HOW FITTING, ON A YEAR IN WHICH we
featured The Zombie in the Imaginarium, that many of us should come to feel
that we had become zombies well before the festival was over!
Luckily, the atmosphere on that last night of Cornerstone tends to be a
little more, shall we say, forgiving — inasmuch as everybody is
ready to let down their hair and party. We do like to go out with a bang in
the Imaginarium, and since we've generally used up most of our powder by
then, we try to set off something on that last night that will work to
dissolve the magic generated over the past few days into a joyful mayhem.
For last
year's Imaginarium finale, Hyperdrive Go! supplied
the soundtrack for a "Halloween Ball."
The band kicked up plenty of dust with their patented zombie rock and the
ooky-spooky joire de vivre of folks who do see the humor in
dead people eating other people. It had been pure happenstance in 2006, when
Dave Canfield found himself camping next to and so meeting Harry Potter's
older brother, Scott. This year, we invited Scott Potter and his band
officially in advance to play for our our last night "Sci-Fi Homecoming
Dance". The fur flew again, as newly de-tonsilled Scott sang his
stitches out, dressed to kill or be killed in a pre-tattered and bloodied
suit. "I never knew Bela Lugosi could dance so well!" he shouted to a mob of
miscellaneous creatures of the night, body surfing a cardboard cutout of The
Count, moshing, mashing and zombie-munching in a monster party that
overflowed the tent.
Next, 3D glasses were issued for the evening's film, Robot Monster.
But while this film was originally released in 3D, we only managed to obtain
a 2D version to screen. Dave instructed the crowd to poke out
the blue and red cellophane squares from the cardboard 3D glasses he'd
just given them, making them into 2D glasses. The crowd wisely disregarded
this order, knowing that its always been the Imaginarium's business to carry
a 3D vision even into the midst of a 2D world. In that world, Robot
Monster has the reputation of being one of the worst movies ever made.
Frankly, it's tough to take issue with the critical consensus on that one.
But it is possible to argue that this bad film elevates the experience
so far beyond that of any ordinary bad film as to achieve a truly
transcendent sort of badness. In the end, the audience was rewarded
for their stubborn defence of that third dimension, when we screened a
genuine 3D short about atomic testing, which climaxed with images of that
roiling apocalyptic beauty which Robert Oppenheimer himself first rhapsodized.
Of course, it's tough to lose oneself entirely in the mere
aesthetic qualities of mushroom clouds. Or to be ironic about weapons
of mass destruction. That's why some people have argued that postmodern
America's irony party may have ended on September 11th, 2001.
THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT THAT ONE MIGHT
overdose on irony, along with any other form of homeland security. And
part of our mission at the Imaginarium has always been to create a safe space
for people to risk opening up — to others, to God, to wonder and art.
Yet the protective gear of quote marks at times seems necessary to shield one
from another danger, the overdose of "innocence". From Duck and Cover
ditties to bio-terror duct-tape, from wars to "rid the world of evil" to how
"cool" a product is when James Dean's
image is used to sell it, we seem to need irony now than ever.
Through this filter of ambiguity then, watching A-bomb blasts in 3D glasses,
the Imaginarium transitioned from the 1950s back to the future — like
Dorothy, clicking her heels and chanting "There's no place like home" —
to our own terror-threatened, climate-changing, consumer-zombified
Kansas.
We closed our 2007 program with a recent Korean film that carries on that
tradition of sublimating social anxieties into movie monsters. What
Hollywood in the 50s and J-Pop since
Hiroshima did for nuclear nightmares, The Host
does for fears of sudden death by terrorist attack. Thus a program which
began with Godzilla and Matinee
(in Atomo-Vision and Rumble-Rama), left us in the end swimming
with monsters in the depths of a post-9/11 world; our celebration of kitsch
was bookended by real-life fears that birth those Monsters on Maple Street.
They're all scary, all those monsters, but the monster we should
probably remain the most afraid of is fear itself: fear can turn our hearts
black, fill our souls with devils and dust, and cause us to do things trying
to survive that end up killing the things we love (so sings The
Boss). It'd be nice if we could just hop aboard a souped-up DeLorean
and go back and fix whatever went wrong. If only it were that simple, and if
only that kind of simplicity couldn't itself become a weapon in the wrong
hands.
But life remains stubbornly complex. Holding onto the Big Picture requires
an impossible double-vision: the serpent's wisdom combined with the innocence
of the dove. Perhaps acquiring a capacity for that sort of double-vision is
what "growing up" — in the best sense — is really all about;
perhaps that's what the Imaginarium is really all about: an annual
"coming-of-age" journey. According to mythologist Mircea Eliade,
this journey involves an exit from Profane Time (where the Muggles rule) to a
mythical Sacred Time, the dimension of gods and monsters; where good and
evil, truth and falsehood come into sharpest focus through the magic of
metaphor (and failure to understand this magic is what makes Muggles).
Necessarily, if reluctantly, we must return to Profane Time, to Kansas —
but we do so refreshed, renewed and re-armed for battle with a world whose
gravity pulls always away from such a wondrous, multi-dimensional vision
toward one weary myopia or another. May all of our friends be victorious in
that most-important battle, and may we all meet again next year, over the
rainbow, or the next best thing, in the Imaginarium. Til then, keep
your 3D glasses on.
