Lang in Hollywood (9/11/99)
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The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. [Sonny Lubick, 1999.]
At a secret base far to the north of the Arctic Circle, devilmaycare flyboy Douglas “Mad Dog” Hoye prepares his B-17 for a daring flight over the polar wastes. Without, the roar of the warming engines can barely be heard over the howling Alaskan winds. Within, as his WAC assistant Judith “Mad Cow” Albino looks on with adoring eyes, the Dog pours coffee from a thermos laced with Ten High bourbon and explains his mission in a grimvoiced monologue. Somewhere in the trackless snows of the polar region lies a mysterious fortress, lost for generations to the knowledge of mortal men. Here under the protective aegis of an evil race of Nepalese Jesuits the armies of the night have found refuge; here are harbored the fugitive operatives whose activities everyone suspects but no one can admit — the doctors who performed the alien autopsies in Roswell, the behavioral psychologists who programmed Oswald, the educational consultants who taught Generation X to spell. This citadel has stood beyond the reach of civilized power since the dawn of the present age. But now it is the dawn of a new millenium; now everything has changed. It has been the sense of a meeting at the highest levels of power — a meeting at which no word was spoken and no look direct — that this secret Arctic fortress, repository of the last and darkest secrets of the Cold War, of the Old World, must now at last be utterly destroyed. As his speech reaches its emotional climax and the music of the “Marseillaise” swells beneath stock footage of marching Nazis, stampeding elephants, the Bikini tests, and the Nebraska game of 1986, the Dog calls upon the gods to witness his oath that the right shall prevail. Zipping up his flight jacket, he takes a last swig from the thermos and smooches Albino farewell before walking out the door into the shapeless mists that cloak the unfathomable mysteries of the Arctic. — Meanwhile, beneath the waves of the Atlantic, intrepid archaeologist John “Wild Buffalo” Craig descends into the depths in his newly perfected bathysphere in search of the ruins of Atlantis. As his support crew listens above on the deck of the research vessel “Arthur Rimbaud”, he describes by suboceanic telephone the world of wonders revealed for the first time to human eyes: the strange glowing fish, the pulsing octopi, the colored vowels ... and beneath, appearing dimly through the murk, the longburied towers of the sunken continent. — Meanwhile the Dog motors onward through the ozone. Lighting a Lucky Strike and taking another pull from his thermos, he unlocks the attache case containing the arming codes for his nuclear weapons. — At the Pentagon in Washington Secretary of Defense Fyodor Dostoevsky is briefed by the brass. Dismissing the Joint Chiefs with an impatient wave of the hand, he places a call to the Alaskan base. — Albino answers. — “It’s me, Fyodor,” says Dostoevsky, “and I’m not wearing any pants.” — Descending deeper into the sunken ruins, John passes the ancient library ... the molecular biology building ... the stadium, a huge edifice erected about a curious rectangular grid, one hundred yards by fifty-three, with pillars raised at either end ... the site, John conjectures, of the religious observances of the Atlanteans ... . But wait ... what is that strange shape that seems to stir amid the ooze of the sea floor? Are those ... tentacles? What ancient evil has been awakened here that might better have been left to sleep another hundred centuries? — Meanwhile on the floor of the Aurora Stock Exchange the Dog’s broker takes a short position on Frigidaire. — Albino breathes heavily as Dostoevsky recites passages from the works of John Grisham. — Calling on Phoebus Apollo to guide his spear, the Dog drops the Big One. — On the deck of the “Arthur Rimbaud”, the crew gathered around the speakerphone look at one another aghast. — The heat of the nuclear detonation melts the polar icecap and awakens an army of prehistoric monsters. Animated by a gameplan born from the darkest recesses of the lizard brain, they march to the South; coming upon Mile High Stadium in their shambling advance, they take the field against Colorado and commence stomping the hapless Bison into buff-jerky. A screaming mob of spectators stampedes for the exits; Moschetti throws another interception. — The globegirdling system of continental plates, knocked askew by the polar detonation, commences a retrograde motion; North America begins to sink slowly beneath the waves of the universal ocean. — From the gondola of a blimp circling overhead, a scholarly figure observes the catastrophe and annotates his copy of Plato’s
Timaeus. Can it be ... John? Or is it — his Evil Twin? Stay tuned. — With brilliant stop-motion animation effects by Ray Harryhausen — applied not merely to the movement of the dinosaurs, but also to an almost convincing imitation of life in the Colorado offense.
____________Godard in the Balkans (9/2/99)
