Bradbury Speaks

by Ray Bradbury

  How?

  With Medusa watching, not freezing but freeing you to shriek, Yeah Team!

  And the Team is Us. We.

  We the judges and jurors trying, damning, or freeing the guilty, weighing topics we’re unqualified to answer. How to cork this motormouth diarrhea?

  The problem is not with our national full-coverage news, which can be mildly depressing. It is with the assault of your local TV paparazzi who machine-gun you with forty decapitations, sexual harassments, gangster executions, in fifteen-second explosions for the full half hour. Is there nothing we cannot wipe our pigpen hands on? Is there a woman so pure we cannot silt her underwear, a man so bright we cannot blind his sun? Sound bite: mass suicides. Photos at eleven. No attack army could survive that fusillade. Bullets, real and psychological, wound and kill.

  So we must stand alert to our central core despair, targeting our Panic of the Week syndrome, mostly a local TV news séance.

  Every week, fifty-two weeks a year, they need a prime disaster focus, to spin the garbage and glue the potato people to the tube.

  Remember the Alar-poisoned apples that the dinnertime news bites claimed would destroy us, so they destroyed some part of the apple industry? Panic.

  Recall the poison cellar gas rising to asphyxiate your kids? More panic.

  Or those arsenic-filled Peruvian grapes promising to strip our gears.

  Or the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown where nothing melted, no injuries, no deaths.

  Panic for two weeks, make it three. Ratings up. Morale down. Not to mention O.J. for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. By the panic-oriented week? No, the year!

  What to do?

  The old Civil War song says it:

  Look away, look away, look away, Dixieland.

  Is it that simple? Is then the only solution to “look away”?

  For starters, in a democratic zoo with us as the keepers and the kept, yes.

  Look away, chop the TV local news on the hour or half hour.

  Leave a message on your local station’s machine, describing their stupidity.

  If you meet their newsreaders, male or female, tell them that they are overpaid and underbrained. Ask them if it would be too much trouble to air twenty-second news bites instead of fifteen-second flashes. Think of the extra enrichment!

  If you can’t tell them, join the Internet. It’s your turn to blather.

  Will this work? Perhaps. The Man Without a Country died of social deprivation. Stop saying that these TV hookers are high-class thinkers; they’re mere graffiti bums, not Einstein’s byblows. Ask them to give back their fortunes and hand us real news.

  I remember Saul Bass when he redesigned the Bell Telephone service vans years ago in clean bright blues and whites. The repairmen fought the change. It was too pretty, they said.

  What to do? How to get the telephone workers to drive the new vans? Bass instructed his three dozen artists to wander the city. Each time they saw a bright new blue-and-white telephone van, they must shout at the driver: “Hey, nice car!” “Looks grrreat!” “Wish I had a van like that!”

  Dumb, right? Wrong. It worked. In a month the Bell repairmen were bragging on their vans and driving proud.

  So instead of treating chat-show hosts as Cinderellas, tell them they are ugly sisters whose lips spew not diamonds and emeralds but spiders, frogs, and toads; each time they open their mouths, they spoil the ecology. Hand them some Lifebuoy. Tell them to chew.

  The bottom line is, if you stare like stunned deer in midroad, blinded by the lights that rush to run you down, you must expect that a thousand and one such nights in such a brutal harem will convince you that the end of the world is at hand, that America is bestial, and that suicide, murder, rape, and AIDS are the fashion of the day.

  We must, then, speak to these confessors of our dark souls and tell them that their awful truths in awesome repetition ends with the Big Lie. We are not as bad as they say we are, but we feel this despair because they have somehow proved that the razored wrist is our metaphor and the slit throat a lesson in linguistics.

  Will all this make the local TV pundits pull up their socks and uncrick the hunch in their backs? They might begin to commence. We don’t ask for Pollyanna reruns, but just a tad of balance. Some spearmint gum with the arsenic. Some rejuvenating trampoline with the roadkill. Some hang glider with the deadfall.

  For starters, when some good-guy celebrity dies, bury him in fifty-nine seconds instead of ten. Linger a long trifle, as against a mindless brush-off.

  Meanwhile, we can permit ourselves to watch Jim Lehrer, George Will, Sam Donaldson, and Cokie Roberts, who are intelligent, informative, and, in the main, nonpolitical coast-to-coast.

  The McLaughlin Gang, also, if we can understand them.

  From time to time, then, we must brush our teeth and run not to glance in mirrors at our crock of tears but to cloud that mirror with our fresh breath, then turn to find a real mirror and rediscover ourselves.

  Yes, we have met the enemy, and they are us....

  But also, traveling from village to town to city across our continental spread, have we not met the friendly Indians: Italian, Swedish, Spanish, and old English-German?

  And are they not, also, Us?

  They are.

  We have condemned ourselves. Now we must save ourselves. No one else can. Shut off the set. Write your local TV newspeople. Tell them to go to hell. Take a shower. Go sit on the lawn with friends.

  THE HUNCHBACK, THE PHANTOM, THE MUMMY, AND ME (UNDATED)

  My favorite horror films have haunted my entire life. They have inhabited me so that when I wrote A Graveyard for Lunatics some years ago, The Hunchback, the Phantom, and Kong dominated the novel.

  Why have these films lived on in me for seventy-seven years?

  Obviously because they are stories about love. In some cases unrequited love: The Hunchback and The Phantom. And in the case of the Mummy, he comes to life seeking his dead Egyptian princess. With King Kong it’s in the finale, when the character called Carl Denham says, “Oh, no, it was Beauty killed the Beast.” So love is central. Consider the Bride of Frankenstein’s search for love and the terror that ends the search. Two other fine examples of a special unrequited love are The Man Who Could Work Miracles and The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells. The metaphor in each is simple: The love of power, which as could easily be predicted, didn’t love back but only corrupted.

  When I was nineteen, selling newspapers on the street corner, with the very first money I made, I went to a recording studio in Hollywood and there ranted and raved one afternoon, playing out the roles of The Invisible Man, as done by the superb Claude Rains, and the hero of The Man Who Could Work Miracles, played by Roland Young. Both plays have to do with a kind of lunacy that occurs when men become tired of tolerating humanity and the universe. There’s a hidden strain of this in most men that never comes out, but which is revealed to fine effect in these two pictures.

  The second great truth about these films and later similar films is that they are pure metaphor. Simply, they declare a metaphor and dramatize it without complication. When a metaphor is acted out, it’s easy to recall it in tranquillity outside the theater.

  When I saw the Hunchback for the first time, I was three. It convinced me that there was something wrong with me. I was crushed down when I left the theater with my mother. Fifteen years later, I saw the film at the Filmart Theater in Hollywood and told my friends I remembered everything about it from the age of three. They laughed; nobody could possibly remember all that. I replied, Well, there’s this scene and that scene and a third scene and a fourth and the finale goes like this! We went in to see The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and there were all the scenes that I remembered from 1923. Metaphor had done its work!

  The problem with our latest horror films is that they think if one metaphor is good, then two dozen are superb.

  The current version of The Mummy is a dumb example. If the original Mummy scared you with less as more, why not load
up on bodies to prickle your spine? So many mummies hurl themselves at you, gibbering, that you laugh and cry, What? Am I such a fool as to take fright at a death battalion when one would suffice? And especially one that, hidden in shadow, is never seen moving? But these new mummies Saint Vitus– danced into the light, and millions paid money to laugh.

  The old films were satisfied to give you brief glimpses of horror. The Hunchback, of course, is not a horror film at all but a tale of grotesquerie, immensely sad. With The Phantom, you have only one scene for a few seconds, when the Phantom, unmasked, rises to accuse his beloved.

  Similarly, consider Boris Karloff in his sarcophagus when his eyes open and his hand falls to his sides. That’s all.

  Minutes later, when the Egyptologist is studying the papyrus, the hand of the Mummy takes the manuscript from the desk. The Egyptologist, in horror, looks off-screen, and all you ever see of the Mummy is a fragment of the wrappings that encased him being trailed along the floor by someone unseen. At the end the Mummy is destroyed in a mere six seconds of disintegration.

  So there are your sublime examples of films that work because they dare to be subtle.

  I argued this with Universal when I wrote It Came from Outer Space. In my original treatment, I was careful to indicate that the invaders from another world should be hidden in shadow. Universal chose to bring them out in the light. I protested, but they wouldn’t listen. Very late in time now, you could wield some scissors, cut the seven seconds from the film that destroyed the illusion, and wind up with a very nice picture indeed. Those beasts that appeared, close up, were comedians not to be taken seriously.

  A glorious example of a film that truly terrifies is The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise, made at MGM in 1962. Everything is shadow and lack of substance. Everything is ultimately a radio show; you hear much and see nothing. It manages to cause a permanent curvature of your spine.

  I first saw The Haunting at a private screening with Robert Wise thirty-eight years ago.

  My God, I thought, this film belongs at the top of the list with Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons.

  My God, fool! I thought again, Robert Wise edited Kane and Ambersons—he’s Orson Welles’s bastard son.

  My dearest hope is that he hasn’t seen the new Haunting.

  If he came from such a screening, he might well, looking down, discover that someone had peed on his Reeboks.

  ANY FRIEND OF TRAINS IS A FRIEND OF MINE (1968)

  There is a special moment for me, crossing the continental United States by train in the early hours of dusk, when I enter alone—and first—to the hushed dining car and stand gazing along the aisle of white linen and hear a very special sound:

  The tintinnabulation of shiny silverware.

  The multitudes of silvery chimes, the small touchings of a thousand knives, forks, spoons, swayed by the train’s glide around an endless mountain curve, causing the tiny implements to nudge, tap, push, speak their bodies against themselves.

  Train travel speaks to me as much in this voice as in the old churning smokes of lost engines or the great throb of our new diesels hauling fellow creatures and freights out of the yellow desert into the new green, up from the westering sun through the high cold of night on the plateaus of the Great Divide.

  And, flashing by lonely way stations and deserted switchman’s towers, there is always the feeling: You’re trapped on a nonstop jet, you can’t get off. But the free soul, yes, the soul that dares to change locomotive riverbeds for no reason, can pick and choose from the always arriving, always departing towns. Then, in wild impulse, get off the train to admire strangeness and welcome surprise.

  You haven’t done it often. You may never do it again. But the imagination says: Could be.

  This afternoon late. Tomorrow morning early. In a place you never imagined but now will remember forever, step out in wilderness halfway between Tonopah and Buffalo Tread.

  And the land is there as it was two hundred years ago, the same, unchanged—the raw land, waiting with an immense and unblinking stare. And you, no better than an astronaut delivered forth to alien planets, far out on the rim of Montana or Colorado or alone like a single stalk of Indian corn on the spread-flat Kansas prairie.

  Remember when Mariner 4 flashed photos back from Mars and people cried, No one there! Mars is dead!

  But the astronauts, four hundred miles high, camera-shooting our own earth, have captured no life, no stir of civilization either.

  And at forty thousand feet, in a continent-crossing jet, the facts are about the same.

  We fly high, see nothing, and yet wonder at our alienation.

  Give me the train, then, so I can see and know and truly feel and be stirred by the history of our people.

  For a few short hours out of a busy life, let me really believe we did it all.

  By private automobile one is tempted to do the American thing—fly before fury, think, at eighty miles per hour, of destinations instead of environments to be lingered on, noticed, and filed away with some leisure.

  For, riding the train, you build the roads, rear the farms, till the fields, chop the wood fences, pile the rocks in walls, push back the night, light lamps in lonely cottages, and suddenly bang together full towns and cities and stand back and be touched and know pride in it all.

  I have, myself, built this country thirty or forty times in my life. Because of the train, I have pathfound the maps of this nation’s beginning and middle life, which are as familiar as the roadways on the palm of my hand.

  I have got off trains in a hundred jerkwater (once they jerked a rope to let the water from the big wooden water tanks thunder down into the old steam-engine boiler), I say, jerkwater towns and time-worn cities across our land, where we changed engines or waited for other trains to pass through. I have watched my dusty footprints blown away behind me in Texas streets so far from Amarillo I can’t tell you. And I have walked through the streets of Cheyenne, feeling like some mute New England farm boy, soft as butter, lost among men who strode shadowed by their Stetsons—all bone, gristle, sinew, tendon, and jerky beef, forever married to the horse and friend to that wind that leaves no sign where they have passed.

  My earliest memories are those of trains …

  My brother and I, hiking every summer along the main line out of Waukegan, Illinois, amid the smell of wood ties, black tar, and urine laid down in a wild rain from the Milwaukee express, kneeling at noon to place our ears on the sun-blasted rails, frying our peach-fuzz cheeks to hear the fast approach of the train storming south out of Wisconsin.

  Or the five-o’clock-in-the-morning train that pulled in down by the empty lake shore. My brother and I up early, shouting in whispers, dressing as we ran across town to stand and watch the circus elephants unload in the cold dark. And all the animals in their night-barred cages shivering their hides, horses jingling their black-and-silver equipments, men cursing, lions roaring, the camels, zebras, llamas passing in a dawn line—the mighty burden of Barnum’s entertainments opening out and unfolding from the mile-long freights … a memory to be kept all one’s life.

  My wife, not long ago, flew to New York with two of our daughters. She reported later that America was a Jerry Lewis– Elvis Presley Festival, hard to ignore at an altitude of forty thousand feet.

  Meanwhile, on Earth, back in Kansas by night, snug on a train, my other two daughters and I stayed up almost until dawn. Why? Because, rolling along, a series of bright flashes ahead made us think we were approaching a war-games area, a field of some strange artilleries exploding bright battles in a cloudy night. And then we found to our amazement that our train was moving upon and then in and through a July storm of lightning and thunder. Vast bolts plunged earthward all about us as we huddled, nestled to the window, noses pressed to the glass, safe despite the downrush of light and sound. And if our train were to be hit, what of that? We could take all the bolts God delivered, devour them whole, and flush them through the always coming, always going rails.
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br />   So the night went, the train gliding among stilts of fire, huge laboratory experiments of electric flame, then rumbling coughs of thunder as great blind hands of shocked air clapped tight, the night’s echoing applause for its own bright words.

  On other trains, at other times, in other late-night hours, I have communed with George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, and Charlie Dickens—old cronies who go with me everywhere, unseen but felt, silent but in continuous uproar. We carouse to all hours in the dining car or the club car or the reading vestibule and make converse with any idea tossed in the air.

  Sometimes Aldous Huxley sits in with us, blind and wandering-wise. Richard III has gone with me often, prating the virtues of murder. Half across Kansas I have buried Caesar in the middle of the night, Antony giving his oration as we steamed out of Elderberry Springs.

  The books I always wanted to read, the plays I always wanted to write, I read and write on trains.

  But most of all, trains are a time for Bernard and G.K. and Charlie and Aldous to talk, and for me to listen.

  This year, probably more than any recent year, the American soul is in need of religious retreats. And is not the train one of the last, and perhaps most logical, places where we can satisfy our terrible hunger to get away?

  Is it too much to ask of the coast-to-coast-voyaging American, who always pleads the excuse of time, to perhaps once a year place himself for two and one-half short days in an environment where he cannot use telephones and, best of all, where the barracuda telephone cannot devour him? Are sixty hours too many to give for what one receives back from such a journey?

  Or, as some suspect, are we afraid to be alone with ourselves? Are we like those celebrities we cluck our tongues over—who surround themselves with eternal partyings, jesters, pranksters, noisemakers, babblers, and honkers? Somewhere mustn’t the party hold its breath for one moment of silence? Sometime mustn’t we, crossing Oklahoma as the sun rises, know the beauty and the dread in that moment of self-revelation when we look in the small train mirror, shaving, after a night of watching the high, bright stars wheel over the sky, and think, Who am I? What? Where am I? Where going and why? To what good purpose or what bad end? And whither fleeing?