a backroom full of sports gear—a red plastic tub of softball bats and balls, gloves; rack of croquet mallets and colorfully striped balls, fishing poles hanging in the rafters. Smell of dust and old sweaty stuff. She asks that I remove my belt and put my hands behind me, waist level. “Close your eyes,” she commands.
She zipties me. I start to ask if that’s really necessary and she slips a black hood over my face, then fastens a dog collar to my neck. Hooks it to a leash. My breath is warm beneath the hood and all I see is the black fabric.
“You want to be an outcast?” asks Bea. “Voila. Wish come true.”
She leads me through camp, yanking the leash whenever I pause. I insist I did nothing wrong. She smacks the back of my head. I smell pine and hay and her Jungle Gardenia as I stumble through the darkness, hot breath trapped against my face. We pass a group of people talking and all go silent as we get close, except for some sniggers. “This is a violation of my rights!” I call out. Someone laughs.
She jerks my leash. “You have no rights, Worm. All you have is lefts. Like left behind.”
A fifteen-minute walk into the woods. I’m stumbling over roots and rocks and she keeps moving. After a while we stop. I feel her fumbling at my wrists and think that’s it, but then I feel her tugging at my pants button and zipper and she yanks them down, lets go, steps back, and jerks the hood from my face.
I squint in the glaring sun. I’m handcuffed to a pole at the center of an outdoor amphitheater. A clearing in the woods. My pants fallen to my ankles.
She eyes me up and down, whistles. “Commando, huh?” She shakes her head. “The choices we make.”
I tell her she can’t do this to me. I’ll report her.
She takes a photo of me with her iPhone. “You do that.” Looks at her screen and smirks. “Looks like we have some shrinkage today don’t we?”
I’m left there all day, standing. I can’t sit down. The zipties are hooked too high into the pole behind me. Soon my legs and back burn. Flies buzz about my face and crotch. I call out for help and no one comes. At one point a hawk lands atop the high branches of a fir and watches me. At dusk I get cold and shiver and yell until my throat burns and finally Bea arrives carrying a flashlight, shining it in my eyes. “Look who’s here,” she says. “The Outcast in all his glory.”
I tell her what I think of her and this aversion-therapy bullshit and she says, “Really? Well that’s another week on your sentence, Dr. Freud.”
I start begging. She asks if I’m going to behave. I promise I will if she cuts the zips.
The cabins are quiet when we return. Amber glow in windows. Smell of pine needles and campfire smoke. In the camp kitchen hut, people washing dishes. For dinner the only thing left is stale hot dog buns and individually wrapped slices of American cheese. The faint smell of popcorn. A crowd of people sit around a campfire in the plaza between the cabins. I take a seat on the outside and eat my dog, tail between my legs.
Helga sits on a stool in front of the dining tables and points at people. “Anderson? Katy Anderson?” she calls out.
A young dark-haired woman raises her hand half-heartedly. Helga asks, “What’s your mother’s maiden name?”
The young woman lowers her hand. After a moment she says, “Witherspoon.”
“Good,” says Helga. “Good. You’ve got fine Anglo-Saxon genes.” She smiles and explains that the whole idea of Repatriation is to encourage people to find their homes. “Marry within your tribe, say the Jews. They’re right.” She’s walking in front of the group now, her face darkened by shadows, the campfire light flickering behind her. “We need to cleanse our country. Each to his own. It’s been this way for thousands of years and it works.”
I listen and nod, grin when appropriate. We sign NDAs so we won’t blab about all the shit going down. One of the new ideas of the Repatriation Counsel is “voluntary” repatriation of black people to Africa. They’re offered $100K in cryptocurrency to immigrate to Nigeria, Zambia or Lagos, no questions asked. It’s called The Final Solution, irony not acknowledged. We all just nod. We keep our heads down.
But it’s Ripley who haunts me. I took the photo. She had crooked teeth and squinting eyes like blue coin slots. Cupid bow lips and wild wavy auburn hair. She didn’t smile a lot but when she did it would break your heart. Sad and alluring with a twist of wallflower. She’d been kicked out of high school for starting a fire in the gym. “It wasn’t like Carrie or anything,” she told me. “I just wanted to get out of P.E.” It was supposed to be a trashcan fire. But the flames leapt high enough to catch the Pep Rally banners to Tame the Cougars and next thing you know the whole school was evacuated.
Once when we were leaving The Library I asked if maybe she wanted to have dinner with me. She acted like she didn’t hear and just kept walking to her car. I was about to call out, “My treat!” but then I stopped. I didn’t really have any money. No use getting her hopes up.
Day Three
As a test of my newfound obedience, I’m assigned to watch the video monitors. Bea sets me up in a shed located behind the main camp headquarters. There’s a bank of video monitors, one in each of the cabins, and several in the communal meeting rooms. “This is wrong?” I say. “I mean, aren’t we invading their piracy or something?”
Bea scratches her neck. “It’s privacy, dumbshit.”
“That’s what I meant. It’s still wrong.”
“Wrong, schlong. It’s what we do.” She points at the screen. “Now watch. See monitor fourteen? What is that participant doing?”
He appears to be pleasuring himself, alone in his cabin. He’s really going at it, like a boy scout trying to win a badge. I tell her it’s none of our business, is it?
Helga laughs. “Where’re you from, Lake Inferior?” She asks me to go knock on his door and report back to me. “When he manages to extricate himself and demands to know why you’re there, say, ‘You’re being transferred to a group cabin.’ Then leave.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You can. You will. Or three additional weeks.” She shoos me along. Her weird chin wrinkle unnerves me. Her cleavage looks like JetPuff marshmallows. “Let’s get this party started!”
When I’m leaving, she adds, “Forgot to tell you. Don’t knock!” She grins. “That would give it all away, wouldn’t it?”
The video monitor station is in the Reinhard Heydrich cabin, and between the Voorhees Dining Hall and Heydrich, I must pass through the Game Courts. There’s a volleyball game in progress. I skitter along the sides and make my way to the Ed Kemper cabin cluster. I’m about to knock, hand poised in air, when I remember Bea’s admonishment: Don’t knock. Don’t knock. Don’t knock. I don’t.
I make a racket, opening the door. Clomp my boots on the wooden porch. Call out, “Hello?” By the time I open the door and don’t even look inside, all I hear is a meek voice saying, “Yeah? What is it?”
“Party on, Wayne!” I call out. Slam the door and promptly step in a mud puddle as I hustle away.
Bea is gone and Helga there when I report back. “If we discover, Mr. Dean, that you reveal anything you see today? Your stay will be increased by two weeks.”
Back in my cabin, I mark tiny black sharpie lines into the wood paneling in the gloom beside my lower bunk bed wall. I record my days, III. No sign of Ripley yet.
Day Four
On one wall of the Voorhees there’s a bulletin board about various events and opportunities at Camp A. In the center of it there’s a photo of me, ziptied to pole, wearing the black hood, with my pants around my ankles. Scrawled at the bottom is the legend, “Look! He’s proud of this little thing!” People gather around, laugh and point. I laugh along with them. I can take a joke.
Afternoon we’re divided into groups and put in vans, driven to the city to participate in a Smash & Grab ceremony.
Helga presents me with a pornographic video of a seriously pregnant woman having sex with two men. I try not to watch. It’s required. There are questions at the end and if you get them wrong, you have to watch again. I’ve already extended my stay by three weeks now.
I want out.
Day Six
I’m already losing track of time. I’m becoming another one of the Know Nothings. At breakfast Helga admonishes me, “It’s not Wednesday! It’s Saturday, silly.”
Later I’m recorded asking a volleyball player if they’ve ever seen a young woman who looks like Ripley. In the video I’m showing her the photo. Three more weeks are added to my sentence.
We’re asked to play games. Rip the Clothes Off the Loser! is a popular one. I play listlessly.
“Are you on something?” asks one of the facilitators.
By early evening we’re encouraged to take a walk around the grounds, to stimulate blood flow. At the end of the Trail of Tears Trail a waterfall splatters and crashes in frothy white foam into a blue pool, beside which the dark-haired woman with a broken arm is sitting, tossing rocks into the pool with her good hand. She’s facing away from me at first but then she turns and squints into the sunshine, my direction.
“Ripley?”
She blinks and doesn’t answer. “Oh, it’s you,” she says. “I thought you might be somewhere.”
I tell her I’ve been looking for her. She doesn’t react. I ask if I can sign her cast.
“That’s the sweetest thing anyone has said to me all day. I don’t have a pen or anything?”
From my pocket I produce a black Sharpie, brandishing it in the air. “Voila.”
“Aren’t you something?” she says. I sign my name with a big B and swirly-font letters for the rest. She watches in bemusement, whispers. “Looks like the credits on ‘Burning With Bob.’”
For an Important Announcement we meet in the Real-America Chalet, a wide room with black-and-white tile floor done in a checkerboard design, a row of folding tables off to one side, where the wet bar used to be. Giant moose head mounted above the fireplace. People standing around like chess pieces who don’t know their next move. The smell of cinnamon tea, ammonia mop cleanser, and people-stink. Above everything hangs a chandelier made of elk antlers—twisted and tangled, like giant’s crown of thorns. At one table you sign release forms and run your credit card through a white screen, sign your name with your finger. At another table you pick up your packet, a brochure about the facility, with happy smiling rehab people ready to get back on with their lives, ready to face the music. A smiling chubby woman gives me a black Sharpie and a name tag. Hello, My Name Is Bob, it reads, in blocky letters. The B is messy and has a tail, so it looked more like a P.
Ripley lurks in the corner, to the left of the massive fireplace, whose mantel is decorated with cattle brands, like the Circle Z, the Bar O, some that look like geometric shapes, petroglyphs. Sitting on the ground, curly hair held up on her head with a scrunchie, like the Bride of Frankenstein. She looks out of place there, on the floor. The center of the room is full of folding chairs.
She wears cream-colored pants that hike up when she sits, exposing her ankles and shins and lower calf. Thick ankles with pink socks drooping. Gold hoop earrings her only flash of color. A gray sweater decorated with white sheep figures, round puffy white forms, cartoonish, the kind counted by cartoon characters trying to sleep.
I’m the guilty one. It’s my fault she’s here. I walk to the end of the folding table upon which are arranged snacks and beverages. Cheeses on a cutting board, a half-circle of Ritz crackers, a white bowl of throat-cut strawberries. Loiter by the punch bowl, round glass tub of red-colored fruit punch in which floated wedges of oranges and limes. Pretend to be examining the various cattle brands on the mantle. She sits with her back against the wall. Knees folded in front of her. Body disguised by floppy slacks and sloppy gray sweater. Something tragically attractive about her face. She’s reading some kind of Repatriation Manual.
At the end of the table, next to the punch bowl, a stack of short clear-plastic cups. I fill one and stand there, beside the punch bowl, hovering. She glances up.
“I’m loitering,” I say. “Don’t mind me.”
She keeps reading.
I lean down a bit, crouching, looking at the brochure photo of a crowd of white teenagers, like a high school sports team from Utah. “Is it good?”
She sighs. “Listen. Whatever you want from me you’re not getting.” She gets to her feet.
“Jesus,” I say. “I was just being nice.”
She walks away. As she crosses the Great Moose Path, across the chessboard tiles, I watch, and see her reach her hand out behind her, my direction, middle finger raised.
Day Seven
The subject today is bubbles. How we all live in bubbles. Neocons live in neocon bubbles with photos of Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk on the walls, and liberals live in diversity bubbles with photos of healthy, fit twenty-somethings on the cover—a white woman, a black man, and an Asian woman paddling a canoe on a sapphire lake, with mountains in the background.
Here we nickname it Camp UnWoke. Or Camp Oopsy, according to the wags. At Camp Oopsy, like prison, you wondered what your fellow inmates did to get there.
A whole barracks full of Affirmative-Action Abusers.
The rules: No drugs, no alcohol. No fraternization with other Canceleds. “You’re here to learn,” exhorted Helga. “You’re here to be better people. If you keep doing the same things that got you in trouble?” She paused and looked around at all of us, everyone thinking no doubt that Yeah, Lady? That’s what we’re planning, first chance we get. “You’ll be out of here. Gone,” she added. “Gone gone. You understand?’
We nodded. Glumly.
That night the bonfire burst to flame with a kerosene-induced whoosh and a smattering of applause from the Canceleds gathered around like a Christian revivalist congregation. Fir branches stacked in a tent-shape, crackling and smoky. Soon the heat is enough to scorch your face while the cold air keeps your backside frosty. Without booze things are too well-behaved and only a few desperate losers try to dance halfheartedly. I wander off to find Ripley.
At Bronco Henry’s cabin, I get no answer when I knock. Doors aren’t locked there so I peek inside, stand in the doorway and call her name. Moonlight stripes the floor, spilling from the windows beside the bunk beds, leaving the rest of the room in shadows and darkness. I feel exposed, standing there, holding a gift-wrapped box. If any of her bunkmates arrive they’ll turn us in for violating protocol.
A paperback book falls to the floor. What she was reading. “Go away,” she said. “I’m asleep.”
The sound of laughter and clapping beyond the cabin. Volleyball game in progress. A thump and a chorus of cheers. I don’t move. “No, you’re not,” I said. “You answered me.”
After a moment of silence she said, “You’ve heard of sleepwalking?”
“I have.”
“I’m sleeptalking.”
I tell her I guess I’ll have to return it.
“Return what?”
Return whatever is in the gift-wrapped box I’m holding.
She scrunches up her legs. Tells me to sit down. Hers is the bottom bunk. Squeaks when I sit. Those wire grids that pass for box springs. I sit, hunching over a bit, tall enough my head bumps against the ceiling of the top bunk.
“This better be good,” she says, smiling meekly as she tears the gold wrapping paper. “Who are you?” she asks. “One of the Three Wise Men?”
“That would make you Mary I guess.”
“Hardly,” she quips.
She rips open the paper and finds a piece of cheesecake I smuggled out. Takes a bite and chews, goes “Mmm,” then opens her mouth wide to show me the masticated cake. Tells me if I’m going to sneak in here, I better hang this blanket from the top bunk, you think?
In the blue light of dawn I wake, curled against Ripley’s warmth. Outside, the sound of footsteps on the cinder path. I give her a squeeze, whisper that I had better get going. “Before the Gestapo show up,” I add.
She twists around and bestows on me a sweet kiss, whispers, “Now go before you get me in more trouble.”
My face smells of her and I can’t help but smile as I shimmy the window open, sit on the sill and flip my legs out, then drop down and proceed to do the crouch, the crawl of shame. I cut behind the Voorhees Dining Hall and am almost to my cabin when a German Shepherd starts barking and I take off on a run, make it to the door and dash in, waking up my bunkmates as I crawl into the bottom bunk.
“You know we’re not supposed to break curfew,” whispers Jules, the bunkmate above me.
Hush, I tell him. “What is this? Prison?” I whisper.
He waits a while, then whispers, “It’s your funeral.”
Day Ten
The Enforcers drag Ripley away. When I protest, Helga tells me to shut up. “You’re next, Bucko. All privileges are over.”
Chad marches me over to my cabin, forces me to gather all my things, and transfers me to another cabin, more like a dirty shed. He tells me to make myself uncomfortable. “No dinner tonight,” he adds. “No distractions, get it? We’re giving you time to learn the error of your ways.”
In the middle of the night I awake with Helga shaking my foot, pointing a flashlight in my eyes. She tells me to get dressed and put on shoes. That I have to see something. Some Enforcers stand behind her. I turn over and squirm into the corner of the bunk, telling them to go away. One of them yanks the covers off me and tells me to get the fuck up and do as she says or somebody’s going to get hurt.
While lacing my sneakers I say, “I’m going to report this shit.”
They laugh. “Oooh, loser here is going to report us!” The beefy one scratches his crotch. “I got your report hangin’.”
Helga stands there, holding her clipboard. She shakes her head. “Enough.” Once my shoes are tied I stand up and she turns heel. “Follow me.”
The camp is asleep and silent, but for the crunch of our shoes on the cinder paths, the god’s breath of wind in the pines. At one point we pass close to a cabin and hear the sounds of weeping. I try to joke, walking toward the woods, toward an orange glow. “This better be good,” I tell them. “What? You’re giving me a pony?”
Helga whacks me with a hiking stick. We head toward the flickering glow in the forest.
In the woods beyond Cabin Row, hidden by a dense stand of aspen, there’s a clearing, encircled by a ring of totem poles. Upon each pole is fixed a deer or elk skull with antlers, and beside each pole, a tiki torch. Eagle feathers affixed to the skulls flutter in the wind. On the poles themselves, carvings of horrible faces, grimacing, and a path leading into the open center. The torch light casts antler shadows on the audience of nearby aspens. Carved into the totems straddling the path is the legend The Vale of Unforgiveness. Beyond the last totems, a sandy circle with no grass or trees. In the center, a square hole in the ground. In the center of the square hole, a lid with a handle. Helga tells me to raise it.
“You’re kidding, right?” I look at all three, Helga, with her dishpan face, the Enforcers, with their Tweedledum/Tweedledee looks.
“Do it.”
I tell them I don’t know who they think they are and what they’re doing, but I’m nobody’s slave. “Raise it yourself, bitch.”
Something hits the back of my head and I go down. My ear explodes twice more. In a second I’m gasping to breathe, a boot on my neck. My hand flails in the dirt until hands yank me back to my feet and let go. “I told you to raise the lid,” says Helga. “Now raise it.”
The tiki torches throw a circle of flickering amber light and antler shadows over everything but with the lid raised, the square is a black pit. Helga fumbles for her flashlight and we hear whimpering. A gust of urine smell hits us. She gets the light going and points it into the void. “See this? That’s what your meddling caused.” She gives me a smirk. “We call it the Epstein Box.”
Into the pit stretches an aluminum ladder. Beyond it, a bare light bulb illuminates the inside of a doomsday bunker. Gray concrete floor and metal shelving. A few feet away sits Ripley, on a cot handcuffed to an iron ring in the wall, mouth covered with silver duct-tape, eyes wild and terrified, whimpering. She’s wearing an orange T-shirt and dirty gym shorts. Her white legs bruised with blue blotches. Her squeals and whimpering get louder, more intense, and she jerks against the handcuffs, scraping the metal legs of the cot across the concrete floor.
So I caught Steven Spielberg’s new movie Disclosure Day on Thursday, its opening day in my neck of the woods. With all the hype worthy of a Spielberg movie drop it begins with a wrestling match in which the camera is alternatively perched on the wrestler being pounded or thrown in the air and the crowd scenes, focusing on one morose fellow with a conspicuous backpack. I was thinking terrorist plot at that point. A trio of black-clad government operatives surround the guy and, as usual with movie magic, somehow he gets away. But he’s not a domestic (or international) terrorist in the conventional sense. He’s more of a whistleblower. Think Edward Snowden. Think government secrets of the profound variety.
From that wrestling-match opening sequence it barrels headlong into plots and subplots full of mystery, bad guys in black governmental SUVs hurtling down roads to catch or kill the good guys, and several amusing moments that involve what most people would call “super powers”: Emily Blunt suddenly breaks into Polish/Russian while speaking to her boyfriend, and when one government goon touches an interstellar object with a glove, he explodes. It’s fun and fast-paced. I don’t know if it’s particularly profound, although the ending implies a reckoning with cosmic reality. It ends with one verb that the UFO-naysayers generally refuse to do.
As Spielberg is 79 years old, he may be nearing the Swan Song part of his career, and Disclosure Day plays into that era nicely. It’s best appreciated as a kind of bookend to his classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), with touches of E.T. (1982) and War of the Worlds (2005). Personally I’d suggest less chase scenes and more aliens, but what do I know. Emily Blunt does a terrific job as a TV weatherwoman Margaret Fairchild, who is somehow linked to conspiracies and extraterrestrials in ways she doesn’t understand, while Josh O’Connor plays Dr. Daniel Kellner, a techie supergeek who mumbles and stumbles his way through the movie, a kind of Everyman for conspiracy theory buffs. Lastly the charming Brit Colin Firth plays the bad guy, Noah Scanlon, who is trying to keep secrets and will do anything to anyone who gets in his way.
As a UFO enthusiast but reluctant skeptic, it’s all pretty fascinating to me. The recent documentary The Age of Disclosure (2025) provides plenty of fuel for ufologists who insist all the theories are real and should be believed, essentially that our government has proof of alien existence, including spacecraft and “biologics” (which, we assume, implies Dead Alien Bodies). That the government is now releasing UFO files makes it all the more timely and relevant. Will this fictional movie convince anyone that “The truth is out there”? Should it? Probably not. But many people believe we are on the cusp of a grand “disclosure,” from the government most likely, that will change our thinking about aliens and UFOs. Like many (if not most), I’ll believe when I see it, when reputable scientists can examine said alien spacecraft and/or bodies. Once we enter a realm where the hard evidence of alien encounters is indisputable, we’ll no doubt look back on Spielberg’s films as prescient and visionary. For now, it’s a lot of fun.
So I’ve been a fan of Ian McGuire’s fiction ever since the publication of his novel The North Water (2016). I haven’t followed his career closely or anything (I see there’s a novel published in 2020 titled The Abstainer, about which I know nothing), but just recently I discovered he has a new novel that debuted in February—White River Crossing. It’s a terrific read and a great follow-up to The North Water.
Set in the late 18th century (begins in 1766), White River Crossing is ostensibly a historical novel, but I find that genre category rather dismissive. Some of the world’s greatest novels, including Tolstoy’s monumental War and Peace (1869), would fit under that label, or Cormac McCarthy’s epic Blood Meridian (1985). No label does a work of artistic genius justice. In his preface McGuire mentions how he did considerable research for the novel, mainly concerning the Hudson’s Bay Company—which had a monopoly on the Canadian fur industry for a good two hundred years—and its interactions with the Native Americans who supplied them furs. Without giving much away (this is mentioned in the novel’s jacket description) I can report the impetus for the novel’s “quest” is the discovery of gold in a remote area northwest of Hudson’s Bay, in a bleak landscape known as the Barren Grounds. Three men working for the Hudson’s Bay Co set out to find the gold and . . . trouble ensues.
What impresses me most about McGuire’s fiction is not so much his subject matter (although I do love a good adventure story) but his style and diction. He has a knack for the odd, specific word, framed in lyrical, complex sentences. When I was teaching a graduate-level creative writing course at Penn State I had the class read The North Water, mainly for the stylistic pyrotechnics, and the class . . . hated it! I’m not kidding. I have to say they disappointed me greatly, and seemed to fall into the trap of gender-sensitivity and the cliches of “wokeness.” I tried to argue the novel’s strengths, to no avail. They weren’t having it. How could he write a novel with no exemplary female characters in it? That was their main beef. How could he write such despicable “toxic maleness”? Groan. Yes, there are despicable male characters in The North Water. We’re not supposed to “like” them. My easy summation of the novel? It’s a revisionist Moby Dick. The men are not noble and level-headed, such as Ishmael in Moby, and not austere and sexually disinterested, such as Ahab. It’s a 21st century vision of the past.
They’re men, some of them violent and dangerous, and sailors on ships in the Atlantic and “North Waters” with sexual urges and crimes. Some of the language echoes Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. At times it’s a mixture of obscure technical lingo (sailing terms, for instance) and archaic usage (historically accurate, we assume), with a zing of Anglo-Saxon spice. I’m digging the book: Best novel I’ve read since Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade (1976), which is a classic that I finally got around to reading a couple years ago.
As a diehard McCarthy fan (my Houston Chronicle review of No Country for Old Men, for instance, is quoted as a blurb on the paperback edition) know that my comparison of McGuire’s fiction to McCarthy’s is not taken lightly. I usually wince when a book comes out that is compared to any of McCarthy’s novels: It’s a literary Kiss of Death. He’s just too hard of an act to follow. But with The North Water, and now White River Crossing, he pulls it off.
So there’s a new British heist movie titled Fuze—quite a thrill ride, complete with complicated plot, excellent cast, and a mess of techno-gadgets. Set in London, it showcases U.K.’s impressive (albeit fictional) city-services people, from police to military bomb-detonation experts to traffic coordinators and more. That city-services orientation reminded me of the classic crime thriller The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), which starred Robert Shaw of Jaws (1975) fame. It’s one of the movies that defines the Seventies image of New York City, and Fuze does the same thing for London in the 2020s.
Fuze stars Theo James, the hunky Brit who made a splash as a philandering husband in Season Two of the HBO series White Lotus. He plays Karalis, a slippery eel criminal who always seems two steps ahead of everyone else, or just incredibly lucky. He’s good. Or good at being bad. There’s a backstory that arrives at the film’s end that suggests some motivation and redemption for his character, even if all the other bad dudes he betrayed still want him dead. The military bomb-detonation expert Will, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, is a key figure who turns the tables on the criminals more than once.
Like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three it’s a white-knuckled joy ride through danger and peril. An unexploded WWII era bomb is discovered at a construction site in the center of London. The area is evacuated and the bomb squad called in. Meanwhile a group of thieves hiding in a nearby apartment building drill through a basement wall into a bank vault and steal diamonds worth reportedly $30 million. But something goes wrong. A chase ensues, as in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. The outcome, however, is different. The ending calls to mind that other classic of New York City cinema in the Seventies, The French Connection (1971)—which, oddly enough, stars Roy Scheider, also a star of Jaws.
So I stumbled upon the film Strange Darling (2023), which has become something of a cult classic. First: I’m not a fan of serial-killer movies. The best of them thrill you with gruesome fantasies such as the “brilliant” serial killer a la Hannibal Lecter, while the worst of them indulge in Rated R torture porn, like the Saw franchise. When I read the description for Strange Darling I was initially put off, thinking, “Oh, just another serial-killer slashfest.” It has a 96% Rotten Tomatoes rating, however. That’s good enough to make me wonder. Spoiler alert: It’s hard to describe/analyze this one without giving away some details.
First thing you as audience notice is its nonlinear structure. It’s divided into six chapters (a la Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction or The Hateful Eight). But it begins with Chapter Three, in an action-packed chase scene. From that moment on you begin making judgements about the characters and situations, based on what you’re seeing or being shown. Most of these are wrong, one way or the other. It’s a twist on gender roles: In the initial scenes there are only two characters: a flirtatious young woman (Willa Fitzgerald, terrific) who seems to be playing a dangerous game of Take a Walk on the Wild Side, and a stern-looking suspicious dude (Kyle Gallner, nicely understated) who has a gun in an ankle holster. They’re in his pickup, outside a motel, flirting. One thing leads to another and they end up in the motel room—frisky, handcuffs, the works. Foreplay, as it were. She produces some drugs—ostensibly cocaine—from her purse and announces it’s her birthday. (I didn’t believe that.) From that moment on the action gets ever more complicated. It becomes obvious Things are not what they seem.
As the nonlinear chapters unfold you come to understand that context is everything. It’s not a matter of seeing is believing. It’s a matter of what you see can’t be understood without the linearity of what came before. When there’s no context for the actions we insert our own reasons and logistical frameworks—which, in this story, are likely wrong. I liked how it subverted expectations. You think you know what’s going on and then realize you don’t. The acting and direction are first rate. (See the glowing blurbs on the poster image.) Ed Begly Jr. and Barbara Hershey play wonderful old hippies who don’t deserve their fate. The end is harrowing and poignant. I’ll leave it at that.
