November 02nd, 2024

​                        Bury My Heart with a Black Cat: Some Notes on the Night Before Halloween

This year I pretty much skipped Halloween. As someone who’s loved the holiday pretty much since childhood, that’s not a statement I thought I would ever make. I could offer up a host of excuses for my skipping, and all of them would have at least a grain of truth, but that doesn’t make me feel any less guilty or sad about skipping.
One sort of Halloween-ish thing I did, though, before the big day, was go see a showing of The Black Cat (1934) at a local midtown moviehouse. I invited the old man (my father) and we had dinner before the show at a Cantonese restaurant. The restaurant sits directly across from the theater, and I made sure to sit facing the window so that I could enjoy the passing scene. It was pleasant to watch late afternoon segue into early evening, to see the exact moment the bulbs came to life atop the flatiron marquee.
Dinner was good, and so was the movie, but the whole experience was tempered by a heavy kind of sadness. Part of that is just the upcoming election, which, regardless of your political orientation, you’re also probably awaiting with a sense of dread.
Some of my depression has another source than the election, though. That neighborhood where we ate and watched the movie is one where I did a lot of my growing up. I spent my late childhood and early adolescence there. It’s the neighborhood where I smoked my first joint, discovered sex (or at least the reflexively onanistic consolations of its absence.) It’s the neighborhood where I kissed my first girl and saw my first female breasts since babyhood, thus (sort of) consummating my first crush. But this was also around the same time and in the same neighborhood where my parents got divorced, where our family fell apart. And it was the place and time where I felt myself growing apart from humanity, retreating deeper into myself whether or not I wanted to. I probably didn’t know it at the time, but was at least starting to suspect that a normal life would not be for me. No wife and kids and a lot of time spent sitting in front of a typewriter (then a computer) trying to put the ill-fitting piece of the jigsaw into some semblance of order.  
My ghosts in the neighborhood are not just the ones of early adolescence, either.
After I got done with the Army—and the War got done with me—I used my GI bill to attend the local college, located, it just so happened, mere blocks from my old house. If I’d felt alienated living there as a teenager, I now felt positively and literally alien in a much more fundamental sense. I wanted nothing but to be alone, and all the time, to enjoy the consolations of my pets, pleasant weather when it occurred, and silence.
Life doesn’t give you that, though—at least not the true silence part—until you die, and being too cowardly for suicide, I continued to live and to feel and hurt. I did most of that hurting and feeling silently in the back of classrooms filled with young and vibrant people. Excepting a handful of other “back to college” types and the professors, I was the only person over the age of thirty trudging those campus greens.
I began a relationship—my first real one in some years, maybe my first real one ever—with a girl, a fellow student at the Uni. We consoled each other physically and hurt each other emotionally and eventually that ended.
After finishing dinner and heading across the street to the theater, I struggled to put it all out of mind—my childhood ghosts, my teenage ghosts, my war ghosts. It was hard, though, made an impossible and highly ironic task by the bill of fare on tap for that evening.
For those who haven’t seen “The Black Cat” (what the hell have you been doing with your life?) here’s a quick thumbnail summary:
Boris Karloff plays Hjalmar Poelzig, a mad and satanic architect who lives in Bauhaus-inspired glass, steel, and concrete mansion. There’s something militaristic and brutally functionalist about the house, and it turns out that’s for a reason. It served as an army post in the lately fought Great War, and beneath it now lie the corpses of several thousand soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian army.
It turns out that Poelzig betrayed these men to the Russians, whether for money, malice, or some other affinity is unclear. Apparently suspecting there may be some kind of reckoning for his crimes, he’s undermined the structure’s foundations with several tons of dynamite, his personal kill switch.
Poelzig’s foil is Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Béla Lugosi), a psychiatrist and former soldier in the Army of the no-longer existing Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy. He retains something of the regal about him, while Poelzig—with his Gropiusstadt-esque square of a house—is very much a modern monster.
The men have history, and Vitus is returning to get revenge on the man who wronged him. There’s a “Count of Monte Cristo” quality to the proceedings, with Poelzig having falsely imprisoned Werdegast, killing his wife, and marrying his daughter. One can easily understand why Werdegast is pissed.  
To reach Poelzig, Werdegast must travel via rail, and share a second-class berth to with a couple of cheery Americans on their honeymoon. Watching him watch them—the reserved sadness in his eyes, the slightly jealous longing—I couldn’t help but sympathize. I understand that distance, I feel it.
Through a series of unfortunate events, the honeymooners find their plans derailed, and are forced to head to the glass mansion on the hill with Werdegast.
Skip the rest of the plot and fast forward to the final moments of the climax. Werdegast—despite his ominous mien—has revealed himself as the couples’ savior, while Poelzig has shown himself to be an atavistic servant of the Devil.
Poelzig and Werdegast wrestle, struggling over the switch that will trigger the dynamite undermining the castle. The female half of the honeymooning couple urges Werdegast to come with her and her husband, to escape to freedom and happiness with them.
Werdegast refuses, intent not just on killing Poelzig, but going down in the explosion. And why not? The man has killed his wife, taken his prime years from him, and most of Werdegast’s friends are moldering in the dirt beneath the atrociously constructed mansion.  Watching his commitment to his own destruction—and watching the couple flee from the two men poisoned by war—I couldn’t help experience it intensely. Much more intensely than I’d planned on feeling all night. I knew, from previous viewings, that “The Black Cat” continues to pack a punch more than ninety years after its initial run. I simply didn’t expect it to floor me so.
No, I didn’t get misty-eyed, but I was caught off-guard by the extra resonance, the layers I’d found in the film, and seeing it in my old neighborhood. Among those old ghosts.
I had expected a couple chills, and maybe a touch of indigestion after eating that egg foo young too quickly then washing it down with Diet Coke.
I guess I got a little more than I bargained for, though. Not so much a sense of dread as one of tragedy, for the human condition. Time takes the flesh, leaves the memories, and then once enough time has elapsed it takes those, too. Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff are long-dead. My father, luckily still alive in his seventy-seventh year, will only be able to buck the actuarial tables for so long.
One day—who knows when—my own time will come, as will yours.
Happy belated Halloween. Now it’s time to prepare to baste that bird.